The law has been applied in the courts by determining if certain cases could even get to a jury in the first place. A judge decides if the SYG law applies and if it does, the jury never hears the case. The police have to determine if they have a case for arresting someone. If they don't, they won't arrest someone, although there may still be a further investigation. A prosecutor was called that night, so they weren't acting alone. At this point, they'd be hard pressed to arrest him, short of a grand jury indictment, or a demonstrable risk that he was about to flee.
The SYG law makes it HARDER to arrest and convict people in this situation. However, the story that's being spun now would have tended to still not generated an arrest. The police were called to the location of a 911 call, because there was a "suspicious person" in the neighborhood. The story gets told that this suspicious person attacked, and the person attacked fought back. It might have been far more "borderline" without SYG, but as it was, without further investigation, the night might have played out just as it did anyway.
SYG needs to be modified to increase the burden on the shooter as they become more provocative in their own behavior. But the colorful story being spun today may have worked with, or without, the SYG law.
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