A New York youth was not justified in fatally stabbing a homeless man outside a South Beach nightclub, a Miami-Dade judge has ruled, paving the way for his case to go to trial before a jury.

Legal observers have been closely watching the case of Nadim Yaqubie in one of several recent high-profile cases that are testing Florida’s controversial 2005 “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law.

Yaqubie, 23, stabbed Roberto Camacho, a homeless man in May 2008 during a struggle in an alley near Mansion nightclub. He was charged with second-degree murder, but insisted he was acting in self-defense.

A tentative trial date has been set for Feb. 13 before Circuit Judge Daryl Trawick.

“We think the judge made the right ruling based on credibility and the facts,” said Miami-Dade Chief Assistant State Attorney Kathleen Hoague, who trains prosecutors on self-defense cases. “We feel as though this is an issue better left to jurors, not judges.”

Yaqubie’s lawyer, Richard Hersch, said he will appeal the ruling.

“This is an emerging area of the law and a lot of interesting issues are raised by the judge’s order,” he said. “We just think he came to the wrong conclusion.”

The 2005 law eliminated a citizen’s duty to retreat before using deadly force to confront an attacker, a measure derided by police and prosecutors who say the law fosters a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality and it gives criminal a pass on facing justice.

The law also included a provision that grants “immunity” from prosecution if a person is deemed to have acted in self-defense, though lawmakers did not clearly specify exactly who bestows the immunity.

After a series of court battles across the state — Yaqubie’s case was also heard before the Third District Court of Appeals — the Florida Supreme Court in December 2010 ruled that judges should be the ones to weigh the evidence under a looser standard than the “beyond the reasonable doubt” one used before juries.

Since then, South Florida judges have dismissed several high-profile murder cases:

In September, a Palm Beach County judge dismissed a first-degree murder case against a disabled veteran, Michael Monahan, who shot and killed two men in a confrontation on the man’s sailboat.

That same month, a Miami-Dade judge threw out a murder case against Hialeah’s Alexander Lima-Lopez, accused of murdering a man outside his apartment.

In December, a Broward judge threw out the 2009 case against Nour Jarkas, accused of murdering his former wife’s boyfriend.

All three cases were the first such dismissals of murder cases in those counties.

In Broward, a man named James Patrick Wonder is also seeking immunity for fatally shooting a federal agent in 2008 after a road-rage episode.

As for the South Beach case, Yaqubie, then 19, had come to Miami Beach to party in May 2008. He had bought the victim’s ID from another man for $50 to get into Mansion on Washington Avenue.

As Yaqubie waited in line, Camacho approached and demanded his license back, threatening to harm him. Yaqubie ran off, into an alleyway between Washington and James avenues.

During their scuffle, Yaqubie unsheathed a 7-to-8-inch knife he had hidden in his pocket, jabbing the unarmed Camacho three times. Camacho threw a book bag at Yaqubie, who responded with a fatal thrust to the torso.

Yaqubie ran off. He returned to party at Mansion the next night. After he began harassing women at the nightclub, security guards called police. They found the knife and Camacho’s ID on him..

Defense attorney Hersch argued that Yaqubie had no choice but to stab Camacho because the homeless man was physically attacking his client.

But Judge Trawick dismissed that notion, saying that Yaqubie was not protecting himself as much as he was protecting his $50 “investment.”

“A reasonable person under these circumstances would have believed that if he had given the license back, it may not have been necessary to stab Camacho,” Trawick wrote in his order last week.

Trawick also noted that Yaqubie never called police but instead partied the next night.

“Taken in their totality, these actions do not reflect someone who had simply been trying to protect himself from death or serious bodily injury from another person. Instead, they reflect a consciousness of guilt and the avoidance of legal consequences,” Trawick wrote.