George Zimmerman Acquitted In Death of Trayvon Martin 1737
theodp writes "Following nearly three weeks of testimony, a jury of six women in the George Zimmerman trial has found the former neighborhood watch volunteer not guilty of second-degree murder. He was also found not guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter, which the jury also weighed."
Is this a hopeless request? (Score:5, Interesting)
People coming from different backgrounds bring different perspectives to the Trayvon Martin shooting. Everyone feels they are right, and everyone feels strongly. Is it possible for commenters to keep that in mind? I see an early post opportunity, so I figure I'll offer the proposal.
Does anyone know (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is this a hopeless request? (Score:2, Interesting)
AHAHAHAHAHA.
Yes, it's hopeless.
Political agendas (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll tell you what bothered me most about this trial. There's a reason that Zimmerman went free immediately, and no charges were pressed. The evidence backed his story. It was obvious to all those investigating and the DA, etc, that it was a case of self defense. It wasn't because of a bunch of racist law enforcement officers or prosecutors that tried to sweep it under the rug or somehow distort the facts that Zimmerman wasn't charged. The media and politicians decided to make it into something else. Pictures of a smiling 12 year old Martin were shown continuously by the media. Obama said it "could have been my son" that was killed. Special prosecutors were brought in to try and make something happen. When these prosecutors rested their case, then tried to get anything to stick (homicide, even "child abuse") the underlying desperation and total lack of a case was made even more apparent.
It ticks me off that Martin was exploited by news organizations and politicians to make some sort of cause to rally behind or push agendas.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:2, Interesting)
The NRA or Fox News could find a spot for him, I'd wager.
You talk about jobs, I talk about careers. He may be able to find a job here and there, but he'll never have a career again, except as a cruel joke.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:1, Interesting)
I think it's because the other guy was black.
Like in this case [cbsnews.com]. Fla. mom gets 20 years for firing warning shots.
A Florida woman who fired warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville had said the state's "Stand Your Ground" law should apply to her because she was defending herself against her allegedly abusive husband when she fired warning shots inside her home in August 2010. She told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she had already taken out a protective order.
Total dead: 0.
20 years for trying to defend herself against against someone she already had a protective order against.
Re:Is this a hopeless request? (Score:2, Interesting)
Different backgrounds, my ass. People are going to be coming in with different sets of facts. You'll have some people who still think Zimmerman is a white man who shot a 12-year-old kid for no reason but racism because that is what the media initially told them, because the media trusted the NAACP to get its facts right and the NAACP didn't. Then you'll have people who have looked at the evidence and discovered that Trayvon Martin was the violent racist sociopath and aggressor in this incident.
But at least the Martin family deserved a trial, right? No. It was that clear-cut a case of self-defense. The police did their job right when they arrested Zimmerman and interrogated him for several hours before determining it was safe to release him and referring the case to a prosecutor. I bet you remember hearing that the police never arrested him. I bet you also heard that Zimmerman was never injured and there were no signs of a struggle. These were all lies. This is the root of the divide: everyone was lied to. Some people have figured it out and some haven't.
Another of the underlying stories is how the mass media hate machine will destroy you on a whim. According to one of the earlier stories that came from the local Florida press, Zimmerman was a Democratic community organizer who had led an activist campaign against police brutality in the case of an officer who had beaten a black man. None of that mattered to the effort to call him a stereotypical Klansman, and the fact that he is not even white did not disrupt the narrative.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Real life isn't the moivies; warning shots are generally illegal. You can only use lethal force if you have justification for killing someone; if you fire a warning shot, that's still lethal force (since a warning shot can kill someone, though it's less likely), but the fact that you fired it as a warning shows that you didn't believe killing was justified.
Re:not surprised at racism and naive WASPs (Score:2, Interesting)
Assumes facts not in evidence.
oh, you were in Zimmerman's brain that day?
A murderer, no. Trayvon escalated; he jumped on the guy thinking he could take him. He was wrong.
I want *every* thug in this nation, white, black, latino, etc, wondering if the next guy they fuck with is packing. Most of us with CCW permits train our ass off, I did in the military and I do now. I will empty a mag into any asshole or group of assholes who try to do me harm so fast that they won't have hit the ground before I'm done (which is why I like training triple and quad taps instead of the Mozambique Drill [wikipedia.org]. Deal with it, prick.
And if you think gun laws are going to tighten, wake the fuck up. We (the gun owners) won after Connecticut and we'll win again. Add in the fact that Obama is losing the support of his base (I'm actually a moderate Dem) and you've got nothing. No retreat law? Well kid, if a sixty year old man is waiting for the bus, no, he shouldn't have a 'duty to retreat'.
God made men; Sam Colt made them equal.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Stand your ground law" isn't really a factor when someone jumps you, pounds your head against the cement, is on top of you and reaches for a gun, even your gun. And if you're ever in that situation and waste time considering if it does, then you will likely not survive. This was clear cut self-defense, as the evidence showed.
Other evidence showed it was racially motivated. The guy's own girlfriend testified that he called Zimmerman a "cracker" before the attack. And the judge excluded evidence of his interest in violence and attacking people, but anyone paying attention outside the jury caught that.
The cops didn't even want to arrest Zimmerman, they investigated and knew enough about what happened to understand he shouldn't be charged with a crime. He was only charged after a lot of blacks fired up the black community to send a message to other black youths that it is alright to attack and try to kill a "cracker", and if he defends himself we can get him arrested.
Gotta go now and research just what that information was that the D.A. illegally hid from the defense. That alone pretty much should tell you this wasn't a attempt to get justice, it was an attempt to convict an innocent man who was attacked.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Authorization for Use of Military Force [gpo.gov] passed by the US Congress after 9/11 designates the enemy for the conflict. It is well settled law in the US that such an authorization is legally equivalent to a declaration of war. Al Qaida made their intentions clear in 1996 with Bin Laden's Fatwa [pbs.org] which is a declaration of war in their culture.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Guantánamo Bay. This is a couple of years old, and doesn't reflect the most current controversies. It's a big topic, and I'm not going to get into all of it right now. One thing I would say to keep in mind is that you can disagree with what the administration says, or does, but remember that al Qaida trains its members to lie about their living conditions, and many of them are highly dangerous prisoners that regularly assault the guards [usatoday.com]. The training to lie is documented in captured training materials.
The Real Gitmo [weeklystandard.com]
Re: not 'self defense' (Score:2, Interesting)
And now the grand questions : ask
yourself why Treyvon attacked GZ? Martin stood HIS ground. Not the other way round. Martin was harassed by an armed racist pig on a power trip. Zimmerman got his ass served for being a douchebag. Martin defended himself from Zimmerman. GZ went to Martin. Not the other way round. GZ is a PIG and a murderer. The verdict is ridiculous and wrong.
Well look at that, it's either a liberal or someone with a huge chip on their shoulder. So, perhaps you should ask: Why did Martin lay wait in ambush. He did not stand his ground, he attacked with no reasonable cause. If he was "in fear" he could have made it home in less than 4minutes.
Only the ignorant, and race baiters on the left post crap like that.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Zimmerman's case was entirely based off of normal self-defense laws that exist even in the most anti-gun state. He was pinned to the ground and was having his head bashed into the pavement - that's attempted murder. Even in your most anti-gun area, that's still full grounds for using deadly force to protect yourself.
You have a right to use deadly force if you're in immediate danger of life-threatening injury. Getting your head bashed into the pavement isn't life-threatening injury, as the prosecutor's expert witness testified. When I was younger, I got into a few fights. If I got on top of the other guy, I bashed his head against the pavement. If the other guy got on top of me, he bashed my head against the pavement. That was street fighting rules in Brooklyn. Sure, it's not pleasant to get your head bashed against the pavement, and maybe it's an assault, but it doesn't justify killing the other guy with a gun.
Whether Zimmerman was in enough danger to use deadly force is a jury question. If I were on the jury, I would have decided that he wasn't.
George Zimmerman joined (or apparently created) a neighborhood watch. If you choose to go around your neighborhood at night, alone, following strangers and confronting them, ignoring the advice of people who know better (like the 911 operators), and ignoring the neighborhood watch rules, you're looking for trouble. You better be prepared to have one of those strangers decide that you're a threat, and bash your head against the pavement. If your prepared response in that situation is to carry a gun and shoot the stranger, you better be prepared to have the jury find you guilty of some degree of homicide.
There's obviously a racial issue here. When white people kill black in the South (or even in the North) they get acquitted. When black people kill white people, they get convicted. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html [nytimes.com] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/nyregion/23trial.html [nytimes.com]
There were 6 white jurors. What are the odds of getting 6 white jurors by chance? What are the odds of getting heads 6 times in a row?
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:3, Interesting)
So if you are walking along the street and I run up behind you and follow you to where ever you are going you would be happy with that?
Because if you show any sign you are not I get to legally shoot you dead.
You Americans are all nuts.
Re: I'm amazed... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the way Greg Palast, who produced the story for the BBC, described it.
http://www.gregpalast.com/floridas-flawed-voter-cleansing-program-saloncoms-politics-story-of-the-year/ [gregpalast.com]
But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters.
Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.
"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away.
They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of being identified as felons.
Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.
A Republican administration in Florida prevented enough black voters from voting to swing the election for Bush. ChoicePoint deliberately targeted blacks. Over half the purged voters were black. ChoicePoint didn't do a similar analysis of hispanic names, because the Cubans voted Republican. It is well known that the Republican state legislatures around the country have a strategy of Gerrymandering districts to prevent blacks from influencing elections.
Florida was a slave state and a Jim Crow state that didn't let blacks vote at all until they were forced to by the voting right act in the 1960s. They're still a racist, Jim Crow state.
Zimmerman was tried for the killing of a black man by an all-white jury, and as always happens in those cases, the jury found him innocent. When was the last time a white man was convicted of killing a black man in Florida?
P.S. My parents went to Florida in the 1940s. My mother told me that she was riding on a bus, and she saw a pregnant black woman standing. She got up to give the black woman her seat, and pandemonium ensued. The black woman got off the bus.
Re:I'm amazed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do I really need to explain this to a 21st century American? Ok... Here goes: Try him. In a court of law. Some people aren't bothered by the apparent illegalities of the War on Terror, and if you are one of them, then you would not understand, what I'm talking about.
But if you did protest Bush's extrajudicial detentions of the accused terrorists in Gitmo, you should be even louder protesting [rall.com] Obama's extrajudicial killings of the same people.