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And fatally slow to stop, for even an instant, to actually think.
Under the Florida law as written, and as explained to the jury, Zimmerman's action was probably justified. That is a far cry from calling it "right". (And yes, I know that American law is based on whether something is legal and not whether it is right.)
I thought then, and I'm restating now, that the Martin/Zimmerman case is one of the poorest possible incidents on which to base any decision about the "Stand Your Ground" premise.
Are you serious? Are you still laboring under the misassumption that Stand Your Ground had anything to do with the case?
A person should not be charged just for the sake of charging someone to satisfy a particular party. There was not enough evidence to charge him. As I mentioned in many of my others posts over this, the best tactic would be to wait until Zimmerman discloses more evidence (either for or against him); this tactic has been used in the past, where they have even waited 20 years to charge a perosn,w aiting for the person to say something to someone, or to accumulate more evidence that would sway the jury due to actions.
I find that people only say that when it suits them. I do not have any poll numbers or statistics to back anything up but if a large number of the population feels like their should be an investigation in to a death - there should be. It isnt mob rule to want due process. A example of mob rule would have been a group of people beating zimmerman to death in the streets. Wanting a legit investigation into a shooting death is the whim of a civilized society wanting equal justice for all its citizens. The sanford police demonstrated they had no intentions of gathering ecidence or making a real case and 20 years wouldnt.have helped.
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There was no racial issue in this,
This is just naive. A lot of people believe that if this were a white kid being shot down the events would have been different.
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If Zimmerman had caught Martin breaking into a car, and held him until the police arrived, no one would describe Zimmerman's following Martin as "irresponsible".
I agree with you but were both wrong. You cant hold a minor or anyone hostage. Remember OJ? He caught people stealing stuff and then held them at gunpoint? You cant gun people down for petty theft. Well maybe in texas. But you cant hold them hostage either.
call the cops and let them handle it. Intervene if you want put you cant kill unless you are personally in danger. I do not believe zimmerman was in danger until he provoked trayvon into a fight.
Self-defense is one thing; stand your ground is another. Most self defense laws include an element of responsibility on the "threatened" person to, if possible, mitigate their exposure - leave if possible, remove yourself from the situation, call the cops, and ultimately act closer to a last resort if need be. Stand your ground is vague & subjective. "I felt threatened so I shot them". If there were no witnesses & the person shot dies, then basically you are giving carte blanche to the shooter on their "I felt threatened". Sounds like a plan for someone with less than stellar intentions to get away with them.
This situation was avoidable. If Z didn't follow him, even if he followed him at greater distance and covertly if he felt so compelled to follow, there would have been no confrontation, physical contact, or death. I can't get past that. Z did nothing at points along the way to avoid confrontation. Under SYG I'll agree he didn't have to. Neither of them had to.
"Legally" either one could have been not guilty of killing the other, especially when only the living one gets to tell the story. But there are lots of things that are or have been "legal" that defy common sense, ethics, & human decency. Legally one can say he was not guilty, but to say he bore no guilt in creating the situation is disingenuous.
Are you serious? Are you still laboring under the misassumption that Stand Your Ground had anything to do with the case?
It didn't.
You're right. SYG was irrelevant in this case.
However, I guess the OP doesn't rule a thread once it gets going, but my point in starting this thread in the Great Debates forum was to try and keep this on the level of reasoned, respectful discussion. So, even though I've definitely seen worse, I'm asking people to try and avoid phrasing their posts in ways that sound as much like a challenge as opening a post with, "Are you serious?"
Though again, Dale Cooper is correct that SYG had nothing to do with this case.
I find that people only say that when it suits them. I do not have any poll numbers or statistics to back anything up but if a large number of the population feels like their should be an investigation in to a death - there should be. It isnt mob rule to want due process. A example of mob rule would have been a group of people beating zimmerman to death in the streets. Wanting a legit investigation into a shooting death is the whim of a civilized society wanting equal justice for all its citizens. The sanford police demonstrated they had no intentions of gathering ecidence or making a real case and 20 years wouldnt.have helped.
A trial is not the place to conduct an investigation. The way it's supposed to work legally is that an investigation precedes a trial, then leads to a trial if the investigation turns up enough evidence to amount to at least probable cause as the degree of certainty.
I believe that what happened in this case was mob rule in the guise of legitimate legal proceedings. The law requires that a given degree of certainty be present before a criminal charge may be brought against a person, and it's a high level of certainty, right below the beyond a reasonable doubt standard needed for conviction. That is the law. There was no hard evidence that Zimmerman broke any law whatsoever. The law does not (or is not supposed to) allow a criminal charge to be brought in the absence of sufficient evidence, never mind the absence of any evidence at all.
What happened here was that high-level state officials may have caved in to public pressure, or may have played to that pressure in the hope that it would help them politically and professionally to give the public what they wanted, but in any case arranged for the charging and trying of a man when there was no evidence against him. They manipulated around this inconvenient legal requirement of probable cause as the minimum standard for bringing a charge, by appointing a special prosecutor known for being overly aggressive, allowing her to submit a deceptive affidavit in support of charging Zimmerman, then hand-picking a judge who had to have known the potential professional consequences to herself if she had been too friendly to the defense. Most likely it was in fact the complete lack of solid evidence against Zimmerman that was the only reason he escaped conviction when, legally and properly, there should never even have been a trial.
As I said above, mob rule in the guise of legitimate legal proceedings.
This is a case where it's important to think beyond just the case itself. There are serious implications for the rights of us all if we accept the idea that trials can be turned into investigations, and people can be tried with little or no evidence if enough of the public wants that to happen. That's dangerous territory.
There was no real investigation. Sanford police used the stand your ground law to immediately set Zimmerman free. Then people were outraged. Then there was a trial and they avoided SYG and used self defense to get him aquitted.
the case did not receive the scrutiny it should have from the beginnin and the fact that zimm got a pat on the butt and sent home the very night of the crime is what set half the country off.
Self-defense is one thing; stand your ground is another. Most self defense laws include an element of responsibility on the "threatened" person to, if possible, mitigate their exposure - leave if possible, remove yourself from the situation, call the cops, and ultimately act closer to a last resort if need be. Stand your ground is vague & subjective. "I felt threatened so I shot them". If there were no witnesses & the person shot dies, then basically you are giving carte blanche to the shooter on their "I felt threatened". Sounds like a plan for someone with less than stellar intentions to get away with them.
I appreciate your offering your thoughts, and keeping the tone civil, but in keeping with the request I made in the opening post about how to present ideas here, I'd also appreciate it if you'd check further into the facts behind your assertions.
The fact is that SYG laws do not give carte blanche for one person to kill another, then be okay legally just by claiming that he felt threatened.
Historically, self-defense law in the U.S. has held that in situations where a person faces the imminent threat of harm so severe that deadly force is legally warranted, before using deadly force the person being threatened should back away from the threat if retreat is safe and physically possible. All that the SYG portion of the Florida law does is state that in such a situation the threatened person "does not have a duty to retreat." All historically held legal requirements, that a person limit deadly force to defense against the reasonable belief that death or serious harm is imminent, are still in place. In order to make this thread work, please check this stuff out before stating something as fact.
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Originally Posted by nj185
This situation was avoidable. If Z didn't follow him, even if he followed him at greater distance and covertly if he felt so compelled to follow, there would have been no confrontation, physical contact, or death. I can't get past that. Z did nothing at points along the way to avoid confrontation. Under SYG I'll agree he didn't have to. Neither of them had to.
One issue here is that you can't really know what Zimmerman did or did not do that might have avoided a confrontation. Zimmerman is the only living person who knows exactly how the two came face to face with each other, and who did what when they did. None of us is in a position to describe what happened as if any of us had been there to witness it.
Another issue is the matter of there being no legal requirement for Zimmerman to proactively avoid a confrontation, especially if Martin did in fact initiate the actual face-to-face confrontation, and there's evidence that he may have. There's a big difference between what you or I or John L. Customer who lives down the street thinks Zimmerman "should" have done to handle the situation responsibly and the question of whether he broke any law.
A third issue here is that in fact SYG had nothing to do with whether it was lawful for Zimmerman to follow Martin at all or in the way he did. SYG involves nothing more than removing the traditional duty to retreat, if possible, before using deadly force in self-defense at the moment an attack is happening or a threat is imminent. And in this incident SYG is irrelevant in any case, because with Zimmerman pinned down on the ground at that critical moment, retreat was not possible.
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Originally Posted by nj185
"Legally" either one could have been not guilty of killing the other, especially when only the living one gets to tell the story. But there are lots of things that are or have been "legal" that defy common sense, ethics, & human decency. Legally one can say he was not guilty, but to say he bore no guilt in creating the situation is disingenuous.
As this case proceeded ahead, there were times when I tried to get as good an understanding as I could by reversing things. What if everything had happened as it did except that Zimmerman had been unarmed? What if Martin had severely injured the defenseless Zimmerman? Or even beaten Zimmerman to death? Would there have been much of a case against Martin, and would Martin have had any defense?
You have two sides to the story: One, a dead man who can't tell his story and the other a killer (yes he killed the boy) who told his story.
There wasn't any evidence that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman yet people believed Zimmerman because the black "thug" must have been the aggressor.
Both of the men had shaky backgrounds but only one had a restraining order against him for domestic violence, assaulted an undercover cop so was made to go to anger management, and was fired from 2 jobs for aggressive behavior. That man was Zimmerman.
So tell me, why did everyone believe that Trayvon, the male carrying skittles and ice tea was the aggressor when the other guy had a gun on him and a history of violent behavior.
(please don't say because Zimmerman had cuts, all that proves it that he lost the fight.)
But let me ask, if a "reasonable person" chooses to put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation, are they blameless [as opposed to "not guilty"] when it blows up in their face, and as a consequence of their actions they are scared and kill someone who was doing nothing wrong?
I understand the legal stuff, and if that is as far as you consider, then you are technically right. My distaste for this case is not legal[except that SYG simmers in the background and I find it too vague, one-sided, and subjective in cases with no witnesses and the death of 1 of the parties]. It is that Z put himself in this position. He was not a cop, it was not his job. He chose unasked to follow him. M was doing nothing wrong - it's not like he saw him checking out car door locks or something. He saw him walking for cripes sake. You follow someone and they're either gonna' run away or confront you.
If M had beaten Z to death - no - there should have been no case legally to convict him based on the standards of this case - he was being followed by some guy he thought was up to no good - and as to who confronted whom - well we would then only have his side of the story. But I seriously doubt, if other things were taken into account - Z being a neighborhood watch & calling the police - that it would play out like that. No way would they have sent him home.
Last year, my husband was involved in a trial. Even though he won, the cost was a lot and no one picks up the tab other than us and relatives who we need to pay back. (Unlike GZ, it was on us - no reimbursement from the Feds).
I heard on Nancy Grace last night about the discussion of PTSD and while it does not always apply, a form of that could be surfacing for GZ. I cannot tell you what this type of thing does to a family and the people close to the person not to mention the person.
The one we went through was considered a white collar and my husband was a scapegoat, an easy target. I guess they went after someone that would not fight thinking another notch on the belt. Well, he fought it, I'm proud of him standing up for what was right but the toll on us was horrible. We lived through this for close to 6 years.
It just derails your life and ours did make the local media and MSNBC but I can't imagine being in the limelight like this case was. Now, we have to start to rebuild our life.
I dislike the violence in this country, the amount of anger really bothers me. Maybe it's because of the Internet but you hear about a terrible shooting just about every day. Horrible.
Maybe, someday, I'll write a book.
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Until you live through something
