Quite a few people have challenged the "Zimmerman is innocent" part in various places (although here I mean more "under a sensible set of laws he would not be innocent" rather than "under Florida's strange laws he is not innocent). I guess not many have addressed the "Martin is a thug" part, so I guess I should now.
As far as I can tell, it boils down to
- He got suspended once for bunking off school
- He occasionally got into fights
- He took weed at some point
- He liked guns
- He exchanged some clearly humorous text messages about being a hoodlum
All of these things are pretty minor and apply to a significant proportion of people of Martin's age. Note the complete lack of anything serious such as violent convictions or actual gang links. The fact that he occasionally got into fights with other kids does not lend any credence to the idea that he suddenly decided he was going to murder a random person with his bare hands, in my opinion.
The notions of Trayvon's criminality or delinquency is in this case, at the risk of sounding amoral is largely irrelevant. It really only demonstrates a lack of inhibitions to crime, and without demonstrating that Trayvon was violent would be of little use. As is the case of Marissa, even if whoever was shot at was known as abusive or a murderer, shooting them would be illegal only in exception of a legitimate threat being presented. Trayvon provided such a threat with his attack on Zimmerman's skull.
Though if you must:
From bottom to top, your points addressed:
- I'd agree. However, only for one such text. You have managed to waltz past the parts that are relevant, it's not like Trayvon riding on a horse was going to change the outcome on a trial. The rest of the evidence however, could have.
- He liked guns. Yeah, there isn't anything suspect here, most people like guns.
- THC was in his body at most hours before fighting Zimmerman, he had been smoking marijuana before fighting. THC is known to relax inhibitions to aggression. Irrelevant in the face of other evidence.
- He occasionally fought other kids, we also know he attacked other kids. He wasn't getting into fights, he was causing them.
- He got suspended multiple times for fighting, drug possession, grafitti and possession of burglary tools and jewelry.
What is significant is that in his text messages he displayed brutish vindictiveness to his peers. This isn't even exaggeration:
In one of the fights he got into, the person he was fighting was "dat nigga who snitchd on me." His vindictiveness came up when he starts talking about how horrible it was that he lost the 1st round, pinned to the ground helpless, but that it was ok since he won the 2nd and 3rd round. His friend responded by saying he needs to stop lest he get suspended again, Trayvon replied saying they need to meet again, "he aint breed enuf 4 me, only his nose......... but afta dat im done"
Trayvon Martin had been told to move out by his mother [again, from the text messages on Trayvon's phone], where Trayvon was feeling like he needed to prove himself against someone. This is all relevant to explaining why Trayvon felt the need to pin George on the ground, punch in his nose and batter him bloody.
Going by the standard that made Martin a thug, Zimmerman was the love child of Hitler and Bin Laden. If getting in fights in high school makes you a menace to society then what does getting in fights with police officers make you? Oh but wait, that's totally not relevant to the case because it might bias the jury...
Yes, Adolf Bin Hitladen is best known for his bloodthirsty shoving of a police officer to defend his friend, Qatada Goebbels.
2) Martin attacked Zimmerman long after Zimmerman stopped following him. If Zimmerman had approached Martin and Martin had attacked him then, Martin could have claimed Stand Your Ground since he may not have known Zimmerman's intentions. Instead he ran away, Zimmerman stopped following him, and Martin turned around and attacked Zimmerman. Martin is the aggressor in this case. Following a man is not a crime (Even if it is stupid).
Is this established beyond a doubt, or based entirely on Zimmerman's implausible story (that includes a young man with a punctured lung giving a death speech)?
I can't tell if you're joking or if you're mocking Trayvon. 'You got me' is hardly some infinitely long ballad and Zimmerman's implausible story is the one that is supported by the evidence. The witness saw Trayvon attacking Zimmerman, and this was brought up by the prosecution. Zimmerman stopped following Trayvon, if he continued he would have saw much more than just the direction Trayvon roughly went, he wouldn't have ended up on the T intersection, and you know, the 911 call where he stopped wouldn't exist as it does.
The idea that Zimmerman wasn't aware of Martin until he was right on top of him is also laughable by the way and only works under the "Martin decided to murder a stranger for no reason, and so suddenly that he decided to hang up his phone in the middle of a conversation" theory.
"Yeah, what are the odds of Trayvon hanging up after finishing his conversation, walking down the main road to turn left at the intersection, to attack Zimmerman where he was waiting. He was still talking in the 4 minutes of silence, and George could clearly see the hostile intent radiating through the row of houses in between him and Trayvon. Couldn't George Zimmerman CLEARLY tell that Trayvon was only hitting his skull into the concrete to save him from headcrab attack? How could you confuse that for murderous intent at all?"
4) Zimmerman only shot Martin after he was pinned to the ground and was having his head bashed into concrete. Zimmerman was at risk for a concussion at best, death or brain damage at worst. He took the only option he reasonably could to prevent himself from becoming a drooling paperweight and shot the man who was attacking him. Martin had no ground to stand on: Zimmerman acted in pure self defense.
"Head bashed into the concrete" is still bullshit and not consistent with Zimmerman's injuries at all. Like what, the first few bashes did nothing at all, but the next one, oh boy, that was going to turn him into a vegetable?
You don't know anything about head injuries, and it pains me horribly.
From the OP:
Also, because I don't think I made this point hard enough in my previous posts: Zimmerman's injuries were very minor. He did not need any kind of medical treatment for them. The idea that his head was being smashed against the ground at any point is a total lie, as he would have suffered far worse injuries if that were true.
Let us ignore the witness testimonies, the medical evidence, the idiotic notion that Zimmerman should have waited until he was incapacitated until he defended himself, or the fact that most severe head wounds [the NHS gives 97%] will not need treatment, or the fact that this reason is so full of spaghetti and fallacious reasoning that you could make a special dinner out of it - how on Earth do you think he got his wounds? Did he cold cock himself on the back of his head? Slip three times on the road to smash his nose and his head? Don't even answer, it's rhetorical. The wounds on his head were presented to the jury for a reason. They are evidence of Trayvon's intent.
You're mistaken if for a moment you believe it is a requirement to look like the black knight from Monty Python's holy grail to be justified in using lethal force in self-defence. Roderick's case, an earlier case exemplified this rather well.
And this one particularly pains me, because twice I've gotten head injuries. The first time I actually cracked the back of my head open, blood everywhere and surprisingly it didn't even need stitches, just some weird glue. The second time I was hit on the side of my head with a foil from the outside of a helmet. No scratches or bumps, not even a bruise. And that's when I experienced concussion for the first time, when black spots appeared in my vision and it became to painful to walk, and then too painful to stand. Surprise surprise, didn't need treatment.
And I think I just got a third cranial injury from planting my head into my desk reading this twice. Fuck my inconsistent head injuries.
Again, jury instructions (something the totally unbiased OP omitted) would have been radically changed by SYG.
_ ~
But I included the main bits of the jury instructions o_O
a) Do not encourage people to pursue random people they regard as suspicious
b) Are not so vague that it's extremely to achieve a conviction for murder if there are no witnesses, even if the person claiming self-defence has no credible story
c) Require some responsibility on the part of the person using lethal force in response to a non-lethal attack
a) He stopped the moment it was known he should. This is already the way things are.
b) The story is credible, the evidence is supporting and there was a witness.
c) You can't hit someone's head onto concrete and call it non-lethal. You can have someone punching you with naught but your fists and fear for your life, the male body is built for combat.
I think the actual reason people chose right-wing bias was that you mentioned every talking point that's been showing up on right-wing news sources while ignoring or arbitrarily dismissing anything that went against the "Zimmerman is innocent and Martin is a thug" narrative.
Nah, I haven't been arbitrarily dismissing anything that went against the narrative, I've been disproving it. Because there isn't evidence to suggest otherwise, unless you count news falsification, which are just that. Call me right wing or whatever, but I came to this conclusion starting from a position where I had assumed Zimmerman was guilty, based off of stuff I heard from the news, and I ended up to the stance I have now from watching the trial. And if you haven't noticed, I detest the fact that facts have become talking points and that the right wing has done nothing to mitigate the politicization here. But I simply won't ignore the role the political left of America has done to make this all possible, from the media to the people and all the way back up to the administration. People are willing to ignore evidence because it's endorsed by those guys they disagree with on minor social issues yet agree on all else.
The idea that you're "just throwing truth out there" is laughable. For example, you state that Martin "turned back and assaulted George Zimmerman." There is no evidence to suggest this is true - at best it's a possibility the jury decided couldn't be ruled out. As far as I can tell you are badly misreading Rachel Jeantel's testimony - she suggested that Martin may have hit first, but that he would've done it in response to physical provocation, since he wouldn't have abruptly hung up on her if he were planning to start a fight. It wouldn't be at all unreasonable to see this as right-wing bias, due to the fact it's a talking point that every right-wing news source has latched on to.
Then the right-wing media too isn't telling everything.
What a surprise!
Zimmerman waited at the T intersection, Trayvon Martin was out of sight having gone around to the main road [around the corner of the intersection]. After hanging up there was 4 minutes between the 911 call and Trayvon's call. The witness saw the fight happen outside his house.
To entertain the idea that Zimmerman attacked Trayvon would be to say that Zimmerman and Trayvon were staring at each other for under 10 minutes before Zimmerman did something to move against Trayvon. All this time no one on dispatch heard Trayvon, heard running or heard fighting.
There's 100 yards of road and houses between the idea Zimmerman stalked and attacked Trayvon and what the eye witness saw and where the fight happened.
As far as I can tell you are badly misreading Rachel Jeantel's testimony - she suggested that Martin may have hit first, but that he would've done it in response to physical provocation, since he wouldn't have abruptly hung up on her if he were planning to start a fight.
She testified saying she thought he hung up because he was in another fight.
Does it? Afternoon in the US is generally evening in the EU, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people post in the evening.
You notice the shifts in these times, especially the Ozzies.
What's actually happened is that you've decided Zimmerman was not only innocent under the law but fully justified in his actions, and now you want to lecture everyone about how they are bad progressives.
Half right, because I'm also saying republicans are correct but it seems they're only correct because they called the right coin flip.
Just as a note, and this is the only problem I personally had with the whole thing other than it being stupid that it's national news - the police didn't charge him, because of the Stand Your Ground laws. They didn't hold him, they didn't charge him, and they had no intention of actually doing so. The problem isn't Stand Your Ground laws - it is Florida's law in particular, which definitely played a major role here.
They held him in the station, interviewed him, Detective Serino interrogated him and berated him for shooting an unarmed minor.
Florida's Stand Your Ground law isn't the reason he got off - he got off because there was reasonable doubt, and good reason for it. But they are the reason this turned into the national wankfest that it is.
You know those two stories in the OP? I think they serve as good reference points. Despite being on his own property, the one guy was arrested and charged.
He was not on his property when he fired on the kids.
-Cont
Despite following someone else in public, Zimmerman was not.
Zimmerman had the bloody wounds on his head, Scott did not. I didn't even know this, but after watching it Detective Serino originally wanted to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter. He felt that Zimmerman did believe there a string of burglaries in the area, he believed that Zimmerman should have had little reason to believe that Trayvon was armed and he also believed it was highly likely that Zimmerman exaggerated his wounds but there was nothing to suggest that his story wasn't true - this was after they did their own investigation.
In Scott's case they didn't have any verifiable information that awarded reasonable doubt until the trial. Cervini had abrasions to the face and leg as well as two gunshots, and unlike Trayvon's case where the bullet did not exit the body from entering those ones did. It was not possible to tell if Cervini was shot in the back, fleeing, whereas Trayvon was shot in the front of the torso with no exit wound and an eye witness account confirming that Trayvon was on top of Zimmerman. Scott and Zimmerman both approached who they shot at some point, Zimmerman stopped, Scott did not. Scott approached Cervini with his gun drawn, Zimmerman did not do the same either.
This is also a bit of extra useful information:
The police did handle this somewhat oddly, but isn't it likely that Zimmerman had a relationship with the police department prior? He was the person behind defending the homeless man who was beaten, and from what I read it caused quite some controversy within the local department. He's also neighborhood watch, meaning he's likely collaborated with the police before.
Not saying that excuses it at all, it's just likely that the police knew him beforehand, and decided not to instantly imprison him due to past events.
Uh, if anything the police would not like Zimmerman because he apparently got into a fist-fight with an off-duty police officer. He was sticking up for some friend of his and the cop didn't announce himself as such, so he got let off on charges of 'assaulting a police officer' so charged but never brought to court.
He might have had some credibility with neighbors he helped, but police don't care. Sanford is part of Orlando, it's a big city. It's not some small-town dump where everyone knows each other since elementary. Nobody knows anybody there. The police only know him by his record.
Yeah the police didn't know who he was when they started interrogating him.
Instead, they waited 45 days to charge him. He wasn't taken into custody. They did not do any drug tests. They did not investigate, and seemed to have no intent on ever actually doing so. Can you blame people for suspecting racism and being furious? Roderick was immediately brought into custody! They investigated! Here, the police refused to do so, and in circumstances that were, let us be honest, a bit more questionable and a lot less clear cut (Roderick case: Crime in progress, own property, multiple witnesses, criminal gets shot, come on, it doesn't even really compare on that front).
Multiple witnesses, Sanford police conduct investigation, find no just cause for prosecution, no trial. On a jurisdictional level New York also has stricter law.
Aaand I think that's the last of the trial for me to blather on about.
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