Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 11:32am PT
|
But Ron, is walking on the sidewalk back to your house with candy criminal?
|
|
aspendougy
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 11:36am PT
|
The likely scenario, judging from the various accounts is that Zimmerman thought Trayvon looked suspicious, law enforcement told him to back off, but he followed him anyway, disregarding their advice. Trayvon was then the one who felt threatened. It was the man following him who possessed a gun, after all, not him!!
Even if Trayvon turned on Zimmerman and punched him out, he also had the right to self-defense, didn't he? If Zimmerman can claim self defense against someone, even though he was following the guy, he had a gun, and the other guy didn't, how much more so could Trayvon have made the same claim. No one thus far has seemed to grasp the point that Trayvon has as much a right to act in self-defense as Zimmerman. Trayvon's in-laws, after all lived in that neighborhood, he had a perfect right to be there.
If I were in charge of admissions for the Florida police academy, I don't think I'd take Zimmerman
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 11:48am PT
|
Even if Trayvon turned on Zimmerman and punched him out, he also had the right to self-defense, didn't he? If Zimmerman can claim self defense against someone, even though he was following the guy, he had a gun, and the other guy didn't, how much more so could Trayvon have made the same claim. No one thus far has seemed to grasp the point that Trayvon has as much a right to act in self-defense as Zimmerman. Trayvon's in-laws, after all lived in that neighborhood, he had a perfect right to be there.
Actually I think lots of people have "grasped" your point, and it may be be correct (although it's not obvious to me that Trayvon would have the legal right to start beating the crap out of George, even if George was following Trayvon and being an obnoxious jerk by asking him where he was going / what he was doing).
It is hypothetically possible to have a situation where two people would have the legal right to act in self-defense and use deadly force against each other. In that case, it's just the luck of the draw who comes out on top, but no crime has been committed.
Here's an analogy: not every automobile accident is the result of negligence on the part of either driver. You may have an Escalade steamroll a SmartCar where the SmartCar driver did nothing wrong, but that doesn't mean the Escalde driver is liable under criminal or civil law.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:08pm PT
|
"appears uninjured"...granted, that calls into question the police report that states z was "bloody" on his face and the back of his head; however, it's not a "smoking gun"
it simply doesn't make sense that the police lied on their official report then took z to the police station where they KNEW there would be multiple cameras to reveal their false report; also, the cops would have to be certain that others on the scene (witnesses, ems personnel, and possibly coroner's and da personnel) would conspire to cover for them
the logical explanation (though still entirely based on speculation) is as follows: police are required to take injured suspects (note, z is cuffed in the back seat of the patrol car, which proves he was taken into custody) to the hospital if needed or render first aid on the scene; so, it makes sense that z would be cleaned up by the time he arrived at the police station
"Trayvon was then the one who felt threatened. It was the man following him who possessed a gun, after all, not him!!"
again, you're not thinking logically; you assume z had his gun drawn, which makes martin look pretty stupid (or at least reckless) for attacking a man who's holding a gun on him rather than running away or screaming for help
yes, martin had a right to be there, but residents also have a right to be suspicious if they don't recognize somebody walking in their neighborhood at night; and there's nothing illegal (or even wrong) about confronting such a person--especially following a rash of burglaries--to which the reasonable response is "my name is trayvon martin; my family lives on this street; you can follow me there to be sure"
|
|
monolith
climber
albany,ca
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:28pm PT
|
We'll never know what really happened. I'm guessing Zimmerman tried to detain Martin cuz he knew the cops were on the way and didn't want 'another one' to get away as he said on 911 tape. Any kind of physical contact could easily escalate into a fight.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:38pm PT
|
you compare this incident to the holocaust, and i'm the one who be ashamed?
the whole purpose of neighborhood watch is to "watch" for suspicious activity; yes, martin was, technically, a child, but he was also 6'2" and walking with his hood up on a warm florida night; there had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood; there is NOTHING wrong with asking such a person to identify himself
bruce, you're the one who assumes this was a racial incident and fueled by hatred when you have NO PROOF whatsoever; in fact, the evidence we have about z's racial attitudes point to exactly the opposite (i.e. black men defending his character)
|
|
monolith
climber
albany,ca
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:44pm PT
|
Yep Bookwarm, WATCH, means you watch and report. Don't confront and detain. He knew the cops were on the way.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:53pm PT
|
zimmerman derangement syndrome: trayvon martin's death = the holocaust = global warming skepticism = acceptance (sic) of gays
bad news, f, but i think bruce might be looking to take your place; you better come up with something way more unhinged than "murder"
|
|
Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 12:57pm PT
|
bookworm: and walking with his hood up on a warm florida night
Bookie, do you ever get anything right? You seem to have some sort of recurring problems with facts. And not just in this thread.
Trayvon Martin, 17, died Feb. 26 in a dark pathway some 20 minutes after a neighborhood watch volunteer called police saying he thought a young stranger looked suspicious. It was raining, and the volunteer thought the kid in the hoodie walked too slow and peeked in windows.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/15/2696446/trayvon-martin-case.html
Is it possible you've got anything else wrong?
|
|
Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:05pm PT
|
How come we didn't have to wait on a report on Trevor Dooley?
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:05pm PT
|
oops, one wrong fact--i guess i'm a racist hoping for a black holocaust; just ignore everything else
The Corner
The one and only.
10 Things That We’ve Learned from the Trayvon Martin Tragedy
By Victor Davis Hanson
March 29, 2012 11:27 A.M.
1) So far there has been very little new light shed on exactly what happened on the night of the shooting. It is likely that Mr. Zimmerman will be arrested on some sort of charge, local, state, or federal, and more likely that most will believe that such an arrest is as much a necessary price to soothe racial passions as it is likely to be based on careful review of existing evidence.
2) Identity in this ill society is everything — something to be put on and taken off as one sees advantage. Civil-rights supporters prefer to wear hoodies in rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with the hooded Mr. Martin, but prefer the media to continue to show pictures of a young-looking victim in football attire that better offers a sympathetic portrait to the general public. Hispanic and Democratic George Zimmerman, had he Hispanicized his name (something like a Jorge Zimmerman, or had he used his mother’s Latino maiden name), would have either found a supportive chorus from Latino activists, or the entire case of Latino-black crime would not have had commensurate resonance. If Mr. Zimmerman were applying for a civil-service job, no one would have created the new rubric “white Hispanic.” Even at this late date, if he were to use his mother’s maiden name as part of a hyphenated last name, he would earn more empathy. Unfortunately, he found himself pigeonholed as a white conservative vigilante, not a Hispanic Democrat, and that has made all the difference in his media profile.
3) The hysteria is not just over the death of a young African-American male, because hundreds are tragically killed to near silence every year, 94 percent of them by other African-American males. Nor is the outrage over a supposed white war against black men, given that in incidents of interracial crime, the latter kill the former far more frequently. Nor is it just over the decision, so far, of the police not to arrest and indict George Zimmerman, because hundreds of black assailants of other blacks each year find themselves not charged for capital crimes, because of the proven difficulties of obtaining critical affidavits, and the reluctance of eye-witnesses to come forward in the inner-city. In general, there are no marches or demonstrations over what has become a case of sheer carnage of one particular racial and gender group in our cities, or the frequent inability to bring murder suspects to trial. Finally, if the deceased had been white, and there are numerous whites killed each year in self-defense cases, with the facts as we know them so far unchanged, there would be zero national interest.
4) There are no such things any more as overtly recognized racial smears, at least not in the absolute sense. They now depend on perceptions of who says what and why, a relative condition. The country is obsessed with decoding a scratchy tape to ascertain whether Mr. Zimmerman said “cold, coons, goons, or punks,” with the idea that if the garbled word proves a racial slur, then we have the magical key that will supposedly unlock the case — even as the late Travyon Martin self-identified himself with the N-word on his Twitter account and used it of his friends. No one can explain why Mr. Martin felt a need to so self-identify; no one seems to care; and no one can provide rules of the conditions under which (who says it, and when, why, how) society must deplore the use of such an epithet.
5) The country is unhinged and pays no attention to simple logic. The mother of Trayvon Martin deplores society’s supposed media obsession over her son, even as she seeks to trademark her son’s name for traditional marketing purposes, after avowing her legal efforts are only to protect his legacy. We are to deplore the use of past information about Mr. Martin that might lend background information to the case (past suspensions, possible drug use, alleged possession of possible stolen items, etc.) that seems at odds with the narratives provided by the media, but simultaneously must be told that in the past Mr. Zimmerman was a vigilante, racist, had brushes with the law, was a bad credit risk, etc. In short, we are to accept that background information is a relative issue, and a necessary means only if it leads to proper ends.
6) There really is no law. The Martins have legitimate questions about the absence of an indictment, as do many in this country who are unhappy with the use of self-defense pleas. That said, no one believes the Black Panthers will be charged with a felony for posting an open-season bounty on Mr. Zimmerman; no one believes that Spike Lee’s deliberate attempt to incite a mob reaction at the Zimmerman residence will even be considered a misdemeanor; and no one believes that a crowd of protestors detouring into a pharmacy to loot it will face arrests for theft. Everyone believes that if he were to emulate any of the above behavior in a non-racially-charged case, he would most surely risk some sort of legal repercussions.
7) There can be no more presidential editorializing. In this case, the Gates matter, the Fluke incident, and the Giffords tragedy, the president weighed in only to find his commentary either unsupported by facts, premature, prejudicial, or abjectly partisan. Nor will the attorney general weigh in, given that he has lost credibility after nonsensically calling the nation “cowards” for not wishing for a dialogue on race on his terms, referring to African-Americans as “my people,” and alleging racism as the cause of congressional questioning of his handling of the Fast and Furious debacle.
8) Mr. Zimmerman indeed may be guilty of second-degree murder, some sort of manslaughter, criminal negligence, or innocent by reason of self-defense. But we are at a point now where such considerations have become secondary to the larger agendas of activists. Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Jackson, the Black Panther Party, the Black Caucus, Spike Lee, and others may feel their invective and shoot-from-the-hip allegations are necessary to ensure an indictment, given the history of racial bias in this country; but fairly or not that aim seems secondary to their larger interests in racial scapegoating and acrimony for careerist reasons. Of course, they are not worried about such criticism, but it nonetheless is widely shared, as the opportunism and lack of ethics of the current self-identified civil-rights establishment is becoming a national consensus.
9) Most who editorialize so passionately on this case, black and white, live in cities, but most likely as far away from those neighborhoods and inner-city schools where murder is an epidemic as they can. They are engaging in de facto profiling in every aspect of their and their childrens’ lives, based on general perceptions, personal experience, and statistical data. Profiling and stereotyping are for others; a “good” or “safe” area is for the more sensitive and educated.
10) If an outsider were dispassionately to collate the public statements of the Black Caucus, the number of widely publicized racial controversies, and the charges of racism and counter-racism in the last three years, then one would conclude that racial relations, at least at the media and sensationalized level, from 2009–2012 were both far more emphasized and far worse, and the country far more polarized, than at any time in recent memory. In short, we are entering a dangerous phase in which millions of Americans have resigned themselves to allowing elites to construct one sort of reality, while they disengage from it and privately live quite another.
|
|
the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:06pm PT
|
martin was, technically, a child, but he was also 6'2" and walking with his hood up on a warm florida night; there had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood; there is NOTHING wrong with asking such a person to identify himself
We don't know the details yet and may never know, but it's no surprise to see those on the right quick to support a LEO wannabe with a gun vs. an unarmed black person who was doing nothing wrong.
He was "technically" a child. He WAS a child. Interesting use of technically there.
It sounds like he had his hood down until he realized he was being followed then put it up. And it was raining. Even suggesting blame for wearing a hood up is like blaming a rape victim for being dressed provocatively. It doesn't justify anything.
There is nothing wrong with asking a person to identify themselves, but if that person refuses or ignores the asker, they can do NOTHING about it.
Bottom line Zimmerman was pursuing Martin. If we take Zimmerman at his word that Martin attacked him (which sounds like BS to me by how Z describes it, why is someone going to all of a sudden risk their own safety and attack someone else who had 100 pounds on him?) Z still pursued him which led to the confrontation. Even if it was self defense Z should have been arrested and shares blame for creating the situation.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:19pm PT
|
right, i see someone 6'2" and i automatically think "child"
and nobody is "defending" zimmerman; we're simply responding to the unhinged rhetoric, the seemingly instinctive accusations of racism, the conspiracy theories, the fact that a militant group has offered a "bounty" for zimmerman (for what, his...capture?...he's not even a fugitive), the fact that spike lee tweeted an incorrect address for zimmerman and forced an elderly couple to flee their home and go into hiding, the fact that roseanne barr has tweeted the address for zimmerman's parents, the fact that a rap artist has released a song calling for violence, the fact that members of congress--our supposed "lawmakers"--are trashing the legal system by declaring zimmerman guilty of first degree murder and racial profiling, etc.
if zimmerman is guilty of stalking and murdering martin, he should receive the death penalty...but he should first receive a fair trial
The Media and Black Homicide Victims
By Heather Mac Donald
March 29, 2012 7:00 A.M.
Cable mogul Evan Shapiro had a stunningly clueless Trayvon Martin entry on Huffington Post yesterday asking: Why doesn’t the media cover more black crime victims?
Shapiro, the president of indie cable broadcaster IFC, should pose the same question to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and every member of the black protest establishment: Why don’t you protest more black crime victims? The answer would be the same in all cases: Because the only black victims who interest the race industry and its mainstream media handmaidens are blacks who have been killed by “white” civilians, including honorary whites like Martin’s killer George Zimmerman, or blacks who have been killed or offended by the police (black officers will do here in a pinch).
Unfortunately, there are very few such victims. Ninety-three percent of all black homicide casualties from 1980 to 2008 were killed by other blacks, and are thus of no interest whatsoever to today’s race advocates, because they fail to support the crucial story line that blacks remain under siege by a racist white power structure.
The coverage of New York City’s West Indian Day Parade in September 2011 exemplifies this rule. The New York Times and other local outlets spilled an enormous amount of ink on an altercation between a black city councilman, Jumaane Williams, and the New York Police Department. Williams had tried to cross a police line, and, when he was not allowed to pass, got into a scuffle with some officers. He was then handcuffed and held until the police verified his identity. The city’s Public Advocate, a New York State Assemblyman, and Williams charged the police with racism, claiming that the treatment of Williams exemplified the “siege mentality” with which the police treat black men in New York City. To this day, the Williams detention is regularly mentioned by the New York Times in its constant coverage of the alleged racism of the NYPD.
What else happened on that parade day in 2011? A black-on-black bloodbath:
In the pre-dawn celebrations known as J’ouvert that open the parade, one man was fatally shot, crowds were sprayed with gunfire, and several people were stabbed. A shooting at a McDonald’s at 6 am triggered a stampede. The police repeatedly had to break up mobs that formed after gunfire. . . .
Later that day, a shootout near the parade route killed its intended victim as well as a 55-year-old mother who had been standing nearby; the two police officers who responded to the murders were also shot. Police also arrested someone in the vicinity of the parade who shot off several rounds without hitting anyone. The day’s violence would have likely been even worse had officers not removed 15 guns from spectators; each of those potentially life-saving stops would undoubtedly be condemned as racial profiling by the ACLU and its backers in the City Council and in Albany.
Previous West Indian Day Parades were hardly more pacific; the violence includes a man shot in the leg in 2007; another leg shooting and a stabbing in 2006; a man shot to death in 2005; and in 2003, a stabbing in the neck and someone who, from his perch on a parade float, shot into a group of spectators and killed one of them.
None of this violence was given the intense and loving press treatment accorded to the detention of Jumaane Williams. In fact, it was barely mentioned at all, even though, arguably, it is more serious to be shot dead than to be briefly detained by the police. Nothing prevented Al Sharpton from protesting the killings and stabbings that day. However, only Councilman Williams falls into the favored category of, in this case, black victim offended by the police, and so his detention was the only event that day worth noting.
On Halloween 2010, five-year-old Aaron Shannon Jr. was playing in his family’s backyard in his Spiderman costume in South Central Los Angeles. Two gangbangers from the Kitchen Crips, seeking to avenge a previous gang shooting, shot randomly towards some houses and killed Shannon, also wounding the boy’s grandfather and uncle. Sharpton, Inc., was perfectly free to make the names of Shannon’s killers, Leonard Hall Jr., 21, and Marcus Denson, 18, as infamous as that of George Zimmerman. But the race baiters never showed up. The killing aroused not the slightest interest from them because it was useless in aiding the white racism conceit. And so no one outside Shannon’s immediate circle remembers today who Hall and Denson are, even though Shannon was at least as innocent as Trayvon Martin (whose image as combined Eagle Scout-St. Francis of Assisi has in any case come under some stress of late, information, that, if true, is not irrelevant to assessing Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.)
We know the names of virtually every unarmed black civilian shot by the New York Police Department in recent years — Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell — as well we should. To the extent that botched police tactics or training contributed to these tragic killings, the incidents are rightly publicized so that they can be prevented from reoccurring. Here’s the difference between these killings — they are a tiny handful — and the routine black-on-black killings that occur by the dozen every day across the country. The officers who mistakenly shot their victims thinking they were facing a deadly threat set out that morning to protect people, often in minority neighborhoods, not to injure anyone. A significant number of black-on-black shootings, however, like many shootings among all races, are done in cold blood.
Here’s another difference between police killings of blacks, white-on-black killings, and black-on-black killings: Sheer numbers. There were nine civilian victims of police gunfire last year in New York City; there were several hundred black homicide victims in the city, almost all shot by other blacks or Hispanics, none of them given substantial press coverage. Nationwide, in 2005, there were 2,646 black victims of other blacks, compared to 349 black victims of whites or Hispanics. The relative rates of interracial killings are wildly skewed towards black on white killings: There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of civilian black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of civilian white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. Yet to read columnists such as the Times’s Charles Blow or to listen to the professional racial extortionists, it is the police and whites who are the biggest threat to blacks, not other blacks.
A further prudential reason why the routine black gangbanger victim gets so little coverage: He is not particularly appealing. Though he had the misfortune of being the victim that day, he could just as easily have been the perpetrator the next day. That is true of many white-on-white homicides as well.
Shapiro, of course, has another explanation for the absence of coverage of most black crime victims: The media is too white, especially in its upper ranks. The “stunning under-representation of minorities at the TOP of our national and local news organizations creates an institutional lack of empathy for minority victims of violent crime,” he writes. Has he noticed that Trayvon Martin is not exactly being ignored? As soon as the media got wind of the story, it ran with it. When Amadou Diallo was shot by four NYPD officers in 1999, the New York Times ran three and a half articles a day on the incident for several months.
If Sharpton protested outside the jail cell of the routine robber or gunman in East New York with as much zeal as he devotes to allegedly racist whites or to the police, if he ever stigmatized black killers of blacks, the phony problem of “racial profiling” might go away, since it is merely an epiphenomenon of black crime. Protesting or covering black crime, however, would require bringing out some uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that the homicide rate among black males of the ages of 14 to 24 is nearly ten times that of white and Hispanic young males combined. Evan Shapiro mentions the elevated rates of black homicide victimization but somehow neglects to include the black homicide commission rate. His column flawlessly exemplifies the ignorance of the Hollywood elites regarding today’s racial realities.
— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Are Cops Racist?
|
|
Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:24pm PT
|
oops, one wrong fact
In your dreams. It's a constant cascade of misinformation from you.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:39pm PT
|
"In order to receive a "fair" trail, there must first be a trial.
That is the issue."
ok, but there has to be sufficient evidence to formally charge somebody; then, there has to be sufficient evidence to take the case to trial
again, zimmerman was cuffed and taken into custody, not, as some seem to suggest, patted on the back and sent on his merry way
it appears the da ordered zimmerman released that night based on the LAW (the law seems clear to me, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be amended or even repealed, but, until that time, it must be followed) but that doesn't mean the investigation ended, either; the police can't just hold anybody indefinitely without a charge
and a trial might still happen, but i think it would be wrong if the trial happens just because of political pressure
|
|
zBrown
Ice climber
Chula Vista, CA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 01:51pm PT
|
Personally, I'd rather wait to hear the evidence, but I would like to point out that the common notion that it is only the job of the police to confront criminals is disingenuous. The main job of police is to clean up messes. Being pro-active is great, but they can't be everywhere at once.
Not everywhere, but they were there in Sanford. You're overlooking the fact that the cops were on the way and that he was told not to follow him.
There is a whole line of argument initiated by academics, but actually implemented in e.g. NYC that it is more beneficial for the police to actively prevent the messes than to clean them up. In the situation under discussion here, had Z-man obeyed the dispatcher there would not have been a big mess, the cops could have confonted Martin and busted him for formerly possessing marijuana or some such.
I'm inclined to agree that it will all end up a "civil rights" violation.
|
|
Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 02:16pm PT
|
A 140 pound 6'2" kid.
|
|
zBrown
Ice climber
Chula Vista, CA
|
|
|
Mar 29, 2012 - 02:22pm PT
|
The case of Emmett Till.
The defense asserted that Bryant and Milam [two of the murderers] had taken Till, but had let him go.
Sound familiar? Z-man asserts that he "lost" Martin and then Martin snuck up and punched him in the nose from behind.
Suppose
Z-man decides he's gonna rape a woman. Follows(stalks) her. When questioned he states that he figured she was a prostitute walking the streets.
Z-man is an aspiring car-jacker. He follows(stalks) a driver in the parking lot. When questioned he states he thought the car was stolen.
Z-man...
Why were you carrying a gun? Because it's legal. I carry, therefore I am.
These are hypetheticals, don't wet yourself. Substitute J-man if you'd like.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!