Florida stand Your ground law?

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philo

Trad climber
Is that light the end of the tunnel or a train?
Jul 10, 2013 - 05:26pm PT
which purportedly show


OMG a Black kid in a hoodie armed with Skittles what other explanation could there be other than purported ones for why he killed himself?.
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 10, 2013 - 06:09pm PT
From what ive read of their law and police statements if true
i don't see why he was charged to begin with.

That's part of what makes this an interesting case. Remember that the local police investigated and the local prosecutor decided not to charge Zimm with anything, although apparently is was a close call.
Trayvon's family got an attorney (Mr. Crump) who agitated for prosecution, it got picked up by the national media, which in at least one well publicized incident clearly manipulated the reporting to inflame racial tensions (remember also there was this business about "coons," which was debunked, as I predicted on this thread at the time), Obama weighed in with his "if I had a son . . ." (but Obama didn't say much after it came out that Trayvon was high on pot, suspended from school for burglary, was a tatted fighter, etc.), and so on.

May turn out that the local police and prosecutors were doing the right thing, but got overruled by more politically minded higher-ups.

Edit:
Wow--anyone following the case should read the exclusive CNN interview with the former police chief:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/justice/sanford-bill-lee-exclusive/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
zBrown

Ice climber
Brujo de La Playa
Jul 10, 2013 - 06:31pm PT
Mr. Paladin is driving down the highway in Florida and his ride breaks down. He gets out to walk back to a call-box. It's a dark a rainy night so he takes his weapon and a couple of clips with him. As he strides along he becomes reasonably afraid that one of the cars traveling down the road is going to hit and kill him. He lights the car up with one shot. The car doesn't hit and/or kill him. Still being reasonably afraid for his life he empties two clips worth of bullets and survives the night.

No charges are filed because the investigating officers determined what his state of mind was and that it was reasonable.

Several of the dead automobile operators test positive for THC upon autopsy. Why was Paladin not afraid of motorcycles?

Florida - don't got there.
couchmaster

climber
pdx
Jul 10, 2013 - 07:06pm PT




IF THE HEAD SPLIT, YOU MUST ACQUIT.



philo

Trad climber
Is that light the end of the tunnel or a train?
Jul 10, 2013 - 08:09pm PT
His head wasn't split. He was all but unscathed.



Do you suppose if this pudgy pasty racist IS convicted that the red neck crackers of Florida will riot?
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 10, 2013 - 08:12pm PT
Do you suppose if this pudgy pasty racist IS convicted that the red neck crackers of Florida will riot?
Nope, and the State of Florida doesn't either--it's issuing public service announcements that are directed to a specific ethnic group. It ain't rednecks!

What does that tell you?
Toker Villain

Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
Jul 11, 2013 - 07:34pm PT
Prosecution just pulled a dirty switch allowing lesser charge of manslaughter.

Grounds for appeal if you ask me.
TGT

Social climber
So Cal
Jul 11, 2013 - 10:45pm PT
he Zimmerman case is about many things, but it isn't about George Zimmerman, an Hispanic Obama supporter who campaigned against police brutality only to find himself plucked up by the hand of Big Brother to play the villainous white racist in the latest episode of liberal political reality television.

Zimmerman is the latest Bernie Goetz; another wholly unlikely cult figure who currently campaigns for vegetarian lunches in public schools and squirrel rescue. It's not that the two men had anything particularly in common. Unlike Goetz, it is very unlikely that Zimmerman jumped the gun, so to speak, but they both fill a similar niche. They represent the embattled lower half of the middle class.

To understand the Zimmerman case, you have to live in a neighborhood that has just enough property values to keep you paying the mortgage and just enough proximity to dangerous territories to make you feel like you're living on the frontier.

The chain of events doesn't make much sense to the elites, which is one reason why they assume that the explanation must be racism There weren't a lot of New Yorker readers cheering as Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey stalked the subways and parks of the city blowing away hoods. The perfect target audience for the Death Wish movies or for Goetz saying "You don't look too bad, here's another" was that bottom half of the middle class that didn't have enough money to leave the city and didn't have enough liberalism to accept the violence as their just due.

But the case isn't about race either. It's about a struggling middle class in a precarious economy trying to hang on to what it has. And it's about a culture of dropouts from the economy who celebrate thuggery and then pretend to be the victims. It's doubtful that anyone in Zimmerman's neighborhood who weathered multiple break-ins has much sympathy for the Martin family. And that's one reason that the prosecution hasn't found any useful witnesses.

If Trayvon Martin had been the clean cut innocent kid that the media tried to pretend he is, the reaction might have been different. But he wasn't. The gap between Martin and Zimmerman wasn't race, in other circumstances most liberals would have called both men members of minority groups, it was aspiration.

George Zimmerman wanted to to be a cop. Trayvon Martin wanted to be a hood. It's quite possible that Martin got no closer to his ambition than Zimmerman got to his. Both men were just going through the motions on the edge of a game of cops-and-robbers that suddenly turned deadly real. And even in a country where the thug tops the entertainment heap, the vulnerable parts of the middle class have more sympathy for aspiring cops than for aspiring thugs.

What are cops and thugs? Cops are the protectors of the middle class and thugs prey on the middle class. Not just any part of the middle class, but the vulnerable parts, the men and women without enough money and mobility to get out when neighborhoods turn bad. And then it all comes down to territory and who can intimidate whom. Either the cops intimidate the thugs or the thugs intimidate the cops.

Everyone is the hero in their own story, but George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were living out different stories. George Zimmerman was looking out for his neighbors while Trayvon Martin was looking to live the thug life. Martin's story ended with him realizing that sometimes attitude isn't enough and Zimmerman's story ended with him realizing that sometimes even when you try to be the hero, you're going to be drawn as a villain.


But the Zimmerman and Martin story is an American story. That's why it has become so big. Back in the 70s, when Paul Kersey was skulking around on the silver screen, it was mainly an urban story. Now it's an everywhere story. It's a story about homesteaders and savages, about a shaky middle class built on piles of debt trying to protect what's left of its way of life while across the street, there's the glamor of not working and scoring money any way you can.

It's a culture clash of a primal kind. Settlers and nomads. Cops and robbers. Builders and destroyers. And it was never going to end well. The elites want the settlers to make way for the nomads, the cops to acknowledge their role in alienating the robbers and the builders to admit that their construction is really the destruction of the way of life of the destroyers. They don't understand the struggling lower middle class and they don't care to. They have a great deal of empathy for the Trayvon Martins swaggering around another neighborhood that decays at their touch, but none for the George Zimmermans, sweating, mopping their brows, worrying how they're going to hold everything together.

Neighborhood watches don't have to turn violent, but they exist because of the potential for violence in a society with plenty of law, but little order. The struggling middle class looks to the cops only to realize that the cops have their own job and it isn't to protect them, it's to protect each other. And so they become cops. It's vigilantism of a sort and it's a symptom of social collapse. But it's also the attitude that helped make the United States happen.

That's the real story behind the headlines, the agitprop and the circus of a public trial. It's the reality that doesn't get talked about much because it's much less interesting than the straightforward story being fed into the presses. The one about an innocent young boy killed for no reason at all. It's a story about what happens when people are backed into a corner and then told to stay there. It's about a frightened middle class trying to survive. And it's about territory.

Settlers make homes. Nomads walk in and out of them. Builders thrive on making things and destroyers on trashing them. Zimmerman picked his side of the coin and Martin picked his.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
couchmaster

climber
pdx
Jul 11, 2013 - 10:47pm PT
"IF THE HEAD SPLIT, YOU MUST ACQUIT."

I MAKE JOKE PHILO. OJ LAWYER JOHNNY COCHRAN SAID: "IF THE GLOVE FIT YOU MUST AQUIT". VERY FAMOUS QUOTE. I WILL JOKE NO MORE THEN WITHOUT SAYING "PHILO, I JOKE MAKE AGAIN". HOPING THAT IS OF HELP.




PHILO SAID:
"His head wasn't split. He was all but unscathed."










CNN SAID
"...photos, reportedly taken minutes after the shooting, showing streaks of blood on the back of Zimmerman's head. "

I CHANGE JOKE FOR YOU PHILO,
"IF HEAD HAVE STREAK OF BLOOD, YOU WEAR THE GLOVE."
IF OJ HAS HIS WAY, HE'LL MAKE HAY.
I WILL GLADLY PAY YOU TUESDAY FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY


HOPE THAT HELPS YOU.
"KNOCK KNOCK ..."WHO'S THERE" ...."BACK OF THE HEAD....BACK OF THE HEAD WHO"
PICTURE FROM HUFFYPO


blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:11am PT
Prosecution just pulled a dirty switch allowing lesser charge of manslaughter.

Grounds for appeal if you ask me.

I don't think you're right about that--I think lesser includeds are presented to the jury all the time (but I'm not a criminal defense lawyer and could be mistaken, and it may be jurisdiction specific).
The exclusion of the the texts about fighting on Trayvon's phone seemed both wrong and good grounds for appeal to me. For example, the phone was password protected, but the judge said something like any 7 year old could defeat the password. My phone is password protected, and I'd bet the judge any amount of money that no 7 year old (or any other non-hacker without sophisticated hacking equipment) could use my phone. Sounds to me like the judge made an evidentiary ruling on a critical issue based on her mistaken view of the way passwords and phones work.

Edit:
The judge really doesn't like this defense team
What I have read and seen in one news story anyway ...
That's the way it looks to me too; her rulings haven't been all one sided, but on balance, they seem to me to have hugely favored the prosecution, and I'm concerned that the jury won't know things that all of us know (e.g., Trayvon's texts about fighting I mentioned above--they're very interesting, if you haven't seen those texts and have an opinion as to what type of guy Trayvon was, I suggest you may not know the full story).
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:17am PT
Riley, they were texts between friends discussing Trayvon's fights, his plans to get into another fight with some guy he had fought before, and his friend telling him he had to stop fighting so much!!!!!

If you don't think that's relevant in considering who may have "thrown the first punch," well, we see it differently!
I'd just like for the jury to have access to all the relevant facts!


Texts between kids ?

And not to pick on you, but I recall one of your previous posts where you said that 17-year olds that you knew when you were growing up were men, and would fight just fine, not whine like little girls. I believe you and agree with you. Let's not call a big, 17-year old, tatood fighter a "kid."
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:28am PT
I mean u can't use a f*#king gun with blood in it that is found in a guys house if the cops don't attain that evidence legally
But u can introduce hacked stupid text messages ?

I'm sure they weren't hacked--defense lawyers have rights to obtain evidence relevant to their client's alleged crime (as do civil litigants)--it's generally called "discovery," and engaging in that process is how lots of lawyers spend much of their time, trust me on that.
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:52am PT
Well, how do you get private texts then?

You subpoena the phone carrier and/or have expert witnesses examine the phone (yes, they can defeat the password protection).

The investigators believed that Zimm's story was both substantially consistent with itself and with the evidence, so I'm not what "lies" you're referring too. I do recall they noted minor inconsistencies, but they understand that's normal. Someone who tells too perfectly consistent of a story is probably telling a rehearsed lie.

And remember the prosecutions's "star" witness (the obese young lady), who admitted lying repeatedly, under oath, in order to say what she thought Trayvon's parents wanted to hear.
So don't get too harsh on Zimm--ordinary people lie all the time when they perceive it to be in their interest.

That's it for me tonight, we'll see how the defense closing and the pros rebuttal turn out tomorrow.

aint a parent on either side of this argument which would advise their kids to put their hands up and stand quietly while the guy assaulting them calms down in hopes hes not a child molester or psycopath

Yeah, cuz short obese "white hispanic" non-athletes are grabbing 6' muscular, tatted out 17-year African-American fighters all the time to molest them.
Gary

Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
Jul 12, 2013 - 12:40pm PT
I don't understand why Zimmerman can stand his ground, but Martin can't. You have to admit though, he looks real thuggish in that photo above.
Dr. Christ

Mountain climber
State of Mine
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:00pm PT
I don't understand why Zimmerman can stand his ground, but Martin can't.

From the start "He looks like he is up to no good or on drugs or something?" Yeah, or something...

Martin did nothing and yet "These Assholes always get away." What Assholes ? Black Assholes ? Teenage Assholes ? Assholes in hoodies?

Zimmerman was told NOT to follow him. Zimmerman was NOT standing his ground, he was followin/chasing a teenager. If someone (not a cop) was chasing me, you bet your ass I'd run away and start throwing punches if they caught up to me.
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:19pm PT
From the start "He looks like he is up to no good or on drugs or something?" Yeah, or something...

He was on drugs--he was high on pot (but that evidence wasn't presented to the jury for apparently somewhat complicated strategic reasons).
The reset of your post presents the prosecution's version of events, but it's largely unproven conjecture. It is undisputed that Trayvon could have easily gone home after he noticed Zimm following him, but he chose not to.
I don't have any particular interest in going through all the evidence yet again at this stage, other than to note that your version is not an accurate summary of the actual evidence.
For example, to say that Zimm was "chasing"--you're just making that up. And if you'd really start punching someone just because they seemed to be following you and approached you and asked what you're doing--well, you wouldn't. That's not reasonable behavior--that's what a violent teenager does who wants to teach a "cracker" a lesson.
And even if you think Zimm's guilty, that's not enough to convict; you have to believe it "beyond a reasonable doubt."

I agree with Riley that it's really hard to have a feel for what the jury will do--I'm sure the defense is very afraid of the "compromise" verdict of manslaughter as wanting to "compromise" is human nature for most of us.
Elcapinyoazz

Social climber
Joshua Tree
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:43pm PT
Zimmerman lied repeadtedly.

Lied about his past arrest record to police when questioned at the scene.
Lied about whether he'd been in a pre-trial diversion program in the past.
Lied about his finances during bond hearing.
Lied about surrendering his passport(s).

I have no opinion on how the verdict will go. But to say this guy isn't a proven, habitual liar is asinine and ridiculous.
Dr. Christ

Mountain climber
State of Mine
Jul 12, 2013 - 01:46pm PT
He was on drugs--he was high on pot

And Zimmerman could tell that while following him in his car? Zimmerman didn't say he was high... he said he was "up to no good OR on drugs OR SOMETHING." You can assume EVERYONE is "up to no good" or "on drugs" or "something" and be correct 100% of the time. That doesn't give you the right to chase them down, confront them, and shoot them.

It is undisputed that Trayvon could have easily gone home after he noticed Zimm following him, but he chose not to.

If you were a teenager, being followed by someone in a car, and you wanted to get to home (the green box), what path would you take?


Zimmerman was NOT standing his ground. He was pursuing his victim. You are an idiot.
blahblah

Gym climber
Boulder
Jul 12, 2013 - 04:40pm PT
Zimmerman was NOT standing his ground. He was pursuing his victim. You are an idiot.

Maybe, but if you think that you have a right to attack someone because you perceive that he is following you and he asks you what you're doing, you just may wind up a dead idiot.

I could easily explain a fallacy that you appear to be under re: "stand your ground," but why bother, it's more fun to see you continue to make a fool of yourself.

OK everyone the case is in the jury's hands, doubt we'll hear anything today as the jury won't want to be perceived as acting rashly no matter what the verdict. Monday could be the big day. A hung jury wouldn't surprise me either--as the comments on this site show, people seem to have fairly polarized views that are only loosely tethered to the actual evidence.

If Zimm's convicted (entirely possible if not probable, especially in light of some of the judge's evidentiary rulings), we'll have to see how appeals shake out, but that could be years down the road and I doubt it'll merit much more than minor news even if a conviction is reversed.
If he's acquitted, that is realistically the end of it from a criminal law point of view. (The public defender pointed out that, theoretically, the federal government could bring a separate charge. While that's true in the abstract, I believe the federal investigation concluded there were no federal issues raised.)
Trayvon's family could bring a civil suit, which I think is likely (and that may happen even if Zimm's convicted, but it's hard to see what the point would be then.)
Jennie

Trad climber
Elk Creek, Idaho
Jul 12, 2013 - 04:55pm PT



Nobody will retry this case after Z. is acquitted, possibly by a hung jury.


Jessguess, with a hung jury, I think it will go to retrial.

You have to admit though, he looks real thuggish in that photo above.


I think Gary is kidding. Trayvon looks kinda delicate compared to high school "toughs" I remember. But the tiny girlfriend does make him look very tall.

Yes, I think many teen boys do talk about fighting...perhaps not the science and tech group, but in general male student body, there's a pecking order based on physical prowess.
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