Open Thread on Zimmerman Verdict

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SamH said:
Why did they not find him guilty - obviously he killed someone - he said so.
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This is a deflection. Again, can you find where the Jury asserted Trayvon Martin was violent and foolish??
 
LisaA said:
I maintain that he was a young man with little impulse control, who was probably very annoyed by the “crackah” following him. He was probably sensitive to the racial implications and probably angry that he was “targeted” for being black. I don’t think it was so much drugs as testosterone and a lack of maturity. A fatal combination in this case.
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Agreed.
 
Robert_Sock said:
But that’s what the Florida state law is doing; making it OK to shoot somebody in cold blood provided you say that you perceived the victim to be a threat to your wellbeing. Concealed weapons should be outlawed, except for law enforcement personnel. LOVE, not guns!
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I sure hope you are never the victim of a violent crime. You might end up seeing that love, not guns, doesn’t work out so well for you. Then again, someone who carries might be the only thing between you and death and you might gain a different perspective then.
 
BroomWagon said:
This is a deflection. Again, can you find where the Jury asserted Trayvon Martin was violent and foolish??
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No deflection - I’m trying to help you. Because if you answer the question you will better understand the issue.
 
Robert_Sock said:
But it could very well be possible that TM used physical force in pounding GZ’s head into the ground after GZ pulled his gun. This is perfectly plausible given the evidence, but nobody seems interested in taking this into account. This thread is so biased.

LOVE, not guns!
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Again, as I indicated earlier in this thread, basic common sense says that if Zimmerman would have pulled his gun first, there would not have been a mark on Zimmerman.
Robert_Sock said:
Perhaps GZ pulled his gun out and a fight pursued. TM slamming GZ head to the ground could easily have been in self defense.
SwizzleStick;10979946:
That doesn’t sound like a plausible scenario to me at all. In that scenario, Zimmerman would have pulled his gun, then Martin punched him in the nose, knocked him down on his back, straddled him, punched him some more and banged his head on concrete before Zimmerman fired his weapon. Plausible? I think not. To me, the plausible ending if Zimmerman had first pulled his gun out, Zimmerman would not have had a mark on him.
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Miss_Felicity said:
Oh you mean in self defense for the man that profiled and followed him even after the police told him not to. Oh yeah thats because the neighborhood watch is supposed to WATCH, GZ called the police and they insisted they did not need him to follow or pursue TM and he did it anyway. GZ took the law into his own hands, if TM was supposed to be so suspicious , So threatening and menacing THAT is why there is a trained and paid police force you DO NOT take the law into your own hands and you would not be in a situation where anybody would get beaten and there would have been NO loss of life.
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Following someone you suspect of wrongdoing is not “taking the law into your hands.” Surely you understand that. Moreover, following someone is not illegal, nor is it immoral, does it justify the savage beating that Martin gave him.

The argument we keep hearing from you all is basically “cracker had it coming.” Except he didn’t. Because again, following someone you suspect of wrongdoing is not illegal and it’s not immoral, and it doesn’t justify a savage beating anywhere except in deranged ghetto street-morality.

There’s a double irony in that, in some sense, Zimmerman did have it coming – I do agree that following someone you suspect of wrongdoing is imprudent in that it puts you in a position where you might have to use lethal force, which is a position best avoided. But this is the exact same logic by which police tell women all the time not to dress immodestly and to avoid bad parts of town to avoid getting raped, which I have no doubt many people on these forums would poo-poo!
NewEnglandPriest said:
I think the above comments are uncalled for. As someone who lives in a fairly dangerous neighborhood that has a “watch” I do have my own opinions on Zimmerman’s actions.
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As long as you recognize them as prudential evaluations, I don’t have a problem with anyone having an opinion. I probably share that opinion (i.e., that GZ shouldn’t have followed him). My point here is that our opinions don’t have any bearing on the legality or morality of GZ’s actions. To the extent many people here are arguing “GZ shouldn’t have followed him [a prudential opinion], therefore he is guilty of murder/manslaughter and/or should be found guilty [a moral/legal judgment],” well, they’re wrong, and they need to be called out for it.
NewEnglandPriest said:
That doesn’t make me an “armchair leftest” nor does it mean that I somehow lack understanding (anymore so than anyone else on this board).
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See the post I was responding to; the poster said s/he didn’t understand the impulse that compelled Zimmerman to follow Martin. My point was that “I don’t understand” doesn’t mean “there is no good reason,” it just means “I don’t know what reasons might exist.”
NewEnglandPriest said:
We don’t know what began the altercation. My first month in the parish I’m currently in, 4 people were murdered in my neighborhood. Illegal guns abound. If I saw a suspicious person I would immediately contact the police, but would never follow them for any length of time nor get out of my car at any point. That’s essentially the advice of the police.
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Yes, we’re speculating. We’re all in the position of speculation since the only living human being on earth right now who knows with certainty who started it is George Zimmerman. We have his testimony, we have forensic evidence which seems largely to support his testimony; we’ve had weeks to hear the case for the competing alternative, that GZ started the altercation, and it wasn’t compelling at all. Etc. These aren’t many data points and they’re not terribly compelling individually, but they ought to be enough for us to give GZ the benefit of the doubt.

The parish I attend is located in a bad neighborhood, too, FWIW. A staggeringly large proportion of the crime committed in this city occurs inside or within a few blocks of that neighborhood, and that’s saying a lot, because there’s over 100k people here. I certainly wouldn’t follow anyone I suspected of wrongdoing, either, mainly because I know they might just kill me for the $20 in my wallet. But, NB, if I did follow them, it wouldn’t be illegal, it wouldn’t be immoral, it wouldn’t entitle the person I’m following to try to kill me, and if he did try to kill me, it wouldn’t entitle anyone else to say that I should’ve just rolled over and accepted the beating.
 
Robert_Sock said:
But that’s what the Florida state law is doing; making it OK to shoot somebody in cold blood provided you say that you perceived the victim to be a threat to your wellbeing. Concealed weapons should be outlawed, except for law enforcement personnel. LOVE, not guns!
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Actually that is not the case. The general criminal law allows for the use of deadly force anytime a faultless victim reasonably believes that unlawful force which will cause death or grievous bodily harm is about to be used on him. Again, Pennsylvania law is generally consistent with this standard.

And that is the standard for the entire US - not just Florida.
 
Miss_Felicity said:
But the fact that GZ pursued AGAINST instruction of police, stated that “they” always get away and SHOT TM, those facts…There is no strawman and like I said I’m not trying to make anybody fall for anything, MY opinion is GZ was not justified in killing TM it didn’t have to happen, I mourn the loss of life. It was senseless and should not have happened period and I have no sympathy for GZ because he didn’t have to get out of the car and he didn’t have to shoot that young man and if that is a strawman I’ll be one of those. That I thought was common sense as a Christian but if we support profiling and killing now I didn’t get the memo…
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(1) He doesn’t appear to have continued pursuit after the 911 dispatcher said they didn’t need him to.

(2) 911 dispatchers aren’t “the police” and have no legal authority to command anyone.

(3) They didn’t instruct him not to follow, they said they didn’t need him to follow, so not only do they not have authority, they didn’t even attempt to exercise any.

(4) Maybe “he didn’t have to get out of the car,” etc., but it doesn’t follow from that that “he didn’t have to shoot that young man.” You get that you can die from having your head dashed against the pavement, right?

(5) “Profiling” isn’t a sin in any religious except the gnostic left-wing counterfeit of faith, so I don’t know why you imagine it’s contrary to being a Christian. People profile all the time in their day-to-day lives, it’s what we do in the presence of incomplete information.

(6) More to the point, Zimmerman’s “profile” of Martin was that he was a drug-addled punk. Which he was.
Robert_Sock said:
But that’s what the Florida state law is doing; making it OK to shoot somebody in cold blood provided you say that you perceived the victim to be a threat to your wellbeing. Concealed weapons should be outlawed, except for law enforcement personnel. LOVE, not guns!
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Screaming for help while getting your head dashed against the pavement is “cold blood”? You know you can die from that, right? Do you know what “cold blood” means?
 
SamH said:
No deflection - I’m trying to help you. Because if you answer the question you will better understand the issue.
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I understand the issue and do not need any help.

I assume now, after going through this once again, no quote can be found on the jury saying Martin was violent and foolish, this is a value judgment. One can say the same for Zimmerman as well.
 
BroomWagon said:
I understand the issue and do not need any help.

I assume now, after going through this once again, no quote can be found on the jury saying Martin was violent and foolish, this is a value judgment. One can say the same for Zimmerman as well.
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You are starting to get there.
 
NewEnglandPriest said:
Well, I’m not quite sure that’s a “fact.” The defense doesn’t have to prove their version of events.

However, the original point was that the situation could have been avoided had Zimmerman not gotten out of his car. Zimmerman reported to police that a suspicious person, possibly on drugs, looked like he was up to no good. If you believe that about another person then getting out of your car to look for them is, imho, a foolish thing to do.
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Of course the whole situation could have been avoided. Hindsight is 20/20. But, it still seems that many want Zimmerman to go to prison simply because he wasn’t prescient enough to know that the young man he saw would end up pounding his head on concrete, so that Zimmerman would have to shoot the young man in defense of his own life.
 
SamH said:
Why do you keep questioning people’s faith?
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I’m not questioning people’s faith, I’m just stating the fact that this thread is lacking in Catholic virtue. For example, where is the maxim of “turning the other cheek” being applied here?

LOVE, not guns!
 
Robert_Sock said:
I’m not questioning people’s faith, I’m just stating the fact that this thread is lacking in Catholic virtue. For example, where is the maxim of “turning the other cheek” being applied here?

LOVE, not guns!
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Now you are insulting.
 
NewEnglandPriest said:
Yes, he smoked pot (as do millions of Americans). Perhaps I used a poor choice of words, perhaps I should have said Martin wasn’t “high.”

With the trace amounts in his system there is no way to say when he smoked it. It could have been 3 days prior. The trace amounts were also most likely to have no effect on him.

When someone says “this guy looks like he’s on drugs” it means behavior that would be caused by more than trace amounts of pot in someone’s system.
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Maybe he was under the effects of Lean or Purple Drank and went to the store so he could get the ingredients to mix up a new batch. Purely speculation, but that could account for his aggressive behavior and choice to savagely assault Zimmerman rather than go on home.
 
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