The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin Travesty

[natina]

I believe Zimmerman tried to do an MMA take down of Trayvon Martin

(zimmerman took MMA)
but Trayvon manged to flip Zimmerman over and beat him up.

did Trayvon have grass stains or cement dust on his back?

I hope one day we find out the truth.
I already know zimmeran is a lying pack of shit!

if you are Hispanic you have Spanish ancestry and are therefore European.
you were rejected as being white because your religion was different then the white Pilgrims who cam here.
you most likely had catholic upbringing

[TSPornFan]

I believe Zimmerman tried to do an MMA take down of Trayvon Martin

(zimmerman took MMA)
but Trayvon manged to flip Zimmerman over and beat him up.

did Trayvon have grass stains or cement dust on his back?

I hope one day we find out the truth.
I already know zimmeran is a lying pack of shit!

if you are Hispanic you have Spanish ancestry and are therefore European.
you were rejected as being white because your religion was different then the white Pilgrims who cam here.
you most likely had catholic upbringing

I don't believe Trayvon flipped Zimmerman over. I believe Zimmerman slipped and fell. Zimmerman weights 250 punds and Trayvon weighted 140 pounds. Trayvon was a skinny kid and I doubt he could had body slammed Zimmerman.

[natina]

both zimmerman and Trayvon learned MMA but zimmerman was not good at it.

the trainer said that in court but i do not know if thats true but its looks like zimmerman is weak when it comes to fighting cause a very skinny kid got the best of him.

zimmerman is a brand new pussy and pussy's get fucked!

just wait until the civil trial when they take all his money like they did OJ SIMPSON

I am very small and many women who I was in college with are small but we had JUDO for P.E. and we use to flip and slam many big guys.


you have to use leverage and physics and not so much muscle. when you use good technique it look so effortless and sweat.
judo is called the "GENTLE WAY"

[bobvela]

I had the same question.

You clearly didn't pay much attention to the trial or the testimony or evidence presented there.

I've been a court watcher for years... this case had many very unique aspects (ending with the jury asking a question about a question... but never asking the final question prior to the verdict (what a way to make lawyers on both sides panic)... one of them... was the fact that not only was witness after witness for the prosecution more supportive of the narrative presented by the defense than that of the prosecution... but it was the state... NOT the defense that kept trying to introduce elements of reasonable doubt throughout the trial.

The roles of the prosecution and defense are generally well understood... in this case they were reversed and the defense proved self-defense while the state just skipped around.

Years from now... law students will look back at this case as an example of an incompetent prosecution trying to push a case that never should have been brought to trial in the first place.

[natina]

The Zimmerman Jury Told Young Black Men What We Already Knew

Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it's a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.
When I was junior in college in Virginia, my then-girlfriend and I decided one night to meet up for a quick snack while studying for midterms. We bought some sandwiches at a 24-hour deli and, rather than waste time going to either of our homes, which were in opposite directions, we decided to eat in her car in a parking lot near a fancy hotel off-campus. We were listening to music and laughing about something when I saw a security guard’s headlights in the rear view mirror, and I stopped laughing as I watched him—a white man in his mid-40s—walk up to my girlfriend’s door and ask her to step out of the car. “Uh, OK,” she said, clearly as confused as I was about what we’d done to warrant his attention.
He walked her away from her car toward his, but they were close enough that I could hear their conversation. He asked her her name, a slight southern lilt lengthening his vowels. She told him. Then he said, “Are you OK? “
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Are you safe right now?” he asked again.
My girlfriend was white. I am not.
I leapt out of the car and screamed, “What the hell did you just ask her?” I wanted to see if he had the resolve to say it again, to me this time.
The security guard turned to face me. “It’s standard procedure, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you were alright, too.”
“I think you’re lying,” I said.
“You can think what you’d like,” he said, a smile creeping up his face. “We can also call the police right now and sort this all out, because y’all aren’t supposed to be here and this is private property.”
I wanted to hit him in his fucking face. I wanted to take his flashlight from his belt and smash his teeth out, giving him a real reason to call the cops, a reason besides the crime of eating a sandwich in a parking lot.
But I was a 20-year-old brown kid in Virginia. It was late. I was with a white girl. I felt embarrassed, and the thought of being surrounded by more inquisitive white men with pepper spray and tasers and handcuffs and guns only made my face hotter. And so I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know this was private property.”
“Well, now you know,” he said.
My girlfriend drove me home, where I stewed for hours and promised myself I’d report the guard in the morning. When I woke, however, I realized I didn’t have the guard’s name, nor did I even know what to report—it’s not against any rules to ask a white woman if the black man in the car with her is attacking her. It’s not against any rules to humiliate someone in a darkened parking lot in front of the person they love. It may, however, be against the rules to eat food in the parking lot in the first place. I never reported it. I think about it to this day.
It is a complicated thing to be young, black, and male in America. Not only are you well aware that many people are afraid of you—you can see them clutching their purses or stiffening in their subway seats when you sit across from them—you must also remain conscious of the fact that people expect you to be apologetic for their fear. It’s your job to be remorseful about the fact that your very nature makes them uncomfortable, like a pilot having to apologize to a fearful flyer for being in the sky.
If you’re a black man and you don’t remain vigilant of and obsequious to white people’s panic in your presence—if you, say, punch a man who accosts you during dinner with your girlfriend and screams “Nigger!” in your face, or if you, say, punch a man who is following you without cause in the dark with a handgun at his side—then you must be prepared to be arrested, be beaten, be shot through the heart and lung and die on the way home to watch a basketball game with your family. And after you are dead, other blacks should be prepared for people to say you are a vicious thug who deserved it. You smoked weed, for instance, and got in some fights at school (like I did)—obviously you had it coming. You were a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later someone was going to have to put you down.


http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury...eady-770650992

[natina]

Zimmerman verdict in Martin case shows justice’s flaws

Did the system work? Was justice served? We like to think of those questions as identical. After all, the point of a criminal justice system is to dispense justice. But with the acquittal of George Zimmerman on charges of murdering Trayvon Martin, the system worked, yet justice fell short. This outcome is simultaneously sad but healthy — sad because a 17-year-old boy is dead and his killer walks free; healthy because the verdict seems justified as a matter of law.

There is an important place for emotion in criminal proceedings, both for mercy and for outrage. But the system cannot function if it consistently elevates emotion over rules.
Both sides, naturally, see the Zimmerman verdict through the lens of their own preconceptions. “This will confirm for many that the only problem with the New South is it occupies the same time and space as the Old South,” said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, invoking the memory of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was killed in 1955 after supposedly flirting with a white woman and whose murderers were acquitted. “Old South justice,” thundered Jesse Jackson.
This comparison is unfair. No doubt race played a role in Martin’s death. Zimmerman likely would not have called the police about a white teenager — even a white teenager wearing a hoodie — walking back from a 7-Eleven.
But there is no evidence that race played a role in Zimmerman’s acquittal. If anything, the racial undertones worked against Zimmerman, increasing public pressure on prosecutors to bring the most serious — and, in hindsight, the most difficult to support — charges against him.
Contrast the Zimmerman trial with that of Till’s murderers. The courtroom was segregated. No hotel would rent rooms to black observers. The local sheriff welcomed black spectators to the courtroom with what was described as a cheerful use of the vilest racial epithet. The New South is not perfect, but it is not the Old.
The overreaction from the left is mirrored by the overreaction from the right, and without the excuse of being swept away by emotion over a child’s unnecessary death. Conservative Roger L. Simon lamented on PJ Media that Zimmerman “will never live a normal life” and described the prosecution as “quite literally, the first American Stalinist ‘show trial.’ ”
That is, quite literally, deranged. Of course no decent person responsible for killing an unarmed teenager could “live a normal life.” And the entire point of “show trials” was that the outcome, unlike Zimmerman’s acquittal, was foreordained.
Which brings us back to the uncomfortable divide between the criminal justice system and justice itself. One way to understand that gap is to think of the episode as a video. The criminal justice system zooms in, and properly so, on one short segment, a snapshot in the larger narrative.
Whatever preceded the fight between the two men, the central question, as a matter of criminal law, was precisely what occurred in the immediate moments before Zimmerman fired the fatal shot. Zimmerman instigated the tragic chain of events, but legally that was not relevant. To convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder, prosecutors had to prove that he did something that he knew was “reasonably certain” to kill or seriously injure and acted with “ill will, hatred, spite or an evil intent.” Even for the lesser charge of manslaughter, they had to rebut his claim of self-defense, showing that he could not “reasonably believe” shooting Martin was “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.”
Justice takes the longer time frame. Zimmerman may not be legally responsible for Martin’s death but he remains morally culpable.
Another way to understand the divide is through the prism of legal rules, which may serve the broader ends of justice but produce unjust results in the short run. Thus the exclusionary rule for illegally seized evidence, meaning that some criminals go free because the constable has blundered.
Likewise, the law’s requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt for criminal convictions presumes tolerance for a certain amount of unjust results. We accept the bargain, in Blackstone’s formulation, that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”
Zimmerman’s acquittal is not the end of this sad story. Because of the lower burden of proof, a civil lawsuit by Martin’s family would have a better chance of success. A federal prosecution on civil rights charges would be a mistake; the state trial failed to show adequate evidence of racial animus to sustain such a case.
In the end, society must accept that there is not always a perfect fit between a criminal justice system and justice.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...424_story.html

[SuzySnappz]

http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury...eady-770650992

I have to respect the decision of the jurors based on the evidence in this case. But one good thing to come out of reading the link Natina posted was running across this heartwarming story on the same page: http://gawker.com/racist-goldman-sac...-bla-769148234

[JenniferParisHusband]

A lot of replies since I posted, let me cherry pick a few to comment on....

Hi JPH, could you post this in the other thread also. Wish you had posted this in that thread awhile ago...lol. You will notice that you'd be one of the very few people with a criminal law degree that post in the political section.

This is an emotional case...you will find that some people won't argue the actual definition of the law with you...they will argue according to what they think the law should be....or believe it is. They don't realize that most of them would never have been picked as jurors in this case because of their preconceived notions.

Good luck in your career counselor. BTW...are you a practicing criminal lawyer?

I did criminal law when I was getting the first law degree. I went back for a second law degree that was more focussed on international law and contracts. I don't practice in Criminal Law anymore, too hard to get your clients to pay when they're behind bars.

Yeah, emotions tend to run pretty close to the surface when it comes to something like this. It's hard for most people to be dispassionate about it. Most people though don't follow the trials that closely either and pick and choose their facts, and don't get the instructions on the proper application of the laws to those facts. Best rule of thumb for anyone looking at a trial like this, as it is with anything else in life, always take a step back, look at all the pieces calmly and rationally, and make an informed decision.

Black folks don't have 2nd amendment rights.

Slightly incorrect. Black folks don't have money to spend on a good defense. Poverty, not whether you are white, black, asian, hispanic, or even martian, is the key factor that prevents most innocent people from being found not guilty. And I don't know enough about that woman's case to say whether she is or innocent. But money is the one thing that separates victory in court from defeat. OJ Simpson (I know, I know don't go there), Ray Lewis, they got away with it. They also had money. Just saying.

Marissa was sentenced to 20 years because the shooting didn't fall under the stand-your-ground law and she had a crappy lawyer. She left to get a firearm to fire those warning shots. Under the law, she wasn't in imminent danger because she left the threat.

Like I said above, I don't know enough about this case to make an informed judgment, but that is a correct application of the law. Defense has to be imminent threat of harm. It's why someone like Sylvia Boots, even though the shooting was accidental in that case, couldn't claim self-defense. Sylvia went back to her car to get the weapon, as I remember her case. The threat wasn't imminent there either, even if it had been building for months. If this Marissa went to go get a gun, then she should have stayed where she was, as she had retreated from danger and called the cops. There was no need at that point to go back and fire warning shots, unless it was in defense of others, in which case she would have had to be using "like force" and they would have had to have been under threat of imminent danger. I'm going to guess that there wasn't.

If Zimmerman had been found guilty by the jury, then the system would have worked just as well.

Not by the facts I saw. Then there would have been two victims, one from a gun, and one from a revenge verdict. What would you have based guilt on? Seriously, please look at the facts again. Re-read the application of the law that I posted. Where is the guilt? Are you saying self-defense should be abbolished? A boy died, and that is a tragedy, a horrible tragedy. And Zimmerman is going to be haunted by that for the rest of his life. He is going to replay his mistakes in his head as long as he lives. His life as he knows it, over. Let's see how many friends he has after this. Let's see how easy he's going to have it at work, if he can even find a job. I worked with a kid named Michael Fay once. He was found guilty of a crime in a S.E. Asian country and was caned three times. He left after a week at the blockbuster video we worked at, too many people asking him if we had copies of "Citizen Kane" and "Empire Strikes Back." Trust me, people are going to make Zimmerman pay for what he did. His life is ruined. He will suffer. He may not get the needle, and he may not be in an 8x12 cell, but putting him in jail when the facts don't call for it. That makes him a victim too. And then there is the Civil Suit. That one, the Martin family will win, and I will enjoy the result immensely.

....and all twat.

Amen! Completely agree!!! (he was referring to Zimmerman there.)

Maybe a pussy who fears for his life fighting a skinny black kid shouldn't be in law enforcement. Maybe he should mind his own business.

Agreed, although neighborhood watch doesn't really count as "law-enforcement." That's a few dozen notches below rent-a-cop, and even mall-cop.

Years from now... law students will look back at this case as an example of an incompetent prosecution trying to push a case that never should have been brought to trial in the first place.

Worse than that. Most people forget that it took massive public protests and pressure from the State and Federal Government to get this to trial. Initially, they weren't going to prosecute him at all. The Prosecution knew from the start that the facts it had, gave them no chance at winning.

[Ben in LA]

You clearly didn't pay much attention to the trial or the testimony or evidence presented there.

I've been a court watcher for years... this case had many very unique aspects (ending with the jury asking a question about a question... but never asking the final question prior to the verdict (what a way to make lawyers on both sides panic)... one of them... was the fact that not only was witness after witness for the prosecution more supportive of the narrative presented by the defense than that of the prosecution... but it was the state... NOT the defense that kept trying to introduce elements of reasonable doubt throughout the trial.

The roles of the prosecution and defense are generally well understood... in this case they were reversed and the defense proved self-defense while the state just skipped around.

Years from now... law students will look back at this case as an example of an incompetent prosecution trying to push a case that never should have been brought to trial in the first place.

AS THE PICTURE SAYS...if everything was the same, EXCEPT the races of Zimmerman and Martin were switched, do you REALLY believe the same outcome would have occurred?

Obviously you do; others don't.

[youngblood61]

If a white guy ventured into a black neighborhood and a black man followed and confronted him on the basis he thought the guy was there to commit a crime, and there had been a fight which resulted in the white guy being killed, does anyone have any doubt at all the outcome of a trail would be the exact opposite of what happened in the Zimmerman case?

No Doubt!!!!