I De-clare, You Could Knock Me Over With a Feather

I’m totally in agreement or sympathetic to pretty much everything you say here. I almost hate myself for this, but for some reason I really cannot resist w/ some weak-ass (but sincere!) trolling and say that the one thing I really do take issue with is the “He doesn’t even look shook up enough; dude just shot and killed a kid! If I had done that by accident I would be in agony” comment. Not that this isn’t probably true, but people react to traumatic shit in very different & unpredictable ways. This sounds a lot like the all too common “if she had really been rape raped, she’d be sobbing now” claim.

I’m on board with all the rest, but hose two sentences make me squirm a bit.

agree with #2.

there are a few notable things that have come out about the case today.
1) on the video, the police aren’t wearing gloves, as they would if there was any chance whatsoever that there was blood. at least if they were doing their jobs.
2) pere Zimmerman has been awfully vocal and aggressive. it would be, as the internet saying goes, irresponsible not to speculate thusly:

2a) George Zimmerman got hisself into a little tussle and assaulted a police officer there in Sanford some time ago. being that i am from a small town in florida not unlike sanford, i do not expect that this is the sort of thing that either the police or the state attorney would be eager to let these felonies slide with a diversion program as they did here, unless of course pere Zimmerman pulled some strings.
2b) pere Zimmerman was a judge in VA. and not just any judge, a state supreme court magistrate. clearly this is a guy who knows how to Get Things Done
2c) given also that Zimmerman fils has had such run-ins with the law, both at the time and since then, it seems likely that the entire Sanford PD knew Just Who To Call If The Guy Just Went A Little Too Far.
2d) it doesnt seem like it would be too big a stretch to think that just maybe the sanford pd called the elder Zimmerman in order to uh, “coordinate” in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. and if it’s found that there was, say, a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice on the part of the sanford pd, i wonder what Zimmerman-the-former-judge’s part would have been in that. perhaps something that rhymes with “maccessory”

hm.

American police procedure is weird. The man was cuffed but not arrested? If I see somebody in Dublin being cuffed and shoved into a police car, AFAIAC he’s arrested. Do Americans regard that as some kind of consensual S+M role-play?

Being arrested in the US is certainly a much bigger deal than being arrested in the UK (and I think than being arrested in Ireland as well, given the similarities in the legal systems between UK and Ireland). The evidentiary bar is lower. AFAICT Ireland, like the UK, has a “reasonable suspicion” rather than a “probable cause” standard.

I do not know who “dd” is, but will you let a similar comment stand if I register with a proper email? I am genuinely curious as to her position and CT’s on this matter.

“More importantly, who doesn’t have a broken nose? George M.F. Zimmerman, that’s who.

I consider myself something of an expert on the subject of broken noses.”

I’ve also had my nose broken and I find it absolute laughable that you think you can tell from that video whether or not he had a broken nose.

American police procedure is weird. The man was cuffed but not arrested?

If he’s not free to leave, and it’s more than a momentary detention for on-scene questioning, he’s legally under arrest. He was arrested but released rather than charged.

Soren at 14, I think you have confused “picking your nose” – which I am sure you do often – with breaking your nose. The two are different matters. Go consult your doctor.

A similar case happened in Ireland a couple of years ago when a 61 year old farmer, Padraig Nally, shot dead an Irish Gypsy, John Ward.

(newspaper quote, not good at blockquoting) “When he found Mr Ward coming out of the back door of his house, he shot him in the hip from a distance of about four to five yards and then became involved in a struggle with him.
Mr Nally grabbed the wounded man by the neck and shoved him up against the side of his house, describing it later to police as “a real movie-type effort”.
He then beat Mr Ward about 20 times with a 2ft ash stick, which he had used to mix food for his dog.
When Mr Ward ran out of his yard and down the road, he went to his shed, reloaded his single barrel shotgun and shot him for a second time, wounding him fatally.” (end quote)

Nally was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years, (according to wiki, my memory isn’t great), for hunting down an injured man and killing him in a ditch. The sentence was quashed after a year when certain elements of our press and public begun to make a consistent and ludicrous case that what he did was justifiable. (John Ward became known universally by his nickname “Frogy” Ward; his long criminal past was used as evidence that he got what he deserved; and of course Nally was sold as the victim of it all)

So it’s just a matter of time before Trayvon’s ‘gang name’ is released, along with pictures of Zimmerman dedicating his weekends to mentoring disadvantaged street kids, and of course the obligatory hour long feature on why America’s gated communities live in constant fear from 17 year old blacks.

Irish Gypsy’s are expendable, they’re expected to cause havoc and die young. That seems to me, as an outsider, the expectation that a whole lot of people have for Trayvon Martin, and if the facts don’t fit the caricature, then they’ll just make up new ones.

I don’t think the case mentioned by rf is all that similar. Here’s the judgement which resulted in Padraig Nally going free:

http://www.courts.ie/Judgments.nsf/bce24a8184816f1580256ef30048ca50/c11ac1afe2f4ab1d80257205003cb715?OpenDocument

Broke my nose in Aussie rules football. Opposing player went up and backward for the ball; I went up and forward; back of skull is harder than nose. (Manly enough?) At any rate, lots and lots of blood.

Did it again in the process of breaking sunglasses between my head and a Munich street, after pitching over the handlebars of my bike. Plenty of blood.

In normal circumstances, I would be wary of passing judgement in this kind of situations, and in particular I would object that these kind of questions (whether there was a fight, how justified was Zimmermann, etc.) should be left to be investigated by the police and decided in a trial, instead of being discussed on some random blog (past experience with premature judgements should teach us something…).

Unfortunately, in this case the law enforcers did a poor job, so I will have to concur with Belle.

I think Keir is either righter than I am, or clearer, or possibly both.

Re handcuffed but not arrested: see this column, in which a young African-American man describes his experiences with the NYPD:

here

Kevin Donoghue 03.29.12 at 6:45 am

” American police procedure is weird. The man was cuffed but not arrested? If I see somebody in Dublin being cuffed and shoved into a police car, AFAIAC he’s arrested. Do Americans regard that as some kind of consensual S+M role-play?”

IMHO (IANAL), the USA seems to be drifting towards a state where just because you’ve been cuffed and locked up, doesn’t mean that you’ve been arrested, so that you can’t sue. Unless you resist being cuffed and locked up, in which case you will be arrested for resisting arrest.

It’s more like, in the US, the police sometimes make the preposterous claim that they’ve handcuffed someone without arresting them, but if it ever matters to the outcome of the case, the court will find they’ve been arrested. I’ve never seen a case where defendant was handcuffed and not found to have been arrested. Given that Zimmerman was both handcuffed and transported to the police station, of course he was under arrest.

On the other thread, Katherine (I’m pretty sure it was) mentioned that one of our porcine friends had apparently ‘corrected’ early witness testimony; that would be evidence tampering/destruction, and should be treated as such. Anyone got more info to hand on that?

Also, I don’t know how it works in the US; maybe there is less separation of powers between the cops and the DA’s office(?), but in the UK a case is built by the filth first and then sent to the prosecutors. Only they, only then, decide (I’m of course describing what is meant to happen) whether the case has an adequate chance of success – and even then I’m pretty sure they have to try to imagine a reasonable jury properly directed. Not the likelihood that some bunch of scumbags like McArdle will bring in a verdict of ‘conscience’. (And in the US they have jury selection by interview, don’t they? Which should mean McArdle would be dismissed on challenge by the defence (a rank speculation suggests the prosecutors should agree, if they are, as in the UK, ministers of justice rather than advocates, and if they, as on Planet Wild-eyed Idealism, were to understand that and take it seriously).

And btw it’s hard to believe that there were no potential charges beside homicide that should have merited investigation.

He was a magistrate, which is different from being a judge. Magistrates are court staffers who hear routine matters, subject to review by a real judge.

Warning: in federal court at least, you are risking sanctions if you refer to a magistrate judge as anything other than a “real” judge. They handle important non-dispositive issues and can be assigned to write recommendations on dispositive ones, which the district judge is likely to accept.

In VA state court, I dunno.

Yep, it was me. It wasn’t “corrected” in the sense of “took a black pen to a witness statement and corrected it”, it was in conversation with a witness who said she had heard Martin screaming and was told by the officer conversing with her that no, the person screaming had been Zimmerman. The point being that the early perception of the police and their presentation of it to the outside world was of Zimmerman being attacked by Martin, and defending himself, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’ll see if I can dig up a reference.

Bexley at 41 is an excellent reply to understudy at 39.

Ah, here it is:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/03/18/446768/what-everyone-should-know-about-about-trayvon-martin-1995-2012/

Point 12:

12. A police officer “corrected” a key witness. “The officer told the witness, a long-time teacher, it was Zimmerman who cried for help, said the witness. ABC News has spoken to the teacher and she confirmed that the officer corrected her when she said she heard the teenager shout for help.” From ABC News

One of the police officers has a good long look at the back of his head early on in that video, so it seems that Zimmerman was complaining of an injury at that point. The officer doesn’t look all that convinced though.

correcting -> ‘correcting’

I’m glad we’re all so confident on assessing injuries and he said/other party didn’t say event from a couple seconds of videos and a few second hand statements. But continue on the rush-to-judge-jury-and-convict train I guess…

reports that a man who claims to have witnessed part of the fight between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman says he saw the 17-year-old student on top of the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer, who was wearing a red sweater. “The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me, ‘Help, help,” said the man, who asked to be identified only as John, “and I told him to stop and I was calling 911….When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.” This account, which John reportedly shared with police, is consistent with the grass stains on Zimmerman’s shirt, his bloody nose, and the cut on the back of the head.

But I’m sure we know what really happened …

You had some good comments about broken noses and assualt victims. I’m curious, can you extend your analysis? How about rape/sexual assuault victims? How do they appear? If I see a student who tells me s/he’s been sexually assualted, but they don’t exhibit emotions and injuries that I believe would be consistent with a sexual assualt, should I call the police and tell them that s/he might be lying, but that they claim someone sexually assualted them?

Well, understudy, since you’ve opened that door (and seriously, you don’t see something a bit wrong with comparing victims of sexual assault to someone who just shot someone else?), anyone else notice how much the Martin-blaming resembles the well refined rape-victim blaming method? Vis:

– he was wearing a hoodie/she was wearing a short skirt – identification as someone asking to be attacked
– he was a drug user/she slept with other men – reputation imputation
– he hit me/she was flirting with me – fault redirection

It’s a tried and tested method. I hope it doesn’t succeed, but the history of victim-blaming is long and ugly.

bob & understudy:
what is, in your opinion, the correct reaction to a case when it is quite likely that the police did not investigate properly?

Because the question is not “is Zimmermann guilty”, but “did the police do a thorough investigation, and if not, is it because the innocence of Z. was so evident that no further investigation was necessary, or because they were covering for a crime”?

In order to answer the second question, one does not need to decide if Z. was guilty or not (for that I would prefer the jury to decide), but only if the explanation given by the police holds water: one can, _at the same time_, believe that the police should not have accepted Z’s story at face value, and reserve/defer his judgement about the question whether Z. should be condemned.

Really, I think this shows just how divided the nation remains. Fifty years on from ‘I have a dream’, race is still a contentious issue. Observers noted national unity for a while after 9/11, and briefly over Jeremy Lin but — like a candle in the wind — no more. Americans need a cause to unite them. Something less transient than Jeremy Lin. Something permanent.

Like nuking Japan.

Enda, thanks God that these moment of national unity are over: may I remind you that 2+ wars were the result of the national unity at 9/11?

Manta: if you haven’t figured it out by now, Bob’s opinion of the correct reaction to this case is pretty much his preferred reaction (on the part of other people) to everything: raise the red flag!

As an aside, I wouldn’t mind Bob McM’s constant calls for Lets You And Him Fight if there were any actual evidence that the particular kind of massive bloodletting he wanted were actually going to improve things on this score. If only there we had some test cases of how despised ethnic minorities fared after socialist revolutions! If only we had “history”. Sadly, as we all know, history is bunk and glorious theory must substitute.

(His constant assertion that as a scruffy-looking old white rrrrrrrradical he is in just as much physical danger from the powers that be as any black man ever? Ho ho ho. Never change, Bob.)

Can we please get back to blaming Obama for the horrendous rise in gasoline prices! Or to paraphrase Annie ‘Got Her Gun’ Coulter yesterday, “All I want is the truth, Just gimme some truth, I’ve had enough of reading things.” Well sort of.

understudy doesn’t supply a source for the “man who claims to have witnessed part of the fight” but evidently it’s this report from a Fox affiliate, last Friday:

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/state/witness-martin-attacked-zimmerman-03232012

For everyone wondering about arrest vs. detention.
In the US we have Terry stops. Terry stops are well described in Wikipedia. Your rights do not start on being arrested: you can always refuse to talk to police, and should always refuse to do so, and can always refuse to consent to searches. Police are reluctant to arrest because they have to inform people that they have these rights when they do so. IANAL, but I can find things written on this to link to that were written by people who are lawyers.

After conducting extensive and exhaustive research into this issue, I can confirm that on every episode of “Cops” I ever saw, the police routinely cuffed drivers on routine stop-and-searches: before interviewing them, before searching their vehicles, before having evidence that any crime has been committed, let alone before any arrest is made.

I have no idea what the legal basis is for this practice.

53: People like Bob are not interested in cases; they are interested pulling the entire system/society off from its roots and starting over again from scratch.

Actually I think it’s fairer to say that they are interested in talking like this is what they are interested in, because it sounds better and sexier than boring old liberalism. As far as I can tell, Bob’s most genuine enthusiasm is for Japanese cinema.

understudy is a poor excuse for a troll, I daresay. When an “eyewitness” conveniently appears out of nowhere to parrot — on Faux News no less — Zimmerman’s story weeks after the fact just as criticism heats up, such a figure is more useful as a gauge of those eager to be taken in than as a window on the actual case.

Totally OT (feel free to delete, no trolling intended), but we are now seriously using Bob McManus who would not be allowed near any revolutionary socialist organization I know as a hook for liberal anti-communism? Sigh. So just to be clear: us real life commies don’t think that capitalist society and state should be allowed to get away with all kinds of shit because the only way to change anything is instant revolution. We don’t think racism or sexism aren’t real and the only thing that ever matters is class – in fact it’s usually us organising that anti-racist (or anti-war, immigrant rights etc.) demo on the fringes of which we supposedly sell papers. It would be good if Dr. Memory, for example, got her history from some better source than the “Black book of communism”.

Ok, back to the topic at hand. Understudy in 53. quotes: This account, which John reportedly shared with police, is consistent with the grass stains on Zimmerman’s shirt, his bloody nose, and the cut on the back of the head.

So where is the bloody nose, the grass stains, or the cut on the back of the head? You think you are countering Belle’s point, but end up making it.

christian_h: nah, I take Bob as symptomatic of nothing but Bob. I have a different set of axes to grind with actual revolutionary communism as it (barely) exists in the real world, but sneering dipshits who use the hypothetical of revolution as an excuse for defending a position of actual total surrender to circumstance are clearly a plague of a very specific type. Carry on with your bad self.

I think the important thing is what will a jury think while viewing this video?

Will it back up Zimmerman’s story or not?

@ 53

But I’m sure we know what really happened …

It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

of -> or

75: yeah, not to set off Otto again, but scoffing at the idea that ethnic minorities suffer under Communist states is pretty sleazy, TBH.

Yeah, christian_h, your statements 0f support for Stalin and the USSR are pretty sleazy, wherever they may be.

87: well, I don’t think he ever expressed support for Stalin or the USSR, to be honest, Tim, but he did scoff at the idea that ethnic minorities suffered after socialist revolutions.
You see, Dr Memory said “wouldn’t mind Bob McM’s constant calls for Lets You And Him Fight if there were any actual evidence that the particular kind of massive bloodletting he wanted were actually going to improve things on this score. If only there we had some test cases of how despised ethnic minorities fared after socialist revolutions!” which is pretty clearly implying that, in fact, despised ethnic minorities do tend to suffer after socialist revolutions.

And then christian said “It would be good if Dr. Memory, for example, got her history from some better source than the “Black book of communism” which is, I would say, scoffing.

I hope that’s helped, because you seemed a bit confused.

Bit of a leap if you ask me, but christian_h can do whatever explaining he wants to I suppose. Anyway I seem to be having a bad thread so I’m going to go down the beach instead of sitting here passing unuseful remarks.

“witness testimony is evidence par excellence”

What??????!

IIRC, J. Otto Pohl did research on that. But again, that’s for another thread.

Chris Johnson 03.29.12 at 5:49 pm
” That being said, if he had a broken nose, short of obvious deformity, which he didn’t have, how could they know that? Did he have it x-rayed? That would be the only way to tell. We generally only x-ray facial bones if there are things like tenderness, swelling, bleeding, deformity. He didn’t appear to have any of those.

Shorter: I’d be very, very surprised to read that he had an x-ray-confirmed nasal or facial bone fracture.”

And if Zimmerman was telling the truth, he’d want a bunch of skull x-rays and photos taken, to document any injuries he had suffered. If you’re going to plead self-defense, it really helps to have proof that you needed to defend yourself.

That’s it! Zimmerman is guilty!

Of caring too much

The next round of pro-Zimmerman fabrications testimony will feature him crouched over the body howling “Why, dear God! Why do you always take the good ones so young!” at the heavens. Why, if only the young man hadn’t been unwise enough to be black suspicious-looking and over the age of twelve dressed in a hoodie possibly wearing a “grill” the kind of Young Person who may enjoy a little Wacky Tobacky now and then a Super MMA Badass WITH TATTOOZ!!, then the compassion bursting from poor Zimmerman’s ventricles might just have persuaded him not to chase, confront and shoot the guy.

Ranjit Suresh 03.29.12 at 8:07 pm

” Barry – Or maybe, as evidenced from the fact that he was sobbing at the scene when police arrived, and by friend’s testimony for days thereafter, he was more concerned over the fate of the young man who was now dead than he was of compiling a robust legal defense.”

‘Fact’?

No matter how much you beg, I’m not coming back, Belle. Except under my seekrit name.

@41:

Actually, the dialogue went like this:

“Buffy: No. But he had my diary, and I-I tried to take it back, a-and
that’s when he hit me.

Det. Stein: Where?

Buffy raises her hand to indicate her right cheek. Detective Stein leans
over to have a look.

Det. Stein: Well, it doesn’t look like he hit you very hard.

Buffy: I don’t bruise easily.”

I don’t know what went wrong with comments above, but I fixed them, and will now delete meta-discussion

@Tim Wilkinson 103: That’s pretty definite evidence that the police didn’t want to find a crime, and went to considerable lengths to make sure they didn’t find one.

Also, Billikin may possibly be referring to one of the many studies on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony (even without anyone deliberately lying or trying to rewrite someone else’s memory), which *ought* to make it far less trusted than, e.g., bloodstains, but in general it still isn’t.

Jesus also wore a hoodie.
Some tell Geraldo and the rest of the racists.

chris – When and if Billikin decides to actually state his or her objection I will address it, but your attempt at reconstructing one sounds plausible I suppose.

If that were it, I’d point out that at that point I (pretty clearly I’d have thought) wasn’t discussing reliability of eyewitness testimony (though the main point was in fact to point out how easily perturbed it is), but rather its central, pervasive and quasi-foundational role in the process of ‘asserting’ evidence. E.g. introducing evidence relating to bloodstains will generally involve witnesses testifying to the integrity of the chain of custody, the lack of tampering, and either tests made, results found, etc., or if for some reason a foundation for admitting hearsay documents is sought (maybe the pathologist has died or something), the authenticity of records or reliability of record-keeping procedures etc. etc. In the end, an actual bloodstained object becomes little more than a prop. Of course props are of great importance given the theatrical aspect of jury trial; just not as evidence.

Well, as I said in the other thread, I suspect we will eventually learn that the facts would support a charge of manslaughter.

However, this video doesn’t provide it by itself.

Belle, there are multiple explanations for why he doesn’t appear properly agonized to you. Perhaps he’s simply good at hiding it. Perhaps he’s in shock. Perhaps he thinks what he did was justified and feels no agony at all, at that point. Perhaps he’s a psychopath. Who knows? Nowhere close to enough facts to tell.

As to injuries, I couldn’t make a determination from the video – there will obviously be close photographs of the injuries he claimed to have. At that point, we can make a real judgment.

As to the cuffs, the police may restrain anyone when they reasonably deem it appropriate to their safety. Transporting a guy who just committed honicide? That qualifies. And ajay is absolutely correct that an arrest in the US must pass a higher bar than in many other countries – US law is more protective, not less, of civil liberties in this respect.

Meredith@69: Then I realize, how do I know she even had a phone conversation with him

From the ABC write-up, so to the extent they have it right we know that one (I understand you were just using it illustratively):

Phone records obtained by ABC News show that the girl called Martin at 7:12 p.m., five minutes before police arrived, and remained on the phone with Martin until moments before he was shot.

And is it really true that we will only have the funeral home operator’s observation of the conditions of Trayvon’s knuckles and hands (he says unmarked), or is that something the police made observations of and are holding close to the vest?

Or maybe police will also testify about Trayvon’s knuckles and hands? You know, the focus is so much on how Z was dealt with; how did the police and others deal with Trayvon’s body?
Okay, I’ll let the investigators do their work. I really do have to discipline myself to patience.

the predisposition to rally to Trayvon’s side

That, if I may say, was bit further on from the initial outcry, which was at least as much “why the flying f*ck didn’t the Sanford Police Department investigate? Look at the all the questionable and incompetent things they did” as “an armed white man killed an unarmed black teenager (dare I say, child)”.

The waters have been more than a bit muddied since then into trial by public opinion, which as you say, we should be all a bit more careful of. It’s quite difficult though when certain elements have decided to join in the muddying by shitting all over the dead black kid.

ajay, you sound like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

I would have thought it a truth universally acknowledged that a police department in possession of a dead body must be in want of (at least) an identification

Maybe the Sanford PD could use your help!

Oh I see, it’s a paraphrase. The dead body thing through me, I thought you’d just invented the sentence from whole cloth!

A lawful arrest requires probable cause. So you can be detained for investigation on reasonable suspicion and you can be handcuffed during that detention if the officer has concerns about officer safety or destruction of evidence. And all of this is distinct from being actually charged with a crime.

See in the sane world, detention without arrest goes by the rather more harsh names of false imprisonment and assault.

I don’t want to hijack the thread so this will be my last statement on this topic. But, I am quite sure that CT will never have a thread on Stalinist treatment of ethnic minorities. It is just not a topic that interests the people who write the posts here. The orthodox position in American academia is that there was never any action by the Stalinist regime that could be described as racial discrimination. Largely because people like Francine Hirsch claim that official ethnicity (natsionalnost) never had any racial components in the Soviet historical context of the 1930s and 40s. But, I have an open thread on the topic at my blog. I am quite sure that I will get exactly zero comments.

“The Legislature finds that it is proper for law-abiding people to protect themselves, their families, and others from intruders and attackers without fear of prosecution or civil action for acting in defense of themselves and others”.

This isn’t actually a particularly morally questionable position to take. The common position on use of force – in lots of legal systems and rules of engagement – is that it’s a last resort, and should be used only to protect yourself or others from an immediate danger of physical harm. I can’t really see a way of improving on that, to be honest.

I was thinking just that faustusnotes – if everyone can defend themselves against what they perceive to be a threat (subjectively judged) by actively attacking the other person, then two people could be happily beating the crap out of each other with no legal recourse either way. Basically, the one left standing is the winner in all ways. Might is right.

But they just sort of let the body sit around for three days before thinking “we should probably try to find out who that is I suppose”.

On the other thread, I posted a link to Tracy Martin (Trayvon’s dad) saying that he found out his son was dead early the next morning. It’s in the second of the three clips here:

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/17/10732812-family-911-calls-show-shooting-of-black-teen-was-not-self-defense

I looked for a long time one day (after I repeated the 3 days thing and my daughter said she had seen this clip), and found no source for the “sat for three days” thing whatsoever, just repetitions on blogs.

If ajay, or anyone, has a link to show that Trayvon’s body did indeed sit around for three days before being identified, I’d like to see it. Otherwise, this turns out to be just another of a lengthening list of things people keep repeating that seem to be made up out of whole cloth, or exaggerated from some kernel of fact, but in any case just passed around uncritically from one blog to another. I’m with Meredith; it’s upsetting. I know I’ve done it myself over the years, but I think/hope this case will cure me of it in a big way. It’s bad bad bad enough without the embroidery.

ajay, I looked for quite a while, about a week ago, but I think I used more words (like “morgue”) so maybe that murked up the search, I don’t know.

I don’t want to quibble it to death, but your quote does a curious thing between the first and second sentences. It specifically attributes the Martin family in the first sentence, without saying anything about three days. Then, in the second sentence, the “three days” is an unattributed assertion. And now that I look at it again, it doesn’t say when the officers didn’t bother to ask neighbors etc. That could mean the night of the murder, if the writer of the article is determined to distort and sensationalize as much as possible.

Regardless of that, since we’ll never know if it was a deliberate hedge or not, it doesn’t match up very well with Trayvon’s dad saying explicitly, on that other clip, that he learned his son was dead early the next morning.

they did nothing to investigate Trayvon’s body.

Didn’t they test it for drugs? (Not Zimmerman, tho.)

Tom Wilkinson: “I’d point out that at that point I (pretty clearly I’d have thought) wasn’t discussing reliability of eyewitness testimony (though the main point was in fact to point out how easily perturbed it is), but rather its central, pervasive and quasi-foundational role in the process of ‘asserting’ evidence.”

“Evidence par excellence” does not convey that to me. To be sure, testimony is central, but that does not mean that it is not faute de mieux. Human perception and memory are constructed and reconstructed, fallible, and subject to suggestion. In addition, testimony is filtered and interpreted both before and after it is uttered. As evidence, testimony is second hand and potentially second rate.

Any chance there’s a bit of stumbling over “notified” and “identified?” Just parsing time…

“faustus and Katherine: that is exactly what the law does, and how it has been interpreted: if there is, say, a gunfight between 2 gangsters, they can both claim to act in self defence, and the winner get free. “Gangsters are using this law to have gunfights,“ Tallahassee state’s attorney Willie Meggs told the Tampa Bay Times.

Actually that isn’t quite true – gangsters have gang fights all the time and no one gets charged, because there are no witnesses, and when someone gets to trial, whatever witnesses there were don’t show up, and if witnesses do show up their testimony changes, and getting convictions is difficult in many US jurisdictions. That has been the case long before “stand your ground”.

88 black/hispanic males dead in Philadelphia so far this year, and less than 50% have an arrest for their murderers, but we don’t need to analyze much to understand why there aren’t protests about that:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20120330_At_vigil__Nutter_cites_city_violence_against_African_Americans.html?cmpid=138882544

The law gets misapplied by juries, and hell by judges, every single day. That doesn’t mean, “the law says” the stand your ground is a free for all. In actual fact, Florida does have a duty to retreat law, specifically anyone who …”initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself” is excluded from the stand your ground statute. Fla. Stats. 776.041. Which excludes about half the silly things people say about the Florida law.

Chris @131: as far as I know, we don’t have the police report. It’s unthinkable, almost, to me that the investigating detective would not have photopgraphs taken of Zimmerman’s claimed injuries. Those photographs may well confirm that Zimmerman is being deceptive, but we need to see them. That one eyewitness says a police officer told her that the voice she heard crying for help was Zimmerman’s doesn’t mean much – more likely a cop being chatty than evidence of a massive conspiracy to shield Zimmerman.

I’m unsure as to why anyone thinks, at this point, that no investigation was conducted. The big questions, for me, are (1) what actually are the facts as collected by the police, and (2) did the prosecutor make a reasonable decision in declining to prosecute.

For Martin’s family, I understand not waiting for more facts to emerge. But for the rest of us, I have to admit that the rush – the eagerness even – to judgment further confirms my faith in the importance of process.

Sebastian, will you please stop commenting about an imaginary law (a law that does not condone shooting of unarmed people; a law that prescribes that legitimate defence is invoked at the trial, after the facts have been established), and either discuss the actual law enacted in Florida, or drop the discussion?

But for the rest of us, I have to admit that the rush – the eagerness even – to judgment further confirms my faith in the importance of process.

Thanks for this note of wisdom, Andrew, as all the CT commenters were under the collective delusion that this was a court of law able to pass judgment and not a blog thread dedicated to discussing a post criticizing the shoddy way the “process” has been handled so far.

Manta. I quoted the actual law. See that little reference at the end? That is the Florida code section. So maybe you should try to discuss the actual law instead of some imaginary boogeyman law. Thanks.

Snug, the law as applied by trial court judges isn’t precedential. When they make mistakes, except in the very few cases where an appeal is taken, it creates no precedent in the sense you are using the term. Juries and judges misapply the law all the time. Finding anecdotes reported in the newspaper where that has happened is not the same as saying “what the law says”. The federal law of self defense for murder has been virtually identical to the Florida law since at least 1895. The problem isn’t with the law in this case. The problem is with the racist cops who didn’t want to investigate a homicide with a black man as the victim and a white man as the killer. Isn’t that actually a big problem than a self defense law that is already held by a majority of the states and the federal government?

Sebastian, Snug already summed up the problem with your approach: your opinion (an mine too) about what the law says and what does not say is irrelevant: what counts is how judges interpret it. And the judges say that under that law you can shoot an unarmed person if you think he is a threat to you.

Thus, since your interpretation is very different from the one of the judges, what you are defending is not the Florida law, but an imaginary one.

Another really striking feature is the eagerness with which George Zimmerman’s father is trying the case in the media — something frowned upon by legal experts. I guess if you’re not a lawyer and have a client in desperate need of PR, you can do wanton damage to your case without being held to account. And, GZFather seems to be screwing it up royally, without any consequence or debate. You can understand the intent.

He’s been way out in front of the news cycle, transmitting justifications and pleas for sympathy. If any public relations experts had been paying attention, I suspect we’d hear a heavy critique of GZtheElder’s heavy-handed method. Actively shaping the narrative, sure, you want to make the public discussion about what serves your best interest. It shows little integrity, though, and it’s been wholly overlooked. Acting in such a calculated manner is really telling, and botches fundamental elements of functional public relations.

No one’s called him on the off-point info, the refusal to take responsibility, the lack of perspective or concern for the Martin family, or the tone-deaf lines (‘but he’s not white he’s Hispanic’, ‘he has black friends’); nor especially has anyone noted the degree to which GZFather’s commentary doesn’t jibe with objective facts in-hand, their entirely self-serving nature or misplaced focus on George’s plight. The dubiousness of the what he’s said seems to be matched by the displays of dubious judgment required to relentlessly push GZtheYounger’s case in the media.

GZtheElder’s refusal to speak on camera goes to that same lack of integrity in my view. You make statements in the media, in a case like this, you show your face on camera to back up your words. It’s a little piece of kabuki theater, premised on the perverse notion that GZtheYounger is the victim here. Has he had death threats? Yeah*, so what? It hardly entitles the Zimmermans to don the mantle of victimhood. Quite the opposite: responsibly addressing this, civilly and in the civic space, requires facing up up to the situation and to any threats on camera, where putting a face up will function to back up your story. So far, it’s all pretense. None of it instills any trust. Leaving aside GZtheFather’s inherent bias, we have no reason to believe his Son told him the truth and every reason not to. And it needs to be said that the news media actively cooperated in that charade, airing a sensational and one-sided storyline bearing little relation to hard data, without requiring an on-camera appearance.

Color me a stickler for getting the details right, but no one’s touched on this and it stinks.

*accepting this as true for the sake of argument

@163 “You don’t have to prove anything.”

Except perhaps that, along the lines of 162’s, “piece of kabuki theater, premised on the…,” that there is a Simi Valley [sans Savior] in the Gator State.

No, manta, the judges say that you can shoot in self defense if you REASONABLY believe that you are in danger of serious bodily harm or death, and that you were not the aggressor in the confrontation. Both of those point against Zimmerman in this case. The best evidence at this point suggests that Zimmerman was the aggressor and that he was not in reasonable fear of death or serious injury. So it turns out that I’m the one talking about the actual law.

Janie at 138 is the only person to use the term “murder” in connection with Zimmerman.

That was carelessness on my part. If comments were editable I would change it to “killing.”

“section 776.032 contemplates that a defendant *who establishes entitlement* to the statutory immunity will not be subjected to trial. ”

But Zimmerman did no such thing. He *ASSERTED* that it was self defense and the police essentially didn’t bother to investigate it at all. And the tiny bit of ‘investigation’ that they did, involved such interesting technique as ‘correcting’ a witness who contradicted Zimmerman’s story, failing to interview the person who was talking to Trayvon on the phone minutes before the attack, failing to establish the wholly legitimate reason for Trayvon to be there, and failure to document Zimmerman’s ‘defensive wounds’.

Furthermore you’re using the Supreme Court quotes grossly out of context. I hope you lifted it from some other source, because it looks really bad for your argument if you read the case yourself and manipulated it in that way. The VERY NEXT LINE is “This plain reading of section 776.032 compels us to reject the State’s contention that a defendant must raise a pretrial claim of immunity only in a rule 3.190(c)(4) motion to dismiss. ”

They don’t like the government’s contention because of course a motion to dismiss can only be based on undisputed facts. The accused wanted an evidentiary hearing on the matter of self-defense, which would allow the judge to weigh DISPUTED facts. The Supreme Court of Florida ruled that an evidentiary hearing would be appropriate (which is why they used all that language about statutory construction vs. mere probable cause hearings.) The state was arguing that they could get a probable cause hearing and then go to trial. The court ruled that they would have to pass an evidentiary hearing. I don’t know why you omitted that, but I think most people will agree that it doesn’t sound so dramatic when you include it….

Ugh I seem to have hit the annoying spam filter because I included a link to the super short case. You can find it by googling CLARENCE DENNIS v. STATE OF FLORIDA. No luck needed at all.

I’m pretty sure that saying the Florida law requires an evidentiary hearing on the issue rather than a full blown trial doesn’t make enough of a distinction between the hundred plus year federal common law on the subject to justify all the “oh noes” we’ve seen on the subject. In fact, you’re the first person who bothered with the distinction. It is a procedural difference between the two, not a substantive difference. The federal law allows for a self defense claim in the same *situations* that the Florida law allows. And so far as I can tell, neither would cover Zimmerman. Your mileage may vary I suppose.

I see your mileage varied. If the defendant can’t avoid trial by invoking the immunity section, he still gets to present evidence of self defense at trial in front of a jury of his peers etc. etc.. Therefore yes, in the context of a discussion of the substance of the law (which circumstances allow for self defense claims) it is a trivial distinction. If the subject were “additional procedural safeguards which Florida law provides to defendants” you’d have a great point. I’ll leave it to others to decide which has much to do with how people are actually talking about the Florida law.

Ummm, not to be rude, but talking about the immunity provision substantively, and then having an alleged refutation of that substance by focusing on procedural points (but while pretending not to focus on procedural points by deliberately omitting the fact that the Florida Supreme Court was ruling on the procedure not the substance) strikes me as a lot closer to ‘lying’ than anything I’ve done here.

My point was that the circumstances under which self defense is an allowable claim are SUBSTANTIVELY identical to the federal law which has been around since 1895.

Snuh responded that they weren’t, and then misleadingly quoted the Flordia Supreme Court on the issue, strongly suggesting that they were distinguishing their position in substance while in fact they were only distinguishing the procedure (preliminary evidentiary hearing rather than allowing the defendant to only have the issue heard in a full jury trial). [And of course the defendant can get BOTH at their own option, so that is expanding defendant protections]. I read the case, and pointed that out. So substantively it appears I’m still right. I’ve been ‘refuted’ into admitting that Florida has an additional procedural protection unavailable in federal court, but that the circumstances under which you can shoot someone and validly claim self defense remain the same in both.

I’m not even sure that distinction would win you a point in a formal scored debate, much less whether or not anyone here will find it remotely important to the questions raised in Trayvon Martin case.

Many”? It’s generally not a good idea to make exaggerated claims about the very thread you’re in. SebastianH at 158 is the only person to say the police were racist,

Gosh, haven’t I said that? Well I’ll say it as plain as day then – I think the Sanford PD were and are racist. Everything I had read about the circumstances of the killing, the immediate investigation, or lack thereof, everything the PD has said afterwards – yep, racist.

Daniel @ 179 – I’m assuming that what you’re doing here is pointing out that in a case of black-on-white violence the perpetrators are quickly arrested, while if a person of colour is killed the known perpetrator is still walking around freely more than a month later. ??