Dragonbums said:
madwarper said:
Why?
No one was shot in the face. Stop making shit up.
To make stuff up would be to imply that I knew the truth in the first place. As such, most people just said he got shot. Nobody went into the details of where. Not that it mattered because it was fatal anyway.
Then, by all means. Randomly attack all the people you want. See what that gets you.
And by all means randomly stalk people in the middle of the night then give chase when they run off and you can't see them and see what happens.
That's not just the witness, it's also the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. Read the autopsy report. Stop being willfully ignorant.
And as I've already stated that's physical evidence
of the fight. A fight that would not of happened had Zimmerman not of gotten out of his car and chased the man when he couldn't even see him.
Which is supported by all the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. Get that through your skull. We have EVIDENCE. You have NOTHING.
Evidence of the fight. Which is not what I'm really talking about.
I'm talking about Zimmerman being absolved of all charges for an incident that could of been avoided if Zimmerman wasn't a hotshot dumbass vigilante who stalked someone in the middle of the night and when shit hit the fan hard shot him in the face.
Honestly the both of you are quite unpleasant to talk to, and I'm going to end it with Gmaverick because honestly he/she at least knows where I'm coming from with this.
Look, your working under a pair of flawed pretenses here.
#1: Zimmerman was a member of the Neighborhood Watch, he actually lead it at one point. This comes up sometimes when the case is mentioned, but people who want to be critical tend to avoid the point. Community policing is common in some places, and while the people who join The Watch are not cops, they are usually approved (and perhaps trained/organized by the police) and a general requirement is the people in the neighborhood have signed off on agreeing to form one, which means that members of The Watch can act as a "representative of the property owner" of pretty much anyone in their neighborhood if they see someone trespassing or whatever. People have been doing this for decades, and there are movies joking about it going back to the old "Police Academy: Citizens On Patrol" movie where the misfit cops were assigned to organized misfit citizens into a watch organization.
The point a lot of people make about how Zimmerman was "antagonistic" in getting out of his car is wrong. For starters it's public property, he doesn't have to stay in his car. Secondly as a Neighborhood Watch member he particularly has the right to approach people that aren't in the neighborhood, indeed it's encouraged. He can't arrest people like a cop (though has some latitude with a "Citizen's Arrest" under the right circumstances), but the whole point of The Watch is to get people who don't live in a neighborhood or are hanging out there to move on.
You'll notice the police pretty much threw this out at first, and made it clear there was no real case (which is also why the trial was kind of predictable) this is one of the reasons why. The whole "who gave this guy permission to act this way" question is answered... the people in the neighborhood did, and the police approved it. Now you can be critical of neighborhood/community watch groups, you wouldn't be the only one, but you can't really attack Zimmerman
for doing what he had every right to be doing.
#2: There were witnesses to what happened, this is another reason why this was pretty straightforward. See, even if one was to argue that Zimmeman shouldn't have confronted him, Trayvon became wrong as soon as he attacked, and opened himself up for being killed when he attempted murder. Being an asshole isn't a crime (if it was the whole world would be dead) and you don't have the right to attack someone for being a jerk (though you can complain through various channels). When the gun came out and the shot was fired, Trayvon was in the process of bashing Zimmerman's head into the pavement. One thing you need to understand is the pictures of Trayvon being circulated by the grieving family and racial politicians is not accurate to what Trayvon looked like at the time of the crime (it's an older picture). Trayvon was actually bigger than Zimmerman, which is why he was able to overpower him that way and get into a position to kill him with his bare hands. One big part of the trial when witnesses were asked about who was beating on who, was that the bigger guy on top (Trayvon) was about to kill someone, and they were concerned, but then the gun came out and the victim survived.
Now there have been points made about how Zimmerman being armed was why he had such courage in being confrontational, and have also tried to turn this into an anti-gun issue. Of course he was. While not armed by the government most neighborhood watch volunteers have something (usually legal weapons like telescoping batons, pepper spray, and things like that), and guys with concealed carry permits are common volunteers (and encouraged to join) after all the watch is usually formed in a neighborhood that has had problems, and the guys patrolling and approaching people are putting themselves in dangerous situations as Trayvon kind of proved for everyone.
It was an open and cut case, because it was really pretty straightforward, with very obvious, witnessed, facts. Unlike other cases that it's compared to where a lot of it was based largely on testimony and multiple contradictory stories. It comes down in those cases to whether you believe the same people the Jury did, or not. At the end of the day it's all about the Jury, the country doesn't have people "tried" by angry mobs or popular opinion. Granted one thing I feel contributes to problems is that even after the fact a lot of details prevented in courtrooms are never revealed to the public and jurors are prevented from revealing a lot of those facts. This oftentimes means the public has wildly different opinions based on what's said in public (especially by the defense, which isn't limited like the Jury or prosecution) than what the Jury winds up with. I understand why these laws exist (to present some degree of privacy)
but it causes a lot of problems, where after-the-fact full disclosure might help. For example in one case that was compared to Zimmeman here, a key issue is a lady in the middle of a domestic conflict fired at her husband and got a pretty heavy sentence, a lot of that comes down to whether you believe her claims that it was a warning shot, or that she fired and missed. Not to mention that there were kids present, near the target, when she discharged a firearm. People oftentimes fail to consider the compounding nature of charges, the "big charge" that gets the public attention might not be where all the time comes from. This is partly how prosecutors negotiate, unlike the simplified version on TV, in a lot of cases it's a situation where the prosecutor will say agree to drop all the other charges in exchange for a guilty plea on the big one. The deal being that even if the defendant was say innocent of murder, in the process of fleeing the police, running from a cop car, and resisting arrest, the guy might have 30-50 years of guaranteed time there that's indisputable since innocence from the initial crime doesn't mean much. On the other hand if the prosecutor gets his guilty plea to say some kind of reduced charge from the murder, Manslaugher or whatever, the prosecutor gets his victory mark, and the accused gets only 2 years when he'd be looking at 30-50 even if he beat the murder accusation. What's more in a lot of cases a "defense" can make things worse, for example if you just shoot someone threatening you, that can have all kinds of mitigating factors attached to it, while counter intuitive saying you fired a warning shot into the plaster wall of an apartment can be worse because now you recklessly endangered other people since the bullet could have blown through (and if say you had 2 people and a baby next door, now you've got three cases of endangerment, one of whom is a baby... that time just starts racking right up). But I'm getting well off the subject here.
In short it's fine if you don't like what Zimmerman did, his attitude, or whatever else, but that doesn't make him a criminal. On most levels he was the opposite of a "vigilante" despite the accusations. I mean feel free to say bad things about community policing, how it encourages profiling, and how the police use it as a way to get around various policies (ie they get a neighborhood watch guy to profile someone, and then call in a tip to the police, who then intervene... perhaps "Calling the police" might involve talking to the cop right next to the guy, and can then work around the law), I personally think it's a good idea (and it has been around a long time) but a lot of people do not. However right now it sort of covers the biggest real "strike" against Zimmerman, not that it mattered anymore when he was attacked (since the case is entirely about self defense).
