Trayvon vs. Zimmerman - The trial

[bsmooth]

You leave out so much that I can't tell if you are being facetious or just ignorant of the facts. I'm referring to the Black Panthers, lies by the Martin's attorney and the 1000's of protesters attacking the police and City hall by phone, mail, TV, other government and in person.

Again ... until Ms. Jaxonville got a hold of the information the Sanford Police Department was waiting on they didn't arrest either. After watching the trial many people realize why. They simply have no "evidence" . They weren't even able to effectively use their biggest piece of evidence as she simply didn't have much to add when all things considered. 

Attacked? They staged peaceful protests and had a sit in around the police station that temporarily closed it, with no injuries.
Your choice of words to describe pretty peaceful protests, is stunning. People expected huge mobs burning down the city, yet aside from a few minor incidences, the protests were tame.
By the way, the police station was closed in April, almost a month and a half after the shooting.

[CF DolFan]

Attacked? They staged peaceful protests and had a sit in around the police station that temporarily closed it, with no injuries.
Your choice of words to describe pretty peaceful protests, is stunning. People expected huge mobs burning down the city, yet aside from a few minor incidences, the protests were tame.
By the way, the police station was closed in April, almost a month and a half after the shooting.

bsmooth ...you're wrong about some assumptions. Businesses were shut down because no one would use them because of the mobs of angry people including black panthers with wanted posters. Not locals but outsiders. It was very ugly around here for quite a while. The things you speak of did happen, sort of, but that wasn't the only things going on.

The police station was shut down and moved to the brand new public safety building they built in the middle of a high crime black neighborhood. It was planned all along. not sure where you thought that was relevant to something else.

I'm friends with many of the local law enforcement as I have grown up with them. In fact I eat lunch with Sgt. Authur Barnes on many Wednesday afternoons. You can google him if you like to see how he is connected but in short he is the black officer who pushed Serino for the quick arrest without regards to getting the conviction.

Just to show you how life changes when I first met Arthur we got into an actual fight. A couple of years later we were calling each other to play ball together.

You'd be surprised what and who I know about the people involved. Oddly even Mark O'Mara and Don West used to work in the same exact office that I work out of now when they were at the DA. My mother in law used to work with them.

[phinphan]

justice has prevailed .

[Landshark]

Zimmerman has been found not guilty. 

[bsmooth]

bsmooth ...you're wrong about some assumptions. Businesses were shut down because no one would use them because of the mobs of angry people including black panthers with wanted posters. Not locals but outsiders. It was very ugly around here for quite a while. The things you speak of did happen, sort of, but that wasn't the only things going on.

The police station was shut down and moved to the brand new public safety building they built in the middle of a high crime black neighborhood. It was planned all along. not sure where you thought that was relevant to something else.

I'm friends with many of the local law enforcement as I have grown up with them. In fact I eat lunch with Sgt. Authur Barnes on many Wednesday afternoons. You can google him if you like to see how he is connected but in short he is the black officer who pushed Serino for the quick arrest without regards to getting the conviction.

Just to show you how life changes when I first met Arthur we got into an actual fight. A couple of years later we were calling each other to play ball together.

You'd be surprised what and who I know about the people involved. Oddly even Mark O'Mara and Don West used to work in the same exact office that I work out of now when they were at the DA. My mother in law used to work with them.

You used the word attacked. You purposely chose this word. They were not attacked...there were protests outside. Engaging in protests and voicing your displeasure is not an attack against them. It is called public discourse.
To call these protests attacks, smacks of an attempt to paint them as something intentionally violent.
I am not assuming anything. I am reading the word you used to describe a protest. Even the dictionary has different meanings for attacks and protests.

[phinphan]

Hey seriously I was at flea world today and a lot of shops were closed.
Their was people who knew the outcome and chose to hide.
A lot of shops were closed at flea world?

[Pappy13]

I have a couple questions not related to the outcome, just curious.

1) Why did the woman who was on the phone with Martin lie about her age? Did she give an explanation for that?

2) Why did Zimmerman not call back his original lawyers for 3 days? Did he ever explain why that was? Was he not happy with their advice and wanted new laywers?

3) I'm reading now that Zimmerman talked off the record with Sean Hannity, but I thought that interview was used in the trial. Am I mistaken about that? Edit: Ok, I think I have this figured out now. Originally Zimmerman spoke with Hannity off the air and then later had an on the air interview. I think that clears that up.

 

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

Based on what I have seen/heard.  The jury got this verdict correct, but in the civil trail Zimmerman should be found liable in a wrongful death action. 

[Sunstroke]

I'm just ecstatic that this over-hyped legal crapfest is over...

[CF DolFan]

I'm just ecstatic that this over-hyped legal crapfest is over...

Unfortunately I don't think it is over as can be seen by the widespread "protests". The irony is people are afraid to come to Sanford yet Sanford hasn't really seen much unrest.

Unless influential black leaders get behind the legal innocence of Zimmerman the troublemakers who are looking for an excuse to start trouble will continue to flourish.

Alan Dershowitz, one of the biggest liberal lawyers in the country, said yesterday that this case should have never reached a jury and that the prosecutor Angela Corey should be disbarred for covering up evidence in the probable-cause affidavit . He said there was reasonable doubt at every turn of this case where it mattered.  He even followed up by stating "If the judge had any courage in applying the law, she never would have allowed the case to go to the jury. She should have entered a verdict based on reasonable doubt.”

Other influential people need to start doing the same thing because there are a ton of people, good people with minimal facts, who really believe the jury just let Zimmerman off ... which couldn't be farther from the truth. I fear this will get much worse before it gets better.

[Phishfan]

I read today the Justice Department is considering filing criminal civil rights charges. This is out of hand. This thing needs to be put to bed at this point.

[Pappy13]

I'm of the opinion that this whole thing will quickly fall into the background now. In my opinion this would have never been the news story it became if the police had arrested him and tried him on manslaughter charges. The police under reacted and the prosecution over reached.

The below pretty much sums it up nicely.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-15/george-zimmermans-acquittal-four-blunt-observations?campaign_id=yhoo

1. Zimmerman was at fault for killing Trayvon Martin.
 Ignore the pious post-verdict declarations by Zimmerman’s (skilled) defense lawyers. The police dispatcher told Zimmerman to stay in his car. If the wannabe cop had followed reasonable instructions and/or had decent training as a neighborhood watchman, he would have remained in his vehicle. Zimmerman deserves heavy blame.

Just for the record, I don't think he deserves heavy blame, but I do think he deserves some of the blame. He acted recklessly in my opinion, but I don't think he ever meant for Martin to be killed.

2. The “system” sometimes works in mysterious ways.
 The American justice bends to public opinion, politics, institutional bias, and sometimes even flat-out corruption. In this case, prosecutors came under understandable public pressure to punish Zimmerman for his foolhardy behavior. The prosecutors brought severe criminal charges and put on the best case they could. Still, the ambiguity surrounding the last minutes of Trayvon Martin’s life left plenty of room for reasonable doubt. The jury could have convicted on manslaughter but made a plausible choice not to. The defense lawyers brayed afterward about Zimmerman suffering grave injustice. Baloney. He endured 16 months of intense suspicion and court supervision. He’ll never escape the moral legacy of a needless killing. Sounds like rough justice to me.

3. The next step should be a private wrongful death suit, not a federal civil rights prosecution.
 Civil rights activists are calling for the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute Zimmerman for violating Martin’s civil rights. While one can sympathize with the demand, especially in the emotional aftermath of the state-court acquittal, federal civil rights charges would require the government to prove that Zimmerman is an old fashioned racist. That would not be easy to do. NAACP President Ben Jealous has compared Zimmerman’s acquittal to one six decades ago of two white men accused of kidnapping and murdering black Mississippi teenager Emmett Till. But that kind of hyperbole won’t hold up in court. Zimmerman’s defense would again be able to engender reasonable doubt, leading to more heartache. Much better to give Martin’s parents an opportunity to prove by the much lower civil legal standard (“preponderance of the evidence”) that Zimmerman acted irresponsibly. A wrongful-death action might lead to the best possible outcome: a swift settlement, including some kind of money payment to compensate the victim’s family and a public apology from Zimmerman.

4. Liberal gun-control advocates are already overplaying their hand.
“Murder has now been legalized in half the states,” proclaimed Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. This loopy statement echoes many less-extreme attempts to associate Zimmerman’s defense with Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law. That statute eliminates the traditional obligation to retreat in the face of life-threatening violence. Such statutes may be problematic (personally, I think they are), but the Zimmerman case isn’t a good example to make the argument against stand your ground. In fact, the defense team waived the opportunity to invoke the statute to preempt the prosecution. Instead, Zimmerman’s lawyers made a more conventional self-defense argument. Their contention was that Zimmerman never had an opportunity to retreat because Martin had him pinned to the ground. Stand your ground just wasn’t relevant to this defense. In the end what got Zimmerman off was the most basic of all criminal-law concepts: reasonable doubt.

[CF DolFan]

Pappy ... I can't get that to open here.

Either way I think you are missing the point. According to the laws ... he never should have been arrested. It wasn't even close and the only reason he was is because of political pressure caused by social unrest and not because they had any proof that he broke the law.

The bigger outrage here is why are we prosecuting someone just to appease people who feel morally violated? Everyone knew they couldn't prove he did anything illegal including those that were pushing for an arrest. It was a complete mockery of the system that "we the people" have set up. 

If you "arrest" you have to prosecute and they had nothing to prosecute with other than emotions.

People can do the "why did he" and "he did this" all day long but unfortunately for Trayvon he didn't break any law. Or at least any law that can be proven.

Now if people want to complain about the law itself that's a completely different argument and even Dershowitz said as much. He doesn't like some of the laws either.

[Dave Gray]

I have been pretty level-headed with this whole thing, but c'mon.  Of course he should've been arrested.

I'm fine with the verdict and I think that the route that we should go now is to realize that the laws are not good if an unarmed man can get spooked by a kid he profiled and followed and then kill him in the name of self-defense.  I understand that the law protects that, but it shouldn't.

So, like with Caylee's Law, the pendulum should swing and make Trayvon's law.

I am of the belief that if you choose to carry a firearm, that you should willingly be held to a higher standard to "de-escalate" situations.

I understand the ruling, but that this happened is a bad thing and laws need to exist to change it so it can't happen again.

[Pappy13]

Pappy ... I can't get that to open here.

I pasted into my comment above.

Either way I think you are missing the point. According to the laws ... he never should have been arrested. It wasn't even close and the only reason he was is because of political pressure caused by social unrest and not because they had any proof that he broke the law.

The bigger outrage here is why are we prosecuting someone just to appease people who feel morally violated? Everyone knew they couldn't prove he did anything illegal including those that were pushing for an arrest. It was a complete mockery of the system that "we the people" have set up. 

If you "arrest" you have to prosecute and they had nothing to prosecute with other than emotions.

Technically that's not correct. If you arrest someone you have to charge them with something. I think there was enough evidence at the time to charge him with manslaughter. You can always drop the charges later if you feel you don't have enough evidence to convict. That possibly should have happened as well, but by then there was too much attention to not at least have a trial.

People can do the "why did he" and "he did this" all day long but unfortunately for Trayvon he didn't break any law. Or at least any law that can be proven.

This was appropriately decided by a trial and a jury. The arrest would have been simply to ensure that he was charged.

Now if people want to complain about the law itself that's a completely different argument and even Dershowitz said as much. He doesn't like some of the laws either.

There's nothing wrong with the laws at least as they applied to this case. As mentioned above the whole "stand your ground" law wasn't really even part of this case as the defense chose not to invoke it and simply argued that he acted in self defense because he never had a chance to flea.