Ah. So stupid from the beginnin to the end. Makes sense, FSVO “sense”.
Martin didn’t have a gun. Everybody knows you only have the right to defend yourself if you have a gun.
That said, if Martin had shot the armed person that got out of his car and started following him in the dark, then all those who rush to Zimmerman’s defense would be screaming for Martin’s head.
You don’t have the right to put people in prison if you can’t prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Nothing else you have to say about Zimmerman changes that fact.
Or you could be like me and actually care about the law, constitution, known and provable facts of the case etc. There are circumstances where it would be justifiable self-defense to turn around and shoot someone who is chasing you. But it would be contextual, as an example say someone wielding a machete is running at you screaming “I’m going to cut your head off”, you attempt to flee, but realize he is gaining on you. You have a firearm, you stop, turn around, and fire–killing him. With that set of circumstances, the shooter has established common law self-defense in any jurisdiction in the United States, and statutory self-defense even in states that have a duty to retreat.
Another scenario, I’m walking home from the store, and I see a guy slowly walking behind me at a distance, which I dislike. I change direction a few times, and he’s still slowly following me at a distance. I decide he is stalking me; I stop, turn around, and shoot him dead. I do not believe that would satisfy common law self-defense in any jurisdiction in the United States, and would view it as murder.
In a hypothetical where Martin shot Zimmerman, would it be more like the latter hypothetical, or the former? That would determine whether I’d be “calling for Martin’s head” or not.
While I agree with the general sentiment that the Zimmerman/Martin case, shouldn’t be discussed strictly on its own merits in this thread–I do think there is some salience in comparing it with the Arbery case, primarily to highlight their differences.
In the Arbery case we have video evidence of armed men chasing down and murdering a young man. We have clear evidence on video that they had no reasonable fear for their life at the time of the shooting.
In the Zimmerman/Martin case we have no direct unobstructed witnesses to the shooting–we have like a half-dozen people who heard sounds outside their house, we have a young woman who was on a cell phone with Martin when the confrontation with Zimmerman started, we have the police dispatch telling Zimmerman to stay in his car, and we have a couple people who saw a bit of it (but not clearly) when they looked through blinds.
We have a whole heap of contradictory and unclear evidence that a court has to work with.
Then we have a defendant who makes a self-defense claim. Then we have some evidence that isn’t in doubt:
- Zimmerman has injuries consistent with being beaten
- Forensic evidence shows Martin was shot at essentially point-blank range, as in the gun barrel was touching his skin or very close to it when the gun was fired
- Forensic evidence showing that Martin was shot from “below” while he himself was in a horizontal position
Those three things corroborate Zimmerman’s claim that he was knocked down, with Martin on top of him beating him, and only then did he fire. That is not “ironclad” proof of self-defense, because it leaves open the possibility that Zimmerman provoked the fight, got knocked down, and decided he didn’t want to lose the fight, and killed Martin. That would not be self-defense generally speaking. However, remember, the prosecution has to prove this was an unlawful killing beyond a reasonable doubt, and the corroborating evidence Zimmerman had is enough to establish reasonable doubt quite easily, simple reality. The reasonable doubt standard doesn’t guarantee that bad men don’t walk free, nor even that guilty men don’t walk free, it is designed to try to minimize the chance innocent men go to jail.
Martin is dead. Zimmerman shot him. Zimmerman armed himself, chose and chased an unarmed Martin walking home at night. These are facts. No doubt. We don’t have a suspect, but the killer pleading "he came right at me, you gotta believe me.
Enjoy jail, killer.
I’m not going punish Martin (a child) for not being ruthless enough to be unarmed when stalked by an armed killer.
You may have drifted into living in an alternative reality. Here in the reality I live in Zimmerman was acquitted and double jeopardy means he will never face punishment for the killing of Martin.
Yes. It is an alternate reality. Zimmerman was acquitted and is free to this day.
I disagree. We have clear evidence on video that Arbery was trying to take McMichael’s gun. Under the law, McMichael had ample reason to fear for his life.
Not relevant. Your weirdly narrow definition of stalking is not applicable in all circumstances.
I do not believe we have clear evidence Arbery was attempting to take his gun. I would say there is video evidence that shows that is a possibility, but I also could imagine Arbery is simply trying to deflect the gun away. However that is a matter of opinion–and not actually salient to the case. The shooter has no legally protected reasonable fear, because he was not behaving reasonably. He and his accomplices had engaged in a series of crimes that culminated in them killing someone.
If I attempt to rob a bank, and a police officer gets the drop on me with his gun, but through luck or what have you, I spin around and shoot the cop dead, I would not be found to have acted in self-defense–my behavior up to the shooting was criminal, and I do not have a self-defense justification because of facing someone else’s forces attempting to stop me committing a crime.
In the Arbery case the men were committing violent assaults with both pickup truck and firearms, one of them got into a scuffle with Arbery, and Arbery was shot and killed. Because they had initiated the violent assaults with truck and gun, Arbery attempting to escape and then attempting to defend himself from their illegal actions, cannot be justification or establishment of reasonableness for exercising self-defense. Criminals largely do not retain self-defense rights in the same manner as people who were not breaking the law.
You should not use the term stalking when talking about criminal cases if you do not mean the regularly understood legal definition of stalking. It is needlessly disruptive and disinformative.
You should not confine yourself to the legal definition of criminal stalking when no one is accusing anyone of committing criminal stalking.
You shouldn’t intentionally confuse discussion in threads about criminal cases by using words that are also used to describe crimes, when you don’t actually mean the named crime. There are tons of synonyms to the word “stalk” that aren’t the names of statutory crimes, the choice to use that word is solely done to confuse.
The video evidence is a damn sight better than it was in the Rittenhouse trial, and we have Travis’ testimony as well.
What injuries did Arbery receive from these “violent assaults”?
You should not confine yourself to the legal definition of criminal stalking when no one is accusing anyone of committing criminal stalking.
There’s a narrow sense in which the Zimmerman decision was technically correct: The state did not make a convincing case as to Zimmerman’s guilt. Which is, frankly, unfathomable, because Zimmerman’s defense team did make a case as to Zimmerman’s guilt. If events transpired exactly as Zimmerman’s defense alleged, then those events mean that he was a murderer. At the time that Zimmerman started the confrontation, according to his own team, he was not acting in a way consistent with a rational person in fear for his life. Therefore, he had no right to act in self defense in that confrontation.
The creators of our legal system never anticipated the frankly bizarre situation where the prosecution would not make a case, but the defense would. If they had contemplated such a case, they would surely agree that a guilty verdict would be appropriate in such a case. And so, were I on Zimmerman’s jury, that’s how I would have voted.
Not to be too much of a pedant, but… when it comes to racial inequity in the law, both in theory and in practice, one of the many deficiencies of our legal system—indeed, a core deficiency—is that its creators would not have contemplated such a “frankly bizarre situation” as people of color being afforded the rights of citizens and given any recourse under the law.
This post suggests you are unfamiliar with the crime of assault.
Your understanding of the law in this case is seriously defective. Zimmerman still was allowed to use self-defense if Martin struck him first, and if he feared for his life when he fired. We can speculate that the conflict started in a different way, but we had no proof of it. The fact that Zimmerman likely accosted Martin first, and that started the confrontation, does not negate self-defense rights unless Zimmerman began the confrontation in some sort of criminal fashion. I.e. by making a threat, or using some serious “fighting words” – which maybe he did, but if he did it wasn’t recorded and we have no proof of it.
Zimmerman’s story as he presented it showed he was being a busy body who put his nose where it didn’t belong, but his story tells the tale of someone being rude to someone walking on the street, not someone committing a threat, assault or provoking a physical fight. Without additional evidence you just don’t have enough to negate self-defense there.
The Arbery defendant’s own story was much worse, in that they basically admitted they did not directly witness Arbery commit a crime, which negates their claims that they were performing a valid citizen’s arrest in Georgia.
There were two assault charges. One was for the shooting, which didn’t happen until after Arbery initiated physical contact. The other was for using their trucks to box him in. Because that was dangerous, technically speaking – they could have hit him. Do you think he was actually in any danger of being run over?
Agree or disagree – the only difference between the two cases here is that the McMichael’s tried to block Arbery’s exit from the situation with their trucks. Something that was so ineffective that Arbery was able to just casually run around the truck.
If that’s true, I really have no explanation for the fact that one situation warrants an acquittal and the other warrants 3 (effective) life sentences. I’m also at a loss for how one case lit up political discourse for months and the other seems to have everyone nodding in agreement.