Bricker is arrogantly propagating information that be could be misused by a vigilantee and lead to someone getting killed. He calls himself a lawyer, but I’d like to think even the dumbest lawyers understands how to interpret two clauses conjoined to each other with the word “and”. It means both elements must be present for that action to be lawful. But he persists in insisting that a person only needs to have probable cause. Why does he do this? He knows he’s wrong because I already pointed it out to him with cites.
For a Pit thread, this reads very mildly, I know. But I’d tired of seeing his crap in that other thread go unchallenged with the appropriate adjectives.
You realize that what you are citing is not Florida law, correct? Why you think that the San Diego District Attorney’s view would be relevant in Florida is a bit of a mystery.
Bricker is entirely, factually correct. Private individuals have the same right to arrest as policemen, what they don’t have is protection if they mistakenly arrest without probable cause. As usual, you with the face misunderstands what the law says, and continues to claim her false interpretation even when corrected by an actual lawyer who has been involved with actual trials, where he has to interpret actual law.
you with the face, you are a fucking moron who has let your conviction that Zimmerman is guilty, based on nothing more than the skin colour of his attacker, blind you to the actual facts of the case, the laws in question, and Zimmerman’s right to due process.
I’ll expand on the last point. It means he has a right to face a fair trial, where he can only be found guilty if the state can prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that he broke the law. As you are incorrect about both what the laws are, and what Zimmerman’s actions were, you cannot determine what a fair court should decide.
I find it interesting that, rather than respond to Bricker’s points in that thread, with actual cites from law - and just repeating the law that he has interpreted for you, and saying it doesn’t say what it clearly does isn’t a sensible response - you’ve decided to make a personal attack on him, because you don’t like the fact that he has shown up your idiocy and prejudice.
I also find it interesting that you’ve ignored most of the questions I’ve asked you in that thread, as well as failing to refute most of my points, instead relying on claiming increasingly bizarre hypotheticals as fact, and deducing Zimmerman’s guilt from those. I will agree with you that, had the law been different, and his actions been different, he may have been guilty fo a crime.
you with the face, you are an intellectual coward, a dishonest debater, and your desire to see the justice system bypassed for someone you dislike makes you both evil and dangerous. You need to shut the fuck up, stop getting your information from TV shows, and listen to people who know more than you.
youwiththeface, i like you, and it’s clear that this whole situation is one that makes you upset, but i think you need to step away from it for a while; maybe even let it go altogether.
I realize that this is hard to do, because the case itself has received considerable national attention, and because the particular issues raised by the case are, for very good reasons, very important to you.
The treatment of African Americans by the criminal justice system and by authority figures in general has, over the course of American history, included a long and almost unbroken string of inequities and shameful incidents and outright brutality and murder. Also, despite improvements over recent decades, and despite the “everyone is equal now” post-racial harping that we so often hear from ignoramuses in America, it seems pretty clear there is still considerable institutional prejudice within American law enforcement and the courts. I think Michelle Alexander makes a very good case for this in her recent book The New Jim Crow.
I also believe, in the particular instance under discussion here, that there’s a pretty decent chance, no matter what he tells us now, that George Zimmerman chose to follow Trayvon Martin specifically because he was a young black guy. I also believe that there’s a good chance that we’ll never know exactly what happened on that night, because (as far as i know) the only witness we have to the whole altercation is Zimmerman himself. Of those witnesses who saw the struggle, none of them saw it from the beginning, and none of them have been able to tell police who started the fight. Even the fact that some witnesses saw Martin on top of Zimmerman before the fatal shot doesn’t prove that it was Martin who started the fight, and nor does it prove or disprove Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense.
So, even if Zimmerman started the ball rolling himself, we may never know about it, and it’s here that i really think you need to step back a bit. The question of morally and ethically right or wrong is (for better or worse) quite different from the question of proving something in court beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if you (you personally, or the generic, all-inclusive you) look at all the evidence and come to the conclusion that you don’t find Zimmerman a credible witness, and that you believe he was largely to blame for the altercation and for Zimmerman’s death, that doesn’t necessarily meet the standard required to find him guilty of murder.
The law is a specialized thing, with specific rules for specific circumstances, and we can’t just project out sense of what feels right and wrong onto the outcomes in a criminal case. Bricker’s argument was a legal argument about what is required to sustain a claim of self-defense. He said, as you note in the OP, that:
Emphasis mine.
Note that this is a conditional statement. The rest relies on the accuracy of the first part. As i said above, we may never know whether or not the first part is true, but if it is, then Zimmerman (or anyone, police or civilian) had a right to defend himself. And this would be true even if Zimmerman is a racist asshole who only followed Martin because he was a black kid walking through a gated neighborhood.
Also, as others have pointed out, the law is precise not only in its particular requirements, but also in areas related to jurisdiction, and you don’t do yourself any favors by citing a California law to bolster your argument for a Florida case. I know this is frustrating, because at some level we might like to think that the standards and the rules should be the same everywhere, but they’re not, and something that might be OK in San Diego might not be in Sanford, and vice versa.
I’ve accused Bricker quite a few times in the past of conflating legal arguments, on the one hand, with moral or principled arguments, on the other. He has, on numerous occasions, waded into discussions about morals and principles with legal opinions, as if every argument about right and wrong could just be solved by an appeal to the law. It’s a jackass move, he’s been called on it by me and by others, and i haven’t seen him do it for a while.
But you’re falling into the same trap, only from the opposite end of the spectrum. You see what appears to you to be a case of injustice, a moral wrong that needs righting, and you make the mistake of arguing that the legal system conforms (or should conform) to your sense of right and wrong, of fair and unfair, and of good and bad. I share many of your moral and principled concerns about this case, but we need to recognize that there are good reasons that our criminal justice system requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that our concerns about this case, while not unreasonable or irrational or unfounded, might not be reflected in the legal outcome of the case.
I’d like to suggest that you stay out of the Zimmerman thread for a while, and maybe leave the whole issue alone until the trial, when things may become clearer, or at least will be laid out in a systematic fashion. Right now, it seems that you’re making yourself a bit crazy with this debate, to no real purpose. I’ve hardly seen you in any other threads for ages; why don’t you get involved in a few less serious discussions, and save yourself some heartache?
I’m not dismissing your concerns about this case; as i said, i share a lot of them. But i think you’d benefit from stepping back from the debate for a while, if only for your own peace of mind.
What does this mean to you? To me, it clearly means that it’s not enough to have probable cause to make an arrest. A crime has to actually be committed AND there must be probable cause. And the finder of that fact is not the arrester, it’s the judicial system.
If a judge found that Martin was provoked into punching Zimmerman and thus not even a misdemeanor (let alone a felony), then that automatically means the arrest was unlawful.
It directly relates to why people hate lawyers. I sometimes wonder if many lawyers aren’t a little Asperger-y or something, including Bricker. It does take something a little unusual to make this mistake multiple times, and I don’t think it’s trolling. I think it’s honestly how his mind works.
It has nothing to do with accuracy of the first part. A private citizen is not the arbiter of when a felony has been committed. That tasks goes to the judicial system.
A single punch in the face is not necessarily a felony. It’s not even a misdemeanor if a careful review of the circumstances leads to the determination that the punch was provoked. Stalking someone at night could certainly lead to such a determination.
You’re an intelligent poster. Do you really think it’s legal to respond to a possible broken nose with potentially lethal gunfire? I’m talking generally, not in some extreme, once-in-a-lifetime-in-Texas kind of thing. I’m purely working off the hypothetical in the OP, not the alleged events in Zimmerman’s actual narrative. Bricker is arguing that not only is legal to conduct a citizen’s arrest after being punched; he’s also saying it’s legal to shoot someone in retaliation for being punched and also detain them under the conditions of his hypothetical.
If I’m wrong about something, I have no problems copping to it. But what he’s written is not just wrong. It’s wreckless. All we need is someone to google “citizens arrest” and have them read his opinion that it’s legal to shoot people for relatively minor offenses and then hold them against their will. It’s the making for Zimmerman v.2.0.
:rolleyes: (and that goes for the mhendo quote as well)
I’ve seen Bricker (and other lawyers, including myself) take great pains to point out that we are only discussing the legal aspect (in my case (but not Bricker’s) because I believe discussing the “moral” aspect is a meaningless waste of time).
What often happens is that people are discussing the “morality” of a situation, someone says something that alludes to the legalities of it, Bricker (or another lawyer) weighs in on the legal angle, and then the likes of you two dumbasses accuse Bricker (or the other lawyer) of conflating the law and “morality.”
And yet there have also been times when he has not taken such pains, and has responded to an issue of morality or principle with a legal argument. He has even, on a few occasions, admitted to doing this.
I’m not interested in what you do, because you don’t interest me at all.
