Threatened, yes. Suspicious, yes. Curious, yes. However, FLA law says that you have to believe your life is in danger before you can respond with lethal force. Actually in danger of losing you life. If you can’t explain to police or to the SA’s office exactly how your life was actually in danger, you’re going to jail.
Did they say they were going to kill you? Were they waving a knife at you? Were they beating you? If you can’t provide a reasonable answer, you’re going to jail.
You can not kill someone or attempt to kill someone simply because they are following you or walking in the same direction as you.
You can use lethal force IF THEY’RE TRYING TO KILL YOU.
Zimmerman may still decide to have a SYG pre-trial hearing which could result in the whole case being tossed out.
I assume Zimmerman’s defense will be self-defense. Martin began punching him. Martin pinned Zimmerman to the ground. Martin continued to beat Zimmerman. Zimmerman called out to his neighbors for help. Zimmerman was forced to shoot Martin in order to save his own life.
Can the prosecutor prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this didn’t happen, or that something else happened, or that this couldn’t have happened?
Again, you think this to be the case. You do not know it to be the case, unless in fact you were there and saw the entire event. (In which case you should probably call the Florida authorities and tell them about it.)
Unless you are privy to evidence that has not been released to the public, you simply do not know for sure what happened or who intitiated the physical altercation.
No, sir, Florida law does not say that. It says that you must be in a situation where a reasonable person would believe themselves to be in danger of death or grievous bodily harm, which is a different, and broader, concept.
that analogy makes no sense at all. There’s no comparison to attacking someone in your example and keeping an eye on someone so the police can find them. The dispatcher made a suggestion with no force of law or implication of such. Zimmerman wasn’t attempting to engage Martin. That occurred because MARTIN chose to do it.
Zimmerman didn’t carelessly take another human being’s life. It was done after an extended beating initiated by Martin. He had ample time to go home but HE chose to engage Zimmerman. All the evidence points to Martin being the aggressor. This could only occur because he imagined the worst of Zimmerman and acted irrationally on it just as you are doing with your extremely violent views that you now admit enjoying. Enjoying!
Zimmerman had every right to be suspicious of Martin. His behavior at the car and then running was suspicious. Zimmerman acted on those suspicions by calling the police and keeping Martin within eyesight.
Martin had every right to be suspicious of Zimmerman. There were 2 logical steps he could have taken together or separately. He could have run home and he could have called the police. He had a phone in his hand and he was 100 yards from his house. He chose to confront Zimmerman and then beat him. He did so without any verbal threats from Zimmerman. He beat him continuously with the same hatred you seem to enjoy.
You of all people have shown it’s relevant. It’s people who have convicted him without a trial and want to see him dead that Zimmerman has to deal with. He’s had death threats and protest marches and violent groups posting a reward for his capture.
We know who had a chance to go home or call the police and didn’t. We know who initiated the conversation and we know who didn’t respond to what was being said (thus ending the conversation). And we know who beat someone with what can be described as a great deal of rage.
Yes there is a gap in the evidence but there is a percentage of probability involved when someone goes out of his way to confront another and then brutally beats him versus the probability of someone who does the right thing and calls the police and then goes on to keep a suspicious person in sight. That’s a logical thing to do when your objective is to catch a burglar in the act.
Actually no you do not, you have absolutely no reason to believe Martin had either the opportunity to escape or that he had any reason to believe Zimmerman had given up the chase.
As far as you know Zimmerman came across his hiding spot and he thought he was going to continue looking for him.
From what I understand, Martin had ample time to make it home. There was also no indication form the conversation that Zimmerman presented a threat. Your use of “escape” implies attempt to capture or capture. There is no indication that Zimmerman tried to detain him.
I don’t fault Zimmerman for being frustrated. If I thought I did right while everyone thinks I did wrong, I’d be frustrated too.
I do fault his lawyer for telling us this, though. His job is to make Zimmerman look sympathetic. “He’s frustrated the judge is making him go back to jail for lying! Give him a break!” does NOT make me feel sorry for him.
Both of them, obviously. Martin could have gone home faster; Zimmerman could have simply not pursued him in the first place. I don’t know what relevance this comment has.
No, you simply don’t. You weren’t there and don’t know how the conversation began, and don’t know why it ended or what ended it. You’re assuming a large number of things for which you do not have the evidence.
We don’t know that Martin confronted Zimmerman, ambushed him from the back, wailed on him mercilessly, or dilly-dallied on his way home. We can speculate and we can choose to believe Zimmerman. But we cannot know these things.
We don’t know what Martin did to Zimmerman. And absent video camera footage, we never will.
So there’s a quote that shows frustration after less than seven months – we know he’s not only frustrated at the seven months point, but almost immediately, since he says his frustration has grown over seven months.
If the prosecution has no evidence, they can’t. The question is what they’ve got; we don’t know if they have evidence we are unaware of (they hinted they did, but we can’t know for sure) or if the charge is a tactic or a bluff.
In the absence of such knowledge, how can people defend Zimmerman so vehemently?
It’s one tihng to say, “I don’t think the state can make a slam-dunk case. I don’t know if I believe the dude or not, but regardless I think that based on what we can decipher, there is not enough evidence to say he is guilty.”
I can kind of agree with this. The emotional part of me doesn’t, but the rational side does.
It’s quite another to say, “Zimmerman didn’t do anything wrong! Martin shouldn’t have done X, Y, or Z! And don’t forget he had THC in his system!”
I have no doubt the defenders think they are taking the first position. But they are wrong. The moment they start a sentence with “We know Martin did…”, that’s when I know they are confusing belief with knowledge and making all kinds of crazy conclusions.
I suppose it could be a bluff. And there has been a high-profile case of a district attorney so desperate to get a conviction that he pushed forward with a charge when he knew the evidence he was hiding actually showed the innocence of his targets.
But in this case, we have a special prosecutor. She won’t lose her job if she fails to get a conviction. She has a reputation of being very vigorous, very aggressive, but I’ve never heard it said of her that she is underhanded or unethical.
So despite the fact that there is currently no evidence that would allow a jury to find Zimmerman guilty, I am convinced that she has some. Otherwise, I don’t believe she would have charged him.
A perfectly valid point. This has been one of the most popular topics I’ve ever seen here on the SDMB. I lost count of the number of threads we’ve had relating to Zimmerman/Martin and each of those threads have produced many pages of text. People quickly divided into Zimmerman/Martin camps and it got ugly fairly quickly.
I think we’ve seen a lot of those statements from both sides. It’s also amazing how we can view the same evidence and come to multiple conclusions.
At the end of the day, whether Zimmerman is guilty of anything, a 17 year old boy had his life cut short. That’s just sad.