Also forgot about the hoodie, the uniform of street criminals!
There are only 2 people who knew what went down that night and one of them is dead. I choose to believe a child with no criminal record felt threatened because a guy with a record of vigilantism brandished a weapon in his effort to Batman the streets of Sanford, Florida on a dark night. Yes, in court we have to assume innocence, but in my opinion I assume that Zimmerman threatened Martin with a gun
Is your opinion based on any evidence? Because it doesn’t seem to account for some of the known facts. For instance, if Zimmerman was threatening Martin with a gun, why did Zimmerman allow Martin to blacken his eyes, break his nose, knock him down, and bash his head against the ground for some time before firing?
Regards,
Shodan
You know, occasionally conservatives like you are accidentally right and don’t rush to assume facts that are unknown or still in dispute. Mostly you do it when it corresponds to your personal preferences. When a cop shoots a black guy, for example, you claim that the facts aren’t known, and don’t condemn the cop no matter how bad it looks.
And then there are the times when you’re like an army of locusts descending onto a piece of juicy news that’s bad for a Democrat, or bad for a minority, or bad for a non-Christian religion. When that happens, all self-control flies out the window. Did the FBI say something about Clinton emails (she was innocent of all charges)? Guilty! Lock her up! No trial! Did a black guy maybe had some trouble with the law? Then he must have attacked the cops with a gun he probably ditched to his druggie friends D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty! A guy with a foreign name do something wrong? Build that wall!
Lol, I don’t care what you think about the Martin murder.
So, no.
Regards,
Shodan
And Liberals do the same thing. It’s called a political bias. People tend to focus on things that validate their personal beliefs and give them comfort that the world works the way they want to. Everyone does this to a certain extent, but some people take it to ridiculous extremes.
Believing that only Conservatives do this is part of this mindset.
sigh
Perhaps a moment of additional thought along these same lines will expose the flaw.
As an aid to that additional thought, let me offer up the police officer who says, “Of course I had probable cause to search the car. After all, I found drugs there. That makes it certain, not just probable!”
Hopefully this exposes the problem with your reasoning – what ultimately happened to Martin cannot legally serve as his basis for fear. His fear must have been grounded in what he knew at the time.
Florida law requires that the prosecution disprove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the claim of self-defense. That means that the prosecution cannot simply ask the jury ti imagine that Martin felt fear for his life. They have to show specific facts that together prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman used unlawful force against Martin first.
What specific facts could they put into evidence to show this?
Resist, even though your resistance may be unlawful.
Scenario: your friend announces, “If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists.” Is he correct?
(I assume we have transitioned into posing interesting but unrelated scenarios and I don’t wish to be left out of the game)
Yes, yes, in your own opinion you are of course not constrained by burdens of proof or the law. Feel free to opine as your fancy suits you. But do not, please, translate that opinion into the related but factually wrong claim that the law was not served here. It’s completely possible that Zimmerman threatened Martin with gun in hand before Martin ever struck him. But evidence of that will never be available until we can apply a Tardis or a fast Delorean to the problem. So – as you acknowledge – the criminal trial of Zimmerman ended correctly. It may well be that Zimmerman avoided conviction for a murder that he genuinely committed, but for which there was no evidence.
As a point of reference, here was the thread I started about the Clinton e-mail server issue:
This is after-the-fact reasoning. While I don’t doubt that Martin had cause to fear Zimmerman, this is like saying, “Todd Beamer was foolish to fly on United Flight 93 on September 11, because that airplane ended up being hijacked.”