Maybe not that night but…
"When the school cop searched Martin’s backpack the next day looking for the graffiti marker, he reported he found women’s jewelry and a screwdriver described as a “burglary tool,” the report said.
According to the report, the 12 pieces of jewelry included silver wedding bands, earrings with diamonds and a watch. The investigator asked about the jewelry and “Martin replied it’s not mine. A friend gave it to me,” the report said."
Interesting, but where’s the part where it shows that the jewelry was stolen? And the evidence that Martin was the one that stole it?
CMC fnord!
Why not just claim that Zimmerman read Martin’s mind and saw jewel thief? :rolleyes:
LOL. This is hilarious.
Could you, or the writer of that article, or the school cop, explain for me the difference between a regular screwdriver and a “burglary tool” screwdriver? I need to know if my toolbox contains anything criminal.
He incorrectly profiled a child as a thief. You cannot argue with that because it is a a fact. Is this the kind of person you want to be? Someone who argues against facts with bullshit? Someone who lies to win internet points? Christ, try harder at life, this is pathetic.
Anything can be a fucking burglary tool if you put it in scare quotes.
I routinely smash down doors with my “penis”.
I meant “burglary tool” not a buggery tool
Oh, well, when you mention that bit it’s obvious that he should have hunted and killed without a trial.
I mean…jewelry!
And how did that argument work out for the prosecution? What was the final verdict again? Did you really think you were making some grand point by citing an argument that has already been considered and explicitly rejected. Also, and this is really important, the law does not require someone to have sustained serious injury (or death) before they can legally respond with force. A reasonable fear of the imminence of such an injury will suffice. And again, a reasonable fact-finder could (and did) conclude a person having the base of their skull repeatedly struck against concrete while being pinned to the ground could legally justify such a fear.
They didn’t explicitly. But that doesn’t necessarily matter for defamation claims. Not making the alleged defamation explicitly is no more an absolute defense than not naming the subject. The test is basically, “How would an average person interpret the statement in question?”
The complaint is online but the short version of the argument is that by mentioning Martin and characterizing his life as “stolen” or “that he should still be with us…” it implies that the person responsible for Martin’s death is somehow morally or legally blameworthy. When someone is morally or legally to blame for the death of another as the result of an intent to cause great bodily injury or death we call that criminal homicide, and it’s a felony. Zimmerman was acquitted in Martin’s death and as far as the law is concerned he is factually innocent of criminal responsibility in Martin’s death.
Furthermore, mentioning racism, white-supremacy, and prejudice in the same context further implies Martin’s death was unlawful and that those were Zimmerman’s motivations rather than the finding of self-defense. And while the term “gun violence” can be fairly neutral, had they used it alone they would be on much stronger ground, by associating it with the above (racism, etc.) they are again making a damaging implication other than the legal finding of self-defense.
Also, even if the per se defamation claim fails, if Zimmerman can establish that they were accusing him of “racism, etc.” did so with malice, and caused damage to his reputation, then he can still prevail. Normally such accusations can fall into the realm of “pure opinion” but since they ostensibly linked the accusations to a factual event, one where the facts where legally determined to be otherwise, then they may have actually made that defense much weaker if not completely unavailable.
In your eagerness to give someone an insufferable lecture on their “privilege” did it ever occur to you that nothing I said had anything whatsoever to do with my own personal feelings? The law doesn’t care any more about my personal, subjective fears than it does Martin’s or Zimmerman’s because people’s subjective fears are frequently irrational. And there is no self-defense law or legal principle in any Western democracy I’m aware of that will justify the use of force as reasonable based merely on following someone or even confronting them to ask questions. Regardless of whether it is night and the race or gender of the person being followed/ confronted. Neither of those things can be reasonably interpreted as an imminent threat of violence. We also have no idea if Martin was aware Zimmerman was armed. And did you really just plead the whole “absence of evidence…” thing in a discussion about a legal case? Because that’s not at all how this works.
If you are advocating for some other standard of fear needed to justify self-defense then you are second-guessing centuries of the accumulated legal traditions/wisdom of numerous countries around the world. If you are further arguing that the law should use a different fundamental standard for females or African-Americans than it does say, white males, then that seems like it would be pretty problematic and unworkable and is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a decent while.
And what exactly do Klayman’s actions or legal record have to do logically with this case? Are you saying the current claim is not cognizable or winnable?
Good news, everyone! OJ really was innocent!
Events as described by Zimmerman, please note.
Also, the point remains that unarmed Martin was being followed by an armed aggressor. Despite the insistence of others that the onus was on Martin to de-escalate or flee, by your own argument and the known evidence Martin also would have had a reasonable fear of imminent injury (or worse) and the right to legally respond with force.
Are you forgetting about the whole “civil judgement against Simpson” thing? And this claim is a lot more complicated than merely taking issue with a jury’s verdict. Accusations of racism, white-supremacy, and prejudice are, unsurprisingly, potentially defamatory. And the further issue is implying those things are associated with Zimmerman’s actions in Martin’s death. Actions which, again, the law found to be self-defense.
Martin certainly was under no legal obligation to flee. There is also zero competent evidence that he was legally justified in using violence against Zimmerman. All this talk about who followed whom, who confronted whom, etc. is ultimately irrelevant. The only relevant issue is who first initiated violence or the threat of imminent violence. And the only persuasive evidence we have on that issue is Martin witnessed on top of Zimmerman violently attacking him.
Yes, as described by Zimmerman as well as other witnesses and without competent contradictory evidence. In addition, your colloquial description of Zimmerman as the aggressor is meaningless from a legal perspective and I’ve never insisted that Martin was under any legal obligation to de-escalate or flee. Only to not initiate physical violence absent a legal justification. And none of the evidence or arguments presented here by me, by others in this thread, or in the trial, come even close to meeting that standard.
Oh piss off, “the only relevant issue?” The only time that was the only relevant issue was at Zimmerman’s trial, and even then that’s only what the prosecution wanted to focus on.
Out here in the rest of society, it’s absolutely relevant that an adult man with a gun profiled a black teenager, followed him in the dark, and then killed him. We can and should absolutely be talking about the racism, the prejudice, and the unreasonable fear that would cause someone to make such a life changing decision like Zimmerman did and yet be so completely wrong about it that a child ended up dead for no reason.
And we can certainly talk about why people are responding to this senseless death 8 years later with a completely bullshit line of thinking like “Well he shouldn’t have been out after dark without expecting some kind of trouble, and also he was probably a jewelry thief” or something.
Yes, if you dismiss the evidence that might demonstrate that Martin reasonably felt threatened by Zimmerman, there’s no evidence. Funny how that works.
Which is irrelevant to determining the reason why that might have happened, a reason which is entirely relevant to the point.
Is it, though? He took up a weapon and followed an unarmed man who was committing no crime despite direction from the 911 dispatcher not to. Had Martin been armed and shot Zimmerman instead, he’d have had a pretty solid case under Stand Your Ground laws, particularly given Zimmerman’s background.
But he couldn’t make that case, because he wasn’t armed and because he’s now dead.
I didn’t say you personally had.
Because the only person able to make that legal argument regarding Martin’s state of mind and the level of threat he felt would have been Martin. Who is dead. Again, funny how that works.
You are very carefully threading semantic and legal needles in order to obscure the application of a blatant double standard.
You’re free of course to have your own ill-founded, stupid opinions. But you’ve been massively outvoted, and I’m going to go ahead and go with the law, which is the system we all agreed on. It’s also been written and tested by numerous people over centuries, all of whom almost certainly more intelligent than you and spending infinitely longer on considering the issues. And as far as the evidence shows, the only reason Martin was killed is because he attacked Zimmerman and put him in legitimate fear sufficient to justify deadly force. That is the only obligation Martin had, not to initiate unjustified violence, and the only evidence we have says he failed to do so.
It continues to baffle me that people can’t even allow for the possibility that Martin, a 17-year-old male, started the fight. Testosterone is a helluva drug. Hell, it’s like 80-90% of the reason we need police in the first place. I’ve witnessed males of that age group walk eagerly into what one would hope was the ass-kicking of their lives. Where everyone knew it was a bad, bad idea except that person and their ego. Teenage and twentysomething males are, as a group, one of the purest examples of human stupidity that exists on this planet.