Well, for what it is worth, during the Zimmerman circus I thought that the jury should have convicted the son of a bitch despite all the bullshit parsing of the jury instructions. Zimmerman murdered Martin, and the technicalities and parsing by all the lawyers in the world didn’t change that. The jury failed, the judge failed, the prosecutors failed, the Florida legislature is dominated by morons and the governors are idiots.
In what galaxy?
As long as your referring to the “innocent until proven guilty” concept any objective reader of the numerous GZ vs TM threads we had here would have drawn the exact opposite conclusion.
IANAL but IMO the case for murder should not have been based on the final minute, when Zimmermann may have acted in self-defense, but the depraved-heart fashion in which Zimmermann, armed, stalked with hostile intent a presumably innocent youth. He created a situation where he was likely to kill. If that were “legal”, it would be straightforward for someone like Zimmermann to march around in certain neighborhoods and kill many “tough” teenagers “legally.”
Did the prosecutor make that case? Would it have a legal basis?
Waitaminute, you hold out for unanimity when someone agrees with you?
You should have said. I was starting to feel unappreciated over in Mighty Girl’s RCC thread.
No, no – that was just a turn of phrase.
But it’s fair to say in the various Zimmerman threads, there was a substantially vocal proportion of commentators holding fast to factually incorrect statements about the way the law works. Fortunately, in neither that thread nor the RCC thread was I the sole opposing voice.
And, thank you, belatedly but sincerely.
Unfortunately – but very much in line with the previous swaths of ignorance I dispensed with earlier – you sweep together some very different concepts.
The legislature and governors by well be morons and idiots. But they nonetheless get to make the law, which the judge and jury are bound to respect.
So a claim that the legislature should never have crafted self-defense law the way they did is certainly a valid claim, but it cannot support the argument that even though they did not, the judge and jury somehow failed. The judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense lawyer all have roles to play in our legal system, and none of those roles should ever be “Ignoring the law because I personally believe it’s stupid.” A judge or a jury that feels empowered to substitute their version for the actual law can do far more damage than a vigilante with a carry permit ever could.
Argue that “Stand your ground,” should be repealed because it’s stupid and creates more harm than it prevents? I’ll help make the signs for the protest.
Argue that the jury should have ignored the law because they just knew what the law SHOULD have said? Nope.
I find it amusing that a huge segment of the population enthusiastically embraced Zimmerman in the heat of a national partisan shouting match, apparently forgetting that, even if the evidence was insufficient to obtain a conviction in court, he was almost certain to be creepy weirdo in real life.
And we disagree about that. Justice is not following the law to a non-sensical conclusion and letting a child murderer off. I would argue that the legislature and governor and even the people have no right to screw up the laws so that a murderer can do the shit that Zimmerman actually did. He was not innocent with any respect to justice. Let’s say Smurfs are real people. The legislature and the governor pass a law that says you can shoot a Smurf with your left hand holding the gun, and that is a legitimate defense to murder. The trial comes down to the prosecutor arguing that the gun was fired with the right hand, the defense with the left. The evidence is not beyond a reasonable doubt on that point. I say the jury can convict and should as it is not in dispute that Zimmerman shot the Smurf. That the legislature passed a dumb ass exception to the laws prohibiting murder is really something that the jury should finally backstop.
YMMV on “creepy weirdo” all the way to another murder waiting to happen.
And you would be comfortable with this standard being applied to yourself? Being arrested and sent to jail, even though it’s understood you did not break the law, because *some *people felt that what you did was wrong?
(1) No you would not be comfortable with that, and (2) that’s an awful standard regardless. I *like *living in a democracy.
“Do you know who I am?” Zimmerman and “Don’t you know who I am?” Palin should be put in a cage match. Why? FREEDOM!
If I had done what Zimmerman had done, I would expect to have been convicted of murder. I’d be appalled not to be. It looks like it drove Zimmerman even more insane. I expect not to kill people.
Now you answer the question. If you had done what Zimmerman did, would you honestly think that society was better off letting people like you go, or putting them in prison? Remember, you’ve done exactly what Zimmerman did.
Murder should not have an exception where you yell “I’m standing my ground.” and you are excused. It’s still murder and democracy cannot condone murder.
I’ve answered your hypotheticals, you haven’t time to screw up the courage and answer the Smurf one and then the Zimmerman one. Can the legislature make it legal to shoot a Hutu or a Tutsi? A boy wearing a hoodie?
Fox News wouldn’t know who to root for, so it’ll never happen.
So it would seem. Until the guys down in Marketing get done counting up what sort of price they could put for advertising , until Moloch whispers the magic words “Ka-Ching!!” in Mr. Ailes’ ear.
The point of the question was: assume that, like Zimmerman, you didn’t feel you did anything wrong, and about half the country agreed with you, and the law didn’t say you did anything illegal. You wouldn’t mind that a particular court substituted its own *moral *judgment for an objective legal one?
Well there a few possibilities:
- The law says my actions were illegal and I’m convicted. This is probably the best outcome.
- The law says my actions were not illegal (and/or there’s insufficient evidence to convict), and I’m acquitted.
- The law says my actions were not illegal (and/or there’s insufficient evidence to convict), and I’m convicted. This is the worst outcome. The rule of law is more important than the eventual fate of any one killer. I would be *somewhat *more sympathetic if we were talking about a jury ignoring the law in order to *acquit *someone due to an overriding concern for justice, but I would like for my legal rights to be respected, and that means I’m obliged to respect the legal rights of others.
No.
Well, we agree on number one being the best outcome.
We do not agree on number two. I say that the law has no right to legalize murder either intentionally or through bad writing and that such laws are void and not a defense to murder and the jury should convict. Juries should decide cases on the evidence, and on any evidence the jury might find helpful, not just the evidence that the lobbyists pay the legislators to allow before the courts. The people and the accused have a right to a trial by a jury of the peers of the accused. Corporations have been chipping away at that for hundreds of years. Paid politicians, which is what judges are, are not as honest as 12 citizens who take their duty to do right by the community seriously.
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? You do know that the thoughts in your head that would make these connections intelligible don’t show up on the screen unless you type them, right?
Anyway, I’m not even remotely close to being comfortable with a legal system that tells juries to just enforce whatever rules they feel like, and treats the laws that are on the books as mere suggestions. Fortunately, most people agree with me.
Second Stone,
Look, I feel you. The very idea that Zimmy is still walking around with a gun instead of writing poorly thought out appeals in a small dank cell, is abhorrent. The Florida legislature did this, they wrote the laws that allowed the outcome instead of the one you wish, Bricker even agrees. He also, rightly, points out that arbitrary changing the application of the law to suit one or even a group of peoples idea of right and fair is fundamentally dangerous.
Essentially vigilante justice is what you are advocating and I don’t want to live in a World where that is acceptable and neither do you. America in the late 19th and early 20th century is a great example of this, we call it Lynching now and this is exactly what you are calling for Zimmy.
Claro?
Capt
Juries and judges do their duty all the time without buying garbage arguments. There is no reason they couldn’t have convicted Zimmerman to leave him scratching out his appeals in a prison cell. Innocent people are convicted and put on death row all the time in the USA and when if their appeals let them out 30 years later we all, including the innocent victim who lost 30 years, do a kubuki dance about how the system vindicated the innocent. Hooray. What a crock of shit. There was no question that Zimmerman was the shooter, that he was looking for a young black man to shoot and he did so, and the jury could easily have decided that his defense was a load of bullshit (despite his not taking the stand, a wise decision) rejected the bullshit, sending him off to get exonerated 30 years later.
Ours is a system that regularly convicts innocent people and sentences them to death. Scalia has stated that factual innocence is irrelevant in a death penalty case. I really don’t see the problem in a jury ignoring a bullshit instruction and making a guilty guy go through two years of appeals when we actually execute innocent people.
The problem you are having is that you believe the mom and apple pie hype about what a fair and just legal system we have. It’s bullshit. We usually get the guilty person, but not always. We usually convict the innocent people we charge too.
If the number of innocent people on death row exonerated (alive or dead) over the past 25 years by DNA has taught you (us) anything, it should be that we don’t give a damn about putting factually innocent people on death row. If you see all the efforts prosecutors put into stopping these exonerations, these proofs of factual innocence, you would be utterly disgusted with a legal system that as a matter of constitutional law holds that factual innocence is not a bar to the death penalty.
The Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are just pretty propaganda to the people in power. The only people who hold them up as principles are treated as radical nutjobs.