I’m sure we did this about a million posts ago. In short, it’s probably not actually reasonable to think that way, but juries don’t tend to see it that way. I don’t for a moment believe that you actually think there’s no real difference between grabbing someone, and punching them to the floor and repeatedly bashing their head against concrete. You’re twisting things any way you can to make Zimmerman guilty of something - anything - regardless of the facts or the law.
I’ll answer your last question if you can explain what you mean by “running aggressively”.
Martin didn’t have mitts full of merchandise. The Arizona tea actually fell out of his pocket when they covered the body, then thery placed it on top of the yellow plastic and took a photo. They found the skittles on the grass, though the exact location wasn’t stated.
I would tend to sort in chronological order. Fitting to the other facts is obviously the wrong way to go. Too many witnesses have changed their testimony based media accounts in this case. The earliest account should be best.
That does seem odd, but I don’t see how that would be something Zimmerman would lie about. Why didn’t Zimmerman ask Martin what he was doing when he walked past? If I am going to ask questions of a stranger, I would rather do it when I have a truck wrapped around me. It just leads to awkward follow on questions to lie about it.
The things I would be looking for lies is how long he chased Zimmerman and the details of the interactions between him and Martin. I actually assuming that the dialog between Zimmerman and Martin will have some dramatic enhancements. I would expect some attempts to make Trayvon look more dangerous.
Actually that part is easy. The police found the ice tea and the skittles in the pocket of Martin’s hoodie. They actually took the ice tea out when they were giving him CPR.
I think he actually had the phone in his hand and the headset became unplugged when he dropped it. The phone was item #7 and it was fairly close to Zimmerman’s flashlight #5. I’m kind of assuming that the altercation started there.
If you grant that TM could have been warranted in punching GZ in a scenario where he was grabbed for no good reason, what, besides GZ’s own version of events, do you have to show that his head was repeatedly bashed against concrete?
I hope it’s more than the two small cuts. Even minor cuts to the head tend to bleed a lot. I’ve bled more than that when I’ve cut myself shaving. If his head was repeatedly bashed against concrete in such a way to make him genuinely fear for his life, there should be much worse damage than two small cuts.
The damage to his nose was his most significant injury. And since that could have come from TM defending himself from assault, I find it hard to look at the two cuts on the back of his head and say those were what made him fear for his life. He wasn’t even scared enough for his life, or health, to agree to get checked out at the hospital.
You’re the one making blanket statements about what Martin could and could not do. You’re the one saying he could defend himself, but only up to the point of causing serious harm. But the SYG law doesn’t draw these kinds of absolutes.
I mean just what the word denote. But to use more words:
I’m walking along, minding my own business, when I make brief eye contact with a man who is staring intensely at me across the street. Its dark so its hard to see his face, but from what I can tell the expression on his face suggests he’s mad at me for simply existing, and it frightens me. Figuring I should get the hell out of dodge, I quicken my pace. Lo and behold, I look back and the man is chasing after me. Oh shit! What the hell? That really gets me running.
When I turn the corner, i think I might have lost him, because he doesn’t seem to be behind me anymore. I slow down and try to regain my breath. Right when I give myself the all clear and head home, the guy comes rushing towards me from out of nowhere. Before I can open my mouth, he has me in a head lock and is dragging me towards the street. All the while calling me an asshole and maybe a punk or coon. Cant make it out clearly, though. He also says something about a button on my shirt.
I have a gun holstered to my waist. The guy stumbles a little, which causes just enough laxity in his grip to allow me get my gun out. I promptly shoot him in the face.
This what I mean. In such a scenario, why would I would be a poor candidate for SYG? Seems to me all the right elements are there.
I’ve never heard of someone begging a person they’re pounding on. I have heard people on the receiving end to beg for it to stop or yell for help. Your explanation makes absolutely no sense. None.
But you don’t know when he got these injuries. They are evidence that at some point, Martin hit Zimmerman. But there is no evidence that he was being beaten at the time he fired on Martin.
We haven’t even seen the guy’s statement. If he swore up and down that seconds before he shot Martin, he was being suffocated, would that change your analysis of either his truthfulness or the origin of that voice? What if he insisted that Martin had never yelled for help either. How much BS in his statement are you willing to accept, in other words?
Dude, I taught English at the college level for a decade, taught ESL for four years, tutored illiterate inner-city kids, and have contributed to academic publications on teaching SWE to youths with nonstandard dialect backgrounds. And you are totally, completely, wildly, embarrassingly wrong. It’s not even close. You’re talking about things on which you clearly have no expertise.
If you really want to get educated on what Black English is and why even a kid who spoke only that (and there are essentially no kids who speak only that) is perfectly capable of saying “I’m begging you,” start another thread, or better yet grab a book.
But your contention here just makes you look like an idiot and/or a bigot … and I say that as someone who thinks it at least as likely that Zimmerman was doing the begging.
Has anyone reported bruising on the back of Z’s head yet?
Some bruising and swelling’d sure help establish the importance of the head/concrete issue.
I am not sure that Z’s version of events plays up the head/pavement angle as much as teh in4rwebz’re playing it up.
If Z version really does include the whole you’re gonna die tonight /reaching for the gun bit, isn’t the head/concrete thing sorta moot?
It seems the declaration of intent combined with an attempt to acquire the means to carry out the intent imminently would be sufficient to establish a reasonable fear for one’s life.
Imho anyway.
So now you are arguing that it is more likely that Martin was the attacker, because his brain was immature? OK, but I don’t see how that helps your point. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.
Well, I guess we don’t have pictures of Zimmerman from earlier in the evening, so we cannot prove he didn’t have the injuries before. OTOH, his nose was apparently still bleeding, and it strains credulity (at least on my part) to imagine that by pure coincidence Zimmerman had injuries consistent with a narrative of being beaten in specific ways just in case he needed to shoot somebody. So I think we can reasonably conclude he wasn’t injured before the altercation.
And I don’t think he had any chance to be injured after the altercation - one would expect the police to notice if someone in their custody describing how he had just shot someone was punching himself in the nose and hitting himself on the back of the head. So I think we can reasonably conclude he wasn’t injured after the altercation either.
So that leaves “during the altercation” as the only reasonable time during which Zimmerman got injured.
IIRC, Martin was shot at point-blank or near point-blank range, eight inches or less. So they were less than arm’s length apart. And Martin’s body was found on or near the sidewalk which Zimmerman alleges was the source of the injuries to the back of his head. And the whole fight lasted, what, a couple of minutes?
So your scenario is a little hard to believe. Somehow or other Martin punched Zimmerman in the face, knocked him down, beat his head in the ground (all the while screaming “I’m begging you” for no apparent reason). Then Martin stopped beating him but continued to scream, somehow they got less than eight inches apart, Martin continued to scream but did not resume beating Zimmerman, and then Zimmerman shot him, even though no beating was happening.
Or -
The fight went down more or less as Zimmerman described it, where Zimmerman was the one screaming (because Martin was beating him), Zimmerman was the one saying “I’m begging you” (in an effort to make Martin stop beating him), and the shot was fired from eight inches away because Martin was on top of Zimmerman beating him, and the screams stopped because Martin was no longer beating Zimmerman.
If Zimmerman said that he was being continuously suffocated throughout the struggle, and that he never screamed for help, then I am willing to believe that he is being untruthful about that. Saying that at some point, Martin had his hand over Zimmerman’s mouth, does not prove that it was impossible for Zimmerman to ever scream.
If Zimmerman stated that Martin never screamed for help, I am inclined to believe him. I see no reason why Martin would scream for help - he was winning the fight pretty easily up to the point where he got shot. And as mentioned, the idea of someone saying “I’m begging you” to the person he is beating does not seem reasonable to me. So if Zimmerman says Martin was saying that to him, then I won’t believe Zimmerman there either.
This makes sense in the context of someone trying to subdue someone they perceive to be a “creepy dude” that put their hands on them - especially if they become aware of a gun during the struggle. It would not be directed at the other person, it would be directed at anyone in the immediate vicinity.
If “I’m begging you!” was heard by anyone, it would also be perfectly natural in this situation - perhaps more plausibly from someone struggling to hold down a man with a gun than from someone who is taking a vicious beating.
It means it was documented that he suffered head and face wounds consistent with his story. That’s what it means. Someone saw him beaten, and the police documented the evidence.
And yet none of us know whether he was being beaten in the moments before he shot Martin. There is no evidence of this beyond Z’s own claim, because no one saw the shooting take place.
No, that’s false. We have a police report that documented the beating. We have photographic evidence of it at the time it occurred by someone there and the police. This is not even remotely in dispute.