Not convicting someone who may be innocent is far more important than finding someone guilty for every death.
You’ve linked to several injustices here, though. Why do you want to create another one by convicted someone who may be innocent?
Iirc, I came to you with that question and you answered it in much the same way.
I recall that. I do my best to understand it.
My understanding is that the state has to make the case which demonstrates that there are no other possibilities which can reasonably exist in which GZ is not guilty. That’s what I took away from our previous conversation. Perhaps I misunderstood. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Imho, it seems significant that a large portion of what we “know” about the case is from a source which is not reliable.
Imho, that means we need to be extra careful about what we take as granted from GZ testimony.
Imho, that changes the nature of the evidence pool before me.
Imho, it seems significant that the primary source for the bulk of our info about how things went down has shown that he is attempting to deceive.
Is that incorrect? Is it insignificant?
That the case you present is not a necessary conclusion doesn’t seem to be impacted by an inability to prove some separate conjecture.
Whether or not I can prove X doesn’t really seem to have any bearing on whether the conclusion, A therefore B, is correct.
It seems quite possible that you could be wrong that the distribution of injuries proves who initiated the altercation [even if the conclusion about who initiated the altercation was correct] w/o any regard as to whether some other scenario could be proven.
It’s faulty reasoning, imho, w/o regard to whether the conclusion reached is correct or not. There doesn’t need to be evidence that the conclusion is incorrect for the reasoning to be false.
Just preemptively noting that I don’t disagree with this.
Afaict, this entire conversation across the various threads and message boards which it is spread is irrelevant–but entertaining. ymmv.
A lack of evidence that GZ initiated the altercation doesn’t mean that we have to accept GZ assertion that TM initiated the altercation.
We could quite easily assume that it’s info we can’t determine.
There’s nothing forcing us to accept GZ’s version.
As a member of a jury (ie. not the internet), you will be asked to determine whether you believed the defendant is guilty “of the crime they are charged with”. If you can’t determine, based only on the evidence presented in court, that the defendant committed the crime, how do you find the defendant guilty of, for example, 2nd degree murder? You may believe that the defended is guilty of manslaughter but they are not charged with manslaughter.
If a juror can’t decide that the prosecution has proved it’s case beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant is then “not guilty” of 2nd degree murder.
Sure, as long as we make sure that we don’t assume Zimmerman initiated the fight without any evidence.
Apart from the evidence, you mean.
Regards,
Shodan
Unless it is technical, written communication such as that written by lawyers, scientists, etc., the exact opposite is generally true. A wise man once said, “Communication is a sloppy affair.” Oh wait, that was me. It’s still true.
I don’t remember listening to him give his account. But there is a big difference right off the bat- there was a lot of evidence against OJ, so it wasn’t necessary to pick apart what he said.
I prefer to determine what actually happened that night by evidence of what happened that night. “Character” is only useful for speculation on what someone might have done. I’d rather see direct evidence of what they actually did. (By the way, I don’t know how closely you’re following the case but his marijuana use is beyond the “purported” stage at this point. And his suspensions beyond the “supposed”.)
Ah, now that you’ve asked it in German I can understand. You’re right about being bilingual helping to communicate. To answer your question…
I don’t know how intelligent George Zimmerman is. But A.D.D. is considered to be a learning disability, and it is often associated with poor academic performance among other things. Having said that, I have A.D.D., I had excellent grades, and I consider myself to be well above average in intelligence in many ways. But in certain other ways, I am a total f**king idiot.
My sense of direction is terrible, I often forget minute details (such as street names), where my car keys are, etc., and can be generally quite absent-minded. In verbal communication, I often answer before thinking, mix words up, and phrase things in an awkward way that I understand, but that others may misinterpret. I think his A.D.D. (and his potentially low intelligence) is relevant in understanding certain aspects of this. But he either fired in self-defense or he didn’t. Dumb people have a right to self-defense, too.
I don’t believe he sexually assaulted his family member, he pushed a guy wearing plain clothes who appeared to be attacking his friend, he slapped a girlfriend in retaliation for her slapping him first, and his attorney was involved in both of the latter two decisions, in my opinion.
Or that he has A.D.D. or had other things going on at the time. Of course, it’s not relevant to anything. But if you wish to consider academic standing to be important, what bearing does it have for Trayvon?
On his third suspension from school, he might have been lucky to even finish high school at the rate he was going. His school records have been sealed by Crump, but I have the feeling he wasn’t going to be an aviation engineer any time soon. Zimmerman may be stupid, but Trayvon is stupider. So to whatever degree stupidity is relevant in what happened, Zimmerman still comes out ahead.
Feel free to explain what compels us to accept GZ word as fact instead of evidence which we can judge as best we see fit.
Accepting GZ’s version is a choice. There’s nothing which requires us to accept what he says as being accurate or factual.
It seems if we were compelled to accept GZ’s say-so as fat, we could skip the whole arrest and trial shenanigans.
But perhaps there’s some reason we’re compelled to find GZ account compelling. One that does not render the whole trial process and jurors as finders of fact redundant. One that I am not aware of.
So, enlighten me.
What forces us to accept GZ’s say-so as accurate fact?
Why do I have to have finding GZ guilty as my goal?
Did I miss the mandatory team sign-ups?
I am not trying to do the prosecution’s job for them. I have no idea how they will go about ruling out the possibility that GZ is innocent.
All of that happens aside from whether or not we have to accept GZ’s version of event, or whether or not we can reach the conclusion that we don’t have enough information to tell who initiated the altercation.
Ime w/ black box problem solving, recognizing what you can and cannot determine is a reasonable step to take.
I am not clear on how this reasonable step in problem solving is impacted by the prosecution’s duty to make a positive case about various things.
It seems to me that it remains reasonable to assess what we can and cannot determine no matter the prosecution’s case or lack thereof.
Even if we posit that Martin started the altercation just by accepting Zimmerman’s claim of such, this doesn’t mean that Zimmerman was justified in applying lethal force. What matters most is what was happening when Zimmerman decided to shoot Martin.
Zimmerman claims he shot Martin because the kid verbally threatened him. He also said the kid was smothering him when he made this verbal threat.
For the cognitively impaired who still don’t get why these lies get Zimmerman in trouble:
The yelling caught on tape could not be Zimmerman’s, if he was being smothered in the seconds leading up to the gunshot.
If it was Martin’s voice, that means he was too busy screaming for help to be threatening to kill Zimmerman.
So we’re left to conclude one of two things (or both): Either 1) Zimmerman wasn’t getting smothered and was therefore not in danger from Martin, or 2) Martin did not threaten him and therefore Zimmerman had no reason to believe Martin was trying to kill him.
Why would an innocent man lie about any of these two things? The State can use the existence of these lies as evidence of guilty consciousness. In other words, lying doesn’t simply indicate the defendant’s account is untrustworthy. His lies can be used to show that he is trying to cover up guilt.
Doesn’t mean that GZ accurately assessed his actions and was able to correctly determine that the actions he is not revealing would nullify his justification for self-defense.
Personally, I don’t see any reason to feel certain that he was able to accurately make any such determination.
If he were an experienced criminal defense attorney or prosecutor, I’d be more inclined to think that w/e he was covering was likely to be something which would ruin his SD claim. But I don’t trust him to have been able to make that determination reliably or accurately.
Just because GZ decided that he needed to fabricate and omit, doesn’t mean that he was correct in his decision about that need.
At this point I don’t think there’s any telling what he’s decided to obfuscate.
The prosecution may be able to string together some stuff and demonstrate certain impossibilities and certainties. But I don’ t think that there’s been any solitary piece of evidence which by itself shows me conclusively that GZ is hiding something which assures his guilt or lays waste to his SD claim.
Zimmerman’s injuries, the wetness on the back of Zimmerman’s shirt, the witness who saw Martin on top of Zimmerman.
Except if there is evidence to back it up.
Evidence. If Zimmerman says something, and there is evidence that backs it up, then most people tend to accept it as factual.
So, if Zimmerman says Martin punched him in the face, and Zimmerman has a broken nose and two black eyes, and Martin has a mark on his fist like he punched somebody, most people would accept Zimmerman’s account of being punched in the face by Martin as accurate fact. If Zimmerman says Martin knocked him down and sat on top of him, and we have a witness who says she saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, then most people tend to believe Zimmerman’s account as accurate fact.
However, if someone asserts that Zimmerman attacked Martin first, and there is no evidence to back that up, then most reasonable people don’t accept as accurate fact that Zimmerman attacked Martin first. Because there isn’t any evidence to back that up.
Like I said earlier, leave out everything that isn’t backed up by evidence. If we do that, we know that Martin attacked Zimmerman, knocked him down, broke his nose, blackened his eyes, and sat on top of him bashing his head against the ground.
There is no evidence that Zimmerman attacked Martin. None. Therefore, we leave that assertion out, because there is no evidence in favor of it. So the part of Zimmerman’s testimony saying that Martin attacked him, knocking him down and bashing his head on the ground, has been established by evidence. Not proven, necessarily - maybe the prosecution has some evidence we haven’t seen. But based on the evidence to date, an important part of Zimmerman’s testimony is backed up by evidence.
There are lots of other parts that are not backed up by evidence. There is no evidence, for instance, that Martin said “You got me” when Zimmerman shot him. So we cannot take that as true. We also cannot take it as a lie, and then argue that everything else Zimmerman said is a lie too. Because there is no evidence that it is a lie.
Another thing we cannot do is make up some alternate scenario, compare what Zimmerman said to what would have happened if the alternate scenario is true, and then call him a liar because he doesn’t testify in accordance to what we want to have happened. Because all the evidence backs up the account of Zimmerman in relevant part.
Yes, there are all kinds of discrepancies and nitpicks you can find. That’s hardly uncommon in any testimony of an average person after a stressful situation. People make mistakes, they conflate things, they describe the same thing in differing terms. That happens all the time, to innocent people as well as to guilty ones.
Was Zimmerman looking for a house number, or a street sign, when he got out of his truck? Who knows - there isn’t any evidence either way. Maybe he meant to say “house number” when he said “street sign”, or vice versa. ISTM to be a fairly natural mistake.
What does not seem natural to me is to shout “Aha! He contradicted himself! Therefore what he was really thinking was ‘Oh look - a nigger! Think I’ll run over and shoot him!’”
IYSWIM.
Regards,
Shodan
Why? It’s well established that he’s not smart, but I don’t think he could be that impaired cognitively to not know that self-defense requires there to be a claim of danger. If he knew enough to speak in “code” about his finances while in jail, then he would certainly know that he couldn’t just shoot Martin and claim self-defense without also saying the boy was threatening him and/or beating him up in some way.
He supposedly has an AA in criminal justice. He also had training for his CCW permit. Self-defense is not that sophisticated of a subject that it would require a law degree to finagle.
GZ could not be injured unless TM initiated the altercation?
GZ’s shirt could not have gotten wet unless TM initiated the altercation?
A witness could not have seen TM on top of GZ unless TM initiated the altercation?
Imho, none of that follows necessarily one from the other.
I am not aware that there is any evidence as to who initiated the altercation outside of GZ’s say-so.
Unless we can prove that the above conditions can only be brought about by TM initiating the altercation.
Offhand I can think of more than one way that those three conditions could come about w/o TM initiating the altercation.
But I am open to being shown how GZ’s shirt being wet coukld only come to be if TM initiated the altercation.
So feel free.
AFAICT, these things could have occurred even if TM had not initiated the altercation. I don’t have any problem coming up w/ a scenario where GZ gets his beezer busted that doesn’t require TM to have initiated the altercation.
and what if someone rightly points out that we don’t have enough info to tell who initiated the altercation instead?
Even if we accept this, it still doesn’t mean that TM initiated the altercation.
[Still not saying that Zimmerman initiated the altercation.
Just pointing out that lack of evidence outside of GZ’s say-so that TNm initiated the altercation.
imho, it’s not a tricky distinction.
Doesn’t seem so. It seems just that GZ says so.
At best the evidence outside of GZ’s say-so is ambiguous as to who started the physical altercation.
We do have his recorded NEN call where he gives directions to his truck before getting out of his vehicle and after crossing the block.
Imho, that is evidence that he was planning on meeting the PD at his truck when he was giving that info. ymmv on that count, idk.
There’s no indication of the other nonsensical assertions in the NEN call.
Can’t really disprove what someone was thinking, but we note that there’s no evidence to support the assertion and evidence which supports a different conclusion.
HE takes the time to make the distinction between the two clear in his re-enactment. I think we can safely rule out that he was making that mistake.
sounds very far-fetched to me as well.
Thanks for sharing on that count.
Suppose that the story about TM reaching for the gun is true. There’re a number of things which mught have made GZ think he was invalidating his SD claim, when in fact, anything else he had done at that point wouldn’t’ve mattered to his SD claim.
Many posters on more than one MB made the same mistake.
I don’t see evidence which convinces me GZ couldn’t’ve made it too.
I thought he was pursuing his degree with limited success.
How is it a lie? You have yet to establish this. Is there any scenario where you see him denying he followed Martin? How is the additional statement that he looked for a street sign at the same time a lie when it’s clear he did not know the name of the street? Do you have a video of him NOT visually panning the street as he got out of his truck?
He didn’t cross the street to retrieve an address. He walked to the end of the sidewalk to get an address. This all occurred while he was on the phone. By that time he got to the end of the phone call he asked the dispatcher to have the police call him when they were in the area so he could tell them where he’s at. This coincides with his attempt to get a physical address. Cite your evidence he didn’t walk across the T.
No, the facts don’t say anything of the sort. The evidence shows that Zimmerman was still at the top of the T when Martin engaged him in conversation which was immediately followed by his assault of Zimmerman. That’s what the evidence shows. It coincides with his account of what happened.
The only thing to hand wave is your imagination which lacks any cites.
And the EMT report.
ah yes, the people who apply bandages and take vital signs en-route to real medical professionals. The defense will ask them what percentage of his head and face was covered in blood and then move on to real doctors for a medical opinion.
The sound of one hand waving.
You missed Shodan’s point entirely. unless you can prove he did not look for a street sign upon exiting his truck then it’s not a lie. The state has to prove it. And considering he did not know the name of the street he had every reason to look around for a street sign. It’s a pointless argument to make made worse because the only reason to make it is to randomly cast doubt on something else.