Responding to a punch in the nose with a gunfire is excessive force. That makes citizen arrest equivalent to battery and false imprisonment.
Whether or not any given citizen’s arrest is legal is left up to a judge or jury to determine. It’s not black and white. Martin would need to charged with a felony, first and foremost: if law enforcement decided not to charge the kid with “felony battery” for punching his night-time pursurer, then once again, Zimmerman would be criminally liable for taking it upon himself to detain the kid. And this is even if we ignore him retailiating with his gun.
I have a philosophical issue with people like Bricker. He’s contaminating this place with misinformation, and then people like you come along and parrot it back like it’s truth.
Not true. A citizen’s arrest is valid in Florida when a felony has been committed, and where the arresting citizen has probable cause to believe, and does believe, the person arrested to be guilty. Period. There is no requirement that the person arrested be subsequently charged with a crime. That’s not true. You said it, but it’s not true. You made it up. You fabricated it. You acted as though you knew it, but you didn’t.
I did not make it up. I accurately and complete conveyed the law in the state of Florida.
You did not provide a cite for your claim that Martin would need to be charged with a felony. You just said it, with no citation to authority.
Look, here it is again:
No cite! Just a blanket statement. Fantastic tactic, for someone who claims to be interested in correct information.
I, of course, can cite my claim:
This case is quoted with approval by the Florida Supreme Court in Phoenix v. State, 455 So. 2d 1024 (1985).
THAT IS THE LAW IN FLORIDA.
If you think it’s not the law in Florida, it’s because you have decided that a lifetime dedication to watching “Law and Order” and “Matlock” is the same as a law school education and years of practice in the criminal courts.
Now, there is a separate question: is responding to a punch with gunfire “excessive force” or not?
This is a question of fact for the jury. I don’t know how hard the punch was, and whether Zimmerman believed he was in danger of great bodily harm.
IF Zimmerman did believe himself in great bodily harm, it’s also a question of fact for the jury to decide if that fear was reasonable.
IF the jury decides it was, then that force was not excessive.
The Florida courts considered the question of “great bodily harm” in a case styled Owens v. State, 289 So. 2d 482 (FL DCA 1974). In this case, they quoted with approval the language from an Illinois case (People v. Smith) in which the accused “struck the complainant twice in the face with his fist.” The accused in that case was convicted of inflicting great bodily harm, and the appeals court upheld that conviction:
All that is to support the statement that a punch in the face, especially one that breaks the nose, is LEGALLY SUFFICIENT as great bodily harm. And that means it is LEGALLY SUFFICIENT to allow the use of deadly force. See FSA § 776.012 on use of deadly force to prevent great bodily injury.
None of these mean that a jury must agree. The jury in this case may not decide that the punch was serious. I have no idea whether it was.
But as a matter of law, it’s sufficient.
Each and every statement made above is a correct statement of Florida law, and citations are provided.
The statements made by you with the face, in contrast, are not.
Look up Man Survives Bullet Wound To Heart on your search engine. The right ventricle supplies blood to the lungs, the left ventricle to the rest of the body. There have been verified cases of people who have been shot in the right ventricle of the heart and survived. You’re pretty much immediately dead if you hit the left ventricle. In Trayvon Martin’s case, I suppose, the damage to the right ventricle was too extensive, though I haven’t seen the x-rays. (hard to imagine but some people have actually carried bullets in their right ventrcle for years and survived.)
I am willing to ask her if she’s willing to enter into another discussion with you, but if you intend to simply dismiss her as you did before, what’s the point?
Is there another lawyer on these boards whose word would convince you?
I neglected to mention that Trayvon Martin had cyanotic nail beds, which would tend to verify he didn’t die immediately. The heart kept pumping blood, but it was leaking out, and eventually the nails turn blue due to lack of oxygen, which wouldn’t happen if he had died immediately. It’s not beyond the realm of possibilty that if it hadn’t been a hollow point bullet Trayvon Martin might even have survived.
You think Bricker is the major source of misinformation here. :rolleyes:
And just what kind of a person am I since you seem to have me all figured out?
I am beginning to imagine you are someone who is regularly engaged in public policy making. Someone dealing often in generalities and the premise that all things can be defined succinctly in a policy statement.
The law does not work anything like public health policy. I’ll continue to go with the lawyers (yes plural) being right in regard to the law here. When the topic is public health policy or veterinary medicine I’ll put my money on you.
Again, still not sure why the vitriol for Bricker. I don’t think he has come out in support of Zimmerman. Maybe I missed it, but I got the distinct impression that he too thinks wrong was done, but is honestly admitting that the facts in the public record probably aren’t sufficient to get a conviction.
What I’d like to know from Bricker, in his opinion how much of the facts do we likely know at this point? All? Some percentage less than all? 10% less, 20% less, more?
Who decides that a felony was committed? That is a thing that is determined by court. If a cop disagrees that there was probable cause for a felony or a qualifying misdeamor, then that makes the citizen arrest unlawful.
A single punch to the face is generally considered a misdemeanor not a felony, so it’s stupid to state matter-of-factly that this constitutes felony battery anyway.
But somehow a citizen can determine that a single punch constitutes a felony. You’re really slaying us here, yup you are.
Which means we can’t say it’s use would be legal. By extension, we also can’t say a citizen’s arrest under that condition would be legal either.
The weasling works in both direction.
This is a meaningless statement. For review, here is what you posted:
You have declared something to be legal, when in reality all of this hinges on what a jury or judge determines. You are wrong and not only that, irresponsibly wrong.
But having PROBABLE CAUSE to believe a felony was committed – that is a matter of law. What facts existed to support the determination are a matter for a court to determine, yes…which is why I carefully said, “IF the conflict began with Martin punching Zimmerman…”
A single punch to the face that breaks a nose is not automatically a felony. But it is automatically probable cause to arrest for a felony. You don’t understand the difference because that was never covered on “Law and Order.”
PROBABLE CAUSE. All that is necessary to support an arrest is PROBABLE CAUSE.
Not correct. In Florida, you can use deadly force in response to a threat of great bodily harm. Cite: FSA § 776.012
And as I previously cited in Owens v State, a broken nose alone is sufficient injury to qualify as great bodily harm.
Wrong. Because all a citizen’s arrest needs to be legal is PROBABLE CAUSE. Even if the ultimate resolution is that the citizen was wrong, as long as probable cause Estes, the arrest is legal.
You have declared something to be legal, when in reality all of this hinges on what a jury or judge determines. You are wrong and not only that, irresponsibly wrong.
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No, that is a precisely accurate statement. IF the conflict began with Martin punching Zimmerman, then at that instant Zimmerman had probable cause to effect a citizen’s arrest of Martin. The job of the judge or jury would be to determine if that’s how the conflict began, sure. But I said, “IF the conflict began …” that way. If. Assuming. Postulating. Supposing. Accepting for the purposes of argument.
Isn’t there an episode of Franklin and Bash you should be studying?
My biggest fear is that people are actually reading you with the face and thinking, “Hey, she has a point.”
Thank goodness you posted this.
Right you are. I assume, based on the charge by an experienced prosecutor, that there exists something beyond what we know.
What we know now does not defeat the self-defense claim.
We’ll never know all. Only Zimmerman knows what happened, and he has demonstrated his deep regard for truth already.
What we need to know is what happened in the period between Zimmerman leaving his truck and the police arriving on the scene. We can make good guesses. That’s all.
That still doesn’t mean it’s a fact that a crime has been committed. That has to be established by judge or jury. If the arresting LEOs determine that the punch was justified given the circumstances, we can’t say a crime has been committed.
And you don’t understand what the word “and” means when it comes in parsing the law. It’s not enough that a private citizen has probable cause. They have to have probable cause AND a crime has to have been committed.
Let’s go over this again:
But with with respect to specific usage of deadly force, a jury or judge has to decide whether that force was legal. Owens vs State doesn’t automatically make it legal to respond to punch with gunfire.
I did. And I will make the same observation here: you are quoting California law for some reason – maybe because lots of legal TV shows are set in California?
You are correct that it is not automatically legal to respond to a punch with gunfire. Never said otherwise.
I’d say the time from when Zimmerman hung up on the NEN operator until W#11 called 911. I don’t see any evidence that a felony was committed before then. Knowing what happened before that would be nice, but a jury doesn’t need to know it. Before then, both Zimmerman and Martin had a legal right to be where they were.
What an embarrassment of a thread on a board supposedly dedicated to fighting ignorance. It makes a mockery of that motto.
Bricker, og bless you for doing this, but I hope you harbor no hope of ywtf actually ever saying “oh, I see the error of my ways, thank you for all the time you’ve spent fighting my ignorance.”