Isn’t it true though if there’s a hate crime possibility, that its against federal law and in fact the DOJ can intervene? I seem to remember something about this from the Rutgers spycam case. Is Zimmerman uttering “fucking coons” enough to bring this case from Florida to the Feds?
Still no ralph to quote Obama for us?
He didn’t actually call him “boy” did he? :eek:
Obama hates negroes!
What’s the point of a president emotionalizing things with references to his daughters and the son he doesn’t have?
Is that the way to calm things and convince everyone that justice will be done?
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I don’t agree that’s what he said.
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If he said it, and if that is the only evidence of a hate crime, I do not believe it would be a fact pattern legally sufficient to sustain a federal conviction.
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But: that, along with other evidence that a thorough investigation might uncover, could.
Now the news media is reporting that the police wanted to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter but the prosecutors’ office overruled them, saying there was not enough evidence.
I am loath to discuss each new revelation breathlessly as though gospel, but on this one I am curious: assuming it’s true (a big assumption, I grant) would it change your mind about anything you wrote above?
It doesn’t change the overall issue of the justice system dropping the ball, but it would mean the police had less responsibility or were not responsible for the failure. I’d say it would put more blame on the law and the prosecutors’ interpretation thereof.
And if you were to hear of other cases, cases where self-defense was alleged but the facts were as (or more) egregious than this case, would you perhaps be open to concede that the prosecutors’ interpretation was accurate and the problem rests almost wholly with the law itself?
In the other thread (and maybe here too, don’t recall) I mentioned the case of Greyston Garcia, who faced murder charges after he chased a man for more than a block before stabbing him for stealing car radios.
It’s true that this guy was not innocent – he was a car radio thief – but that doesn’t have anything that I can see to do with self-defense. Garcia ran after him, tackled him, and stabbed him, then claimed self-defense.
I don’t see where the law, as written, says you don’t arrest the shooter long enough to determine things like (a) whether he’s intoxicated, (b) whether he has any wounds, and if so, what their nature is (which could of course support or detract from a claim of self-defense, and support or contradict whatever story the shooter was telling about the risks he thought he faced), and (c) what his account of the altercation is (if he chooses not to exercise his right to remain silent), before he has the opportunity to consider what account might best serve him in court.
Then if the prosecutor says, “hey, I don’t think we’ve got a case against this guy,” you release him on his own recognizance, and await further developments. But the law doesn’t say to abstain from gathering evidence that might inform the validity of a self-defense argument because the shooter might have a strong self-defense argument under the law.
From Bricker’s quote:
But it seems to me that, before we even get to the issue of whether the Stand Your Ground law should be invoked, we have to determine who was the actual aggressor here.
After all, the law, as the article says, “eliminated a citizen’s duty to retreat in the face of danger.” But if Zimmerman was the aggressor, the one who made the first threatening move, then the Stand Your Ground law should actually apply to Martin in this case. If Zimmerman came at him in a threatening way, he had no duty to retreat, and was simply exercising his legal right by standing up to Zimmerman.
I don’t know whether this is actually what happened, but at the time of the incident, neither did the police. It just seems to me that, when there’s an unarmed person lying dead on the sidewalk, and another person standing over him with a smoking gun in his hand, the police who arrive on the scene should not automatically take at face value the latter person’s claims of self-defense.
But if the police don’t know what happened, how can they find probable cause to believe that Zimmerman’ use of force was unlawful?
Forget believing Zimmerman – what other evidence should they have believed? Not supposition or speculation – evidence.
To be quite honest, i believe that the presence of an armed man standing over a dead, unarmed man should, in our legal system, constitute, all by itself, sufficient probable cause for an arrest. I recognize that, under our current system it may not; but it should.
It should not be cause for a conviction. Nor should it even be sufficient to deny bail at the arraignment. But it should be enough for an arrest.
Police have been allowed by the courts to use their judgment, based on past experience in engaging with suspects, to claim that they recognized (for example) the shape of a crack pipe in a person’s pocket during a Terry search. Given the relatively subjective nature of some types of probable cause, it seems to me that arresting a guy with a smoking gun who has just killed an unarmed man can quite easily pass the same sniff test.
Put it this way: based on your own experience as a criminal lawyer, if the police had arrested Zimmerman at the time, do you think that the arrest would have been thrown out by a judge as lacking probable cause?
I would also ask one other thing;
If the circumstances had appeared identical when the cops arrived, but it had been Zimmerman lying dead on the sidewalk and Trayvon Martin with the gun in his hand, and if Martin had claimed self-defense, do you think the cops would have arrested him?
I realize that this question is less about the law, per se, than about race relations and politics. I also recognize that it’s a counterfactual question than can never really be answered with complete confidence. But it seems to me that it’s not an irrelevant question in a case like this. If you believe that they would have arrested Martin under identical crime-scene circumstances (and i do believe that), then why shouldn’t they have arrested Zimmerman?
OK, at what step do things differ? Does Martin have a gun with him the whole time? Did he take Zimmerman’s gun from him? What?
In just about any scenario where Martin had shot Zimmerman, they would have arrested him. And probably prosecuted him too, even if they thought their case was far from open-and-shut. That’s just part of the DA’s job when a black man kills a white man in a southern state: his constituents aren’t going to be happy if he’s seen just letting the black guy off the hook. Call me cynical, but I don’t think I’m off base.
I’ve been saying throughout this whole thing that what would ultimately cause the repeal of the Stand Your Ground law would be if you had a run of black men successfully using self-defense under SYG to avoid conviction for having shot white people. Though I expect a more likely scenario would be differing outcomes due to less systemic deference towards, and crappier representation on the part of, the black men.
Wounds, scrapes, cuts, and bruises - or their absence - revealed in a physical examination at the time. Which is why you have to do it at the time: now Zimmerman can make up any BS about how Martin pounded his head into the concrete, and there’s hardly any way to gainsay him.
You want to take his testimony as quickly as possible, too. And that of any other eye- and ear-witnesses, while their recollections are still fresh. Yeah, I know the problems with eyewitness testimony, but waiting three weeks won’t improve the quality.
I’d be willing to shift some more blame to the law since I already think the law is partly to blame, but no, I don’t think you can take all the blame and the questions off the police and the prosecution. The fact that nobody at the time noticed a potential racial slur on the 911 call does not speak well for the police, nor do the fact RTFirefly mentions (some of which I noted upthread). The fact that these prosecutors or others have made the same determination in the past doesn’t mean their hands were completely tied in the Martin case. It means someone else made the same mistake earlier.