The ‘few months to a year’ in jail is a lot shorter than the time that Martin will be dead, which is FOREVER.
You want to carry a gun around, and have the ‘right’ to exercise mind-numbingly poor judgement that results in you shooting someone dead? Sorry dude, you absolutely should end up in court.
I don’t think he’s guilty of 2nd degree murder, but reckless homicide / manslaughter or some other charge? Abso-fucking-lutely. Either way, I still expect him to walk because of how skewed the law is (and how mind-blowingly bad the prosecution was <bangs head on table>).
So congratulations; he won’t spend the next 20 years in jail. I’m not going to lose a wink of sleep over any jail time he serves or any legal bills he has. Small price to pay for the ‘right’ to play wannabe-cop.
Back to the actual trial: Why in the world didn’t the State bring up a) the two-minute gap between end of NEN call and start of fight? b) how impossible it would be for Martin to see the black gun, in a black holster, at night, when the gun was underneath Zimmerman? c) how impossible it is for Zimmerman to grab Martin’s arm with his right arm and draw his gun with the same arm? d) how impossible it was for Martin to have done the whole ‘disappear behind the houses, them come back and circle my car’ bit? e) how implausible it is that Zimmerman ends up struggling -south- down the path when he says he was walking backwards to the -west- as Martin approached him? f) how weird it is that Martin would approach Zimmerman from behind, but then issue a challenge instead of just jumping him if he planned on sucker-punching him? g) how zimmerman changed his statement from ‘one punch, I fell backwards immediately and Martin jumped on top of me’ to 'well, I didn’t fall down right away, I sort of stumbled -forwards- etc etc.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what the State was thinking. There’s no way they’d do this bad of job with the case on purpose, so I can only conclude that they are actually incompetent.