I had hoped that my gentle spankings would have begun to cure people of this broad “no evidence” thing. Now I see why the manual recommends a cattle prod.
Jeantel testified that she heard “a little bit” of Trayvon saying, “Get off, get off.”
A finder of fact can believe that. And a finder of fact may make the following permissible inference: since Martin was saying, “Get off,” Zimmerman was “on” him in a way that constituted unwanted touching. Unwanted touching is a battery. And that would make Zimmerman the aggressor.
That’s what we call “evidence.”
Now, according to one juror’s interview, the jury did not find Jeantel credible. But that doesn’t destroy the fact the her testimony was evidence. It just means that for those particular finders of fact, it wasn’t credible evidence.
Team Trayvon’s latest argument seems to be as follows:
Zimmerman admittedly pursued Martin.
This pursuit terrified Martin and provoked him into attacking Zimmerman.
Since Zimmerman provoked the attack, he waived any right to use lethal force in self defense.
My response to this argument is as follows:
This doesn’t seem to be the law in Florida.
Even if it were, common sense says that not any conduct which results in an attack qualifies as a “provocation.” For example, let’s suppose I am in a movie theater and a thuggish-looking young man is making noise and I shush him and he attacks me. While it was poor judgment of me to shush him, common sense says I have not waived my right to use lethal force to defend myself if it would otherwise be justifiable.
Fundamentally, I don’t see any difference between this and following a strange person who is wandering in your neighborhood.
I haven’t seen any case law interpreting this statute, but I have a feeling what the legislature was driving at is provocative conduct which is aimed at producing a violent reaction. For example, if you follow someone around, taunting them with ethnic slurs, hoping that they will attack you so you can shoot and kill them, it makes sense that you should be convicted of some kind of homicide crime.
In that case, you would only be justified in shooting them if you’d exhausted every reasonable means of escape and were in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm; or if you’d withdrawn from physical contact with your assailant and indicated clearly that you wished to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continued anyway.
Which is only good sense. Taunting with ethnic slurs, pushing people, hitting them with a snowball, etc, are all bad things to do, but they shouldn’t be punished by death, and such a person shouldn’t be forced to either lay there and hope their beating didn’t cripple or kill them, or defend themselves and go to prison.
I have no idea what your point is here, but anyway, Martin’s big mistake – which a lot of young men make – was responding violently to a situation which threatened his male ego. More simply, what Shodan said.
Nope, but if you then say he reached for my gun, or he reached for his own gun, or he grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go. And he said “You’re gonna die tonight, mother fucker”. You were just minding your own business. Who is going to refute your statement? The dead guy?
This bizarre double-think has cropped up a bit in discussions of this case. Normally peaceful leftists, who norally decry violence and vigilantism, suddenly advocate for escalating a mere argument or confrontation into a fight with a stranger as the sensible and morally right thing to do.
Responding violently to anything less than an imminent threat of harm is stupid, wrong, and illegal.