Really? That’s quite shocking, then. If he knew that he succeeded in shooting him, due to Martin’s lack of resistance, why in the world would he then climb on Martin’s wounded body? See the problem there? Although I seem to recall, perhaps incorrectly, that you were of the opinion that there was nothing untoward about Zimmerman not seeking medical assistance for Martin, based on the idea that Martin supposedly was trying to kill him a moment earlier. So you probably find no fault in his climbing onto Martins wounded body, in so doing almost certainly worsening his pain if he was still alive, and hastening his death.
But that’s just a reasonble inference arising from your earlier POV, of course… I’ll let you speak for yourself.
And let me speak for myself, as well as I’m sure many other people, when I say that I am horrified that Zimmerman would do that, and I believe it Zimmerman realized that people would be horrified, and that it would not look good for him, and that’s why he made up the whole story about not thinking he’d hit him to begin with.
I would hazard to guess that relatively few people have muchexperience with how people behave in the moments between when they are shot and when they lose consciousness and die. I have certainly never heard any evidence that George Zimmerman had such prior experience and knowledge prior to the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Sadly, in an unrelated case in Milwaukee, another man shot an unarmed teen. The incident was captured on CCTV. Reports and witness testimony show that the victim ran from the scene after he was shot and yet the shooting proved fatal.
So what exactly should Zimmerman have seen that would have unequivocally led him to believe that the shot had hit? Medical experts from both sides indicate that Martin could have lived a few minutes and may have been conscious for several seconds to a minute or so.
Real life fatal shootings apparently are not always as instantly fatal as in TV or movies.
To restrain him, to ensure he is no longer a threat. Do you remember the law we’ve looked at many times in these threads, that details at what point someone no longer remains a threat? They need to retreat, and clearly communicate that they are ending violence. Martin did not do that. Why do you assume that Zimmerman would have known, even if he had realised he’d shot Martin, that he was no longer a threat?
And Stoid continues to ignore my replies to her posts…
Bottom line, people don’t always act logically in a crisis. The fact that you think they should shows that you haven’t researched anything to do with how people react in high stress situations.
Another author who writes movingly of emotion, and doesn’t once mention the specific elements of the crime with which Zimmerman was charged and how the evidence met those specific elements.
“How dare those women decide this case on emotion, unless it was the emotion we wanted them to feel!”
Do people believe that a jury gets to just hear evidence and then decide how they feel? The jury had a set of instructions and those instructions accurately defined the law involved. They applied the evidence they heard to those rules and found that the evidence did not address those elements beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then the defense shouldn’t have called an emotional witness to tell a story that had absolutely nothing to do with the facts of the evening in question… I guess the burglary story could speak to GZ’s motivation.
The author didn’t suggest the jurors did anything wrong. The article only points out how the defense may have used age-old tactics to solidify Trayvon as the boogeyman in the minds of the jurors.
You misunderstand. This piece certainly is pro-Trayvon but it is not a miscarriage-of-justice tract. The author is, with justice and I should hope with your complete agreement, condemning certain specific emotional reactions/attitudes all too common in our society and using the case as an exemplar. (It is in that regard similar to comments I read post OJ Simpson’s acquittal, to the effect that the prosecutors miscalculated when they assumed the black women on the jury would sympathize with Nicole as a sister, when in their eyes she actually exemplified the threatening white “other woman” stealing the black men away.)
As I just mentioned, he didn’t say anything at all about that the night before. He didn’t say anything about that until he had a chance to think about how it really looked and sounded: bad. Very bad.
No, I was rejecting your explanation for the behavior a person could expect from someone surrendering at the sight of a gun. Zimmerman never made any kind of claim that Martin was surrendering to him when he fell to the side, because he can’t even remember whether he pushed or Martin fell on his own.
So, are you saying that you think it’s reasonable to believe that Martin was alert and appeared normal when he had a bullet in his heart and a hole in one of his collapsed lungs? That there would be nothing unusual in his demeanor to give that little fact away? Did I ever say slowly? I don’t believe I did.
Well, no, I’m not shocked, because I don’t believe he did not notice. While I’m sure that, as someone said, he had one of those “oh my God I can’t believe I shot somebody” moments right after he did it, I do not believe that that actually manifested as Him having a genuine failure to understand and believe that he had shot Martin. I do not find that remotely believable. And I especially do not find it believable as a result of the incident being so overwhelming/scary/confusing/chaotic/, since both witnesses and medical tests showed that he was extremely calm and focused. If witnesses had reported him being frantic, babbling, confused, chaotic, generally “freaked out”, sure, I would believe lots of things due to that. But that’s not how he was. He was calm, cool, collected, and clear, as witnesses reported, as seen on tape, as vital signs confirmed.
In other words, in case you missed it, the actual evidence that we have on record in the form of witness statements, video, audio, and medical tests, all serve as proof that was not confused, freaked out, stressed, etc. Quite the contrary. And interestingly, I don’t recall him ever making any claims of that nature, apart from some vague “a lot was going on I don’t remember exactly” type of remarks.
Some people here are accusing me of arriving at conclusions without evidence… which is pretty funny… Seeing as how the actual evidence that we have for Zimmerman’s state of mind, which is considerable, obliterates the pure, unsupported speculation being tossed out that he was too wrecked after his Very Big Adventure to be expected to accurately recall or perceive things.
Theres a few of you that do that a lot and really don’t seem to be aware of it: you conjure explanations, excuses, reasons, possibilities, all out of thin air, to justify and explain the gaps, inconsitencies and implausibles in Zimmerman’s account, then you act as though you’ve proved something by creating an answer that came entirely from your busy little brains, followed by taking umbrage when I decline to sign on for your imaginative creations.
Fact? Inference? Or Creative Writing 101? I like facts and reasonable inferences, thanks anyway.
Really hard to see how you arrived there, except that you just want to. He said it over and over and over again, more consistently than anything else, and since that is a factual statement, there is nothing remotely disingenuous about my saying so.
Did the prosecution object to the witness on grounds of relevance?
The defense is not a neutral party. The defense is a zealous advocate for their client.
But if they did, as a judge, I would have overruled the objection. The testimony was relevant to show why Zimmerman felt that he should get involved with stopping people he didn’t recognize.
Yes, they probably did that.
What of it?
The defense is not an impartial seeker of truth. The defense lawyers could come upon a recording of Zimmerman explaining how he’d been waiting for a week to get Martin alone to kill him, and they would have been obligated to keep quiet about it.
The prosecution, on the other hand, is not. They have a dual role: they represent the people of the state of Florida, and their interest in prosecuting crime, AND they represent the abstract interest of justice. If they came across a recording of their key witness doing something discrediting, they are obligated to reveal it.
You have no reason to believe this is the case.
Or do you suddenly find a part of Zimmerman’s tale believable, because it fits with what you have learned about the reaction of shooting victims in popular media?
It sounds completely impossible doesn’t it?
Sadly, heartbreakingly, it isn’t entirely impossible.
The horrors of combat are not just the catastrophic injuries, but the mind altering realization that often human beings don’t just peacefully or quickly slip into deaths grasp despite them.
A few years ago I saw a video of a cop (VA State Police, IIRC) and a perp standing 5 to 7 feet from each other, both blazing away. 19 shots, total, were fired by the two of them. Not one hit was scored by either man. The perp surrendered when he ran out of ammo. In high stress shooting situations, even highly trained cops miss frequently from remarkably close ranges. If M doesn’t react the way Z assumes a shot person would, it’s not at all surprising he would, at least for a few seconds, assume a miss.
Stress hormones divert blood glucose to exercising muscles, therefore the amount of glucose – hence energy – that reaches the brain’s hippocampus is diminished. This creates an energy crisis in the hippocampus which compromises its ability to create new memories. That may be why some people can’t remember a very traumatic event,
There’s a plethora of data available that backs up this phenomenon. Very simply, a persons recollection of a traumatic event is extremely unreliable.
**Illogical Action in an Emergency
**
*"Then, having finally taken cover, he turned and pointed back down the hallway toward the shooter. It was a chilling sensation to see **his bare hand in front of him, pointing in the shape of a pistol like a boy on the playground. **Where was his gun? “I looked at my hand. It wasn’t there. I looked in my holster. It wasn’t there.”
*
A trained law enforcement professional pointed his finger like it was a gun because he wasn’t thinking clearly. And you think it’s unbelievable that a civilian could temporarily believe, for a matter of seconds, that he might have missed with his shot?
