Insufficient as a matter of law. The ill will, hatred, spite, or an evil intent cannot typically be found from such generalized circumstances. It generally refers to a emotion arising from some personal acquaintance or knowledge:
(emphasis added)
The mere use of “punks” or “assholes” is simply not enough, as a matter of law, to reach the requisite finding of malice.
I agree the jury has a legally sufficient case for manslaughter, which you’ve laid out.
Ran out of edit time:
Item #6 is not supported by the rationale you give. You have to give Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt; you can’t say that you just decide it was Zimmerman pursuing Martin just because there was testimony that someone was pursuing someone. Your evidence has to exclude all reasonable scenarios except that of guilt.
But you don’t need #6 to make your case.
And let me say this, to the assembled audience. Stoid takes a lot of shit here.
She earns some of it, to be sure. But pretty much alone amongst the Martin defenders, she has tried to examine the law, the elements of the crimes charged, and the evidence supporting those charges. Stoid’s issue is that she is a skeptic, in the sense that until she knows it, it ain’t so, and it takes a huge effort to dislodge her from her convictions. But isn’t that a prize trait, in a way? She’s saying, in effect, PROVE IT TO ME.
It would be gratifying to me if she simply said, Bricker I know you’re a law-talking guy, and so I’ll take your word for it.
But that’s not a reasonable request.
Yes, she locks in on ideas and it takes a mighty wind to budge her – but really, shouldn’t these propositions HAVE mighty winds in their support?
Anyway, it’s not like Stoid and I are going to be sailing off into the sunset or anything. But credit where credit is due. She’s got her view of the world, and it’s not a view that can be lightly tossed aside. Nor is she tossing alternative views lightly aside. Who else, on the hard-core Martin side, is doing that?
The problem with Stoid is not her opinions*, it’s that she thinks she has access to some alternative facts that are both different and equally valid to those the rest of us perceive. She is decidedly not a sceptic, she is (on this case at least) the direct opposite. She has chosen a position not supported by law or evidence, and is defending it incessantly. A sceptic would not choose a position until they’d examined the facts, and would hold that position in constant doubt. She has, rather, a religious belief that Zimmerman murdered Martin, arrived at through no rational means, that survives any attempt to show it’s incompatible with law, fact, or reason.
Many things have been proven to her, again and again, and that proof rolls off her conviction like the nourishing rain of truth off the windshield of fundamentalism.**
*This opening statement to be considered rhetorical, rather than a statement of my opinion. In my opinion, her opinions are generally idiotic.
**Ok, enough rhetoric.
Stoid is atypical. Nothing wrong with that. In many ways it is what makes her who she ism and why she is fairly we’ll known on these boards. She is certainly stubborn and will worry a lose thread till it shakes free or the whole thing unravels, sometimes to her detriment.
Setting aside Bricker’s legal analysis of her reasoning, I’m following most of her thoughts and certainly see where it is sufficient for her conclusion. However due to that uniqueness, I have serious doubts that 6 or 11 like minded souls would ever be found in a jury pool.
So Stoid, I don’t think you are entirely wrong, I just don’t think your line of reasoning stands a snowballs chance in hell under current Florida law.
I saw the words “liberal” and “hate crime” so I had to take this opportunity, as I generally do, to self-identify as a liberal and declare unequivocally that I find the whole notion of “hate crime” repugnant, because it is essentially policing thought. And I find that far more terrifying and destructive to a free society than racists or homophobes.
And I have many liberal friends who agree with me completely.
For the record.
He fired one shot. It wasn’t like he was trying to get rid of the witnesses.
I don’t know what happened and neither do you and that uncertainty tends to work in favor of the defendant. What do you think we should do? Convict anyone who looks like they may be guilty?
I clerked for a judge during my first summer and I sometimes sat in on a jury selection for a crimnal trial and a common voire dire question was “there is the defendant (scruffy looking guy in a borrowed suit), here are the charges (assaulting a police officer), if you had to come to a verdict right now, what would your verdict be?”
You would be amazed at how many jurors would say guilty before hearing any evidence
They might have been fighting over the gun.
I was against SYG before (except in your home, ie castle doctrine) and i am pretty much where I started. I am also not so sure that the prosecution should bear the burden of proof in self defense. I am still trying to figure out why they changed that from the historical norms.
He can be beating GZ and still be innocent if he was acting in self defense, or he was provoked. Why is GZ’s account of events so believable to you and any alternative that might make TM something less than a crazed lunatic who randomly attacks strangers so hard for sdme people to believe?
From what I can tell, TM is not the one that went out looking for trouble. Trouble found him, lets not forget that. Some people seem intent on seeing this as a case of a young black thug who randomly attacked some innocent bystander and got shot.
I am severely time crunched, but I didn’t want to let too much time pass without acknowledging this:
[QUOTE=Bricker]
I agree the jury has a legally sufficient case for manslaughter, which you’ve laid out.
[/QUOTE]
Now is when we do our SNOOPY DANCE! Damn I wish we had a little animated smilie snoopy dancing…
Woo Hoo… oh yeah, uh huh, oh yeah, uh huh… oh yeah…
Take THAT, oh ye who continually declared that there was not sufficient evidence to find Zimmerman guilty! HA!
And I will have more, and more snoopy dancing directed at the Counselor and his kind words, but I have a person boring holes into me as I type… more later.
That’s just a trivial statement. Of course the jury had a legally sufficient case for manslaughter. No one ever denied that. In order to have such a case, all you have to do is to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that:
Trayvon Martin is dead - I believe that was never in dispute.
George Zimmerman intentionally committed an act that caused the death of Trayvon Martin. - That was never in dispute either. I don’t think either George Zimmerman or the defense ever denied that. Yes, George Zimmerman pointed the gun at Martin, knowing that it was loaded, and intentionally pulled the trigger.
So all your jumping around, Stoid, is a bit bizarre. Yes, unless the jury found that the shooting was justified (due to self-defense), they had to find that it was manslaughter. And they found that it was justified.
Human nature is such that we look for facts that support our beliefs. Ive seen a lot of that in this case. I believe there were critical errors in judgment that were made by both parties, for whatever reasons, that culminated in a confrontation, and a result of death. I do not believe GZ intended the result to be the death of TM.
Frankly, Ive enjoyed how people have made statements, as if they were fact, about the intent of TM and GZ when the best any of us can do is guess. Just remember, your guess, even if you consider it an educated one, is still just a guess
I rather suspect you don’t know what “legally sufficient case” means… It certainly shouldn’t lead to an assumption of guilt in defiance of the evidence, and celebration that you think you’ve found a loophole to convict someone.
And now for her next trick, the Stupendous Stoid will show how, after acknowledging a reasonable jury could have convicted on manslaughter, a reasonable jury also could not have found otherwise!
And for her encore, how the Seventh Amendment’s bar on the revision of jury-found facts doesn’t moot the issue!
Why do you find Jeantel’s account of events so un-believable? GZ said he lost sight of TM. TM told Jeantel that he had lost GZ. Jeantel’s testimony placed TM by his daddy fiance house. GZ was in the area of the “T”. GZ and TM were some 300 feet apart.
What part of this do you disagree with?
You still seem confused about what happened at the trial. I assume that’s because you had already made up your mind that GZ was guilty before the trial ever started. Neither FLA law or any evidence or lack of evidence could possibly change your mind. There was no evidence introduced in court to convince a jury that GZ was guilty of 2nd degree murder. There was evidence that GZ might/maybe be guilty of manslaughter, EXCEPT for the self-defense aspect, of course.
If there had been no evidence and no jury instruction concerning self-defense, the jury might have found GZ guilty. Since the prosecution introduced GZ’s self-defense claim(s), the court was forced to instruct the jury on justifiable homicide. According to FLA law, GZ was always innocent until proven guilty. After considering the evidence presented in court and considering the laws of Florida, a jury found GZ not guilty.
So what? Lets say that TM had a change of heart and decided to confront this guy that was following him. He had AT LEAST as much of a right to confront some strange guy following him around in a pick-up as GZ had to follow a teenage black boy with skittles in his pocket. TM had no obligation to go running into his daddy’s house. Maybe TM was the one who just wanted to talk and GZ plled a gun on him.
I don’t see how anything you said negates the possibility that GZ subsequently encountered TM and ordered TM (at gunpoint) to pull down his pants and bend over so he (GZ) could fuck him up the ass.
You don’t know what happened, nobody does. The only person who does has lied about these events before. You seem to be equating not guilty due to lack of evidence with not only “innocent” for GZ but criminality on the part of TM.
Quite true. What Martin did not have a right to do was to punch Zimmerman in the face, break his nose, blacken his eyes, knock him down, and jump on top of him and slam his head into the pavement. And we have evidence, other than Zimmerman’s word, that Martin did all these things.
This scenario is contradicted by Dee Dee’s description of what she heard them saying on the cell phone. So again, we have evidence other than Zimmerman’s word that this is not what happened.
One would think that Dee Dee would mention it if Zimmerman had said anything of the sort. One would also expect that, if Zimmerman had his gun in hand, he would have shot Martin a good deal sooner. But he didn’t. So attempted rape by Zimmerman isn’t very possible, based on the evidence other than Zimmerman’s word.
Sure, you can make up whatever you like and claim victory when there isn’t evidence to disprove it. And no one expects Team Trayvon to stop doing this just because the evidence indicates that anal rape by Zimmerman is fairly unlikely.
If this is your excuse for manufacturing fantasy, go ahead. Fortunately the jury was a little better grounded.
Regards,
Shodan
That reminds me of another merry band:
But on you, it looks good.[/Rodney Dangerfield]
Funny how you assume the reader will immediately take a comparison to Occupy as being proof of something derogatory.
So what?
Maybe, maybe, maybe, blah, blah, blah. Your sexual fantasies seem to be working overtime. You forgot to mention that GZ stole the Lindbergh baby and had grass stains from the grassy knoll. :smack:
GZ was by the “T” and TM was some 300 feet away by his daddy fiance house. Maybe you imagine TM getting back to the “T” area with his pants around his ankles butt your dreams weren’t introduced in court.