Primarily because poverty is correlated with racial and ethic minorities. And that’s the biggest hurdle when dealing with the law.
OK, you can reject it all you want. My point is, at this level of granularity, it comes down to the luck of the draw in the jury pool. If I say, my BEUOTW is that this was just a street brawl with no fear of serious bodily harm in play, I can convict, fully consistently with my oath to find the facts fairly and reasonably and to apply that BEUOTW to resolve the mixed questions.
Your huffiness in response to my POV, by the way, is exactly what the critics feel. Like you, they are pretty convinced that nobody really could see the case differently. So, if you have purported to be mystified by their lingering dissatisfaction, well, now you know where its coming from.
But, at this level of granularity, there is no grounds to challenge whether the BEUOTW are well-founded or not. No getting huffy over “Well, your understanding of the world is stupid.” The jurors get to cast the only votes that count, and the majority prevails.
It doesn’t actually. I would posit 90% of the population or greater would never think such a stupid thing as you.
Except you ignored the key part of my initial response to you. The vast majority of the huffiness you see in this thread and elsewhere centers around the fact that “Zimmerman got out of his car” or that “Zimmerman started it.” You’re not speaking for everyone here, but the people who have spoken on their own point to a different reason for disagreeing with the jury than you do. Even the prosecutor in this case used the phrase, “this is a case about why someone got out of their car.” (Or something to that effect.
Actually I’m convinced beyond almost any possibility of error, that if the jury had convicted him the judge would have either set aside the conviction or it would have been overturned on appeal.
FWIW President Obama I think explained to me very well why black people are upset about this, and I “get it.” But it had nothing to do with the issues Kimmy_Gibbler goes into. The President explained that for blacks it is hard to think about the justice system without thinking about car doors locking when they see you (a black man) walking near their car, or women clutching their purse when they step into the elevator with you. It’s hard to think about the justice system without thinking about the unfortunate history of racial injustice in this country.
I understand, while I don’t talk about it much in these threads, that if your race has a history of being mistreated by the criminal justice system you have a very reasonable bias in believing the criminal justice system is intrinsically not just. I think that means you’re both more willing to believe its outcomes are unjust even when there is little evidence to suggest that and you are more willing to believe in concepts like “the outcome we want should happen whether the law says it should or not, because we’ve been abused by the law many times even when it goes against the letter of the law. Why should we be so concerned about the legalities on this?”
I understand for people steeped in historical and sometimes present day injustice and mistreatment, it can be a bitter pill to be told, “hey, this was the result the law demanded.” Because I get that you can point to many cases where blacks should have been treated a certain way by the letter of the law, and they weren’t.
But despite all of that, despite my empathy for historically mistreated segments of society, I can’t let the faction that wants to assert facts that didn’t exist go unchallenged. There is no evidence Zimmerman started the fight. It appears that the vast majority of the complaints we see on these forums and on the TV and I know the vast majority in my personal life posit that Zimmerman started the confrontation and/or that there was something inherently “wrong” about him even exiting his car.
As to starting the confrontation, that’s an opinion, never supported by fact. I don’t think the prosecution presented a single piece of evidence as proof that Zimmerman started the confrontation. Instead they tried to play a distraction game with the jury, by saying that Zimmerman profiled Martin and “created the situation” and then they tried to muddy the waters enough that the jury would be willing to convict Zimmerman despite a paucity of evidence against him to counter his plausible self defense claim. This happened because the prosecution, politically motivated, was trying to win a case it never should have started. One that very likely would not have made it past a grand jury if they had deigned to avail themselves of such a body’s services.
As to the inherent wrongness of getting out of the car, I won’t say if that was right or wrong. Unwise I will say. Legally I don’t believe it was improper in any state. I also do not believe it would by itself suffice as evidence that Zimmerman had failed in his “duty to flee” even in duty to flee jurisdictions.
I think in such jurisdictions the earliest said duty could “attach” would be when Martin (in Zimmerman’s narrative) confronted Zimmerman. At that point, could you convince a jury that a reasonable person could have fled? I think it’d be hard, because the way Zimmerman’s story went, he answered one question from Martin and was then knocked down, pinned, and beaten.
The prosecution could argue that the duty to flee attached earlier, in some scenario we never heard about at trial where Zimmerman had reason to be fearful and chose not to flee. But the prosecution would need evidence to support such a story, and I didn’t see any such evidence available to them.
I think there are three types of people who are OK with the verdict: 1) racist shitbags who are secretly and not-so-secretly glad that a black kid was shot to death (the Lonesome Polecat and Brazil84’s of this message board), 2) people who are so genuinely stupid that they can’t see anything wrong with creeping after a minor in the dark while carrying a loaded gun because the minor committed the crime of walking slowly, and 3) the sort of autistic pedants who lack the basic common sense to realize that the people who are upset with the verdict are upset that the law justified the verdict.
The first type of person should be painted black and sent back in time to 1850’s America, the second type of person should be stalked every where they go by a creepy, hyper-vigilant, armed wannabe cop, and the third kind of person should be locked in a room with a collection of where’s waldo books and a big box of crayons so they can’t post stupid OPs on my message board.
You’re an idiot.
Cite?
I’m not talking about the acquittal. I’m talking about the law itself. If a homicide is found to be justifiable, there is no crime. If the law allows a situation where Martin is justified in using force against Zimmerman because he fears for his safety because Zimmerman is following him and Zimmerman is then justified in using force against Martin, then no one committed a crime,yet someone ended up dead. There’s something wrong with that law- either the law as written clearly allows that result or more likely the law is written so vaguely that it is open to multiple interpretations.
Anyway, it looks like it’s time for the SDMB versions of Al Sharpton to roll in and put their fingers in their ears and started shouting mindless insults (this is in response to Evil Economist). That suggests this thread has little value left to it; unless things take an unexpected lurch back to reasonable.
For the people upset over the Zimmerman verdict because they believe Zimmerman started the confrontation: there is no evidence Zimmerman started the confrontation. He had a plausible story in which he was attacked by Martin after an aggressive confrontation by Martin. It may or may not be true, but it was plausible enough that I think to secure conviction the prosecution would have been well served to have given evidence undermining that story to the jury.
From what I can see, they gave the jury virtually nothing to counter his story and basically tried to ignore it as best they could. The jury acquitted Zimmerman.
For the people upset over the fact that Zimmerman getting out of his car in the first place was legally okay, I’d question why it should be illegal in a free society to get out of your car to investigate someone as long as you do not confront them and do not intimidate them. I do not feel that just walking towards someone in a public place (in a private community, but community space) makes you someone who should go to prison because something bad happens after that. [I have explained elsewhere that there are parts of Zimmerman’s story I disbelieve by the way, and several things Zimmerman did that I disagree with. I also don’t believe Martin is a “thug” or a “bad guy.” I think both Zimmerman and Martin did several stupid things that lead to this, but neither here nor there in terms of the case.]
For the people that Kimmy_Gibbler suggests represent a substantial portion of those upset about the outcome of the case, those who believe all of Zimmerman’s story, but still think he should have been convicted: I agree with Kimmy. You have to accept that self defense claims are there for the jury to determine how they ultimately feel about it, and reasonable juries can disagree. (In general, in the case of this specific jury I do not feel a reasonable jury could have ruled otherwise, but Kimmy’s general point about some matters before a jury being one in which reasonable juries can validly rule differently is correct and may help you understand what happened in the case.)
They say you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, so…do you guys want to be my friends?
Yes, he is. Taking his option 3, we have the claim that people who are ok with the verdict lack the common sense to realize that people who are upset with the verdict are upset that the law justifies the verdict.
Huh?? The law justified the verdict, and thus I’m ok with the verdict. That doesn’t mean I am ok with the law. But we can’t try a guy under a law that didn’t exist when he committed the act we’re calling criminal…can we?
I’ll ignore your logical fallacy to remind you that it would have been legally reasonable for the jury to have accepted Rachel Jeantel’s testimony about hearing Martin say "Get off"and to then reasonably infer that Zimmerman started the fight.
Ad hominems aside, there is actually a divergence of views throughout our society regarding what constitutes reasonable fear of death/GBI. For example, it is demonstrably much more common for teenagers to engage in what we call schoolyard fights, so why wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider that there would be a difference in how both participants would view seriousness of the altercation?
This is part of the problem I have with holding a minor to the same standard of behavior as an adult. Regardless of his size, Martin was legally a child, and if they both could have avoided the altercation (as the juror admitted to), the greater burden of responsibility should have been on the adult to do so. Again, that’s not a conviction outcome, but it certainly explains/justifies the outrage over Zimmerman’s actions.
Well, I think the “real story” had someone who legally did something wrong and legally should have been convicted of some crime. I think that the realities of the evidence were such that it’d be very difficult to prove the survivor was the guilty one, because his would be the only story we heard and witness and physical evidence was too scarce to contradict it.
If Zimmerman’s story is true, then legally I do not believe Martin had any right to start hitting him, for example.
It may have been Martin, it may have been Zimmerman that were in the legal wrong. I don’t know, it’s like a black box where sadly the real truth is protected by the fact that one of the persons involved is dead. If Zimmerman’s story is true then while I have problems with some of his decision making skills, I don’t think he was morally or legally guilty of manslaughter. If Martin was the one who was confronted or provoked or even hit first, then tragically his murderer got away because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to disprove his murderer’s side of the story. But I’d much rather be resigned to that outcome than one in which people go to prison when the State has failed to prove their case.
“had returned to his car when Martin confronted him”?
I’m going to say that I think you haven’t read Zimmerman’s full account or watched his interview. I have enough faith in you that I think you’re just speaking from a misunderstanding. Please look it up and come back, because the way you just outlined Zimmerman’s statement is easily disproven by reading a transcript of them or watching them on video, and it’s best for you to do that on your own research so you aren’t concerned I’m giving you biased links.
CMC fnord!
Clearly you will be leading us back to civility.
Serious question; what is the minimum level of IQ necessary to spot the hypocrisy in this paragraph?
I think this is consistent with what I’ve said. I think the lingering doubt is this (expressed as the critics understand it): Most people would not think Zimmerman’s account, fully accepted as true, made out a case of reasonable fear of serious bodily harm, had Martin been white. It is Martin’s status as a young black male that, perhaps unconsciously, led the jury to conclude that the encounter, as Zimmerman described it, presented a threat of serious bodily harm.
So this is like your clicking locks and clutching purses. It is that the jury ratified the unspoken belief that an ordinary (if albeit disorderly) situation became more dangerous because of the involvement of a young black male in it.
The critics thus believe that most juries, standing as proxy for majority (i.e., white) America, would not have found a street fight, even one instigated by the victim, to justify deadly force if both participants were white. The jury only so concluded because one of the participants was a young black male, and that added an essential predatory element.
I know of no way to determine who’s right. It’s not as though we could re-run the events of that evening with a white victim and find out how the jury would find. I don’t think any of us doubt that there are people out there who would say “Of course it’s perfectly reasonable to be extra vigilant/extra suspicious when dealing with black people.” Some have made that statement on this very board.
If the jury, consciously or unconsciously, regarded the events as Zimmerman described as more threatening just because Martin was a young black male, that would be a miscarriage of justice. On this point, I think we can all agree. Those who are comfortable with the verdict trust the jury when they say (impliedly) that they did not assess the threat as greater in that way. Those who reject the verdict are all too familiar with clicking locks and clutched purses to believe the jury when they say they did not make an escalated threat assessment because of Martin’s age, sex, and race when hearing Zimmerman’s account.
Do you see that this directly implicates what I have called the “background everyday understanding of the world” that I spoke about above? If a juror’s BEUTOW included, consciously or unconsciously, the belief that “young black men are just more dangerous than other people,” then the fact-finding has been distorted.
Bricker, I actually respect your opinion (unlike magellen01, and Martin who I think are pretty scummy examples of humanity). I will also say that you’ve made some well-thought-out posts on this subject.
I’d like to believe that you know what I was saying, and your comment above is nitpicking, not lack of capacity.
Sorry, you’re correct to call me out on that. However, the error is typographical, not otherwise. I used the wrong tense of the word “return.” Instead of “returned” I should have typed “returning.” Zimmerman’s account is that after confirming he had lost Martin and his initial call ended, he was “returning to his car” when Martin confronted him. Note, I did not intend for anyone to think Zimmerman was actually back in or at his car when the confrontation started. I was just trying to repeat the claims Zimmerman made in his story, which was in fact that he was returning to his car when the confrontation with Martin began. [Actually the second confrontation, it’s not of huge relevance but you’d need to look more into the entire Zimmerman account for that info.]
Again, I don’t feel that most of the problem with the verdict has been by people who believe Zimmerman’s story. Instead it’s been a few different key points:
-
A belief that no matter what the details of the case, if Zimmerman were black and Martin white, Zimmerman would have been convicted.
-
That Zimmerman by exiting his car had committed a legal wrong that was ignored by the jury.
-
That Zimmerman started the fight and got away with finishing it with shooting.
I have less issue with people who simply think differently than me on what is justifiable self defense, but by and large the arguments I’ve seen haven’t focused on that. The racial stuff tends to focus more on “would Zimmerman have even called the police if it was a white kid?” “Would this have ever turned into a fist fight if it had been a white kid?”
I don’t know of very many people other than you arguing that if Zimmerman was getting his face punched in (as per his story) he would have been less likely to shoot if Martin had been white, or that if he had shot, the jury would have been more likely to convict.
Sob. Well, when someone you respect agrees with those you hold in such low esteem, and that same person considers you to be an idiot, you may want to reconsider your position. But you won’t. Wanna know how I know you won’t. As the three people you named agree: you’re an idiot.