No, it was (mostly) ignored because the police say they have her sworn testimony contradicting her later change of mind. And she couldn’t possibly have said truthfully that it was Martin that was screaming - she was an “earwitness”, not an eyewitness, and she has never heard Martin’s (or Zimmerman’s, for that matter, I bet) voice before in her life.
See, that’s why I think this is messed up. Witness accounts, while imperfect, should mean something. If we had to wait for high-tech forensics analysis to justify charging someone with a crime, then no one would ever be arrested.
I will continue to be confused for awhile, I guess.
It is not just about about witness statements. Apparently the Stand Your Ground law imposes an unusually heavy burden of evidence on the police before they are able to make an arrest. I am not enough of a legal expert to say whether they are interpreting this correctly, but they did at least consult with a prosecuting attorney before concluding they didn’t have evidence enough to correct.
And the text of the law itself is not enough to provide an accurate legal analysis, as there are also decisions reached by earlier courts in interpreting the law which must also be considered.
I don’t have answers to your second point at all. But the witness who says a detective corrected her, I believe is the same one that police have an official statement from in which she basically insisted (and even seemed disinterested in the issue) that she knew nothing that could help their case.
It’s possible she didn’t really know what was going on, and just wanted to stay out of it. After the resulting media hoopla, after a fuller understanding of what was going on, she may have felt ashamed she didn’t want to give her original testimony because she couldn’t be bothered.
We don’t really know what actually happened. But the police are saying they have a signed statement from her, and if that is the case anything she has said subsequently to the media will be an irrelevancy in court–even I as a non-lawyer could trash her value as a witness just by asking her whether or not she was lying when she signed the first witness statement or lying now. It wouldn’t take Perry Mason to destroy her credibility as a prosecution witness, because of that I even doubt Angela Corey will/would use her as a witness in her case.
With this witness there are really only two distinct possibilities (with some various variations on the two):
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She signed a statement that did not reflect what she actually heard. In which case she lied.
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She signed a statement that did reflect what she actually heard; but because of later developments in the case she has decided she “heard” something else. In which case she is lying now.
In the first instance we can talk about how maybe the police “corrected” her, or whatever, but that’s unfortunately not going to be likely to go into the court uncontested and the simple fact remains if she signed a statement that is vastly different than what she testifies to in court she will lack credibility. The reasons don’t matter. Maybe the police did not want her to give the real information, or maybe she just did not wish to be personally involved and didn’t realize the full parameters of the situation. Either way…I don’t see how she can be a powerful piece of legal evidence at this point.
Boyo Jim does make a good point though. Unless she personally knew and had had conversations with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, I don’t know why she is so sure she at the scene that she was able to know right after the fact who it was that was screaming. I don’t know why an officer would necessarily correct her, and as I was thinking about that point the whole exchange she says happened between her and police just doesn’t make sense to me.
In her original statement to police that happened right after the incident, how would she even know who was involved? Wasn’t she just an ear witness? She didn’t know the names, race, even clothing of either person did she? Unless I’m confused on the details of what she witnessed. If during the actual event she was only an ear witness, I don’t know how she could credibly be telling the police which of the two parties she overheard was screaming, the black guy or the white guy. I don’t know how she would even think to bring that up in discussion. I dunno, I’ll have to look more into her deal on the interwebs I think because that whole part never made sense to me.
I’m wondering if the following scenario had played out, what would have happened:
Let’s say Martin was a sixty-year-old woman. Zimmerman claims he had been screaming, by an earwitness reports hearing a woman’s scream. Would that be enough to cast doubt on Zimmerman, even under something like SYG?
Jon says the screams belonged to Zimmerman. One could argue that he was also an “earwitness” since he was constrained by darkness and distance.
If both witnesses had said it had been Martin screaming, would that have been enough to warrant an arrest?
Well I think Bricker has pointed out something we hadn’t noticed in the law back in the beginning. Namely that it imposes a specific and higher evidentiary burden on police to be allowed to legally make an arrest when the suspect claims self defense.
Imagine if you were away from home and I’m caught by police, wearing a balaclava, unloading all your stuff into a van. Technically they have no proof that I’m doing anything illegal. Maybe I’m helping you move, and because of some emergency situation you can’t be there, and because I have a crazy work schedule the only free time I have to move your stuff into my moving van is late at night, and because I’m highly sensitive to the cold I need to wear a balaclava. All of those things might be true, but the police don’t have to really worry too much about it. They’ve stumbled upon someone, not the legal resident of a property, unloading property from the residence in the middle of the night into a van.
I’m going to jail for a little while because there is probable cause to arrest me.
Now imagine if instead of the police being able to look at the totality of the situation and find probable cause, they had to prove the specific act of me taking stuff out of your house was not legal before they could arrest me. That is a far higher burden, it does effectively seem to force law enforcement to be quasi-finders of fact to a level not seen in normal criminal law to allow even an arrest, because the law states that you’re immune from prosecution or arrest if you were acting in self defense, so it puts an onus to disprove the self defense before the arrest and prosecution can happen.
I hope I’m not misrepresenting Bricker’s explanation, but if I’m not, you can see why this law is as crazy as people say it is.
She says the screams were from a boy, not a man.
I’m not saying the world should drop to their knees based on everything she says. But before the media hoopla even began, she was pointing fingers at the detective who took her statement. It could be that she didn’t know what the hell she was signing and the detective didn’t explain its significance to her. Or it could be all the things you mentioned. I don’t know.
Oh, I knew the law was crazy as soon as I learned about it. The scenario you laid out nicely illustrates why. I’m just confused why the people who crafted this legislation didn’t foresee this and why anyone would continue to defend it.
I don’t really understand why you’re asking all these hypotheticals. If the evidence were different in any number of ways, it’s certainly possible there could have been a different decision made about whether or not to make an arrest.
But we don’t know that he said that at all. Maybe what he said was that his head was bashed onto the ground and then Martin pulled back to take another swing at his head. You haven’t read his statement.
Our understanding of the details of what Zimmerman is claiming is based on an interview with his Dad, and details-wise it isn’t worth a bucket of crap.
I find Zimmerman’s entire story highly questionable, but I find equally questionable your understanding of how people do or don’t scream, how the human trachaea works, or whether or not you know the sequence of events Zimmerman claims happened. This playing junor CSI stuff based on theory and rumor is ridiculous.
Because I’m trying to figure out, once again, what would constitute enough probable cause.
I don’t understand what it would be when it comes to SYG. I understand what it would be under other laws, but not SYG.
A lot of people did foresee this, but written off as bleeding-heart liberals (and as the legislative minority), they weren’t listened to. That, and the influence of the NRA, could be the subject of whole 'nother threads.
Honestly, I don’t believe there is a “pat” answer to this. When you hear about a guy who chased down and stabbed a petty thief to death, sold the thief’s stuff, and then successfully employed the SYG defense, IMO we have entered into a legal Twilight Zone.
What do you want probable cause for? Like we said- SYg is likely not changing the law much. In any case, either the guy’s guilty or he’s not. Arresting him just means he stays a night in jail before he’s bailed out. What purpose does that solve? It does not increase his chance of being convicted, in fact, if he’s charged with the wrong crime, it could decrease the chance of convicting him.
You keep demanding we answer your questions, so answer mine, which you and You with the face have been dodging:
Do you want Zimmerman arrested or convicted?
I want him treated like we would treat any other guy who kills someone out of the blue.
Really, it is not that hard to figure out what I want. You are acting like I am expecting something that defies all reasoning. I’m not.
Who is “we”? Even Bricker says the law has had serious if unintended negative consequences, and and isof the opinion that it should be reviewed for amendment.
It is a MAJOR change in the law, at least as it is being interpreted by the courts and police,
You are still ignoring the point that arresting him at the scene would massively harm the chance of conviction. That wouldn’t always be the case, but as the evidence here is questionable, it would definitely happen here.
There seems to be no need to arrest him right now - why do you want that to happen? There’s no pressing time limit by which he has to be arrested for him to be tried - but if he is arrested, then he has to be charged in short order.
You should answer DrDeth’s very straightforward question - do you want him arrested, or do you want him convicted?
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I was reading this story in the LA Times. I don’t have cable TV, so I didn’t realize how much coverage the Martin case is getting.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-trayvon-media-20120401,0,1199315.story
The percentages for MSNBC may be distorted since Al Sharpton has a show on that network.
Not a whole lot. Lawrence O’Donnell has been flogging the story like a rented mule, and Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews a whole lot too.