Because the idiots who wrote and passed this law were probably working off the assumption that you can tell, just by looking at someone, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.
Zimmerman “looked” like the good guy. Martin “looked” like a bad nobody. Thats why we can be pretty confident that had it been Zimmerman who had been shot, Martin would have been locked up the same day.
What is the other criminal act?
Perhaps this will spur a change in the law. We can only hope.
I am just haunted by that photograph of Martin in his white hoodie. What a beautiful young man he was.
So I asked monstro what I had posted about her and you with the face that was obnoxious.
Her response:
That doesn’t strike me as particularly obnoxious. Actually, it doesn’t strike me as obnoxious at all. My point, then as now, was simple: both you and you with the face have already decided Zimmerman is guilty. I haven’t.
You are biased. You have reached a conclusion. Your bias is evident in your posts.
I haven’t reached any conclusion. I’m waiting until I hear the remainder of the evidence.
I assume you mean the Duke case.
Yes, there I reached a conclusion. And I was right – Nifong ended up resigning, publicly disgraced, for pushing forward when he had no case – an action he took, it’s now widely agreed, because he felt pressured by the community to act before he had all the evidence.
I agree the Duke case is a cautionary tale, but I think its caution is a message for you, not I.
Here is a primer on how intent as an element of most criminal laws, and must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
LOL! OMG!
I would hope that the public would have an explanation of the facts that convinced the grand jury that Mr. Zimmerman did, indeed, act in a way that conforms to the intent of the Stand Your Ground laws.
And, in any case, I would support any group that tries to reverse these Stand Your Ground laws.
P.S. You accused me earlier of making up quotes to make Zimmerman look like a liar, I hope you are retracting that now.
Nope.
Here’s the problem. I said you misquoted Zimmerman in response to this post of yours:
To defend this quote, you posted this:
So I agree Zimmerman said he would follow Martin, and I agree that Zimmerman said that when he was attacked, he wasn’t following Martin.
I DON’T agree that he ever said that he didn’t intend on following the teenager, which is the quote you imputed to him.
He said he was going to follow Martin. At some point, he lost track of Martin, and was no longer following him when he was attacked (according to him).
You quoted him as saying he never intended to follow Martin, so you could show a contradiction between his also saying he was going to follow Martin.
But he did not say he never intended to follow Martin. THAT, you made up.
Right?
There is always the option of gunning him down in cold blood and claiming “self-defense” under the SYG law. After all, it seems to be working for Zimmerman. 
In fact, it would work better. He has a much more violent history then his murder victim did.
No, wrong.
Zimmerman told the 911 person he was going out of the vehicle to follow Martin, and was following Martin. Later on, he told the police he was going out of the vehicle to look up a street sign because he didn’t know on what street he was, and that he then went back to his truck, and Martin followed him and attacked him.
How do you reconcile those two things? I appreciate you bending over backwards to defend this guy, but I am amazed that you don’t see that the evidence contradict what he says. But I’ll humor you anyway.
Let me rephrase my post this way:
I think the “reasonable” story offered by Zimmerman is contradicted by the evidence. The shooter tells the 911 dispatcher he is following the teenager; later on he tells the police that the reverse happened, the teenager pursued and attacked him ?!? This is contradicted by the evidence of the person on the phone with Trayvon, saying that Zimmerman was chasing Zimmerman and not the other way around. Zimmerman, to me, is clearly lying.
Do you find his story credible? That this man, he was advised multiple times to not follow the teenager, but clearly showed he didn’t want to let “another of those assholes get away”, didn’t actually do that? That Martin followed and attacked Zimmerman, even though Martin’s last phone call shows the reverse? How can you say that there is no evidence to contradict his story?
There are two problems with this.
We, the non-jury, have no duty or obligation to remain impartial, pronounce Zimmerman innocent until proven guilty and sit on the sidelines quietly until all the facts come in.
It’s precisely because there’s so much public interest in this story that the investigation has moved forward. Were the public to have waited “until the facts come in” there would be no facts coming in!
That and the fact that the real bad guys tend to be serial bad guys and are probably barred from carrying a weapon.
Isn’t Zimmerman mixed race? Depending on the part of the country and the neighborhood I think he might be mistaken for a bad guy. Especially running around in that orange jumpsuit he is pictured in. 
Any chance of a cite for this? My understanding is that he was arrested once, and that arrest did not lead to any charges, and may in fact have been expunged.
I find it very credible. I also think it could be credible that once he caught up with or cornered Martin that he was attacked. Does this justify what resulted? I don’t think so, but given Florida law and so little explicit evidence, I think it really muddies the waters.
I think Zimmerman was spoiling for a confrontation. I think he got more than he bargained. I think things got out of hand. I think a 17 year old died for no good reason. I think a lot of questions in this case will never be adequately answered. :mad:
Exactly. Have people forgotten that the cops, only within a few weeks after the shooting and while the investigation still supposedly was in progress, matter of factly announced that Zimmerman felt the need to defend himself? They had their minds made up already and it didn’t matter what the evidence said or didn’t say. That’s why they werent collecting any. Hence, no checking of the phone logs, doing any blood tests, or performing any background checks.
It is extremely easy to say a case is weak due to the lack of evidence when you don’t look for any.
This is an erroneous statement, but it doesn’t matter, because it has nothing to do with this thread and this case, which is all I’m here to participate in talking about.
Okee dokee. Here is the Florida murder statute. Where it plainly says (among other things, this is specifically section (2):
Without intent to kill. Or even the intention to do anything criminal at all. You just have to cause death by doing something that is dangerous without regard for the fact that someone could die, you do not have to have any intent to kill, nor any intent to commit any other crime.
And as I noted previously, it is very easy to make the case that the act of following a stranger with a loaded gun in your hand, never mind confronting him directly, is an act which is imminently dangerous to another and disregards human life. Certainly there are defenses to this argument, but we are not disagreeeing over whether Zimmerman will actually be convicted, we are arguing over whether he can be charged with the crime of murder in the state of Florida if he had no intent to kill nor an intent to commit any criminal act which then resulted in the death of someone. The answer is yes, he can. Second degree murder as defined in 782.04(2)
For the benefit of those who are not accustomed to reading statutes or super-deep outlines and might mistake everything around Section (2) as having a direct bearing on Section (2), it doesn’t. The Florida statute is broken into 5 main sections, the outline levels go like this:
(1) Main section is numerals in parentheses.
(a) first subsection is lower case letters in parentheses
[INDENT]1. Then numerals with a period
[/INDENT][INDENT][INDENT]a. Then lower case letters with a period
[/INDENT][/INDENT]Section (2) is complete, it has no subsections which alter or refine the section in any way.
[INDENT][/INDENT]
And Bricker made a mistake in asserting that this applied in Florida, as Florida attorneys will readily tell you.
And on what reasonable basis can a cop reliably determine that a man they know absolutely nothing about except that he’s just shot another younger, smaller, darker unarmed man to death is no threat and isn’t going to run? Are you really comfortable with cops making a call like that? I’m sure as hell not. Lock that guy up and THEN figure out if he’s really unlikely to be a threat - leaving him on the streets to see if he does it again seems jaw-droppingly stupid as a way to police.
Handy rule of thumb for choosing the first person pronoun: remove the other person from the sentence and see if the pronoun you chose still sounds right.
And I’m sure you know that in law the specific trumps the general.
No, he didn’t. You added the “going out of the vehicle” part:
He never said a thing to the dispatcher about going out of the vehicle, did he? You added that.
Which is perfectly consistent. He followed martin IN HIS TRUCK, got to a point that he didn’t know which street he was on, and got out of the truck to look at the street sign.
Multiple times? I count one time.
Now, hearing the testimony of the girl who was on the phone with Martin, we have new evidence. She says she heard a sequence of voices that does not suggest Martin attacked Zimmerman.
But how could the police have used that evidence to decide whether or not to arrest him? They weren’t aware of the phone call when they questioned him. How can you contend this should have been part of the probable cause calculus?
The problem I see here is that all they used to make that determination was Zimmerman’s own word and a minor injury. Yet we have witness accounts of them wrestling before the killing, which could have been started by either Martin or Zimmerman. Why is the killer given the beneift of the doubt in such a situation? If a driver were to hit and kill a pedestrian I expect the cops to rule out contributing factors like distracted driving and being under the influence, not just take the guy’s word that the person just jumped out in front of them.
Stoid, you need to understand something (and never will).
Your opinions on legal matters are not worthless; they are less than that. The fact that you have asserted something or other goes a long way towards establishing that it’s wrong.
You know the saying ‘a stopped clock is right twice a day’? Yours is digital.
Regards,
Shodan
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
Do you find his story credible? That this man, he was advised multiple times to not follow the teenager, but clearly showed he didn’t want to let “another of those assholes get away”, didn’t actually do that? That Martin followed and attacked Zimmerman, even though Martin’s last phone call shows the reverse? How can you say that there is no evidence to contradict his story?
[/QUOTE]
Another telling clue is that, when asked by the dispatcher for an address where a cop can meet him, Zimmerman at first directs him to the clubhouse. But then suddenly he changes his mind and asks the dispatcher to tell the cops to just call him when they arrived and he would direct him to his location then.
If Zimmerman really want to make it easy to link up with the cops, he would have either told them where to meet him or, better yet, he would have volunteered to wait for them at the front entrance. But he didn’t want to wait for the cops. His request to the dispatcher indicates he wasnt concerned about making it easy for the cops to find him. His priority was to get the kid, and then direct the cops to where to find him.
If the crime is not a strict liability crime, it has an intent element. Second egree murder in Florida is not a specific intent crime. You don’t have to have the specific intent to kill. But your general intent is relevant – indeed, the state must prove it.