Waitaminit. The cops took the body and the father didn’t find out until he made a report the next day?I’m flabbergasted. They didn’t knock on doors nearby? They didn’t call numbers on the cell phone? What the hell?
Actually no, the dangerous act is not the gunshot, it’s the stalking with a loaded gun, following, confronting, hassling, essentially scaring the shit out of the kid and (perhaps) causing Martin to feel threatened, leading some kind of interaction that led to Zimmerman pulling out that gun and killing that kid.
If it was not considered a dangerous way to behave, then Neighborhood Watch guidelines would not specifically say that NW participants should not carry guns. If it was not considered a dangerous way to behave, the 911 operator wouldn’t have told Zimmerman not to follow Martin. It was a dangerous way to act that reasonable people could predict would lead to harm, which is exactly what happened.
Right. And that determination is made in court. Either, as Kimmy explained, in pre-trial hearings or in an actual trial: does the evidence show that Zimmerman killed Martin because he needed to defend himself against an (unprovoked!!! Very important!!) threat of harm to himself? If the answer is yes, then it was not an unlawful killing and it does not fall under the statute and Zimmerman is not convicted of that crime.
But if the evidence does not show that, but instead shows that Zimmerman acted in a manner that provoked Martin into acting in a manner consistent with defending HIMSELF against Zimmerman’s threatening behavior, (or any number of other scenarios) then the killing is determined to be UNlawful, which is another way of saying that Zimmerman would be convicted.
Of course it can. Lots of perfectly lawful things are dangerous and can result in the death of another, which is the point at which the lawful becomes the unlawful: It’s perfectly lawful to start the car in the garage with your kid in the seat and run back to the house to answer the phone or find your purse or whatever - when you come back to find your kid is dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, it becomes a crime (child endangerment, manslaughter, whatever). And a thousand other things can go from perfectly lawful to unlawful depending on the results and other contributing factors. It’s perfectly lawful for college kids to drink (assuming they are of drinking age) and perfectly lawful to have hazing rituals. It can become second degree murder when those rituals require that the hazee drink so much they die of alcohol poisoning.
Etc.
Of course not, and nowhere have I ever suggested otherwise. It’s simply a matter of whether the charge makes any sense to begin with or not, not whether he can successfully avoid conviction.
Martin didn’t live with his father, he lived 5 counties away with his mother. He was just visiting his father at the time. It doesn’t appear his father had custody which may have led to the delay on officially changing the body’s ID from “John Doe”, legally they had to wait until the Mother ID’ed the body, if so. As soon as his father filed a missing persons report, the Police notified him.
This is why this case is complex.Two other officer’s may have very well come to a different field conclusion and arrested Zimmerman.
As a comparitive example, even a sitting trial Judge can overrule the Probable Cause determination of another who issued a search warrant.
True enough. But combined with playing cop by following people around and questioning them and thereby upsetting and scaring them when you are not a cop is behavior that reasonable people could predict could easily lead to someone being harmed and that makes it reckless conduct.
And based on what we know so far, that’s exactly what Zimmerman did.
It comes down to your favorite thing: intention, combined with action. Zimmerman’s intention was to protect himself and his neighborhood from bad people. His action was to carry a loaded gun and occupy himself with looking for people who might qualify as bad, then follow them, question them, and make them feel uncomfortable, even threatened, and acting accordingly, leading to Zimmerman acting accordingly.
Insanely reckless, really.
I was surprised when I learned that too. It seems to me that calling the cell phone would have been one of the first things to do, if only to assist in identifying the victim.
I suppose we can wait and see if the cell phone was on Martin’s person or near the scene. If it was and there is evidence of the family calling the number repeatedly, it just makes the case reek so much more of incompetence and untrustworthiness. The phone log clearly shows that Martin was engaged in conversation shortly before he was killed. Seems to me that the girlfriend should have been one of the first individuals contacted. But we didn’t hear about the girlfriend until the family raised an alarm.
Maybe we should wait and see about this too?
I would think, however, that even all the “waiters and seers” would concede the mysteriousness with the cell phone is a bad way to launch an investigation.
(The neighborhood is not that big. I would think that if someone was killed on my street and I was also looking for my missing son, it wouldn’t have taken me that long for me to learn the tragic news. Wouldn’t there be people out in the street looking at the cordoned-off crime scene, with a lot of flashing lights and commotion? It suggests that the neighbors weren’t cohesive enough to go knocking on each other’s doors to find out if anyone knew who this kid belonged to. And it lends support to the belief the police accepted Zimmerman’s claim from the very beginning and worked off the assumption that Martin was a trespasser in the “wrong” neighborhood.)
What does any of this have to do with Ascenray’s shock over the apparent indifference to determining who the dead child was by not making what to most people would seem to be the most minimal and obvious efforts to find out by asking around and checking his cel phone??
How do you know they didn’t?
It sounds like the challenge facing the prosecution is proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman was the aggressor in the altercation that led to this shooting. The legal requirements for manslaughter and murder are one thing. But if they can convince a jury that Zimmerman was the one who started the fight that led to the boy’s death and thus, he is not entitled to SYG protection, then thats all they need to do, correct? I am asking this sincerely.
If a case can be made that Zimmerman’s account requires us to accept too many coicidences and improbabilities, and thus is untrustworthy, does this qualify as evidence that Zimmerman was probably the aggressor? Again, this is a sincere question. if Martin truly was the aggressor, for instance, why would Zimmerman feel need to claim he was attacked on the street when he was really attacked on the walkway?
Alternatively, if Zimmerman is lying about details most critical to establishing this as a SYG shooting, wouldnt this be an indicator that he doesn’t have a legitimate basis for claiming self defense and therefore is guilty of manslaughter? For example, if it can be shown that Zimmerman was not truly in fear of serious injury (a prosecutor could show that Martin had injuries twice as bad as Zimmermans for instance, or that Zimmermans wounds were superficial and unlikely to have been directly inflicted by Martin).
I think this is the most disturbing byproduct of this SYG law. It apparently causes cops to prejudge shootings as unwinnable without conducting an investigation first.
I feel like we’re arguing the same thing here. I never said an imminently dangerous act couldn’t be lawful; indeed, quite the opposite. I just said that the fact that an act is lawful doesn’t mean that it can’t be imminently dangerous, too. Your example of the fireman is an example of a lawful imminently dangerous act.
Talk about “duh!”
And let us not forget that the girlfriend reported the conversation she heard of Martin asking someone (presumably Zimmerman, given everything else we know) why he was following Martin, and someone (presumably Zimmerman) replying by asking Martin what he was doing there, then the scuffling noises and the phone went dead.
So from this it seems very likely that the altercation began at that moment, meaning that the cell phone was within a few dozen yards at most of the final scene. Meaning either that the cops did find it in their diligent search for evidence, had it in their possession and utterly failed to bother answering it or checking it for identifying information, OR the cops failed to bother to look around for any evidence and didn’t find it.
Neither looks very good.
We also know from this that Zimmerman did confront Martin and that Martin did feel threatened by Zimmerman’s behavior, which supports my contention that Zimmerman is a candidate for a second degree murder charge, as I’ve described.
Possibly, there is so much info on this thread, that itself is confusing. 
Because if they had they would have reached someone and it wouldn’t have taken 12/24 or however many hours it ultimately ended up taking to identify Martin.
I’m sure alllllll of you have read this and listened to the recordings, but here ya go.
It’s being called standard procedure to do exactly that everywhere I’ve read, which certainly makes sense.
Stoid, I agree with you, but I know what the chorus is going to be.
“We don’t know any of that.”
We don’t know if who the girlfriend heard was Zimmerman.
We don’t know if the girlfriend is telling the truth. She could be lying just to make this story more sensational than it already is.
We don’t know what the pushing sounds mean. Maybe it was the sound of a stiff wind. Maybe the connection broke off because Martin threw such a wild punch at Zimmerman that the headset fell off.
Maybe Martin was lying when he said Zimmerman was chasing him. Maybe he was actually chasing Zimmerman and just told his girlfriend that so she could be his unwitting alibi.
Maybe everything went down just like the girlfriend said, including the pushing. But what happened was…Martin got angry when Zimmerman pushed him and chased him into the yard. Zimmerman really did get afraid for his life at this point and that’s when he shot him. Martin should have retreated after having been pushed, so by chasing Zimmerman, HE was breaking the law.
Or maybe everything we’re getting from the lawyer is all a concoction. The girlfriend doesn’t even exist and neither does the cell phone.
Most of these are crazy hypotheses, of course, but I still anticipate them being offered up as reasons for why you are jumping to premature conclusions.
How bad is it that I hope the cops didn’t collect it from the crime scene? I would prefer if it had been one of the neighbors, because I actually trust them to tell the truth about where it was found moreso than I do these sloppy cops.
I am inclined to believe that the cops didn’t know about the phone. Bumbling incompetence is easier to swallow than malicious negligence.
I see you’ve been paying attention to how things work here in Bizarro World, where a person standing over a dead body telling the cops they shot him doesn’t qualify as probable cause for police to investigate the possibility that something less than lawful may have occurred.
It’s not bad at all, that IS the less noxious explanation!
Let’s reverse it. Suppose an officer comes upon another officer who said what Zimmerman did. Arrest or not? Believability is the crux here.