Also, the size argument is irrelevant. Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather both give up a lot of inches, weight, and height to me. Either one of them could literally beat me to death with their bare hands if they so chose.
No one is claiming the police have to disprove anything before they make an arrest. Only that a case that is extremely weak will often not result in an arrest because the police do not desire to make arrests when they don’t believe the evidence will obtain a conviction or a guilty plea.
Probable cause is a law barrier, and in a lot of scenarios you can be held for awhile even on lesser barriers. I’ve never said the police could not arrest Zimmerman at all. I think they probably could have, and I don’t think the arrest would be legally incorrect. Just because the police can arrest does not mean it is always wise to arrest, what’s the point if you believe your case so weak as to have no chance of going anywhere?
What I will reiterate is that the Chief of Police has never said he didn’t arrest Zimmerman because he could not disprove Zimmerman’s story. Instead he stated “they lacked the evidence to arrest.”
I’m not a lawyer in Florida or a police officer in Florida, but just based on the “plain reading” of the Florida homicide statutes, my “vaguely informed suspicion” is the reason the police are saying they lacked the evidence is because:
- The only evidence they have is that Zimmerman killed Martin.
- In Florida, there is no generic “illegal homicide.” Meaning homicides are not, by default, illegal. All of the criminal homicide statutes in Florida have some aggravating element to the crime itself, homicide without those elements is not a crime. Perhaps when they say they have no evidence they are saying they have not been able to find any evidence other than Zimmerman killed Martin, and without any of the aggravating elements that doesn’t meet the definition of a crime in Florida.
- Zimmerman provided an explanation, which the police have believed. The police have the authority to review information like that and decide to believe it or not, and use that information to decide whether or not to make an arrest. This is not an unrestricted or unreviewable power, the State’s Attorneys are presumably more expert in Florida law than Florida law enforcement and they will make a final determination about whether or not charges are appropriate. The rest is really immaterial to that process, the police can arrest for various reasons but it’s always up to the State’s Attorney to decide to pursue a case and that’s where the real decision matters. All that has happened so far is the police have said they don’t see a reason to arrest–that isn’t the same as the State’s Attorney saying they will not file charges or that no crime was committed.
Just as an update, the police turned the case over to the State’s Attorney for that county around 5 PM today, so we should hear something in a few weeks as to how it will turn out in that regard.
Claiming insanity would also be different because most States if you’re dealing with someone you believe to be mentally unfit you have to turn them over to a psychiatric facility and they have to be reviewed by doctors and et cetera.
If he claimed insanity and was halfway believable in his claims the police probably would have a duty to transport him to a secured psychiatric facility. I used to work for the State level agency here that handled the mentally ill, and generally if the police encountered someone who they believed to be having a psychiatric episode they were duty bound to take them to a hospital. At a regular hospital they’d be housed typically for 24-72 hours in a psych ward before potential transfer to a State psychiatric facility where they would then go before a civil commitment authority in which their long term status would be decided. If they had committed some crime the criminal court process would sometimes go parallel to this to a point.
If the police did not believe the claim of insanity then at least in my experience people would end up in jail, if at trial they were determined unfit to stand trial they would be transferred to State hospital indefinitely (that was a real problem because forensic admits over time took a larger and larger portion of beds and made it harder to house the non-criminal civil commitments.)
There’s no reason to be dismissive of my posts in this thread when I’ve presented the same arguments Kimmy has about evidence which demonstrates that it was Zimmerman who initiated conflict with Martin, not the other way around. Never have I said that just because there’s a dead body, the guy needs to be arrested. Only that the dead body plus everything else (like the 911 call), seems to be more than enough grounds for an arrest. We should not be letting his claim get in the way of how we interpret evidence that strongly points to manslaughter.
And of course to determine who the likely aggressor is in this exchange, you’d need a receptive jury. That’s been the point all along. Zimmerman needs to be charged so that we can let a court assess his credibility in combination with all the evidence for and against him.
Yes, of course. But those guys are professional boxers who spend hours training everyday.
This kid doesn’t look like he could punch his way out of a paper bag, but let’s not let common sense get in the way of daydreaming. I find your position about size being irrelevant…intriguing.
No. But there are some key differences.
A person who kills as a result of insanity does not typically walk free; a person who kills in self-defense does. A finding of not guilty by reason of mental disease is typically necessary to commit the accused to confined treatment. So regardless of the existence of legal insanity, a trial or plea is necessary. That’s not the case in self-defense. If the prosecutor believes the claim of self-defense, it is malpractice to bring the charge, since self-defense negates any criminality.
All I know is that this case is really bizarre. I’ve never heard of a case in which the police accept the word of the perpetrator and admit so to the media–biasing the potential jury pool in the process?–without first letting a court of law decide whether or not there’s enough mystery to doubt the perpetrator’s word. Granted, we are not the police and we are not privy to all they know. But I’m really wishing that they–if they haven’t done so already–would just release all the facts so that at least the family can figure out what happened. We can “woulda, coulda” all day long, but it’s meaningless if we aren’t equipped with all the facts.
If we do have all the facts and nothing else is to be done here, then I’m very very very confused. I appreciate the lawyerly input (except for the obnoxious insinuations…but whatever). But this case is just shitty, no matter how you slice it.
Except he landed enough punches to visibly injure Zimmerman, who must be at least a little tougher than a paper bag.
So who is daydreaming?
We don’t have all the facts. Believe me: it may sound like I am defending Zimmerman; I am not. I am saying we do not yet know all the evidence, and I am perfectly prepared to wait until the investigation is concluded. If there is no additional information at all, I will be very disturbed. But not yet.
I don’t know that Zimmerman needs charged or not, I want to reiterate the very first point I made back at the beginning of the thread:
At the time I thought the prosecutor was already reviewing the case BTW, but just replace “prosecutor” with “police.” My assumption is the police know a lot of things about this case that we don’t know. My assumption is when the Chief of Police says they lack the evidence to justify an arrest that he’s a decent authority on things like that.
That’s not me saying Zimmerman acted in self defense, it’s just me saying I don’t see anything yet that I believe justifies the outrage. I’ll be outraged along with everyone else if we never hear any more information about this case and Zimmerman is never charged.
Everything else in this thread is just an “interesting” legal debate on the doctrine of self-defense, and has little to do with this actual case, at least yet, since this case hasn’t even featured someone charged with a crime up to this point.
I can see where a lot of people would feel that this is the case, but I can think of lots of situations in which you can kill someone and you won’t be arrested at the time of the homicide and the police may even make a statement very shortly afterward saying they believe it to be self defense.
One I have always noticed is hunting accidents. If you accidentally shoot and kill someone with your rifle in the woods there’s an excellent chance that as long as a certain set of facts are true you will not leave the woods in handcuffs and will most likely be exonerated of any crime.
If you want to apply the same thought process to that which many have applied to the concept of police finding a story about self defense credible, then you have to view hunting accidents as another “free license to murder” for people so inclined. However just like using self-defense in such a way, you open yourself up to tremendous risks something comes out in the physical evidence to contradict your story. Further, fessing up you did the shooting then turning yourself in and saying it was an accident makes little sense compared to just walking away from the scene, if you have a situation with no witnesses.
I’m not being deliberately obnoxious, and I definitely agree that this case is absolutely shitty, a 17 year old child is dead and it certainly could have been avoided if Zimmerman had stayed in his car or even just stayed in his house and not been a play-cop for fun in the evenings.
Was it just unintentional obnoxiousness when you implied I was worked up just because the victim is a black kid?
I admit that the race angle is important to me, because I believe race is an important variable in situations like this one. I don’t think Zimmerman would have thought Martin was suspicious if he was a white or Asian kid.
But if you reread the OP, it is intentional devoid of any racial rhetoric or accusations of racism.
So like I said, whatever.
Just to be clear I have only been trying to answer the OP. My own opinion is that it looks to me like manslaughter. But obviously I do not have all the facts as presented to the police. Some of the things reported to the media seem very bad for Zimmerman if true but all that I have seen are from anonymous sources. I will say that in such an obviously high profile case, if there is some sort of cover up or there is a reason why they are protecting him it is monumentally stupid. It will get out.
My cat could probably do worse if she felt endangered enough. And she barely has teeth. Seriously.
You never addressed my question. If we were talking about a woman who was of the same size and weight as Martin, would you really be suggesting that this was a one-sided fight?
It probably wouldn’t be looked at the same way. That doesn’t mean it’s right. The only time I have seriously injured while doing this job was in a struggle with a woman who weighed maybe 120.
Uh huh . . .
What’s your point, exactly? There is no mention of race in the OP, your much later quote notwithstanding.
Please. Monstro is trying to disavow being worked up because of the races of the participants, when that’s the farthest thing from the truth (as shown by monstro herself).
But it’s not unreasonable to consider it unlikely that a 140lb woman would have an advantage over a >200lb man in a physical fight. Despite what Martin Hyde says, size is not irrelevant. Neither is muscle mass. So to believe that such claim is true, we’d need enough evidence to support that something so unexpected occurred.
I don’t see why we’d do anything anything differently in Zimmerman’s case. If the size differential between him and Martin is as big as it looks from their photos, it seriously casts doubt that he was ever in any real danger, irrespective of what he’s claimed.
No, the farthest thing from the truth is that I wouldn’t care about this if the kid was white.
If someone is going to make this claim, they need to provide evidence that all I ever do on this board is talk about race and black people. Since I do not do this, any claim that I’m only worked up about this because I’m black is an obnoxious jab at me.
I have been respectful to everyone in this thread. It is not wrong for me to expect to be treated the same.