Stoid is right that even if Martin did throw the first punch, Zimmerman could still be considered the aggressor. The law says Zimmerman is the aggressor if he:
“Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself”.
Using racial slurs or threats while armed and following someone on a dark street would probably qualify. Other less extreme actions might also qualify, as the wording is somewhat vague.
OK, so let’s say we can establish that Zimmerman is the aggressor according to the law. Then in order to shoot it must be true that he:
“reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant”
I think it could be convincingly argued that he did not have this belief reasonably. We know for a fact that he thought he was up against an armed criminal, because he said so. But that belief was entirely unreasonable.
A reasonable person, up against not an armed criminal but a kid going home with skittles, would probably not find it necessary to use deadly force even if they were punched during a fight. Zimmerman could have covered his face with his arms and taken a defensive posture when the fight started to go south for him.
But Zimmerman thought (unreasonably) that he was fighting an armed criminal. If he had taken a defensive posture he thought he could be shot. But he can’t use that, in particular, as a defense. Because it was not a reasonable belief.
That is not the correct description of what he did ( as far as I am aware) and that is not the correct description of second degree murder.
I know you disagree.
I am only curious about one thing, Stoid. The last time you and I engaged in a lengthy discussion of a legal issue, it was one you had studied extensively, and had a great stake in.
Again in that discussion, we disagreed. And ultimately, the court decision in that issue went against your analysis.
Did that event cause you in any way to say to yourself anything like, “Gosh, I was convinced I was right, but I was wrong. Maybe I am not as good a judge of my own legal analysis skills as I thought I was.”
Because what I picture you as doing in that case, and this one, is saying to yourself, “I know I’m right, and no outcome will convince me otherwise.” I believe that you tell yourself you’re open to persuasion, but that the persuasion would have to logically change your mind; the mere fact that the actual court case doesn’t go your way means zero.
Is that at all accurate?
You don’t even have to paint him as having an intention to murder anyone or shoot anyone to see his culpability. The idea of reckless disregard for human life can often come down to “being egregiously stupid”, not nefarious. And that’s what I think Zimmerman is guilty of. Egregious stupidity, foolishly disregarding the HUGE potential for creating exactly the situation he went on to create, with the horrible results of someone dying. Exactly what second degree murder is designed to deal with. You don’t get a pass for being THAT fucking stupid, you need to take responsiblity for being THAT fucking stupid and reckless and foolish and dangerous.
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No. What we have been doing is gasping in horror at the lack of humanity in some people who want to reduce this to an arcane misapplication of a moronic law, so that a paranoid gun nut who killed a kid gets away with doing so.
But it’s more than just not minding his own business. This is a guy who made it his business to go hunting for black kids, and when his business paid off, people like you can sit back and say "Well, we don’t really know what happened before he shot the kid.
As I keep saying, the rest of us do. Gun advocates would have been smart to distance themselves from this one from the start, politically speaking.
Specifically, do you believe our government should have the power to say, “We screwed up this law. This is a moronic law. We’re repealing it immediately, and you’re under arrest anyway, because you’re a paranoid gun nut who killed a kid, and that should have been illegal, even though it wasn’t, in this case.”
(Of course, my question assume the truth of Zimmerman’s self defense claim, because if his claim is not true, I have no problem with his arrest. But it sounds to me as though you urge his arrest regardless of the truth of his claim. Do you?)
This is a specious argument, since it pretends that the law has anything to do with Zimmerman. Those who wrote it are clearly saying it doesn’t apply. I think what you’ll see is that the proportion of people trying to find legal protection for anything that Zimmerman did will be rapidly diminishing, since what he did is obvious to everyone.
Res ipsa loquitur. The direction in which the snowflakes flew don’t matter to me after he set the avalanche in progress.
I’m not talking about the SYG law, but “the law,” the entire extant body of criminal code.
Either he’s guilty under it or he isn’t.
My question to you is: if he’s not guilty under the law, do you urge that the police arrest him anyway, because what he did was so obviously morally wrong?
Claiming it’s not murder is not an arcane misapplication of a moronic law, it’s the correct application of a well established, sensible law. If you think that believing that everyone, including actual murderers (which Zimmerman isn’t), deserve the full protection of the law makes me lacking in humanity, then there’s something very wrong with you.
That’s not what he did. He hunted no-one. Look, if you want to condemn Zimmerman for what he actually did, that’s one thing. If you want to claim that what he did should be against the law, that’s fine, as long as you don’t claim he should be punished for it. But making stuff up is not fine, and that’s what anyone claiming it’s murder on the evidence we have is doing. Like it or not, Zimmerman was perfectly entitled to carry a gun, to follow Martin, and to ask him what he was doing. If you are going to claim he hunted him, chased him, stalked him, or anything else, you need to provide some evidence for that claim.
He, uh, called the kid a coon and then went from point A to point wherever the kid was, and then he shot him dead, and whatever spider sense he was following was definitely terribly calibrated.
It’s even dumber to be confident that he definitely didn’t do anything wrong than it is to say that he’s a murderer because he followed the kid, no matter what happened after that.
I have played that recording now for 11 people. I told five that it said “coon,” before I played it, and four agreed. I told six I couldn’t understand it, and not one of them came up with “coon.”
You know, we post experiments like this in other forums here on the SDMB and congratulate ourselves for being so bright as to recognize that sort of trap. Someone just recently posted a Youtube link to a very entertaining presenter who demonstrated how people, once they’ve been told what’s in an unintelligible soundbite, will much more reliably hear it.
It’s funny, though, that all that critical thinking seems to vanish in this instance.
However, I completely agree with you on the last point. Until we know what was in his statement, and how it matches up with the rest of the evidence, it’s foolish to believe he’s blameless. But he shouldn’t be arrested, either, until that evidence convinces either the police or a grand jury that there’s probable cause.
I actually don’t understand why the charges against Garcia were dismissed in this case. Yes, he could chase the guy, but how does the law allow Garcia to use deadly force when there is no indication (at least not in the article) that he could have had a reasonable fear for his life?
Nolo press is dedicated to helping laymen understand the law. It has a tidy little pageexplaining all this.
Which is where Kimmy was going, in talking about malice aforethought being betokened by the depraved mind, in other words, reckless disregard subbing in for criminal intention.
Nolo also provides an example reminiscent of the Martin killing, I’ve changed the names to those of our players:
Zimmerman was provoked into killing Martin. He says he was using the force he believed necessary to defend himself from being killed after Martin attacked him for no reason. If that is the truth, then there was no crime.
If that is not true,* then what was the crime*?
One thing everyone agrees about is that it was not premeditated murder. No one believes Zimmerman set out to kill anybody that night.
So what did he do? Zimmerman, in the course of trying to do good and keep his neighborhood safe:
[ul]
[li]Made it a point to look for people who could be doing something wrong[/li][li]Upon seeing Martin, followed him and stared at him so obviously that Martin was totally aware that he was being followed and stared at.[/li][li]Got out of his car and approached Martin, who asked him why he was doing that.[/li][li]Chose not to answer straightforwardly and instead asked Martin why he was there.[/li][/ul]
The above was stupid and provocative. Then add the fact that he did all that stupid, provocative shit with a loaded gun in his pocket. That made it extremely dangerous and extra stupid, as any law enforcement professional (and your own good sense) will tell you, the formula is very simple: Paranoia + Loaded Gun = Mayhem.
Which in this case took the form of some kind of physical altercation ending with Zimmerman pulling out his loaded gun pointing it at Martin’s chest, and shooting him with it, resulting in Martin’s death. And there’s your intention: he intended to shoot Martin, that’s never been a question, it was not accidental that his gun was pointed at Martin and he pulled the trigger. But did he intend to kill him?
If he did intend to kill him, that’s murder. If he did not intend to kill him that’s still murder:
If he was just being an idiot with his gun and a horribly bad shot, it was second dgree murder under the “depraved heart”, if it was more like the Nolo example of street-bumping, it was provoked. I just can’t see how, if we reject self-defense, Zimmerman killing Martin is anything other than 2nd degree murder, no matter how you look at it.
I don’t think racial slurs qualify. If it were shown that Zimmerman was merely an asshole towards Martin, I dont’ think that justifies Martin attacking Zimmerman, because that would be a response from anger. Fuck anger. Anger is not a good reason to be violent.
A good reason to be violent is fear. I think Zimmerman scared him, and that made him the aggressor.
Zimmerman did not engage in activities which by their very nature could and did lead to the death of an innocent human being? Then who killed Martin, and how did they do it?
I disagree with you, but I agree with all the Florida lawyers and all the other legal sources I could find, as exhaustively demonstrated, so I’m ok it. I’m also OK with confining myself to discussing this case.
If Zimmerman was legally the aggressor, he can’t jump to using deadly force. If he was the aggressor, then the question is: Would a reasonable person believe that the only means Zimmerman had to escape imminent death or great bodily harm was to kill Martin? As Martin himself was unarmed and could not reasonably be considered a criminal, I believe the answer is almost certainly no (there can be no absolute certainty with the facts we have). He could have taken a defensive posture and covered his face with his arms. Again, that is only if Zimmerman was the aggressor, and therefore required to exhaust all other means of escaping imminent death or great bodily harm before resorting to deadly force.
“Healthy” has nothing to do with it. If you, for example, stab someone and they fight back, under that law you would be required to try all means of escape before stabbing them again (fatally). It isn’t that it is necessarily “healthy” to take more punches when you could stop it with a quick stab. It is that you brought that extra requirement on yourself by stabbing them in the first place.
Your explanation of the Garcia case, then? Was that among the cases you looked at?
Of course. And if this case also ends up showing you in error, the next one we discuss will undoubtedly include your voluminous posts and an insistence that we don’t mention this one. Right?