George Zimmerman found Not Guilty.

Dog bites man? Where? This dog must be put to sleep!

 

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Zimmerman never came across or didn’t seem like a violent or racist person. He was getting his ass beat, which is why he screamed for help and didn’t fight back, etc. His gun was his last resort apparently. He evidently feared for his life. The aggressor in this case and the one who seemed to be racist or prejudice was Trayvon. When his friend Jeantel testified she made comments about her asking Trayvon if he was going to confront Zimmerman. Trayvon said he would call her back afterwards or to that effect. On top of him using racist slang, "some crazy ass cracker". Chances are zimmerman was riding through his neighborhood before going to his house and decided to check for any unusal activity, since his neighborhood had such high crime rates and he was in charge of looking out for all of his neighbors.

 

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Then how do you explain the charges against him of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest after shoving a cop, and the restraining order issued against him to protect his former fiancee from domestic violence?

 

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Yes, let's discuss it for three months, but only if it's a white dog.

 

Haven't herd anything about it. Sounds like something you just made up. Have any sources for this?

 

"In 2005, at the age of 21, Zimmerman was charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest, after shoving an officer while a friend of Zimmerman's was being questioned about underage drinking. The charges were reduced, then dropped when Zimmerman entered a pre-trial diversion program." (Wikipedia page on George Zimmerman)

 

He wasn't "in charge", he took it upon himself to stalk a teenager for no good reason.

 

Evidently it wasn't anything serious since the charges were dropped.

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Agreed. Sounds like it wasn't too serious. But still, assaulting a police officer - even not that seriously - doesn't sound all that nonviolent. Most people never assault cops in the first place.

 

I may have jumped the gun on the handcuffs equal arrest. Apparently if they cuff you AND transport you then you are being arrested. Handcuffing on the side of a road etc. alone is not automatically arrested. That is according to Yahoo answers.:facepalm:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/arrest

 

Well, that is a pretty blatant appeal to authority which is a very serious error in logic. But beyond that, if the word of juror," I have a book to sell" is true, the Zimmerman jury was divided. Half the jurors believed Zimmerman was guilty - guilty of murder and manslaughter. They only agreed to find him not guilty by interpreting the Stand Your Ground law in a way that exonerated Zimmerman.

I suggest you go back and listen to the A360 interview again, this time more carefully. There is no question the juror who gave the interview (i.e. the I’ve got a book to sell juror) was very biased towards Zimmerman. The, I’ve got a book to sell juror, believed that Zimmerman was credible, his witnesses were credible and the state’s witnesses were not and vocalized a great deal of sympathy for Zimmerman. And she said quite clearly others on the jury didn’t share that opinion and she didn’t want to speak for them.

So the bottom line here is that contrary to your assertion, the jury did not unanimously find Zimmerman credible and the evidence and eye witnesses do not support Zimmerman’s story. What they found is that they could not convict Zimmerman given the Florida Stand Your Ground legislation. Your A360, I’ve gotta book to sell, juror may have believed everything Zimmerman said was true, but even Zimmerman’s defense attorneys were forced to admit Zimmerman have overstated or exaggerated a bit.

That is funny! I don’t suppose you are familiar with the old adage about the pot calling the kettle black? The jury is no more “expert” than anyone else. There is no school or training for jurors in this country. They are no more qualified than any other citizens and many cases like this one, less qualified. And in this case, the “I’ve gotta book to sell, juror appears to be less expert than most average citizens. The A360 interview revealed not only her biases and her financial interest in the case.

And nothing you wrote changes the fact that if Zimmerman is to be believed, he went from a very panicked and hysterical state to an extraordinarily calm within minutes. Like I said before, in 10+ years of being a first responder to numerous shootings, stabbings, rapes and other violent crimes, I have never seen someone go from extreme hysteria as evidenced by the pre-shooting recording Zimmerman claims to be his, to an extreme calm as evidenced by the police officers and tapes, to an extreme calm.

Further Zimmerman’s claim screaming just doesn’t make sense. If I have a gun and feel my life is in imminent jeopardy, I am shooting…not screaming hysterically. Zimmerman’s claim to the scream is ever more absurd when you consider he bought his gun. He applied for and had a concealed firearms permit. You don’t do those things without thinking through the day when you might need to shoot someone. And the claim gets more absurd when you consider the fact that Zimmerman wanted to be a cop. I have known many cops, and not one of them would squeal in terror and cry for help if their lives were in jeopardy. They would be shooting and not hysterically screaming for help.

And I think anyone with a rational brain would deduce that the person recorded screaming on tape, pleading for help, was not the aggressor. And logic and reason would dictate the person screaming on tape was not Zimmerman.

 

1. Not relevant for the trial.
2. "The restraining order" was actually two restraining orders: his and hers.

Note, you said "charges", not convictions and the restraining order did not involve even an arrest or charges, just a bad break-up. As violent histories go, that's pretty mundane.

 

No, appeal to authority is not always a logical fallacy and a court case is a particular example of that. That's a misunderstanding of the fallacy. It is a fallacy when authority is substituted for knowledge, but when the authority really is an authority, then it isn't a fallacy. In a court case, experts are declared by the court to be experts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

In the first vote, before deliberation. Jury verdicts have to be unanimous though and the decision was.

No, stand your ground was not argued by the defense. Zimmerman was acquitted on self defense grounds. They are two different things, but apparently you don't know that there is a difference.

The jurors are chosen based on lack of knowledge of the case going-in. Coming out, any "bias" is generated by judgement of the facts of the case. So after hearing experts and witnesses corroborate Zimmerman's account, yes, the jury became "biased" toward his account.

You misunderstand: two key states witnesses contradicted the state's account and corroborated Zimmerman's (that he was on the bottom). The jury did consider them credible.

You need to read more and get a better grasp of the facts here, because it seems you don't even know what was testified to and what arguments were made. Without that, it is no surprise you are drawing wrong conclusions!

Well he was shooting of course. But it seems to me that humans are capable of using their arms and mouths simultaneously...

I'm pretty comfortable apparently having a "bias" that matches the conclusions of the experts.

 

I didn't claim it was. I was replying to Username who commented that Zimmerman didn’t seem like a violent person. To me, someone arrested for assaulting a cop - and one with a restraining order against him - does seem like a violent person.

Agreed - and both listed domestic violence as the justification, and they were both issued by a judge. Which would make them both somewhat violent people.

Hmm. How many people do you know who have restraining orders against them and have been arrested for assaulting a cop? I've met perhaps five people in my life who have had either issue; never one who had both.

Perhaps there are people out there who know much more violent people than I do.

 

Said the Club to the Wang?

I thought that was the crow to the spade.

Er ... never mind.

There are two issues at play here, since you mention black. The most obvious is that a lot of people who feel they have a stake in protecting a person's right to pick a fight and then kill in self defense once they're losing.

The other, of course, is racism.

Danielle C. Belton notes, for The Root:

George Zimmerman got the most out of what privilege he had after being found not guilty in the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. After the verdict, Zimmerman's attorneys held a press conference, and attorney Mark O'Mara, while answering a reporter's question, remarked that if Zimmerman had been black, "He never would've been charged with a crime."

O'Mara couldn't be more wrong.

I don't know which justice system O'Mara's been operating in, but black people are more likely to get a conviction no matter who they kill—black or white—even if they claim self-defense. Especially since most of them can't afford O'Mara to represent them in the first place.

There is no privilege in claiming self-defense while black—even when killing another black person. When the verdict came down not guilty, Zimmerman had not just the jury but also statistics on his side.

A 2012 study by PBS's Frontline is getting a second look post-Zimmerman's exoneration, and it reveals that if you're going to kill in self-defense in America, you'd better be white. By analyzing data from a study by John Roman, senior analyst at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, Frontline found that in "Stand your ground" states, white people who kill black people are 354 percent more likely to be found justified in their killings. And it doesn't get much better in non-"Stand your ground" states, where that number goes down only to 250 percent.

But even when it comes to black-on-black crime or black-on-white crime, a black defendant is unlikely to get a self-defense ruling in his or her favor, whether or not the state has "Stand your ground" laws on the books ....​

I think of Homer Simpson: "Do I have to draw you a picture?"

Well, the good folks at The Root did just that, and a grim picture it is, indeed:

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​

I mean, Zimmerman's camp is really rubbing it in. Not only did Zimmerman's brother go after Martin in the wake of the verdict, suggesting the young victim was working the black market for guns, but Zimmerman's lawyer actually stood there in front of the cameras and told a bald-faced lie.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

But to kill two birds with one bullet (ha!) we might note the coincidental miracle of Alexandra Petri posting an article that isn't a complete waste of time.

It's almost good, and actually closes on a pretty serious note for an attempt to beat America's Wang with a silly stick:

Most other states give you at least a theoretical choice among heat, humidity and the constant fear that you might be eaten by an alligator. Most other states do not have such terrible PR that the Internet fears, briefly, that they might have outlawed computers. More pressingly, in most other states it is not the case that, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, “in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living. An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did—buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law, and then wait.”

The rest of it's silly. That's serious. And Stevie Wonder's got a point.​

That second bird is Coates' article, which really is worth the time.

To paraphrase an associate, not all of our neighbors who support Zimmerman are racist, they're just so appalled by the idea that one cannot pick a fight and then kill in self-defense that they're forced to make these dubious arguments in Zimmerman's defense.

I mean, they're not all like Zimmerman. They don't necessarily care what color the person they finally get to kill actually is. You know, just as long as they get to kill someone.

I mean, look at all this government regulation about self-defense interfering with their right to kill someone.

And that is what it's about.

The racism of the case in general? Well, it's Florida, after all.

And, yes, it's a deadly mix. That's why I say the SYG law and the Florida court system worked in this case exactly as they are supposed to.
____________________

Notes:

Belton, Danielle C. "Killing in Self-Defense: You Better Be White". The Root. July 16, 2013. TheRoot.com. July 16, 2013. http://www.theroot.com/views/killing-self-defense-you-better-be-white

Petri, Alexandra. "Stevie Wonder has a point. Is Florida necessary?". ComPost. July 16, 2013. WashingtonPost.com. July 16, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...evie-wonder-has-a-point-is-florida-necessary/

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "On the Killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman". The Atlantic. July 14, 2013. TheAtlantic.com. July 16, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/national...of-trayvon-martin-by-george-zimmerman/277773/

 

That's incorrect, but irrelevant in this situation. The jury is no more an authority on what happened that night than a loyal HLN viewer--and arguably less so considering that HLN and cable news viewers were privy to certain pieces of information that were not admissible in court.

 

Or both just spiteful about the break-up: apparently neither had previously called the police to report domestic violence and the judge doesn't really decide on the validity of the reason for the restraining order to a legal standard as if for a crime.

Indeed: how many of those people have also been charged with murder? There are an awful lot of people who've been charged with assaulting police officers. Even little old ladies can get road rage and hippies can get passionate and hit cops - you see things like that on TV all the time. But without a conviction with some meat there really isn't anything substantial enough to be worthy of consideration. At any one time, the US has about 2 million people in jail, serving time. Zimmerman was never one of them. If we're going to cite behaviors that might be relevant to whether he is capable of murder, those are the people we should be comparing him to.

 

That's not how it happened, as proven in the court case. Martin initiated the fight, not Zimmerman. If you are going to claim that you should be intellectually honest enough to say clearly that you understand you are going against the evidence presented and accepted by the jury and instead believe in some vast, racist conspiracy.

That data has the obvious flaw that it is not normalized for crime rates: percentage-wise blacks get self defense exonerations less often because statistically blacks commit more murders than whites. Ie, if self-defense works at the same rate for blacks and whites but blacks are twice as likely to be the defendants then the rate of self defense working will be half as much.

 

No, no, no, no, no. The jury gets its information straight from the eye and expert witnesses. Someone who watches HLN gets the information filtered by a news agency. The jury isn't an authority because they are smarter than us, they are an authority because they made their judgement by listening to unfiltered authorities.

Furthermore, information not admissible in court is not admissible because it isn't relevant and/or is prejudicial. That's exactly the type of information that causes people who were not on the jury to react based on biases and prejudices.

 

Your use of the appeal to authority is clearly a serious error in logic, for the reasons that were previously explained. As pointed out to you jurors are no more expert than anyone else. So citing them as an expert is a logical fallacy. And no, courts do not declare jurors as experts. Jurors are people selected from tax or voter rolls. They are reviewed by the court and trial attorneys, with each side trying to stack the jury with folks they think will be friendly to their case.

Jurors are triers of fact. Triers of fact are not experts. They are supposed to review the evidence and make a rational decision. But being human, that doesn’t always happen (e.g. Zimmerman case). Ohio State did a study estimating 10,000 people are wrongfully convicted every year. If that many are wrongfully convicted, there are likely many more thousands that are guilty and acquitted like Zimmerman. So the bottom line here is that you are laboring under a myth.

But not for the reason you had previously declared…the jury came to unanimous verdict according to the AC360 interview, because of the Stand Your Ground Law and not because of any change of facts. It was an interpretation of law, not of fact that persuaded the 3 jurors who believed Zimmerman was guilty of manslaughter and 2nd degree murder to vote for a not guilty verdict.

No it was not argued by the defense, but if you believe your juror, she said in the AC360 interview that it was the deciding factor that led to the not guilty verdict.

Jurors are supposed to be nonbiased. But that does not mean they are not. Jurors are not selected based on their knowledge of a particular case. Each side wants to stack the jury with jurors they think will be more sympathetic to their cause or in the case of the defense, cause a hung jury. That is why we have jury consultants who are paid big bucks. They look at much more than case knowledge. They look at personality attributes, as well as social economic factors in an attempt to find sympathetic (i.e. biased) jurors.

http://www.juryconsulting.com/

Wrong, the state never gave a theory as to who was on top. It just presented evidence and that turned out to be a tactical mistake. And the eye witness, the state’s witness, said he was unable to tell who was on top. So I don’t think anyone other than Zimmerman can say with any degree of certainty who was on top. Further it is not really relevant.

Well I seem to know them better than you my friend. So before you go accusing others of ignorance or biases, I think you would be well served if you took a very long and serious look at yourself…something about that kettle and black seems apropos here. You haven’t even been able to correctly state the very demonstrable statements made by your, “I wanna book deal”, juror during the AC360 last evening - a 20-30 minute interview.

Oh, I am sure you are very comfortable with your many biases. That was never in doubt. Many things are possible. But a courtroom is about what is probable. If I were in an altercation and had a gun and felt my life was imminent danger, I would be shooting and not yelling hysterically for help. And I don’t know of any policemen who would act differently. And we all know Zimmerman wanted to be a cop. You don’t buy a 9mm pistol and get a concealed weapons permit, if you are squeamish about using them (i.e. hysterically screaming for help). And then there is that little issue of the huge temperament change, going from hysterical to super calm in a matter of minutes and without drugs.

Further, if you paid attention to the trial, you would know that no witness concluded that Zimmerman was not guilty. So your notion that your biases match the conclusions of experts is just fantasy. It is unquestionably a notion nurtured in cognitive biases. But it doesn’t match the evidence; it is not consistent with reality. The best any witness, state or defense, said was that some aspects of the case could have occurred the way Zimmerman asserted in his latter versions of the event. That is not the same as saying they did. And then you have all of the inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s story of that evening, so overall Zimmerman’s story is just not credible, as previously pointed out to you, even Zimmerman’s attorneys admitted to some embellishment by Zimmerman.