George Zimmerman | Trayvon Martin | Disobeyed Police

George Zimmerman | Trayvon Martin | Disobeyed Police

Mistakes happen, of course, so I promptly sent off an email to Professor Coker alerting her to the error in the certainty that she would wish to issue a correction.  That email follows below.  I only sent it an hour or so ago, which is far to little time to expect a response of any kind, but should I receive a response I will naturally share it.

Dear Professor Coker,

I recently came across your Foreword for the University of Miami Law Review Summer 2014 edition, dealing with issues around Stand-Your-Ground law and other aspects of self-defense law. I myself am an attorney with a particularized interest in self-defense law, and found your article very interesting.

I did note one substantive factual error, however, that I know you would want me to bring to your attention for purposes of correction. It particularly references the Zimmerman trial.

On page 955 you write:

“The dispatcher advised him not to pursue the teenager, but Zimmerman disregarded this warning and set out on foot to follow the youth.82″

Your footnote #82 comments:

82. See id. Alafair Burke argues that had the court granted the prosecution’s request for a first
aggressor instruction, the trial outcome might have been different. See Alafair Burke, What You
May Not Know About the Zimmerman Verdict: The Evolution of a Jury Instruction, HUFFINGTON
POST (July 15, 2013, 11:19 AM), available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alafair-burke/
george-zimmerman-jury-instructions_b_3596685.html. See also FLA. STAT. § 776.041 (2013)
(“The justification described in the preceding sections . . . is not available to a person who . . . (2)
[i]nitially provokes the use of force against himself . . . .”).

The primary substantive error in your text is the mistaken order. You have the sequence as:

(1) The dispatcher advised Zimmerman not to pursue the teenager.
(2) Zimmerman disregarded this warning and set out on foot to follow the youth.

Self-defense cases are always exquisitely fact sensitive, and the sequence of events is of course critical. In fact, you’ve placed the sequence of events backwards, and stripped them of context that likely played a critical role in the jury’s conception of that night’s events.

In fact, the sequence of events as they actually occurred is:

(1) Zimmerman informed the dispatcher that Martin had fled from sight around the corner of a building.
(2) The dispatcher asked Zimmerman where Martin was running to.
(3) Unable to observe Martin from his vehicle, Zimmerman exited the vehicle and set out on foot to look around the corner of the building.
(4) The dispatcher, sensing that Zimmerman had exited his vehicle, asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin.
(5) Zimmerman affirmed that he was.
(6) The dispatcher advised Zimmerman, “We don’t need you to do that.”
(7) Zimmerman responded, “OK,” and began returning back to his vehicle.

On the way back to his vehicle Zimmerman concluded his call with 911. It was then that Zimmerman and Martin had their fateful encounter.

That my recounting of events is accurate is readily confirmable by listening to the 911 recording of Zimmerman speaking with the dispatcher. It is available from many sources, but for your convenience you can also listen to it here:

Zimmerman Trial: Myth Busters: Did Zimmerman disobey police orders to stay in car?

That post also has a transcript of the relevant portion of the recording.

As you can see, there’s a very good explanation for why the court did not grant the prosecution’s request for a first aggressor instruction. There is zero evidence–literally, none–to support a claim that Zimmerman was a first aggressor. He did not disregard dispatcher advice to not pursue the teenager, quite the contrary–he immediately complied. Indeed, it seems likely that the only reason Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to follow Martin in the first place was in the reasonable belief that the dispatcher was asking him to do so in order to ascertain Martin’s direction of travel.

Even if, however, Zimmerman HAD followed Martin in disregard of police instructions I am unaware of any state’s law that holds that merely following someone, absent malice (of which there was also no evidence) is sufficient to qualify as a first aggressor.

Frankly, the notion that a “first aggressor instruction would have saved the day” is just silly, once the actual facts of the case are known.

In any case, clients call. Again, I enjoyed your article, and I’m confident you’ll wish to make that correction.

Of course, it goes without saying that if you have actual evidence in support of your statement, I’ll adjust my understanding of the case accordingly.

Best regards,

Andrew

Andrew F. Branca
Attorney at Law (MA)
www.lawofselfdefense.com
@LawSelfDefense
Facebook: Law of Self Defense

I guess we’ll have to see what, if anything, happens.

Ferguson | Mike Brown | Trayvon Martin | George Zimmerman

Ferguson | Mike Brown | Trayvon Martin | George Zimmerman

Fwd: FW: Breaking News: Alexander Rebuts Obama's Zimmerman/Martin Statement

Alexander Rebuts Obama's Zimmerman/Martin Statement By Mark Alexander · July 19, 2013       "It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him." --Thomas Jefferson (1785) Barack Hussein Obama walked into a White House press briefing Friday afternoon, unannounced. He used the briefing to deliver his political assessment of the Zimmerman/Martin case. I have published two comprehensive critiques of this case, "Race Hustlers and Double Standards" last week, and "What Democrats Won't Say About Race" this week. Those columns challenge the Left's promotion and intentional distortion of the case as race bait, to maintain the unyielding sycophantic support of 95 percent of black voters. Without that low-information voter constituency, Democrats would win few congressional elections, and Obama would not be president. Below, I rebut the key points of Obama's latest effort to politicize the Zimmerman/Martin case. O: I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit. A: In other words, there is more political capital to be squeezed out of Martin's death. O: I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle's, to the family of Trayvon Martin. A: How about Obama offering thoughts and prayers to George Zimmerman and his family, whose lives Obama, et al., turned upside down by politicizing this case 16 months ago. Otherwise, there never would have been a trial as there was no basis for the charges -- and the jury and virtually every legal expert agree. O: There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. ... There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. ... There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. A: Obama is referencing an unfortunate stereotype, unfortunate because that stereotype is well earned. Black males between the ages of 16 and 35 commit a grossly disproportionate share of crime across our nation. Until that changes, the stereotype profile will not change, nor should it. Most people of all races have decent instincts about threats to their person or property, and they respond accordingly. The problem is not that a particular demographic of our society is subject to increased scrutiny, the problem is that demographic has earned that scrutiny. O: The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case. A: The racial disparity in arrests and convictions of blacks is commensurate with the racial disparity of crimes committed by blacks. To suggest otherwise is flatly disingenuous. O: Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It's not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. A: They are not "disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system," they are disproportionately involved in crime. And then in the same sentence Obama suggests "it's not to make excuses," he asserts "historical context" as the excuse. Post Your Opinion O: We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history. A: Actually NOT. The "violence, poverty and dysfunction" can be traced to decades of liberal social policy, which created the urban poverty plantations upon which generations of poor blacks have been enslaved, and which have become breeding grounds for an unprecedented culture of violence besetting our whole nation. O: Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? A: Apparently, to the political bank. O: I think it's important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government -- the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels. A: Then why did Obama federalize the case in the first place? Obviously he thought they would win this case. Now, he is attempting to punt the blame back to "the state and local levels." O: Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it'd be productive for the Justice Department, governors [and] mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists. A: But Obama and his NeoCom cadres fomented the distrust in this case, as they do with every political opening -- and to suggest now that he will step in with training to correct the situation is arrogant and ludicrous. We already know that Obama thinks police "act stupidly." O: I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations. A: Florida's "stand your ground" law, as well as those of 22 other states, do not encourage tragedies, they prevent them. O: I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? A: No. Zimmerman did not attack Martin. Martin attacked Zimmerman, case closed. And for the record, more blacks, as a percentage of the population in Florida, have invoked the "stand your ground" defense than whites or Hispanics -- or even "white Hispanics." Post Your Opinion O: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them? A: The best place to start would be to reverse the liberal social policies that created the problem. O: Finally, I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. A: Start with your own soul, Obama, if you haven't completely sold it out. O: You know, there has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. A: Obama launched the Zimmerman/Martin "conversation on race" so on this point, he is correct. O: Finally, ask yourself ... am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy. A: This from the titular head of the Democrat Party, which has turned Martin Luther King's challenge about color and character upside down. Indeed, for Obama and the Left, color trumps character. Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis Mark Alexander Publisher, The Patriot Post

Dean Weingarten: I am Pulling for George Zimmerman

I am Pulling for George Zimmerman

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-am-pulling-for-george-zimmerman.html

But those who push racial animosity do not give up.  His life will never be the same again.   Under the intense pressure of the personal attacks, death threats, and media scrutiny, his marriage crumbles.   It happens.   It has happened to a great many.   As part of that process, his wife plays the "domestic violence" card that has become ubiquitous in divorce proceedings.   But George is not a quitter.   He does not accept the false charges.   His wife recants.  The charges are dropped.  George prevails.

George finds solace in the arms of a physically attractive woman.   She tries to shop her attachment to the old media, who are not willing to pay enough.  George discovers that physical attractiveness does not guarantee a golden character.   George makes a wise decision to break off the relationship.   The woman  tries to play the "domestic violence" card again.  George has learned, and is wiser.  He calls the police himself.   Later, the girlfriend recants in a notarized statement to George's lawyer.   The charges are dropped and George gets his guns back.   George prevails again.

He may well need his guns.   Due to the old media assault, a third of the country think that George is a crazed killer.  The New Black Panthers who posted a reward for George, dead or alive, have never been prosecuted.  Maybe that has something to do with a Department of Justice, run by Eric Holder...

George Zimmerman girlfriend | Samantha Scheibe | Set Up

Link: http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/11/developing-zimmerman-defense-narrative-girlfriend-set-him-up/ (via shareaholic.com)

Almost as soon as George Zimmerman was arrested, a report surfaced that girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, who made the dramatic phone call to 911, had been shopping her story to national media for several weeks – but no one would pay her what she wanted.
The Orlando Sentinel confirmed that at least one national media outlet (unnamed) had such communications:

WKMG's report that the women were seeking money for interviews with national news organizations was confirmed to the Sentinel by one such organization.

Not unexpectedly, the Zimmerman defense team is letting it be known that this was a set-up

Allergic to Bull: Prejudice Towards George Zimmerman

Link: http://allergic2bull.blogspot.com/2013/09/prejudice-towards-george-zimmerman.html

The George Zimmerman case, of course, was based on prejudice from the beginning and most of it seemed to be racial prejudice.  Right at the beginning of the case involving the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I started to get a "Duke non-rape case" vibe.  Read that analysis: virtually everything I wrote held up, and what little didn't was merely because of the development of the evidence.  In the Duke case, no one was there but the accused and the accuser, and yet people half a country away acted as though they were personal eyewitnesses, and absolutely convinced of the lacrosse players' guilt.  But by the end of it, it turned out they were guilty of nothing more than a rowdy college party and positively innocent of rape.  And the same was true in the Zimmerman/Martin case.  Right away people acted like they knew what happened—often with blatant appeals to racial bigotry (i.e. "white people have been victimizing black people therefore this allegedly white man must have victimized Martin"), when what should have happened was for everyone to wait for all the facts being in.

Yesterday, we saw a microcosm of that exact same dynamic when the news hit the web that George Zimmerman had been arrested, for allegedly threatening his wife with a gun.  The press and much of the Twittersphere declared Zimmerman guilty almost immediately... based on the word of a woman who has just recently been convicted of perjury.  I mean, there is no guarantee that a perjurer would lie at every opportunity (though rules barring perjurers from testifying do make a great deal of sense), shouldn't that have given some people some pause?

But before long the story started to fall apart.  According to MSNBC (whose bias against George Zimmerman is well-documented), the police said that George didn't have a gun, and according to USA Today, Shellie Zimmerman has admitted that he didn't.  So it should be no surprise that CNN is reporting that the police absolutely will not file charges against George Zimmerman.  Shellie Zimmerman's credibility is utterly ruined.

Mind you there is still plenty of disinformation and misinformation, as well as unanswered questions, involved here.  News outlets, for instance, keep reporting that Shellie and her father are "not pressing charges."  You see, on the 911 call, Shellie claims George punched her father and smashed her iPad.  But lawyers know that the term "pressing charges" is largely mythological.  The victim doesn't get to decide if charges are filed.  The state does and they can go forward despite the victims' insistence that the charges be dropped.  But having worked in a domestic violence unit in a state district attorney's office, we often defer to the wishes of the victim in a domestic dispute if only because we expect the victim to lie about what happened.  Also the CNN article I cited above treats it as proven fact that Zimmerman smashed her iPad, but I am doubtful that they really know this to be true.

Update: Can I call it or what?  Now Shellie is back-peddling.  Previously she said he had a gun, now she is saying she assumed he had a gun because he touched his stomach.  But why didn't she just say that, instead of positively stating that he was armed and touching his gun?

More Zimmerman stuff

Boo-ya spelled backwards has additional posts on the Zimmerman trial.

PART 15: TALK AT THE SCENE, TALK ON THE STAND?

Why did Zimmerman talk when he did, and why didn't he when he didn't?

Only Zimmerman and his defense lawyers can tell you why he didn’t take the stand, but I can give you an educated guess: He didn’t have to. The state’s case had imploded even before the defense began theirs, with virtually every prosecution witness turning into a defense witness. Zimmerman’s walk-through at the scene, when everything was fresh in his mind, was already in to the jury…and it was the best evidence. There was simply nothing important enough to add.

I will continue to recommend that people involved in these confusing, high-stress incidents not submit themselves to detailed questioning and re-enactment in the immediate aftermath. That said, it worked for George Zimmerman. I will continue to warn my students that they can expect to take the stand to explain why they shot their attacker…but in this case, George Zimmerman had already done that very well during police interrogation, and had nothing to gain by repeating himself.

The Impact on the Black Community

When propagandizing media made this case out to be something other than what the evidence showed it was, a hoax had been played on the whole country. It was a particularly cruel hoax on the African-American community.

The cops

In the first installment of this series, I mentioned that the cops were among those to thank for justice having been done in this case. Let’s look at that.

Every commentator has noted that it was the police witnesses called by the state – civilian dispatcher and community watch coordinator and evidence technicians, as well as the responding and investigating officers – who cut the legs out from under the prosecution’s weak case before it could ever get to its feet. Fewer commentators have spoken of the price paid by many of those honest members of the criminal justice system.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee, a highly respected CLEO (chief law enforcement officer) resisted powerful demands from elected officials to file a case even though he knew there was nothing there. He did his duty and did the right thing. He was fired for that.

Detective Chris Serino was the lead detective in the case. He took a lot of heat for not wanting to file a case because he knew he didn’t have probable cause. He wound up as a patrolman back in uniform.

Doris Singleton was in the role of investigator on the night of the shooting. She handled things competently. She comforted Zimmerman when she saw he was emotionally devastated by having had to end a young man’s life. And she was at the rank of patrol officer at the time she testified almost a year and a half later.

Ben Kruidbos, IT director in the office of the special prosecutor, realized that the office had failed in its duty to turn over full discovery material to the defense. He fulfilled the office’s duty and got that information to Zimmerman’s defense team. As soon as the trial was over, special prosecutor Angela Corey fired him for doing what she should have done.

The aftershocks

Massad Ayoob � Blog Archive � THE ZIMMERMAN VERDICT

Massad Ayoob (Boo-ya spelled backards.  Coincidence?) has written extensively on the Zimmerman verdict.  Here is a 14-part series on the trial and verdict.  (At least 14 parts so far.  The latest one was today.)

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/13/the-zimmerman-verdict-part-1/

Several blog followers have asked me why I haven't written here (or spoken anywhere) on this, the most important armed citizen case of our time. The answer is this:

I did write on it once, on Friday, March 23, 2012.  The following day, I received a phone call from Craig Sonner, George Zimmerman's original legal counsel, to retain me on the case as an expert witness for the defense.

In the meantime, to get the commentary and analysis of the case that most of the mainstream media denied you, go to the excellent day by day writing of Andrew Branca, an attorney who specializes in this sort of case, at www.legalinsurrection.com.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/16/zimmerman-verdict-part-2-the-unarmed-teen/

"Unarmed?" Actually, NO.  The history of adjudicating deadly force actions shows that Trayvon Martin was "armed" two or three times over.
First, the haters (like the prosecution) assiduously ignored George Zimmerman's statement that while Martin was "ground-and-pounding" him, Martin saw Zimmerman's gun in its now exposed holster, told Zimmerman that he was going to die tonight, and reached for his victim's pistol.
If I'm your criminal attacker, you don't have to wait for me to shoot you before you can shoot me to defend your life, and you don't even need to wait until the gun is in my hand. If I announce my intent to murder you and reach for a gun, I'm bought and paid for right there.  And it doesn't matter whether the gun I'm reaching for is in my holster, or yours. That's why every year in America, when thugs try to grab a policeman's gun and are shot, the shootings are ruled justifiable.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/17/zimmerman-verdict-part-3-who-started-it/

The evidence indicates that Zimmerman didn't get out of his car until the operator asked where the suspicious person was, and where the police should meet Zimmerman, the complainant.  Taking that as a request for information, Zimmerman obligingly got out of the car to gather the intelligence that seemed to have been implicitly requested of him.  He was, after all, the elected (not self-appointed) captain of Neighborhood Watch, and his function as Eyes and Ears of the Police had been drilled into him and the other Watch members through the Police Department itself. When the call-taker asked if he was following the man, Zimmerman replied in the affirmative. He was then told, "You don't have to do that."

The evidence indicates that he stopped following Martin at that moment. His former rapid breathing returned to normal and wind noise from his phone stopped, consistent with his testimony that he stopped following and had lost sight of Martin. The dispatcher did not "order" him to stop following, and later admitted in court that he had no authority to do so. Nonetheless, it was clear that Zimmerman was simply following Martin to keep him in sight and report his whereabouts, not "pursuing" with any intent to "confront."

Who struck the first blow? Virtually all the evidence supports Zimmerman's account; no evidence contradicts it, and no evidence supports the theory that Zimmerman assaulted Martin first, in any way.  If as some conjecture Zimmerman had drawn the gun at the first, why did he wait until his scalp had been split open on the sidewalk and his nose smashed before he pulled the trigger? And if Martin really believed he was in danger from the man watching him, why didn't he simply call the police from the phone he was already speaking on?

Within the totality of the circumstances presented in court by the prosecution itself, it would seem that saying "Zimmerman started it" is like saying that a woman was raped "because she asked for it."

It's about evidence, not about "what-ifs." The simple fact is, no matter what some want to believe and no matter how much the brainwashers of the media have twisted the facts, there is no solid evidence to support any theory other than that Martin didn't like being watched, attacked Zimmerman violently, and was shot in self-defense by the man whose head he had been smashing against the sidewalk with potentially lethal effect.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/19/zimmerman-verdict-the-stand-your-ground-element/

The evidence showed incontrovertibly that Zimmerman, straddled by his attacker in the MMA mount and being savagely beaten while supine, could not possibly have retreated or otherwise escaped at the time he pulled the trigger.  His wise lawyers knew that from the beginning, Craig Sonner when I spoke with him in March of 2012, and Mark O'Mara and Don West when I discussed it with them a couple of months later.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/21/zimmerman-verdict-part-5-the-gun-stuff/

The take-away is not to avoid such unmeritorious courtroom attacks by carrying a .25 auto with an empty chamber. The take-away is, be able to logically explain your choice of gun and method of carry.  The defense did exactly this, to their credit.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/23/the-zimmerman-verdict-part-6-what-if-versus-what-is/

"What if Zimmerman hadn't gotten out of his car, and just driven on to his destination, the Target store?"  Well, certainly, the confrontation would not have occurred. But that pales in comparison to what if Trayvon Martin had not attacked him and smashed his head into the sidewalk? In following a strange man who was looking into windows in a community riven by burglaries and even a home invasion, Zimmerman never broke the law. Indeed, had it not ended in death, most would have appreciated him taking notice and calling the authorities…as people had done earlier, when the head of the homeowner's association in that community had chased down and captured a burglary suspect.

"What if" is not the standard of the law, nor the standard of logic. "WHAT IS" remains the standard for both.  The evidence, not a hypothetical "theory of the case," is what counts in every aspect of the real world…the real world of the courts, and the real world of the streets.
A duly empanelled jury determined the truth from the facts in evidence and the testimony presented.  Even the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses overwhelmingly favored the defense.
And that was only the evidence the jury was allowed to see.  There was much more evidence which was confirmatory to Zimmerman's account of a clear-cut self-defense shooting. We'll get to that soon in this space…and why the jury was not allowed to see it.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/24/zimmerman-verdict-part-7-why-the-jury-didnt-learn-about-trayvon-martin/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/26/zimmerman-verdict-part-8-the-quantity-of-injury-argument/

Professionals in the justice system knew that the prosecution was desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel when they tried to make it look as if George Zimmerman wasn't justified in shooting Trayvon Martin because Martin hadn't hurt him badly enough yet.
Anyone smart enough to pass a bar exam and research the laws of self-defense and use of force, would know that you don't have to sustain a gunshot wound before you shoot the criminal gunman pointing his weapon at you. Similarly, you don't have to let the guy fracture your skull or spill your brains onto the sidewalk before you are justified in stopping him with lethal force.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/28/zimmerman-verdict-part-9-the-propaganda-factor/

When Ms. Corey announced that she would bypass the grand jury, it was clear to any criminal justice professional that she was going to indict him on her own, via an offer of information. There is generally one reason why a chief prosecutor will take a case away from a grand jury: the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn't think a grand jury that has heard the evidence will deliver one.

At this point, the die was cast. The show trial was inevitable, and America had experienced a triumph of propaganda that would have been worthy of Joseph Goebbels or Josef Stalin. Even today, after the opportunity to watch three weeks of intensive trial broadcast live minute by minute which brought much of the truth to light, a majority of Americans seem to be ignorant of the facts and still convinced that a self-appointed vigilante racially profiled a black child and murdered him.  Never mind that the facts in evidence clearly showed otherwise.

When that TV station in California realized they had been pranked on the "Sum Ting Wong" broadcast, they admitted it and apologized.  The mass media, sadly, has not done the same in the Zimmerman matter.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/31/zimmerman-verdict-part-10-the-semantics/

Anyone who has trained with me in the last few years has heard me talk about what I call "combat semantics." Smart debaters know that many words in our language have multiple shades of meaning, and they'll often try to tell people that one of those words meant "B" when you used it, when in fact you really meant "A". We saw this in more ways than one in the Zimmerman case.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/04/zimmerman-verdict-part-11-rating-the-lawyers-defense/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/08/zimmerman-verdict-part-12-rating-the-lawyers-prosecution/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/12/zimmerman-verdict-part-13-angela-corey/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/18/zimmerman-verdict-part-14-the-judge/

Look deeper at preconceptions about race and self-defense - Cathy Young

Link: http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/young-look-deeper-at-conceptions-about-race-and-self-defense-1.5744782 (via shareaholic.com)

As proof of pervasive bias, some cite a June 2012 Tampa Bay Times report based on a study of cases involving self-defense claims since 2005, when Florida passed its "stand your ground law": 73 percent of defendants who killed blacks were cleared, compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white person. Yet, since most homicides were between people of the same race, this also suggests black defendants were more likely to win. Indeed, the study found that "black defendants went free 66 percent of the time in fatal cases compared to 61 percent for white defendants." In mixed-race cases, "four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free."
Of course, one study in one state and a few anecdotes do not prove a national pattern. Critics point to an Urban Institute analysis of FBI statistics for 2005-10 which shows that firearm homicides are far more likely to be ruled justified when the shooter is white and the victim is black than vice versa. But without knowledge of the specific circumstances of these homicides, it's impossible to say how much of the disparity is due to bias.

One Florida case has been widely cited as a contrast to the Zimmerman verdict and a shocking injustice: the case of Marissa Alexander, a black woman said to be serving 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to scare off her violent ex-husband. But that's not quite what happened. Alexander's "stand your ground" claim was rejected because, after the altercation with then-husband Rico Gray, she went to the garage, returned with a gun and fired a shot that Gray said narrowly missed his head (a claim backed by forensic evidence). Gray was indeed abusive, but Alexander was no innocent; she also assaulted him while out on bail for the shooting. Her 20-year sentence, required by a mandatory minimum for firearm offenses, was a travesty; her conviction was not.

George Zimmerman Trial | Legal Insurrection blog

Link: http://legalinsurrection.com/tag/george-zimmerman-trial/ (via shareaholic.com)

This blog has very extensive coverage of the trial.

JustOneMinute: Zimmerman - Waiting For More Discovery

JustOneMinute: Zimmerman - Waiting For More Discovery

On the bright side, I like the basketball metaphor! However, Zimmerman's clothes were held by the police (his wife brought him a change before he went home) and the police have held onto his gun.

Warren Piece

New Media Shames MSM in Elizabeth Warren Saga

via Breitbart Feed on 5/12/12

The inconsistency of the mainstream media's choices on newsworthiness is sometimes too absurd to fathom.
We know liberal reporters are obsessed with race, the most recent example being their reporting on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The mainstream press has also shown, in the face of falling opinion polls and revenue, they still will expend the resources to find ancient details on Mitt Romney's high school classmates or, when they want to, track down former President Barack Obama's composite ex-girlfriends. And when it comes to politicians, when the mainstream press smells any hint of an inconsistency or a cover-up, they usually pounce on and circle the politician like a gang of sharks ready to chomp into its helpless prey.
So when Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for Scott Brown's Senate seat, seemed like she was caught red-handed (no pun intended) lying about her "Native American" heritage at best, and at worst, perpetuating the falsehood so she or her employers could reap the benefits from it, it seemed like a tailor-made for the mainstream media to pounce on.
There was race. There were inconsistencies. There were walk-balks. There was a mystery -- whether Warren really had any Native American ancestors -- to be solved.
But because Warren is a darling of the liberal mainstream media, particularly among those in the D.C.-New York-Boston axis, they just ignored it. And in the old days, the story would have been swept under the rug.
But things are different now, as new media like Breitbart News flourishes while mainstream media organizations sink toward bankruptcy.
When Warren claimed she may have allowed herself to be listed as a minority or Native American in various professional listings and directories so that she could meet more people from those communities, it was Breitbart News Editor Joel Pollak -- and not the mainstream press -- who discovered that Warren never openly participated in the many events put on by Harvard's Native American student association.
When a prominent genealogical society (more on that later) told the mainstream press that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee, Breitbart News contributor Michael Patrick Leahy revealed one of Warren's ancestors was directly responsible for actually rounding up Cherokees for the infamous "Trail of Tears."
The mainstream uncritically accepted the assertion that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee, which they surely would not have done if she were anything but a darling anti-capitalist mouthpiece for them. Imagine the lengths the mainstream press would have gone to make Warren prove her ancestry if she were a conservative who was against affirmative action programs.
So, it was left to Breitbart News contributor Leahy, an amateur genealogist, to again do the work the mainstream press would not. And he found, "The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren's claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent."
Leahy contacted an official in the Oklahoma Court Clerk's office in Guthrie, Oklahoma and discovered the marriage license application in question was not stored and probably not even created. He also discovered, almost unbelievably, that no mainstream media organization had even contacted this official to inquire about the supposed document on which Warren's claims of being partly Native American rested. Leahy also found that the bride and groom, on the official license of the couple in question, left blank the column where they could have indicated their races.
Mr. Leahy also discovered the "source" for the Warren's claim Warren is a 2006 family newsletter, which the New England Historical Genealogical Society found sufficient to deem the assertion an indisputable fact. The Genealogical Society, caught red-handed, has changed spokesmen and now refuses to comment further on this case. But the damage has been done, as the mainstream media ran with their original assessment, now all but proven bogus.
And then there was the question of who was responsible for listing Warren as a Native American: the professor or her employers. With all the inconsistencies between Warren and Harvard's accounts, the mainstream media should have made trips en masse to the university. But, of course, they did not.
Instead, Breitbart News reporter John Sexton discovered both Harvard's and Warren's stories did not add up. Sexton discovered a letter written by a Harvard administration official, in response to a New York Times story played up Derrick Bell's complaints about the lack of diversity at Harvard Law School, indicating that Harvard had a Native American law professor, which was a reference to Warren. Because that letter was no longer available in the online New York Times archives, Sexton had to track down the letter at his local library.
Further, Sexton discovered that Warren most likely volunteered information that she was Native American to Harvard so the school could properly fill out its reports to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) because Harvard is a federal contractor.
As Sexton wrote, "the employer may visually identify the race of the employee, but in Warren's case that seems unlikely. No one looking at Warren would likely designate her as Native American. ... So the most likely way this information became part of Harvard's official records is via 'post-employment records' ... which Warren would voluntarily have filled out herself."
And with all this evidence and work put right in front of the mainstream media, they still have not put pressure on Warren, which proves the importance of new media and how much it is needed.
Further, this episode reveals two things Andrew Breitbart always said about the mainstream media and its members. First, they are often lazy and incompetent. Second, they protect their own.
Thank goodness there are new media reporters like Messrs. Pollak, Leahy, and Sexton to keep the mainstream media -- and the liberal politicians they seek to protect and coddle -- accountable.

The Trayvon Martin Nightmare

 

 

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The Trayvon Martin Nightmare

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Arnold S. Trebach on 4/19/12

The Martin-Zimmerman matter is a nightmare because of the way in which government officials, private citizens, and the media have made blunder after blunder in taking a sad situation and provoking it into a national and international catastrophe. Instead of acting as the leader of the nation and seeking to calm the situation, President Obama engaged in blatant racial pandering by saying the dead youngster would have looked like his son if he had one.

Attorney General Holder has been even worse and I assume that he is working with the active approval or indeed the encouragement of Mr. Obama and the White House staff. Of all the sins committed in recent months by the Obama-Holder Justice Department, one of the worst is the refusal to curb the blatant criminal activities of the New Black Panther Party. This hate group has taken to the Florida streets and has openly put a $10,000 bounty on the head of George Zimmerman, dead or alive. If the attorney general needs legal advice on what federal statutes have been violated by the Panthers, I will seek out some freshman law student in Washington and send him down the street to the Justice Department.

Such shameful racial pandering gets votes, lots of them. There is an important election coming in November. As a veteran of the original civil rights movement, I simply cannot believe that this is happening to the country that I love. I have the same angry, sad feeling that I had when I sat in a civil rights hearing in July 2010 and watched J. Christian Adams blow the whistle on in his former colleagues in the Civil Rights Division for their racist behavior in the performance of their official duties. The current disturbing actions of Messrs. Obama and Holder demonstrate that Adams' seminal book, Injustice, was sadly prophetic.

For many years in the distant past my specialty was investigating and reporting on police and mob brutality to blacks and other minorities. My investigations often were conducted in the hot sun of Mississippi or Alabama or in the cold of beautiful downtown Detroit as part of my duties as a federal civil rights official. Time after time I documented cases of such unlawful actions against innocent black citizens. (For what it is worth, I was helped in my Detroit investigations by a little known young black lawyer named John Conyers.) Moreover, on several occasions I confronted the brutal police and mob leaders and sought to convince them to curb their racist activities.

The available evidence in the Zimmerman-Martin case bears no resemblance to the actual cases of brutality that I documented. The evidence, to start with, reveals George Zimmerman to be a minority citizen who had black friends, including two young kids he mentored. Joe Oliver, a black friend with media experience, has felt impelled to come to his defense in the public forum, and continues to do so. No reliable evidence shows Zimmerman to be a violent bigot. No reliable evidence supports the notion, put forth by many black and white officials, that he hunted Martin down and shot him like a dog.

While other evidence may appear that will change my mind -- and it is evidence not wild hysterical charges that should rule here -- the current available evidence suggests that in his legal capacity as a neighborhood watch volunteer Zimmerman became concerned that Martin might have been one of the burglars who had been breaking into homes in that neighborhood. The two had some conversation and soon, according to Zimmerman, Martin hit him, knocked him down, and jumped on him. There was a struggle on the ground and Martin tried to get Zimmerman's pistol which was in a holster at his waist. Zimmerman somehow got his gun in his hand. One shot was fired and the young man died. That was indeed a tragedy but the evidence suggests that the shot was fired in self-defense.

Had George Zimmerman been intent on killing the young man, as many people have claimed, he could have taken his gun out and shot him several times from a safe distance. There is no evidence of that murderous intent. To the contrary, there is evidence that Zimmerman deeply regrets the shooting and is suffering from post-traumatic stress. He believes that his life has been ruined. Because of the massive number of threats on his life, including threats from the Black Panthers, he and some of his family members have been hiding and living in fear.

Think of that fact. An alleged assailant, a minority member who claimed he is innocent, has been hiding and living in fear of black mobs. In America. In the year 2012. Now, George Zimmerman has been charged by the special prosecutor, Angel Corey, with second degree murder and is in jail awaiting further proceedings.

WHILE THE FACTS OF THE CASE have been reviewed time and time again in the media, here and around the world, I have just gone back and looked at a few key pieces of objective fact that seem to have been forgotten in the racial hysteria.

Zimmerman claimed self-defense, a legal defense that has been in existence for centuries, long before the new stand-your-ground laws expanded on that defense. I have not found a single solid contrary fact that has been brought forth in all the emotional weeks since the sad death of Trayvon Martin. In her amateurish statement of probable cause for the second degree murder charge, Special Prosecutor Angela Corey did not cite a single such solid contrary fact. Her actions seem to be in response to the public protests and not to any new objective facts. It is just possible that Ms. Corey could be facing ethical charges like Mike Nifong, the ill-fated prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case.

In my experience the facts that come out soon after an incident occurs are usually the facts that tell the truth. Perry Mason moments are as rare as hen's teeth. Officer Timothy Smith arrived within minutes of the shooting. He wrote in his report: "Zimmerman stated that he had shot the subject [Martin] and he was still armed. Zimmerman complied with all of my verbal commands and was secured in handcuffs. Located on the inside of Zimmerman's waist band, I removed a black Kel Tek 9mm PF9 semi auto handgun and holster. While I was in such close contact with Zimmerman, I could observe that his back appeared to be wet and was covered in grass, as if he had been lying on his back on the ground. Zimmerman was also bleeding from the nose and back of his head."

That report also stated, "Zimmerman was placed in the rear of my police vehicle and was given first aid by the SFD [Sanford Fire Department]. While the SFD was attending to Zimmerman, I overheard him state, 'I was yelling for someone to help me, but no one would help me.'"

These objective facts are fully supportive of Zimmerman's version of the incident. They have not been rebutted except by mass hysteria and by charges of racial discrimination on the part of police and prosecutors.

Zimmerman agreed to talk to the police investigators and even took a voice stress test while in custody. This is a type of lie detector test used by hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. It was reported that Zimmerman's voice test came out clean.

Yet, there was a conflict in the opinions of the local law enforcement officials as to the proper course of action. Lead homicide investigator Chris Sereno said he did not believe Zimmerman's story and wanted to file an affidavit charging him with manslaughter. However, Police Chief Bill Lee and State Attorney Norman Wolfinger looked at the same set of facts and concluded that there was not enough evidence to support a conviction. Since Wolfinger was in the superior position, the case was dropped and Zimmerman was released. This action was consistent with centuries of Anglo-American legal traditions enshrining the presumption of innocence.

However, those centuries of traditions mean nothing in the current racial quagmire afflicting America and its legal system. Race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the New Black Panthers soon took the lead in demanding that Zimmerman be arrested and jailed. It seemed as if the nation's social fabric was being torn asunder by racial hate and mob hysteria.

And where are our president, our attorney general, and the entire federal law enforcement community in this nightmare? They seem to be on the side of the mobs. Instead, they -- starting with Messrs. Obama and Holder -- should be saying that they understand American history and American legal traditions and they know that even if Zimmerman appeared to be guilty, the forces of justice would stand solidly in favor of fair and peaceful judicial process. They should be shouting out from the Rose Garden of the White House that the era of lynching is long dead and we will not let mobs of any color revive it, that we will protect the judicial process and we will protect Mr. Zimmerman -- with federal troops if necessary.

IN THE RECENT PAST the mobs were white and the objects of their hate were black, as at many efforts to integrate schools in compliance with court orders. National and local police and military forces were ordered out to hold the white mobs back. Now one of the main inciters of violence is Al Sharpton, our president's designated leader of outreach to the black community. Moreover, there seems to be no attempt to curb the Black Panthers, who a few years ago were also given favorable treatment by Mr. Holder's Justice Department. I repeat: this is a nightmare for all of us, including the millions of decent black citizens who will take years to recover from this trauma.

Brooding over this entire situation is the obscene level of black crime in America. That subject is too often ignored. Normally, it receives little national attention unless the assailants are white and the victims are black. Black leaders and liberal politicians routinely deny that the high level of black crime even exists. Numerically, as is well known, black on black crime is the sad rule. However, black on white crime frequently occurs, which was the case in another recent murder case in Florida, one that has been largely overlooked by the national media. It has also been ignored by President Obama and his entire administration.

The evidence in this case is not in dispute and it is truly a horrible racial hate crime. Last April, Shawn Tyson, black and aged 16, confronted two white British tourists in a Sarasota public housing neighborhood where Tyson lived. The young man was raised by a single mother; no father was in the house. The Britons were James Kouzaris, 24, and James Cooper, 25. Both were well-educated young professionals on a carefree holiday in Florida. It was early in the morning and both were quite drunk when they wandered into Tyson's area, the Old Projects in Newtown, a section of Sarasota. Tyson confronted them with a pistol and demanded money. When the two said they did not have any money, Tyson replied that he had "something for your ass." The young murderer bragged to friends later that when he started shooting, the victims started crying and pleaded for their lives. Tyson was unaffected by the pleas of the "crackers" and continued shooting until both were dead. At the trial, which concluded recently, virtually no defense was offered by Shawn Tyson. He was convicted and was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Paul Davies and Joe Hallett, friends of the murdered Britons, attended the trial and issued emotional statements about their dead friends and about the lack of compassion shown to their parents, particularly in light of the massive amount of compassion shown recently to the parents of Trayvon Martin. Davies said, "We would like to publicly express our dissatisfaction at the lack of any public or private message of support or condolence from any American governing body or, indeed, President Obama himself. Mr. Kouzaris [the father of one of the victims] has written to President Obama on three separate occasions and is yet to even receive the courtesy of a reply. It would perhaps appear that Mr. Obama sees no political value in facilitating such a request or that the lives of two British tourists are not worth ten minutes of his time."

Thus, there is tragedy and heartbreak all around us now. Our president should take the lead to defuse the mob mentality roiling our society. He should disarm and prosecute the Black Panthers. If nothing else, he must launch massive efforts to curb black crime, whether involving black victims or victims of other races. He must see to it that George Zimmerman and his family are provided with police or military protection. And of course it might be a nice idea if he called the parents of Cooper and Kouzaris and expressed his condolences for their tragic losses in our country. If our president cannot accomplish these civilized actions, he has finally and fully forfeited the trust of those who voted for him.

 

 

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Stand Your Ground, America

 

 

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Stand Your Ground, America

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Peter Ferrara on 4/18/12

How do you stand your ground if you are lying on your back getting pummeled in the face?

That one question alone shows that Stand Your Ground laws are not at issue in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin controversy. But the tragic death of young Trayvon is only seen by those on the left as a valuable media opportunity to further exploit the millions of gullible Americans to advance the left's political interests and agenda. Indeed, we have some people in positions of influence, both leading politicians and figures in the major media, who see their interest as exploiting the death to incite race unrest across America.

There is only one solution to this budding insurrection. Enforce the damn law!! That applies most directly in Florida now, where conservatives are in power, and they have to start acting like it.

The Perfect Resolution for Zimmerman
Enforcing the damn law is exactly what is happening now in the Zimmerman case, and it's the perfect resolution for all concerned.

This case needs to be resolved by a jury, and can only be resolved by a jury, which is the only way to satisfy the public interest in this matter. There are too many people in America today who will not listen to the evidence, and will follow only their own racial prejudice.

But the evidence needs to be laid out in a court of law, and resolved by a jury of Zimmerman's peers. That is the only way to satisfy the fair minded that justice has been done. I will discuss those who are not fair-minded below.

Despite what I say about the evidence below, this is not too much of a burden for Zimmerman. Even staunch advocates of gun rights and self-defense need to recognize that if someone is shot and killed even in self-defense, the ensuing investigation is not going to be easy for the shooter, in any event. Indeed, it should not be. Moreover, a jury trial gives Zimmerman the opportunity he needs to clear his name.

But based on what the established evidence on the public record indisputably shows, Zimmerman is going to be easily found innocent of the charges. That is more than well proven by eyewitness testimony and the physical evidence, despite what those who think they will benefit politically or socially from race turmoil want to believe.

Zimmerman himself is from a ethnically mixed family. He has a history of positive relations with African-Americans, even voluntarily tutoring black children at his own expense. He also has a distinguished history as a neighborhood watch captain, providing evidence leading to the capture, arrest, and conviction of criminals before.

On the night of the shooting, Zimmerman going to the store himself observed a black youth, 6 foot plus, high school football player walking alone in the rain and looking around, possibly for opportunity, in a gated community that had been robbed many times before. Zimmerman knew the community's residents, and correctly identified the youth Trayvon Martin as not one of those residents.

Zimmerman properly called 911 to report a suspicious person in the neighborhood. When Zimmerman indicated he was following the youth, the operator told him, "You don't need to do that." Zimmerman was not legally obligated to obey that suggestion. There is nothing illegal about following what you think is a suspicious person in your neighborhood. Based on these facts, this is not even a case of racial profiling.

But Zimmerman obeyed the suggestion anyway. The taped conversation with the operator showed he left the trail to go find an address so a cop could come by and pick up the investigation. While Zimmerman was walking back to his car after reporting the address to the 911 operator, as he later told police, Trayvon Martin came up behind Zimmerman and asked Zimmerman if he had a problem with him. Zimmerman whirled to say "No." Martin replied, "You do now," and proceeded to punch him in the nose, breaking the nose and knocking him down.

Martin then jumped on top of Zimmerman, grabbing his head and repeatedly slamming it into the ground. Zimmerman is recorded on a 911 call repeatedly screaming "help!"

Zimmerman was licensed with a conceal and carry permit to carry a handgun, which he had with him that night inside his waistbelt. One news report stated that Martin saw the gun and said, "Now you're dead," going for the weapon. But Zimmerman got there first, using it to shoot Martin in the chest once, killing him.

These facts are corroborated by the physical evidence as well as eyewitness testimony, medical and police records, and taped recordings, including Zimmerman's own uncontradicted testimony, which is part of the record. The police report recorded the broken nose and head injuries, which are apparent in a video tape of Zimmerman at the police station thereafter. The police report also records grass and grass stains on the back of Zimmerman's shirt. The coroner's report stated that the gunshot was at close range.

Regardless of the facts, we can say that it was a tragedy that the young Trayvon Williams died in any event. But the boy was not well served by a national social culture that led the cute kid we see in the photos celebrated in the national media to identify with gangsta culture as he matured into his later teens, which is also confirmed by photographic evidence.

We will see the full evidence at trial, but I don't know of any evidence that even contradicts the above statement of the facts. And if these are the facts, then what Zimmerman did was fully justified under the law of self-defense to save his life. That does not involve any stand your ground defense. As noted at the outset, Zimmerman at the time of the shooting was flat on his back struggling for his life, not standing his ground. So stand your ground is not even an issue in this case. What is involved is just standard, common law, self-defense.

Moreover, the legal standard for conviction is beyond a reasonable doubt. There is just no way that standard can be met with all of the evidence supporting the above facts. In addition, note that for a conviction the jury must be unanimous. It takes just one juror to insist that the evidence does not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt for the defendant to go free. You can't stuff the jury box with votes from illegal aliens to win.

I predict the prosecutor will argue that in following Martin, Zimmerman lost his right to self-defense. Under the law, an attacker cannot claim the right to self-defense for what ensues thereafter. But a neighborhood watch patrol captain following a suspicious person in the neighborhood whom he reports to the police has not committed an attack that forfeits his right to self-defense under the law. That would amount to saying that when Zimmerman was attacked by Martin he had a duty to die. That is the position of Al Sharpton and Joy Reid, and the Washington Post and the New York Times. But that is not the law. Such a ruling would effectively hold that every neighborhood watch volunteer in America loses his or her right of self-defense just by monitoring the neighborhood.      

Zimmerman has worthy defense counsel. They need to ensure that the case is decided by a multi-racial jury with each member of the highest intelligence possible. If the prosecutor tries to eliminate all Hispanics (Zimmerman's mother is South American) from the jury, such a discriminatory practice has already been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The judge will instruct the jury that they must unanimously find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to convict, and on the legal standard for self-defense.

The Justice of Stand Your Ground
Over a century before the NRA began promoting Stand Your Ground laws in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1895 in Beard v. U.S. that an innocent person under attack was "not obliged to retreat, but was entitled to stand his ground, and meet any attack upon him with a deadly weapon, in such a way and with such force as… [he] honestly believed, and had reasonable grounds to believe, was necessary to save his own life, or to protect himself from great bodily injury."

Stand Your Ground laws only became necessary when states began to adopt laws, through either the legislature or the courts, imposing a duty to retreat whenever possible on victims of violent attacks in public. At least one state, Massachusetts, even adopted that duty to flee when attacked in your own home, which is the rule in England.

The point of Stand Your Ground laws is to eliminate the duty to retreat when you are attacked in public. That has now been adopted as the law in half the states. Almost every state I believe has adopted the Castle Doctrine, which says you do not have the duty to retreat from your own home when attacked there.

The duty to retreat would not apply to the Zimmerman case in any state, however, because the duty only applies when it is possible to retreat. For Zimmerman lying on his back with a 6 foot 3 high school football player sitting on top of him slamming his head into the sidewalk, there was no possibility of retreat. So Zimmerman would qualify for self-defense under the laws of every state, even Massachusetts.

Stand Your Ground laws only involve the simple logic of justice. The attacker does not have the legal or moral right to attack the victim. The victim has the moral and should have the legal right to remain where he is if he wants to do so. But the duty to retreat says the violent attacker has the legal authority to impose a legal obligation on the victim to flee the scene. That is not moral or just.

Liberals argue that if victims will just flee when possible then that will reduce deaths or injuries to violent attackers. But the violent attackers can eliminate any possibility of their injury or death from such incidents by simply choosing to stop attacking innocent victims.

Moreover, economist John Lott, an expert in applying regression analysis to use of guns and violent crime, rightly argues that the most important issue is, "Did the [Stand Your Ground] laws increase total deaths? More criminals might be killed in justifiable self-defense, but if the number of innocent lives lost falls by more than the deaths of criminals rises, is that really a bad thing?" The answer to that question is not only no, but Hell No!

Lott reports that the latest edition of his book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010), includes the only published, refereed academic study of Stand Your Ground laws, which "found that states adopting Stand Your Ground/Castle doctrine laws reduced murder rates by 9 percent and overall violent crimes by 11 percent. That implies an annual drop in murders that is about 10 times more than the entire measured increase in civilian justifiable homicides from 2000 to 2010 -- and it isn't even clear that there was an actual increase."

Lott argues the supposed increase in civilian justifiable homicides since 2000 is due to increased reporting of that statistic from states and jurisdictions within states, not because of an actual increase. He notes as well that between 2000 and 2010 the much more numerous justifiable homicides by police increased by 25 percent, and that statistic does not suffer from any change in reporting practices during that time.

Lott further explains why the Duty to Retreat imposes an unreasonable burden on victims, saying, "There have been many cases where victims have been chased and knocked down a couple of times before firing in self-defense, but prosecutors thought that the victim still could have done more to retreat before firing their gun." He adds, "forcing victims to take time to retreat puts their lives in jeopardy," which is supported by the above statistics showing that replacing Duty to Retreat with Stand Your Ground actually reduces overall deaths sharply.

Enforce the Damn Law
Florida is governed by top notch conservatives, such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has tremendous future political potential, and Tea Party Governor Rick Scott. They are the ones with the clear duty now, to enforce the law and maintain public order.

What is on the horizon is that race hustlers like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party will attempt to intimidate judge and jury by agitating mob violence. Even more obvious is the threat of extreme mob violence when the jury acquits Zimmerman.

What Bondi or Scott or both need to do is to hold a press conference and announce that the public order will be maintained and mob violence will not be tolerated. They may think they are in a tough spot now, but their political futures will be obliterated if they stand by while Sharpton, who has incited mobs to kill before, and/or Jackson or the New Black Panther Party incite racial riots that result in the death of innocents.

Scott needs to announce that the integrity of the legal and jury process, and public order, will be enforced by the National Guard if necessary, which will be armed and on high alert until after the jury trial is completed. And Bondi needs to announce that if Sharpton or anyone else does incite racial violence, the agitators will be arrested and prosecuted under state laws.

 

 

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Does Constitution's double jeopardy ban protect Zimmerman?

 

 

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Does Constitution's double jeopardy ban protect Zimmerman?

via Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog by Steve Sailer on 4/11/12

Assume for a moment that a jury finds the state of Florida's case for second degree murder unconvincing beyond a reasonable doubt, refuses to compromise to a lower charge, and frees George Zimmerman, thus setting off riots. 

Is he then free for good, under the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy?

Of course not. As seen in the two trials of the cops who whomped Rodney King, the government gets two shots at defendants whose unsatisfactory verdicts cause black riots. 

Of course, in the Rodney King trials, the first one was a state trial and the second one a federal trial. As everybody knows, when it comes to Bill of Rights protections, state governments and federal governments don't have anything to do with each other in the slightest. That's why the states can do anything they want regarding civil rights, such as having an established state church. You see, Constitutional rights only apply to the Federal government. 

Oh, wait ... that's how it was in 1790, but that got changed a long, long time ago. Well, never mind about that ...

Okay, the real reason the LAPD cops weren't protected by the 5th Amendment's prohibition on double jeopardy is that their two trials were on utterly separate charges. The first trial was on charges of whomping Rodney King and the second trial was on charges of violating Rodney King's civil rights by whomping him: totally different!

Also, you might think that the second trial was inherently likely to be biased since the jurors were under vast pressure to convict so that Los Angeles wouldn't be burned down again by drunken mobs. How can you have a fair trial with a vengeful horde standing in the wings ready to loot, rape, and pillage if they don't like the verdict?

I think, however, you'll find that you've just answered your own question.

Seriously, the most interesting thing I saw about the second Rodney King trial, in which two officers were acquitted and two convicted, was an interview with three of the jurors soon afterwards. I believe it was in the New York Times, but I've never been able to find it online. At the very end of the interview, tossed in as aside, was the stunning revelation by the three jurors that they had only voted to convict based on the last of the 60 or so blows the videotape showed landing on King. They had spent a large amount of time studying the full videotape (not the truncated part shown on TV) in slow motion and had concluded that only the very last of all the blows could be seen beyond a reasonable doubt as unnecessary to subduing the large and energetic King.

My jaw fell about six inches reading this, but as usual with most things that interest me, this fact seems to have disappeared down the memory hole without leaving a ripple in the Narrative. So, maybe I'm just imagining it all ...

My overall opinion of the Rodney King case is what I've always told my sons when giving them "The Talk:" if you make the cops chase you at 100 mph, you get their adrenaline up. And you really don't want to do that because they will likely do very bad things to you when they finally catch you because they will be so worked up they will have a hard time controlling themselves.  It's like the end of a fox hunt in England. The hounds don't carefully eat the fox after they finally catch it, they rip it to shreds because the dogs are so overwhelmed with adrenaline. 

Moreover, Rodney himself had plenty of adrenaline flowing, too, so he put up a helluva fight. (His friend in the front seat calmly stayed in the car and was untouched.)

Something I've noticed about myself is that I'm the opposite of most people in that I tend to find deciding upon the morality of specific, idiosyncratic cases unappealing. It looks like to me that the cases that most get people worked up over who is the good guy and who is the bad guy tend to be the cases that are most arguable. I look at the Rodney King story and say, wow, that's not very good, how can we more often avoid that kind of thing from now on?

Most folks' turns of mind are judgmental, retrospective, and moralistic. My turn of mind is probabilistic, future-oriented, and technocratic. So, for example, the Rodney King case seems to have been an example of the bad consequences of a 100 mph chase. But you can't let criminals escape just by driving away fast. So, the best thing to do is to discourage criminals from, in the first place, trying to get away by driving 100 mph. How? By making sure they almost always get caught. And, indeed, it appears the LAPD actually has managed to get better at tracking fugitives with helicopters, so that they are now less likely to try it. 

Here's another technocratic idea: as we know, whomping hell out of Rodney King with batons came about in part because LAPD officers weren't allowed anymore to use the windpipe-closing chokehold that they had formerly been taught to use on out-of-control arrestees. The problem was that cops would periodically choke people to death, especially black guys who had really pissed them off. Was this because cops were seized by an irrational, uncaused hatred of black guys or because black guys tend more often to do things that really piss cops off? The first answer is the only socially acceptable one.

So, the two dozen cops trying to apprehend Rodney King saw themselves as having not much alternative to bouncing truncheons off Rodney until he decided to come quietly. (Plus, they'd been chasing him at 100 mph, so whomping him just seemed like a good idea at the time.) 

To me, it seemed like there has to be some kind of technological improvement that was better than either whomping or wading in and getting a chokehold. And, indeed, we've seen police forces equipping cops with stand-off weapons such as tasers and pepper spray.

P.S. Commenter gwern found an article from the LA Times, not the NY Times as I recalled. (I was a subscriber to the NY Times in Chicago at the time, but I was vacationing at my parents' house in LA at the time of the verdict in the second trial.)

> Jurors also played and replayed the best evidence in the case--the videotape of the beating that had been taken by an amateur and enhanced by the FBI.
>
> "We went through it frame by frame, slow-motion, fast-motion, God I don't know how many times we watched that thing," Juror No. 9 said.
>
> The tape, made by a bystander, could not answer all their questions. It was blurry at one crucial moment after King was struck and fell to the ground. Some jurors said they could see Powell using his baton to bash the fallen King in the head. But others had difficulty seeing head blows, even when the tape was viewed frame by frame.
>
> All could see a powerful blow that Powell later landed across King's chest. King was on the ground at the time, on his back.
>
> "That chest blow was unreasonable and we felt it was not to effect an arrest but just to hurt the guy," No. 9 said. "That convinced about a third of us."
>
> Powell's laughter while making a radio call to request an ambulance for King also contributed to jurors' impressions that he had acted callously. But the panel stopped short of taking a vote.

So, to the extent that this is the article I remembered, it doesn't say that it was the last blow that led to the conviction, just that there was one blow that was seen by a significant fraction of the jury as unjustified beyond a reasonable doubt. But, in any case, that's awfully different from The Narrative.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

 

 

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