George Zimmerman

[ruckman101]

I have never felt the need or have ever wished that I had a gun.

When living essentially in the wild, many many people, including the guy I bought the place from, suggested I invest to protect myself from bear, cougar and intruders. Never did. Don't regret the decision.

There had been a murder on the property, at a party, dick waving stupidity.



neal

[pj]

Neal, Colin and others'

Below is the Florida law in question, please take note about 2/3rds of the way down. It will explain why no one has been arrested. as of yet. It looks like someone in the law enforcement arena will have to have "probable cause" to effect an arrest. If they later lose in a court case and it is determined that the probable cause they used was insufficent, it looks like there is going to be a lot of money paid to the wrongly accused.

So I think the authorities are getting their case in order to present to a grand jury, so that all the i's are dotted and t's crossed.

2011 Florida Statutes CHAPTER 776 JUSTIFIABLE USE OF FORCE[18]

776.012 Use of force in defense of person.—A person is justified in using force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. However, a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if:

(1) He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony; or
(2) Under those circumstances permitted pursuant to s. 776.013.

776.013 Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm.—

(1) A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force was used was in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle, or if that person had removed or was attempting to remove another against that person’s will from the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle; and
(b) The person who uses defensive force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry or unlawful and forcible act was occurring or had occurred.

(2) The presumption set forth in subsection (1) does not apply if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force is used has the right to be in or is a lawful resident of the dwelling, residence, or vehicle, such as an owner, lessee, or titleholder, and there is not an injunction for protection from domestic violence or a written pretrial supervision order of no contact against that person; or
(b) The person or persons sought to be removed is a child or grandchild, or is otherwise in the lawful custody or under the lawful guardianship of, the person against whom the defensive force is used; or
(c) The person who uses defensive force is engaged in an unlawful activity or is using the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle to further an unlawful activity; or
(d) The person against whom the defensive force is used is a law enforcement officer, as defined in s. 943.10(14), who enters or attempts to enter a dwelling, residence, or vehicle in the performance of his or her official duties and the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person entering or attempting to enter was a law enforcement officer.

(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

(4) A person who unlawfully and by force enters or attempts to enter a person’s dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle is presumed to be doing so with the intent to commit an unlawful act involving force or violence.

(5) As used in this section, the term:

(a) “Dwelling” means a building or conveyance of any kind, including any attached porch, whether the building or conveyance is temporary or permanent, mobile or immobile, which has a roof over it, including a tent, and is designed to be occupied by people lodging therein at night.
(b) “Residence” means a dwelling in which a person resides either temporarily or permanently or is visiting as an invited guest.
(c) “Vehicle” means a conveyance of any kind, whether or not motorized, which is designed to transport people or property.

776.032 Immunity from criminal prosecution and civil action for justifiable use of force.—

(1) A person who uses force as permitted in s. 776.012, s. 776.013, or s. 776.031 is justified in using such force and is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force, unless the person against whom force was used is a law enforcement officer, as defined in s. 943.10(14), who was acting in the performance of his or her official duties and the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person was a law enforcement officer. As used in this subsection, the term “criminal prosecution” includes arresting, detaining in custody, and charging or prosecuting the defendant.

(2) A law enforcement agency may use standard procedures for investigating the use of force as described in subsection (1), but the agency may not arrest the person for using force unless it determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful.

(3) The court shall award reasonable attorney’s fees, court costs, compensation for loss of income, and all expenses incurred by the defendant in defense of any civil action brought by a plaintiff if the court finds that the defendant is immune from prosecution as provided in subsection (1).

776.041 Use of force by aggressor. —The justification described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who:

(1) Is attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of, a forcible felony; or

(2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless:

(a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or
(b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.

[BellePlaine]

My apologies to everyone for my monopolizing this thread. I'm indulging my curiosity and trying to hone my debate/communication skills.

More significant then the law enforcement getting to judge "probably cause" before an arrest, I found this bit the most interesting:

776.041 Use of force by aggressor. —The justification described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who:

(1) Is attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of, a forcible felony; or

(2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless:

(a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or

Was Zimmerman heading directly to his truck as he was attacked? If not, he can't claim to have "exhausted every reasonable means to escape...".

(b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.

Does crying count as "indicates clearly"? If Zimmerman could convince a jury that it was him crying on the tape (and maybe it was) then perhaps this is his best defense.

These are the questions that we've been debating, thanks pj for bringing us the law!

[ruckman101]

Don't get me wrong, the guy who murdered the other guy at a party on the property I bought was convicted of murder and died in prison.

I met the murdered man's son one morning. He was strolling along the walk past my house in hunter's orange and toting a rifle. I went outside and gave him my standard line when dealing with concerns, "Excuse me, can I help you?" Opens the door to "Who are you and why are you here?"

He told me the owner of the property had given him permission to hunt or at least walk through to hunt on. I told him I was the owner, for over a year or so now, and I didn't know him. Then he told me it had been his father that had been murdered at the party on the place.

And what of the murderer? Did he have family? No one wins.

I understand the attraction. I'm pulled to bb guns. Haven't put my eye out yet. There's a cult encouraged, exploited by media et al around guns and might is right. And when I really have to indulge in that cliche, I watch episodes of the short lived TV series "Sledge Hammer".

Similar language to castle laws? Haven't parsed the legalize yet pj, but suspect the legal system would have supported those arguments anyway without another layer of legalese draped over things, Florida's law included. So why does my gut wrench? Why my sense that these new laws green light vigilanteism?

No apologies needed BellePlaine. Still learning myself.



neal

[ruckman101]

Ahhh, stand your ground, castle gun laws of course were crafted by ALEC. Not sure why. Where's the benefit to corporate profit? Reduce us all to felons? No voting rights? Prison labor? Private prison industry? FEMA camps? Oh my things can quickly spin conspiratorial.

Regardless, tragic. Political, you betcha. Remember Terry Schaivo.


neal

[Amskeptic]

Ahhh, stand your ground, castle gun laws of course were crafted by ALEC. Not sure why. Private prison industry?

Good grief. Even my crazier conspiracy fears get exceeded by reality these days.
Colin

[Lanval]

Ahhh, stand your ground, castle gun laws of course were crafted by ALEC. Not sure why. Private prison industry?

Good grief. Even my crazier conspiracy fears get exceeded by reality these days.
Colin

What makes the crazy conspiracy theories tenable is that quite often, truth is stranger than fiction.

ML

[BellePlaine]

Food for thought from the WSJ, 4/4/12

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 26300.html

Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin
The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

By SHELBY STEELE

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a "hoodie," a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: "I will take you out!" There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon," said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family's side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, "There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement." And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon's parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth.

The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth. O.J. Simpson was innocent by the poetic truth that the justice system is stacked against blacks. Trayvon was a victim of racist stereotyping—though the shooter never mentioned his race until asked to do so.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.

When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.

And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon's sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the '60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin.

[ruckman101]

Wow. He believes the conservative myths. Unbelievable.


neal

[BellePlaine]

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

Had to look up the story of Emmett Till. Wow! I feel sick. White guilt? I don't know, honestly, maybe a touch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

[ruckman101]

Alright, let me pull a couple of sections that cause me concern from the legalese pj proffered.

I'd like to find the version ALEX wrote up, but that's tough. Secretive and all ALEX be. And it might be that what ALEX wrote up was based on Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, now packaged as the "Castle Doctrine" by ALEX and up for a vote in a state near you. I kinda doubt it though. Somehow I suspect "Stand Your Ground" was the Beta version.

Florida's "green light to kill scary on the street law* (*my phrase)" underlies all the other issues regarding this tragic incident fanned and flamed to political hay by pundits, candidates and media.


(1) A person who uses force as permitted in s. 776.012, s. 776.013, or s. 776.031 is justified in using such force and is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force, unless the person against whom force was used is a law enforcement officer, as defined in s. 943.10(14), who was acting in the performance of his or her official duties and the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person was a law enforcement officer. As used in this subsection, the term “criminal prosecution” includes arresting, detaining in custody, and charging or prosecuting the defendant.

The way I read that, if the police had arrested Zimmerman that night, they would have been breaking the law. Immunity clause. And the kid's family can't sue Zimmerman over it. That's just cold. Is that what's in it for the corporations? To just cheapen the value of life?

But this last bit really chilled my soul.


776.041 Use of force by aggressor. —The justification described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who:
...
(2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless:

(a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or
(b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.


So if I go taunt someone and they get in my face and I beg off and they don't I can legally kill them? Without fear of prosecution or civil lawsuit?

Help me here. Is this interpretation wrong? What am I missing?



neal

[Amskeptic]

Florida's "green light to kill scary on the street law* (*my phrase)" underlies all the other issues regarding this tragic incident fanned and flamed to political hay by pundits, candidates and media.


So if I go taunt someone and they get in my face and I beg off and they don't I can legally kill them? Without fear of prosecution or civil lawsuit?

It is a terrible stupid law borne of a pandering to the lowest common denominator.
The situation has been distorted almost beyond recognition, particularly with the race angle.

I see a judge's son being protected from his own criminal conduct.
Colin

[Cindy]

"If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace."

He entirely misses the effect of white racism on the relations between blacks and Hispanics.

Cindy

[ruckman101]

Steele twists evidence that actually confirms racism exists in an effort to prove it doesn't. Same tired saw of denial.


neal

[pj]

A small history of Shelby Steele, I bet he understands the topic.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Shelby_Steele.aspx