Posted on 06/25/2013 7:53:51 AM PDT by kristinn
Two flawed innocent lives intersected one 2012 February night in the town of Sanford, Florida. Afterward one life was ended and another was marked for death.
The debate over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman sixteen months ago has partisans painting each as villains in order to justify their belief in the guilt or innocence of Zimmerman of the charge of second degree murder.
Those who believe Zimmerman is innocent have rejected the Martin family’s attorneys’ portrait of Martin as a cuddly boy who looked about twelve years old. Instead, they point to Martin’s thug-wannabe social media persona and high school suspensions to portray the just turned seventeen-year-old as a hardened Black street thug who was casing the neighborhood where Zimmerman lived.
Those who believe Zimmerman is guilty have cast the part Black, part Hispanic, part White, then-twenty-eight-year-old as a white racist cop-wannabe who stalked Martin that February 26th night with murder in his heart.
But what if neither view is correct. What if the basic stories told by the two key witnesses in the case were pretty much what happened. Zimmerman and the mysterious ‘Witness 8’s tales overlap on key points.
Witness 8 is the alleged girlfriend of Martin who was supposedly speaking to Martin as he walked though Zimmerman’s neighborhood as he made his way to the townhouse home of his father’s then girlfriend where he was staying after being suspended from school in Miami. Her statement (albeit with spin and hyperbole) was relayed by Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump at a news conference March 20, 2012.
Zimmerman and Witness 8 both say that Martin was staying close to buildings. Both say Martin walked near Zimmerman’s parked car to check him out. Both say that Martin and Zimmerman lost sight of each other. Both say they came back in contact. And both agree confrontational words were first exchanged followed quickly by a physical altercation between the two.
Witness 8 says Martin was staying close to the buildings to get out of the rain—an innocent thing to do—and got upset that someone was watching him. Zimmerman, involved in his community’s neighborhood watch, took into account the rash of burglaries in recent months as he observed the stranger lurking near buildings.
Martin wanted to get a closer look at the stranger to him who was eyeballing him. Zimmerman took that as menacing. Martin then got away from Zimmerman. Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to see where the stranger to him was running toward. Losing him and being advised by the dispatcher not to pursue the stranger, Zimmerman says he started to make his way back to his vehicle.
It is not known why Martin did not go straight to his father’s then-girlfriend’s townhouse. He could have gotten disoriented in the evening rain as he tried to get away from the stranger, or he could have decided to confront the stranger who had gotten out of his vehicle in the rain to follow him. He would have been in his rights to do so--as would Zimmerman be in his rights to check out and follow the stranger in his crime-stricken neighborhood even if the police dispatcher advised him not to.
When the two met face to face, neither got violent right away. They both asked each other ‘what are you doing’ type questions. What apparently made the confrontation turn violent is the move by Zimmerman to reach for his cellphone. As he relates in his written statement to Sanford police the night of the incident: “…as I tried to find my phone to dial 911 the suspect punched me in the face. I fell backwards onto my back. The suspect got on top of me…the suspect grabbed my head and slammed it into the concrete sidewalk.”
Martin could very easily have been acting in self-defense if he took Zimmerman fumbling for a cellphone as him reaching for a knife or a gun. The way he reacted, according to Zimmerman, is exactly how a friend into self-defense told me long ago to get the upper hand in such a situation: First punch the nose hard enough to break it, thereby stunning your opponent, and then beat the tar out of them before they can recover.
So Martin would have been in the right acting in self-defense against a strange man who was following him who reached for something as they confronted each other.
Zimmerman also would have been right in trying to defend himself with deadly force as he did not initiate the violence and was quickly facing having his head bashed in.
There are no eyewitnesses to the beginning of the fight between Martin and Zimmerman, save for Zimmerman himself. The description by one eyewitness who saw some of the fight before the gunshot tracked with Zimmerman’s description at that point of the incident—just as Witness 8 largely tracks with Zimmerman’s account.
It is quite likely that the unarmed Trayvon Martin died believing he was fighting for his life from a stranger who stalked him with bad intent and was trying to pull a weapon on him. Zimmerman saying that when they were on the ground Martin saw the gun in his waistband would only have confirmed Martin’s fears.
If Zimmerman were trying to pull his gun out at the onset, rather than fumble for his cellphone, the fight would have right away been a struggle for control of the gun. There’s no evidence that happened.
It is my belief that both Martin and Zimmerman acted within their rights the night of February 26, 2012. Sometimes acting within your rights with flawed judgment can get you killed. Other times it can get you put on trial for murder by a legal lynch mob.
Well, now that Trayvon's Mom got over a MILLION DOLLARS in a lawsuit, it's EX-FIANCEE.
Post 25 for context.
SYG does not presuppose the existence of a place for the person invoking it to retreat to. Anyway, we don't know for certain if Z could retreat or not once the violence or threat of violence began. As of April 30, O'Mara told the judge that he was keeping Z's options open. Whether Z invokes SYG is for his lawyers to decide, and whether he invokes it successfully is for the courts to decide (and not for third parties such as us to decide). In any case I was using SYG as shorthand more or less for people caught in Z's situation: self defense using a CCW.
Here is one of the larger issues: The Z trial is setting precedents for how CCW carriers who use their weapons are treated by the police and the courts. Are the precedents that are being set favorable towards an ordered society, or not? If not, what additional laws, regulations, or rules might be needed?
It seems that almost all on FR are agreed that barring unforseen testimony or a highly biased judge and/or jury, Z should be found innocent, so discussing that is somewhat moot ('preaching to the converted') here, as well as somewhat boring. JMHO. So go ahead and Keep arguing that Z is innocent if you want to. I am not contradicting you. We are in non-violent agreement on that. But I am primarily concerned with larger implications, so our arguments actually have no intersection point.
It is important that we have Freepers — including leading Freepers like you — willing to consider both sides of the case.
This is not a black vs. white case, no matter how much some may want to make it that. Also, because intent is critical and we have no living witnesses besides Zimmerman to key actions done by both Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, we may never be able to have enough evidence that we would have need to be able to convict Martin of anything, even if he had lived. Maybe he thought he was acting in self defense; maybe he wasn't. We don't know and probably have no way to know for sure since he is dead.
Let's change the facts of this case slightly. (Keep the races unchanged; it should be irrelevant.) If this were an unarmed black woman who said she went to the store to get Skittles and said she was walking close to houses to keep out of the rain, and had an altercation with an armed Hispanic man who she thought was stalking her, and she thought he was pulling a gun when he was actually pulling out his cell phone, and when she saw the gun she punched the man in the face, knocked his head into the pavement, but managed to stun him and run away before he was able to get hold of the gun and shoot her, how many of us would be presuming the woman was the victim?
Before that sounds silly, go take a look at some of the advice given to women in some rape-prevention self-defense classes. A woman probably won't win a sustained fight with a comparable male opponent, let alone a stronger and larger man, but she may well be able to get in a first blow, and if she is experienced in martial arts she may be able to knock a man out, so attacking first to disable an opponent is part of the training.
That's not the same as saying Zimmerman did something wrong. A good case, maybe even an excellent case, can be made that he acted in self-defense. The jury will see and hear things that all but the most dedicated trial-watchers will neither see nor hear, and likewise, some evidence reported by the media has been tainted and won't be seen by the jury.
All the jury will do is determine whether enough evidence exists to say beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman committed a crime.
My personal guess is that when this is all over, the jury will find that standard of proof has not been met.
The bottom line, however, is that when we pull a gun out and pull the trigger, even if there are excellent reasons to do so, we need to know that our lives will radically change from that moment forward. Taking someone’s life, even in legitimate self-defense, is a critically serious act and we need to know the law and be sure things are the way they seem before the trigger gets pulled.
Once that trigger is pulled, there's no turning back. The bullet won't return to the gun.
Straightening things like this out is why we have courts and judges and juries, and an appeal system when the local judges and juries make bad decisions.
We agree, especially about guns being the great equalizer. I tell liberals all the time that feminists should be the greatest supporters of the Second Amendment because it puts power in the hands of women to defend themselves against bigger and stronger men.
If Trayvon Martin had acted the way most normal people act, i.e., retreating when confronted, this incident would have ended very differently, based on what we now know about George Zimmerman.
But Martin probably didn't know at the time who Zimmerman was. We do not have clear evidence that Zimmerman identified himself to Martin as head of the neighborhood watch. And even if Zimmerman did, he wore no uniform and presented no identification. (Not that he needed to; my point is not that Zimmerman did something wrong, just that we have no proof that Martin knew or should have known that Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch leader.)
What complicates this is that in our conservative circles, we understand that there is not **AND CANNOT BE** a “duty to retreat” before pulling a weapon or otherwise acting in self-defense. The NRA, quite correctly, has worked to get “duty to retreat” laws repealed.
Martin's behavior was stupid. It probably got him killed. It may have been an illegal assault, but we don't have the evidence to prove that either way because he's dead and can't make a self-defense claim or tell us what was going through his mind.
What we may have here is a case where nobody — not even Zimmerman — will ever know enough facts to prove that Zimmerman or Martin committed a crime.
All the jury needs to do is decide whether reasonable doubt exists. People are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and that is the way it should be.
The narrative is that Trayvon was "on his way home from the 7-11" with his skillets and IT when GZ saw and approached him. If he's "on his way home" how does Travon NOT know about Zimmerman and the neighborhood watch in his own neighborhood?
Worse, M displayed the activity of a shark. He actually had the gall to circle Z’s vehicle before taking off RUNNING. If I didn’t know better I would say he was literally trying to get Z to come out so he could beat him up.
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