So the short fat Latino dude ...

[Aliantha]

Chris, I like your post. Well thought out, and expresses everything I feel about this issue.

I keep thinking, 'what if it had been my son'. I have a couple the same age, and I am almost certain that if they felt someone was threatening them, they'd confront the person, simply because their powers of reasoning out these sorts of problems are not fully developed yet. It's a medical fact. KIDs, are not equipped to deal with these sorts of situations rationally - plenty of adults are not either, which perhaps might explain why Zimmerman made such a bad decision.

[ZenGum]

This is bloody brilliant:

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeI...m_kyle/cb39la5


Read up until

And there's the closing line.

"Oh my god, you killed Kenny!"

Sharpton looks at the crowd, at Kenny's body, back at the crowd.

"He was wearing a hoodie."

Closing credits

[Adak]

Was it Zimmerman who was getting his face (and back of his head), pounded on, in the fight with Trayvon?

Photo's say, YES!
(Note: these are unaltered photo's, not the lying touched up so Zimmerman is unharmed, photos that the media, have been showing.)





Seeing these photo's, the juror says, she was sure that Trayvon was on top, beating on Zimmerman - NOT the other way around:


and that it was Zimmerman who was calling for help, before the fatal shot was fired.

Her interview was on CNN today, with Anderson Cooper. Story and video of the interview with the juror, is widely available.

[Adak]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I have. When the guy winning knew without help it couldn't end without him hurting or being hurt badly. Remember this wasn't a drunken brawl outside a bar, no posturing for the chicks or bros.

Neighborhood WATCH, not neighborhood guard.

I don't see where I called Zimmerman a guard. I called him a watchman, and a community watchman.

There was a very old (about 80 year old) Japanese karate master - not just ANY master, this was one of the greatest masters (of Goju iirc). Anyway, he was attacked by 5 Japanese young thugs, and refused to even hit back. (He was still teaching Karate at that time, and was definitely able to defend himself quite well.)

His reasoning was that he would kill them if he did start fighting, but that they would not kill him. He was right, but they did beat him savagely, and in fact, nearly killed him, in a long bout of hard punching and kicking by the young men.

Reading about this in the newspaper, the young men each came to apologize to the Karate master, thoroughly ashamed.

Which probably was a very good idea, because the master had several thousand students, who would like to have met these young thugs, up close and personal. Possibly give them a free karate lesson.

I've seen victors in minor physical disagreements, ask for help (for the loser, or to even end the fight), but they were just "minor physical disagreements", not a full on fight like Martin and Zimmerman were having.

I have never seen such concern in a full on fight - ever.

[DanaC]

Ah well, if you personally have never seen such a thing, then surely such a thing cannot be.

[DanaC]

Interesting piece in the Guardian:

One of the six female jurors who acquitted the Florida neighbourhood watch leader George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin has revealed that three of the panel originally wanted to convict him.

The middle-aged woman, who is white and has grown-up children, said she and her fellow jurors believed that Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, threw the first punch in the fatal confrontation, leaving Zimmerman in fear of his life. That, she said, was the determining factor in why the three changed their minds.

The woman, with her face blacked out and identified only as juror B-37, insisted that justice had been served. "George Zimmerman is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighbourhood and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday night.

"It just went terribly wrong," she said. "Things just got out of hand. I think he's guilty of not using good judgment."

The panel deliberated for more than 16 hours before all of them accepted that Zimmerman acted in self-defence, she said. In their first poll, one juror thought he was guilty of second-degree murder and two of manslaughter.

But this same juror expresses confusion over the evidence she heard. As well as a gross tendency to make assumptions:

She pointed to two pieces of evidence that were key to the case: the screams heard on a recording of a 911 call made by a resident of Sanford's Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community on 26 February last year, and the instructions of a police dispatcher whom Zimmerman called on a non-emergency line to report a "suspicious male".

"It was George Zimmerman's. Because of the evidence that he had gotten beaten," she said when Cooper asked her whose voice the jury believed it was. She said the conflicting testimony of Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, and Gladys Zimmerman each claiming it was their son cancelled the other out

She insisted that the race of the two parties – Martin was black, Zimmerman of mixed white-Hispanic parentage – never came up in the jury room.

"The circumstances caused George to think he might be a robber or do something bad because of what had gone on," she said, referring to a recent series of burglaries in the development.

"If there was another person, Spanish, white, Asian, if they came in the same situation Trayvon was in, I think George would have reacted in the exact same way. We never had this discussion. I think he just profiled him because he was the neighbourhood watch, he profiled anyone who came in who did something strange.

other statements the juror made highlighted the difficulties of processing so much information to try to reach a verdict. She referred several times to a 911 call that she said Zimmerman made, even though his call was to a police non-emergency line.

She was confused when asked who she thought was the most credible witness. "The doctor, and I don't know his name," she replied. "He was awe-inspiring, the experience he had over in the war, I never thought somebody could recognise somebody's voice yelling, a terrible, terror voice."

Cooper asked if she meant a friend of Zimmerman's, a man named John Donnelly who served as a combat medic in Vietnam and who testified that he recognised the defendant's voice on the tape. The juror, however, said no, she was referring instead to the "defence medical examiner". That witness, Dr Vincent DiMaio, gave evidence about Martin's gunshot wound, not the recording

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...trayvon-martin

[Adak]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Ah well, if you personally have never seen such a thing, then surely such a thing cannot be.

I notice that you did NOT say YOU had ever seen the winner of a knock down drag out fight, calling for help, either.

Well, have you?

No, of course not. So if you were on the jury, would you say Zimmerman was guilty beyond a reasonable double, because it's always statistically possible that he:

ripped off Martin's hoodie, and put it on (so he looked like Martin, in the fading light).

Called 911, and then shot Martin, with just the right angle of his pistol, and replaced Martin's hoodie, back onto Martin.

Laid down on the ground and pulled Martin's body over the top of him, to get the right blood stains on clothing, then beat his face with his fists, and slammed the back of his own head repeatedly on the concrete beneath him.

Because the above is what would have had to happen, for the prosecution's case to be true and in agreement with sworn testimony, from both the coroner, and the one witness (who could see clothes and general arm movements (punches going downward), but not faces, due to the dim light and distance.

I'm not saying it NEVER has happened in the world, someplace, sometime, but it's rare, VERY rare. In gentle physical altercations, I've seen the victor ask the loser to stop, etc., but never in a vicious knock down drag out street fight. It just doesn't happen.

[DanaC]

The prosecution should have tried for manslaughter, not murder.

A year or so ago someone posted a video here of a big kid who had been regularly bullied by a little kid. Big kid was a gentle giant. Little kid was a cocky little gobshite. On this particular occasion the big kid snapped, grabbed the little kid, spun him up and over in wrestling move and slammed him back onto the ground, where he apparently broke his leg (that part of the story was later questioned).

On the evidence of the injuries, the big kid was unscathed, the little kid injured: take away the video camera and close standing witnesses that evidence points to the big kid as the aggressor.

[DanaC]

And incidentally, I have seen one streetfight in which the winner/aggressor was yelling for help. Specifically yelling to 'get her off me!' because it was a fight between two groups of lads and lasses and he really didn't want to injure the girl.

I'd like to say I played my part in that fight, but I was just a gobby cow....never really had the fists to back it up :p

I recognise this is a different scenario, and I really haven't seen enough real fights to know what is or is not 'common' or usual in this regard.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Adak

I'm not saying it NEVER has happened in the world, someplace, sometime, but it's rare, VERY rare.

It just doesn't happen.

Which is it?

[DanaC]

Wow. I mean, seriously, wow.

Fellow defence attorney West proved the most colourful and controversial character during the trial, opening his case with a questionable knock-knock joke about Zimmerman's notoriety and clashing frequently with the judge.

He also appeared in a photograph posted to Instagram by his daughter Molly showing the family enjoying a "celebration" ice cream after opening statements. The accompanying caption "we beat stupidity" and hashtag #dadkilledit prompted the state attorney's office to demand an inquiry

[gvidas]

Ta Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic, and Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker, have done an amazing job breaking down why the entire story -- from the kid's death, to the police's reluctance to investigate, to the smearing of the kid, to the exoneration of his killer -- is a quintessentially American tragedy, entirely rooted in the color of the kid's skin. In short: it wasn't murder, and that's the problem.

I'm having a hard time writing anything that isn't just paraphrasing one or the other of them. So instead of stringing together a bunch of decontextualized quotes that end up hacking apart their stellar writing, here's a few of the pieces that stood out:

Ta Nehisi Coates, "Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice" -- in which he argues that "the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest."

Jelani Cobb, What The Zimmerman Trial Was About -- on fear and correlations.

Ta Nehisi Coates, "How Stand Your Ground Relates to George Zimmerman" -- on the fact that 'stand your ground' and 'self defense' in Florida are one and the same.

Jelani Cobb, "Zimmerman, Everyman" -- "This apparent contradiction—the prevalence of racist attitudes, the disavowal of actual racism—is key to understanding the way Zimmerman has been received. His actions are understandable, even reasonable, because it doesn’t take a racist to believe black males equal danger."

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by gvidas

"This apparent contradiction—the prevalence of racist attitudes, the disavowal of actual racism—is key to understanding the way Zimmerman has been received. His actions are understandable, even reasonable, because it doesn’t take a racist to believe black males equal danger."

That's powerful.

[Sundae]

L'Oreal need to bring out a lipstick called Zimmerman Blood.
I'm not saying whether the photo is doctored or not... but damn his blood is bright.

[chrisinhouston]

And meanwhile most conservative news sources and commentators/talking heads are rallying behind the not guilty verdict and outcome, some going so far as to accuse Martin of being a dope smoking adict, and a punk thug, etc. I doubt the GOP will pick up any black voters in the near future which will only hasten their demise. And they sure aren't endearing themselves to Hispanics.