We can restart this argument if you want to. Zimmerman had lost Martin and was heading back to his truck. Martin circled back and attacked him. Yes, Zimmerman is an idiot, and he proves that with his stupid antics more and more lately. Yes, he made a mistake trying to stop Martin. My essay wasn’t defending him for being an idiot, it was to point out that an unarmed person can in fact be a lethal threat. I have a feeling you didn’t even read the essay, because my point is pretty clear.

He said that on ebay? That’s an odd place to speak out.

GZ is not a hero in my eyes, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that he’s an idiot. However, I’m not convinced he’s a murderer.

I know he’d be in jail in Germany, but heck, if you cross the street without a “walk” signal in Germany you go to jail. 🙂

One of the essential pillars of our shared legal system is that for GZ to be convicted of murder, the Jury would have to be convinced “BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT” that he had not been in fear of his life.

In regard to this, we have to remember that the criteria is NOT the extent of GZ’s wound, but the state of GZ’s MIND.

One thing that even Australians like myself know is that you cannot claim self-defence against a person who is disengaging and retreating, unless there is an over-riding circumstance (such as still being under the effects of a physical assault). The available evidence is that – GZ was disengaging at the time that physical contact was initiated, and that physical contact was initiated by TM.
No matter what we might personally think about people and behaviour that merit an “ass-whupping”, there is no justification under law for assaulting a person who is moving away from you having committed no other crime than making you nervous by observing you.

That is the AVAILABLE EVIDENCE. Some may choose to personally doubt GZ’s testimony, but we should fear a legal system that would discard it without strong evidence to the contrary. There is reasonable doubt that GZ initiated physical contact. There is reasonable doubt GZ’s actions leading up to the event were motivated by a desire to kill TM, or even a callous disregard to TM’s safety…. and there is reasonable doubt that GZ was NOT in fear of his life or serious injury at the time that he fired that fatal shot.

We may speculate, but we are not entitled to convict a man of murder on nothing more solid than our speculations. This appears to be a hard lesson for some people to learn…..

The determination to declare GZ guilty smells more like pay-back than a dispassionate desire for justice.

Peter.

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

*THANK YOU! For deleting my email address and any other email addresses from this message if you plan to forward it . PLEASE use “Bcc:” for lists and group mailings, INSTEAD of “Cc:” or “To:”. If you help keep our addresses private, we will be able to cut down on computer identity theft and annoying, unwanted emails.

Here’s what I actually wrote:

“If you watched those videos and still feel that it’s always wrong to shoot an unarmed person, or that George Zimmerman, moron though he may be, could not possibly have been justified in shooting Trayvon Martin, I have a request for you. Put down your latte, step out of your insulated little academic/theoretical cocoon, walk into the real world and start a fight with the first street thug you see. After you awaken from your brutal beating, if you still believe deadly force against an unarmed person is never justified, then by all means don’t carry a gun.”

In this second comment you’ve changed your accusation. Earlier you claimed I wanted people to start fights and then shoot the people they’re fighting with.

“So, that’s “self-defense”? Initiating a fight, then killing the person you attacked before they can hurt you?”

But now you’ve toned it down to “It was not at all clear to me that you did not literally mean what you said regarding ‘latte-sippers starting a fight’, however, if you say you were employing some kind of rhetorical device regardless of how inartfully I feel it was done, that’s fine with me.”

My rhetorical suggestion was not meant to be “artful”. I’m a very blunt, literal writer. While I would in fact like to see proverbial latte-sippers start a fight just so they’ll get some ignorant idealism beaten out of them, sadly enough I don’t expect them to actually do it. And you’ll notice that in my rhetorical suggestion, all I talked about was starting the fight, waking up after a severe beating and then reevaluating their belief that unarmed people aren’t dangerous. Nowhere, not once, not in any way, did I suggest they start a fight and then shoot people for engaging in the fight. You pulled that interpretation out of your head, not out of my writing.

Again, I’ll point out that you’re wasting your time rehashing the GZ case. I never claimed GZ’s testimony was honest. I stated an unarmed person can in fact be a lethal threat. I didn’t even claim GZ was definitely justified, I simply argued against those who believe there was no way he could have been. I get your point that his claimed attacks didn’t match up with the physical injuries. However, he was in fact on his back, TM was in fact at least trying to beat his head against concrete, and TM did in fact punch him. My point is that even unarmed, TM could have posed a lethal threat to GZ.

As for your claim that GZ’s testimony was false because the injuries he had didn’t match up with his claims, I’d ask if you’ve ever been in a real fight. In most of the fights I’ve been in, I couldn’t tell you how many times I swung or how many times I got hit. There were times I found injuries afterward, even a day afterward, and had no idea how I got them.

People in life-and-death stress situations often experience “survival stress reactions”. They’ll have tunnel vision, auditory exclusion (loss of hearing), loss of fine motor skills, and critical incident amnesia. I’ve experienced all of these myself and have seen them in others. In “live fire” training exercises with Simunition rounds, I’ve seen officers expend a full magazine in a gunfight with one suspect, subsequently engage a second suspect, then totally forget about the first suspect when we debriefed them afterward. One of the reasons attorneys advise people not to give a statement to police without a lawyer after a justified shooting is that people often forget critical details in the immediate aftermath.

Is it possible GZ actually believed he had been hit more times than he actually was, and made honest statements about his perception of the fight? Yes. Is it possible he was intentionally inflating the number of strikes, in order to make him appear justified in using deadly force when he knew he wasn’t? Yes.

As you stated, the only other witness is dead. Neither of us were there, and the physical evidence isn’t definitive.

I also get your point that the entire incident was GZ’s fault. Actually, I agree. He was mistaken about TM’s intentions, he exercised horrible judgment in getting out of his truck, and when he wound up engaged in the fight he was unable to handle it without resorting to deadly force. I don’t hold GZ up as an example of what to do. But I do understand how he could possibly have been justified, which was one of the points of my post.

It was not at all clear to me that you did not literally mean what you said regarding “latte-sippers starting a fight”, however, if you say you were employing some kind of rhetorical device regardless of how inartfully I feel it was done, that’s fine with me.

As concerns Zimmerman’s injuries, or lack of them. The issue here is credibility which is very important when you have killed the only other witness to a deadly confrontation which has led to criminal charges. I realize that a person might have a reasonable fear of death or bodily injury without or before actually suffering the same and of course, they would need to act before such an occurrence.

However, Zimmerman claims to have been hit in the face hard enough to have his head slammed into the concrete over a dozen times. His lack of commensurate injuries simply defies common sense and there was no forensic evidence or independent evidence that supports his position. The fact is the forensic evidence contradicted it.

He didn’t say I shot Martin before he had a chance to slam my head on the concrete. He didn’t say he might have been hallucinating, delusional or was in anyway unsure of what had occurred. He was examined by a medical professional (though it was only because his employer demanded it) and was found not have suffered any form of head trauma.

I drew the comparison between what happened to the officer you mentioned and to Zimmerman because what happened to the officer and what Zimmerman claimed happened to him are quite similar. This served to point out the absurdity of Zimmerman’s claim and the fact that his account and therefore he, is not even close to credible, under the best of lights.

I was not implying that you thought Zimmerman or his accounts of what Martin did to him in his “testimony” are credible.

Yes, I referenced my a post on my blog as a basis for a position I took in my comment. In that post I simply laid out what evidence was presented at the trial. Of course, the potential for bias is clear. I can cite to other analysis or to the actual testimony to support my position if you’d like.