Do you think Zimmerman will be convicted of murder?

For one thing anyone found not guilty should be make financial whole plus interest on the funds spend in mounting a defense.
...

For one thing anyone found not guilty should be make financial whole plus interest on the funds spend in mounting a defense.

the poor underclass that contain a lot more blacks then whites get it in the back.

By percents of population we have roughly ten times the numbers of our citizens in prison then the UK does and yet their society seems to function just fine.

For one thing anyone found not guilty should be make financial whole plus interest on the funds spend in mounting a defense.

it would seems that you would had prefer that instead of Trayvon being kill with a bullet to the chest that Zimmerman would had been kill by having his brains being beaten out on the sidewalk.

No, I would have preferred that George Zimmerman had followed the instructions of the 911 dispatcher, and not pursued Martin, and not provoked a confrontation.

No, I would have preferred that George Zimmerman had followed the instructions of the 911 dispatcher,

Asked whether knowledge of the money might have made a difference to Lester, who presided at Zimmerman's bond hearing, O'Mara said, "It might have."
O'Mara could not explain why Zimmerman didn't disclose the funds, but said he didn't think his client had meant to deceive anyone.
"I consider it an oversight because I don't see anything else that suggests that Mr. Zimmerman has been insincere or dishonest," he told CNN's Erin Burnett on Friday. "The moment I asked him about it, he acknowledged it and forwarded the money."
Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump said Zimmerman's failure to reveal that he had the money shows that he is being dishonest.
"If his testimony at the bond hearing is any indication of what is to come, then the lying has already begun," Crump said.
"This is going to say a lot about whether Trayvon Martin can get a fair trial," he told Burnett. "If he (Lester) doesn't revoke his bond, the court should severely sanction him so George Zimmerman understands you cannot lie to the court."

Not good enough. We need to toss the entire "adversarial" system of justice in favor of the sort of 'inquisitorial' system found in France in which the common incentive of all parties involved in the process is to determine facts.

So long as the government is willing to abuse the citizens the systems are irrelevant,
only reform or removal of the government will solve the problem.

...The facts observed over the past 40 years suggests the cycle described by Ms. Petersilia is basically accurate: higher incarceration leads to greater union influence, which in turn leads to still higher incarceration, and thus higher union membership, revenues, and political influence. Whatever the initial causes of California’s prison problems, the prison guards’ institutional pro-incarceration and anti-rehabilitation agenda has calcified a broken correctional system....

To provide an understanding the CCPOA’s objectives in and influence over California’s prison system, it may be helpful to recite a brief history of the prison system since the CCPOA’s inception over 50 years ago:

1957: California Correctional Officers Association (the predecessor to the CCPOA) is founded.
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1972: In its initial decades, the CCOA largely backed conservative political measures. For example, in 1972 the CCOA backedProp 17, which amended the California Constitution reinstating capital punishment following the California Supreme Court decision in People v. Anderson, holding the death penalty violated the state constitutional prohibition against “cruel or unusual punishment.”
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1973: The CCOA reaches 3,200 members. It is still dwarfed by the 102,000 member California State Employees Association.
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1976: California becomes the second state after Maine to abolish indeterminate sentencing, which had explicitly embraced rehabilitation as a correctional goal and tied a prisoner’s release date to his or her rehabilitative progress.
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1978: Gov. Jerry Brown signs the Dills Act into law, giving public employees collective bargaining rights.
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1980: California has 12 prisons. Prison guards make approximately $21,000 per year.
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1980: Don Novey takes over as president of CCPOA; although no longer working in a prison, Novey continues to receive his $59,900 salary, in addition to his new $60,000 union chief salary.
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1983: By the end of Jerry Brown’s term as governor, total prison population increases by 9,899, from 24,471 to 34,640.
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1983: CCPOA successfully negotiates a 2.5% at 55 retirement package.
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1984: CCPOA membership swells to 10,000.
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1990: CCPOA contributes $1 million to Pete Wilson.
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1990: The CCPOA contributes over $80,000 to an unknown opponent of Senator John Vasconcellos, D-Santa Clara, who led opposition to a prison-building bond as an assemblyman in 1990. The much more visible Vasconcellos only narrowly defeated the unknown CCPOA-backed candidate.
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1991: By the end of George Deukmejian’s term as governor, total prison population explodes by 62,669, from 34,640 to 97,309. The Corrections’ share of the General Fund saw an 81% increase over the past 8 years.
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July 1993: The CCPOA is one of the top 10 state political campaign contributors with more than $1 million in contributions, substantially to Republican candidates, including a challenger to an assemblyman who had repeatedly called for slowing growth in prison operating budgets.
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1992: Prison guards’ pay averages $45,000 per year.
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1994: With the help of CCPOA’s $101,000 support, Californians passed Proposition 184, the nation’s toughest three-strikes law mandating 25-years-to-life sentences for most felony offenders with two previous serious convictions.



1995: States around the country spend more building prisons than colleges for the first time in history.
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1998: Don Novey, president of the CCPOA, contributes $2.1 million to the Gray Davis campaign.
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1998: The CCPOA donates a total of $5.3 million to legislative races, the Gray Davis campaign, and voter initiatives. It was the No. 1 donor to California legislative races at $1.9 million. It contributed $2.3 million into Davis’s campaign, placed television spots for Davis in the conservative Central Valley, and helped fund a bank of telephone callers before the election. The CCPOA contributed $3 million to Gray Davis during his term in office.
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1998: Since approximately 1980, California tripled its number of prisons and increased its inmate population to nearly 160,000 at 33 prisons and 38 work camps.
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1998: Gov. Pete Wilson, who receives $1.5 million in CCPOA contributions in 1998, vetoes pay raises for other state workers while CCPOA members obtain a 12% pay increase, bringing top pay from $46,200 to $50,820. State university instructors earn between $32,000 and $37,000. By the end of Pete Wilson’s term as governor in 1999, total prison population increased by 67,875, from 97,309 to an estimated 165,166.
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1999: After the Legislature approves a bill to establish a $1 million pilot program to provide alternative sentencing for some nonviolent parole offenders—estimated to save taxpayers $600 million a year—the CCPOA opposes the bill. Governor Gray Davis then vetoes the bill. The CCPOA also persuades Gov. Davis to close three privately run prisons, even though they housed inmates at substantially lower costs than state-run facilities.
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2000: The CCPOA contributes at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders.



2002: CCPOA contributes $1 million to Gray Davis’s campaign. The CCPOA contributes $200,000 to defeat Assemblyman Phil Wyman in 2002, an advocate of private prisons. The CCPOA negotiates an increase to prison guards’ pay estimated between 28% and 37%, at a price tag of $500 million per year. Senior guards earn $52,700 a year, compared to $30,000 for a senior supervisor in Texas. The California Legislature approves $170 million in extra prison spending. In addition to granting correctional officers a major boost in pay, the labor pact permitted officers to call in sick without a doctor’s note confirming the illness. With the new policy in place, prison officers called in sick 500,000 more hours in 2002 than in 2001, a 27% increase. “Our overtime would have been below 2001, or real close, had it not been for that 500,000-hour increase,” said Wendy Still, the main budget analyst for the Department of Corrections. Corrections officers called in sick 27 percent more often last year than they did in 2001, for an additional 500,000 lost hours. More than a third of the overtime logged last year was to compensate for guards who called in sick, according to the Bureau of State Audits. The California Department of Finance requests $70 million to cover unexpected prison costs from 2001. In December, Gray Davis asks lawmakers for $10 billion in emergency cuts to other state programs.
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2003: Gray Davis asks the Legislature to approve another $150 million for prison system’s budget. The CCPOA contributes $25,000 to Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, a San Francisco Democrat, three months after giving $12,000 to Senate Republican Leader Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga. CCPOA members receive a 7% raise, pushing average annual take-home pay to $64,000. California’s prison budget is estimated at $5.2 billion.
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2004: The CCPOA spends over $1 million to defeat Prop 66, the initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law.
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2005: The CCPOA defeats Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.” Spending on California’s penal system constitutes approximately 7% of the state’s general funds. CCPOA membership reaches 26,000.
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2006: The average CCPOA correctional officer receives compensation worth $73,248 per year. Over 900 workers added $50,000 or more to their base salaries in overtime pay; over 1,600 officers’ total earnings topped $110,000. (Kathryne Tafolla Young, The Privatization of California Correctional Facilities: A Population-Based Approach, 18 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 438, 441-42 (2007).)
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2007: Following a 2007 ruling requiring the state to fix its prison overcrowding problem, the Legislature passes a $3.5 billion bond package to finance the construction of new prisons, yet four years later not a single new facility has been built.
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2008: The CCPOA contributes $2 million to Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign. The CCPOA contributes $1 million against Prop 5, a measure to reduce prison overcrowding by providing treatment rather than prison sentences for nonviolent drug users.
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2011: Gov. Brown’s proposed Fiscal Year 2011-2012 budget funds the prison system $9.19 billion, nearly 7.2% of the entire state budget. It costs an average of $44,563 a year to house each of California’s approximately 158,000 inmates in a system at roughly 200% of capacity. The national average is $28,000.

By 2011, CCPOA members are among the most generously compensated public workers in the state, even while their union resists policy changes to bring prison overcrowding, recidivism, and costs under control. As observed by Rich Tatum, a 33-year prisons veteran and president of the California Correctional Supervisors Organization, “It does seem at times like the union is running the department.” John Irwin, a retired professor and commentator of California’s correctional system, worries that “the wardens don’t feel they have much control of what goes on. The cliques – mostly led by sergeants – at the prisons are very strong, and the union, of course, backs them up when they get into trouble.”