@oralloy,
Quote:
You're the one who is arguing that someone should have been convicted when there is no evidence of their guilt.
There was plenty of evidence of Zimmerman's guilt in terms of manslaughter, and in a great many other states he most likely would have been convicted of manslaughter. His reckless and impulsive behaviors created the conditions for Martin's death and he caused the provocation for the final altercation. In most states, that's manslaughter.
What helped Zimmerman avoid conviction were Florida's loosely written and flawed self-defense laws. They gave him the benefit of the doubt if there was
any possibility he believed he was in imminent danger of great bodily harm. The jurors were also given instructions for Stand Your Ground, which seems to have further confused them because this was not a SYG case, yet they seem to have possibly inappropriately applied SYG in reaching their decision, judging by the comments of the one juror who has spoken out. She also said there were jurors who wanted to convict Zimmerman of something, because they felt he was guilty of bringing about Martin's death, but they couldn't because of the vague way the Florida self-defense laws are written, and she urged that these laws be changed.
The jurors made the best decision they could, given those self-defense laws, but that doesn't mean there wasn't evidence also pointing to Zimmerman's guilt. He's hardly blameless or "innocent" regarding this death.
If he had stayed in his car that night, as a neighborhood watch should do, rather than trailing his "suspect", none of this would have happened. If he had left his gun in his car, since neighborhood watch volunteers are not supposed to be armed, this death would not have happened.
Martin was on his way home to watch an NBA basketball game on TV, and he was walking around yakking on his phone until the game started. The following day he was returning to Miami with his father. He was minding his own business, not bothering anyone, not doing anything at all criminal, until Zimmerman decided, on the basis of his own erroneous racial profiling, that this middle class high school kid was a criminal "suspect"--and everything that followed from that was caused by Zimmerman's tragic error in judgment. He stalked, frightened, and wound up killing, someone who belonged in that community he was allegedly "protecting" because he was impulsive and reckless in his actions.
Florida law seemingly allowed the jurors to separate all of Zimmerman's actions that led to, and caused, an altercation from the immediate reason he fired his gun--something that the laws of a great many other states would not allow. In a great many other states, Zimmerman also would have been found guilty of using excessive force, since his actual injuries were minor, his victim was unarmed, and the victim might well have been acting in his own self-defense, given the way Zimmerman had followed him, without ever identifying himself or his motives. Zimmerman, who had considerable formal fight training at a gym, seems to have made no attempt to fight back with equal force, he just used his gun.
Zimmerman didn't even scratch Trayvon Martin in self-defense, he just shot him in the heart. And at 5'11" and 158 pounds, Martin was not an overly physically imposing opponent for Zimmerman, who's only about an inch shorter, and who outweighed Martin by 50+ pounds at that time. Zimmerman had no objectively compelling need to use lethal force, his claims of imminent fears of great harm were all subjective, possibly exaggerated, and not really supported by objective evidence.
This is how George Zimmerman looked after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
He was not "beaten up", he was punched once in the nose, and his nose does not appear to even be fractured, the midline is straight. He had two tiny abrasions (like a half inch) on the back of his head--no bruising, no swelling, no goose-eggs, on the back of his head to suggest any repeated "pounding", just some dried blood streaks from his two little scrapes. He was nowhere near an imminent threat to his life when he fired that shot into Martin.
Revising those flawed Florida self-defense laws, that allowed Zimmerman to escape the consequences of his own actions in causing a death, should be the next step on the agenda. And that's the direction the protests are moving in.
Zimmerman received due process, and he was acquitted, but Trayvon Martin did not receive justice.
