The State of Florida vs George Zimmerman: The Trial

Yeah Bill. 40% of teenagers are in jail because of it.

revelette wrote:

There is no proof that Martin attacked first

How did Trayvon get to Mr. Zimmerman's position without deliberately approaching him?

revelette wrote:

Even if he did, he had the right the stand his ground and not retreat or else the whole stand your ground law is meaningless.

Stand Your Ground does not authorize attacking other people for no reason.

On doing some more research on the laws he came to the conclusion that under the laws there was no way he could legally do this research so he abandoned the research and deleted the pictures off the computer he was using at the time.

Years later someone undeleted those pictures and he could not use the defense of scientific research and he was charge and convicted of having downloaded child porn.

Jurors also didn’t have all the court instructions for self-defense cases. The judge withheld instructions that the jurors could have used to determine that Zimmerman was an “initial aggressor,” a finding that could have denied him a self-defense defense. But the defense successfully argued — and the state did not forcefully protest — that prosecutors failed to show how Zimmerman was an aggressor.

“Losing the initial aggressor instruction may have been the moment the state lost its case,” criminal-law professor Alafair Burke wrote in the Huffington Post.

How did Zimmerman get to where Martin died if he was heading back to his car after searching for street sign?

There are no street signs on a sidewalk behind the houses.

Of course Martin being black had no 'stand your ground' rights when Zimmerman followed him.

Also, the Judge withheld instructions jurors could have used determine if Zimmerman was an "initial aggressor."

Since it is the same area he was in when advised, three minutes earlier, that they did not need him to pursue Trayvon, I speculate that he got there during his earlier pursuit, and then remained relatively stationary from that point on.

I would certainly have categorized Martin as a hoodlum based on what we know about him

Young black male, dressed in a dark hoodie at night walking through a primarily white neighborhood.

The fact that Martin attacked first confirms that he was a hoodlum. A normal person being followed by a suspicious person would hurry home or to a public place. Not wait in ambush of the person following them. That is something a hoodlum would do.

Cops who kill criminals in the act of a crime often have to have intense and continuing counseling to get them through the trauma of what they have done. Trained soldiers often have to be counseled to get them past killings done in combat.

But these brave souls will be able to kill…and then go out for dinner and dancing.

Boy, that's a vague story with no facts. No wonder you believe the things you do

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/10/15/i-was-doing-academic-research-not-an-adequate-defense-for-child-porn-possession/

James Kent was a professor of public administration at Marist College in New York. Back in 1999, he contemplated writing a book about the legislation of child pornography, and how to differentiate between what is and is not child porn for the purposes of criminal prosecution.

To do his research, Kent surfed various sites — including “School Backyard” (Editor’s note: Yuck!) — and downloaded lots of images. He sent a note in July 1999 to a potential collaborator on the book, “Sooner or later someone at this college is going to wonder why I keep looking at porno sites. . . Jim.”

In fact, it took a few years for someone at the college to wonder about it. It came to the college’s attention in 2007 during a virus scan. When it did, it led to felony child pornography charges for Kent and a prison sentence…

About a year after his research began, Kent decided to abandon the book project. He wrote another note to his collaborator in June 2000, “I still don’t think there’s anything in this project. . . So here I am (and I suppose you are, too) with a bunch of disks full of photos, at least some of which are probably illegal. Do you want them or should I wipe them or should I send them to somebody else?”

Kent decided eventually to delete the images. His final message to his collaborator in July 2000 was:

Well, this last batch pretty much tears it. While, as somebody’s father, I’m pretty appalled by this stuff, I also don’t want to get arrested for having it. So let’s do this – if this is a legitimate research project, let’s write it up and tell the deans (and preferably also the cops) what we’re doing and why. Otherwise, let’s drop it in the most pronto possible fashion.

I don’t even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I’ll probably just go ahead and wipe them. You have the URL’s if you want to pursue it.

See you sooner or later, no doubt. Kent.

Apparently they decided to drop it without alerting the deans or the cops. But seven years later, while running a virus scan, a college IT guy came across a “work” folder on Kent’s computer with images of scantily clad underage girls. The college decided to turn Kent’s hard drive over to the police.

The work folder had been deleted but remained in the computer’s unallocated space — where folders you delete from your recycling bin wind up, according to a court opinion. Further investigation yielded thousands of child porn images stored in Mozilla and Internet Explorer cached files. While surfing the pint-sized XXX sites, Kent had inadvertently been collecting and storing these images thanks to his browser’s desire to load web pages more quickly.

Kent was found guilty of 130 child porn felonies last year, and sentenced to one to three years in prison. (That seems lenient in comparison to Corey Beantree who I wrote about on Tuesday, who was sentenced to 10 years in Alabama after the Geek Squad found a child porn video on his laptop.)

Those messages sent to his collaborator were not used in Kent’s defense. Instead, they were used by the prosecution to prove that Kent knew what he was doing when he downloaded the images.

“There is no safe harbor for researching child porn,” says cyberlaw professor Eric Goldman. “This is why I call child porn ‘toxic’–there is no easy way to legally cure even a single download of child porn.”

Like TheDataDoc, the courts have little sympathy for those with child porn on their computers, though there are some judges like Jack Weinstein of Brooklyn who think that harsh child porn possession penalties are examples of the “unnecessary cruelty of the law.” (See this New York Times piece for more on that.)

An appeal, objecting to the search of Kent’s computer as unconstitutional, was rejected this week; the Supreme Court of the State of New York decided that his computer was college property, so the college had the right to hand it over to police. Kent is currently in prison, and has lost his job at Marist College.

I spoke to one of Kent’s attorneys, Nathan Dershowitz, who expressed frustration over his client being prosecuted for images that had been deleted and that he could not access, and others that he had not consciously downloaded. “I wonder what’s on your computer that you can’t get to?” asked Dershowitz.

Now might be a good time to clear your cookies and browser cache. Just in case.

But seven years later, while running a virus scan, a college IT guy came across a “work” folder on Kent’s computer with images of scantily clad underage girls. The college decided to turn Kent’s hard drive over to the police.

There is no reasoning with them. They must defend Zimmerman, because they hope some day, in effect, to be him

if this is a legitimate research project, let’s write it up and tell the deans (and preferably also the cops) what we’re doing and why

“There is no safe harbor for researching child porn,” says cyberlaw professor Eric Goldman.

It seems you didn't get the story correct. The files weren't deleted since the IT guy came across a work folder.

The work folder had been deleted but remained in the computer’s unallocated space — where folders you delete from your recycling bin wind up,

NEW YORK’S highest court has overturned the conviction of Kingston resident and former Marist College professor James D. Kent on two child pornography charges, ruling that simply viewing child porn on the Internet is not enough to prove its procurement or possession.

The state Court of Appeals, in a ruling handed down on Wednesday, declined to overturn convictions on more than 100 other charges against Kent but ordered that he be resentenced in Dutchess County Court absent one felony count of promoting a sexual performance by a child and one felony count of possession of child pornography...

The charges dismissed by the Court of Appeals, Smith said, relate to photos that were on Kent’s computer but that he hadn’t downloaded. The court ruled that to be convicted of possession, a person must take an active step, such as downloading the illegal material.
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2012/05/12/news/doc4fadc30767615793456955.txt?viewmode=fullstory