@DrewDad,
DrewDad wrote:If this were just about anywhere other than Florida, Zimmerman would have a really tough sell to get people to buy his self defense story.
True. Self defense is an
affirmative defense in most American jurisdictions. Defendants bear
some burden of proving that they actually defended themselves. Florida is unusual in that it's just a plain-vanilla defense there. (For a quick check, see the
table of contents for the Florida Standard Jury instructions, under "3.6: defenses"; it distinguishes clearly between "defenses" and "affirmative defenses".) This makes the
absence of self-defense just another element of the crime that the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
On a meta note, I suspect that this is the root cause for a lot of the disagreement between me and other correspondents in this thread. Most of my correspondents here are North Americans. They presumably look at this case with intuitions about self defense that they've developed over their whole lives in America, and that are correct in every state or province they have lived in --- just not in Florida. By contrast, I, being an immigrant, have no such intuitions. I knew I was ignorant in this matter. So I knew I needed to educate myself by searching the web for legal authority
from Florida. And I never had any mental block against the insight that Zimmerman's burden of proof is absurdly low --- so low he'll probably clear it.
