Every time I watch that gif I'm CERTAIN that THIS TIME, she WILL hit her head.

Even drawing a gun in Florida gets you like 10 years so you might as well attack their life points directly.

They should have given him 5 years for starting ****.

Open carry is legal in ky, I do it all the time.

Bah, HUMBUG!
Bang, HEADSHOT!

I would've put more emphasis on the fact that Zimmerman *pursued* Martin. If anything Martin's the one that evoked "Stand your ground".

At the point at which he actually shot martin I do believe his life was in danger.

I also think that by exiting his vehicle and trying to be dirty harry he provoked the ass beating and fatal shooting.

Lets face it; Zimmerman is an overzealous gun toting nut bar that used his gun confidence as an excuse to do something he was asked by dispatch not to do.

Treyvon Martin had a bright orange jumpsuit future a head of him. The kid was a punk, and normally up to no good.

Any time two awful people occupy the same space for too long this kinda **** happens.

The only reason this made news is because zimmerman is the whitest looking latino dude ever.

Just to settle a widespread misconception: The "stand your ground" law was not directly at issue in the trial AFAIK. I don't believe the jury was even instructed on it.

It is, however, an awful, stupid law, the only purpose of which is to allow one person to kill another person when he doesn't have to.

is because zimmerman is the whitest looking latino dude ever.
is because ted turner wanted another hundred cases of armand de brignac and this seemed like a convenient way to get them.
is because president obama is a bad president who wilfully wreaths himself in a living hurricane of on-going controversy.

Yes/no. From what I understand, the real motivation behind these laws is to stop the legal system from re-victimizing crime victims; basically to crack down on civil suits by the criminal, and on prosecutors who were deliberately targeting victims in genuine self-defense cases for easy battery and manslaughter wins. I'm not sure how you would solve these problems without lowering the bar on what constitutes self-defense.

Yes, I know. The drafters of the law were pretty adamant that it should not be applied to Zimmerman and was not to be used as a shield for vigilantes.


The other purpose was to prevent the legal requirement to retreat. If someone attacked you, you legally had to try and escape before you could fight back, whether it's on the street or in your own home.

This case is a great example of why "Stand Your Ground" laws need to be done away with.

Especially when you contrast this case (and the absurd idea that Zimmerman is innocent) with other cases like the recent one of Marissa Alexander

ty for reading thread

Do you mean "read my posts and agree with or debate me"?

It's funny, I don't see where you or anyone brought up the case of Marissa Alexander in the whole thread. But I guess that's not what you want to talk about

I mean the three posts immediately before yours were talking about "Stand Your Ground" laws and if you had bothered to read them you might have chosen to rationalize your opinion about how this case is a great counter-example instead of simply claiming it as one.

Like that post by Actual Real Life Lawyer which says the law was not directly at issue in the trial.

WHEN YOU GET YOUR LEGAL ADVICE FROM MICHAEL MACFARLANE, YOU ARE GUARANTEED TO NEED LEGAL ADVICE

I wasn't aware that there was any ambiguity about whether Stand Your Ground is relevant to this case (if that's what you're saying).

Going back and reading the posts in question it seems you're trying to divorce the trial from SYG when it's clear that this verdict was the direct result of that law:

Miami Herald
[quote="Miami Herald]“The law became very confusing. It became very confusing,” she told Cooper Monday night. “We had stuff thrown at us. We had the second-degree murder charge, the manslaughter charge, then we had self defense, Stand Your Ground.” Juror B37 mentioned Stand Your Ground a second time of her own accord, saying the jury ultimately made its not-guilty verdict Saturday night based on the evidence and “because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground.”[/quote]

So unless I'm missing something that you're just hinting at, I'm not sure how reading those posts would have affected my post.

An interesting point indeed, although one of the jurors seems to disagree with this assessment.

It turns out that the jury was instructed on SYG (jury instructions here), but I can't imagine a single account of the facts in which it would have applied.

In the state's version of these events, Zimmerman either started the fight or threatened Martin. If SYG applied to anyone here, it would have been Martin, but regardless, Zimmerman would have been engaged in illegal activity. Or, there's an alternative version where Martin started the fight and was beating Zimmerman, but not to such an extent that Zimmerman reasonably feared death or great bodily injury. Here, Zimmerman is permitted to use force, but not deadly force, so neither SYG nor even basic self-defense is any help to him. (Note that in the first version, the prosecution is required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman started the fight or threatened Martin; in the second version, the prosecution is required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt Zimmerman's state of mind. The impossibility of proving any of this, given that the two best witnesses were dead and entitled to invoke the Fifth Amendment, respectively, is why Zimmerman was correctly acquitted.)

In Zimmerman's version, Martin started the fight and Zimmerman didn't kill Martin until Martin was on top of him and beating him, so he had no opportunity to retreat safely. (The bit about Martin being on top of him is almost certainly true, based on the testimony from the defense's gunshot wound expert.) Self-defense in this situation is allowed in all fifty states, not just the ones with SYG laws.

The widespread idea that SYG is an integral part of this case, much like the widespread idea that Zimmerman was obviously guilty, is rooted in early news accounts of the case that didn't prove accurate. The sad irony is that if someone was deemed ignorant enough of the details of this case to serve on the jury, SYG was probably one of the few things they'd associate it with. It's worth noting, too, that four of the five other jurors released a written statement to the effect that B37 shouldn't be treated as any kind of spokesperson for the jury as a whole.

Hmmm... I'm not really sure why you are advocating doing away with SYG other than maybe not actually understanding the law. From the verry little that i know about the Marissa case, it seems like the outcome was a huge miscarriage of justice and also has absolutely zero to do with why stand your ground should be done away with... If anything I would think you would be arguing that she should have been covered under stand your ground... But that might be hard to do that and argue against stand your ground in the same breath huh??

That was a beautiful synopsis.

I was living in Florida when it was passed so I'm a bit familiar with it and the debates that went on at the time it was being passed.

You seem to not understand my point whatsoever with this post. The point is that even when SYG is appealed to in an "obvious case" like Alexander's, it "happens" to result in an obvious bs verdict while in Trayvon's case (a much less obvious case for SYG for Zimmerman) the jury appeals to SYG to acquit him. The contrasting of these two cases is why race will remain an important factor in analyzing the outcome and reactions people have had so far, while those complaining that "it doesn't matter" seem unable to see the bigger picture (and most of them can't even see the bigger picture past the direct confrontation between Martin and Zimmerman!)

ty for reading thread

Marissa Alexander who had already retreated to safety and voluntarily chose to return to a dangerous situation in order to threaten someone with her firearm. Not exactly standing your ground. But alright lets keep ****ting our pants, inside and out, swearing up and down about race and a law that doesn't even apply to either case.

What did I miss? Could you please enlighten me?




Ty for reading about that case. It seems you're assuming she returned to the scene to confront her husband when it seems that's not the narrative that's out there at the moment:

The point, clearly, since you keep talking about Stand Your Ground w.r.t. Zimmerman's case when pretty much anybody paying attention already sees it as passing the bar for ordinary self defense. Namely, Actual Real Life Lawyer's post about how in spite of the jury instructions that **** didn't apply, and that the one juror who claimed it did has been disavowed by the others.

Uh, the narrative out there apparently is that she fled to a garage which has no fewer than two points of egress by any first world building code, couldn't leave on foot because *stares at feet, mumbles* so I guess somehow was compelled to return inside the house to obtain her property at gunpoint??

The real issue we should be discussing in the Alexander case is the preposterous mandatory minimum sentences pushed through by the corporate prison lobby, not her lawyers' miserably failed attempt to apply a highly specific self-defense law in a situation where it very clearly does not apply.

Not to divert, but this is such a national disgrace that no American should feel proud to be passive in a democracy (?) that, for example, gave a mandatory life sentence to Stephanie George because she stored cocaine for her boyfriend.

(And, of course, HSBC executives never had to face criminal charges when they were discovered to have been laundering money for al-Qaeda!)

Of course, we can't pursue criminal charges against bankers, for that will hurt the economy!

Mass incarceration? Well, I suppose if it creates jobs (for certain special people, at least), the more the better.

To be fair, HSBC executives being charged would have implied Eric Holder was a competent attorney general and a good person, neither of which is true.

Edit: It's a detour, but basically from what I understand USC affects the business relationships banks can have with financial institutions that have been charged with crimes, and that would have been a systemic risk, not just isolated to HSBC (I'm fuzzy on the details). This is really a product of major, principally European financial institutions deliberately creating a system of moral hazards to stymie the abilities of governments to punish them. I don't think the US government had much of a choice. Still doesn't mean Eric Holder's not a dilz tho.

Don't forget that many of these private prisons supplement their per-prisoner government funding with the profits from uncompensated manual labor performed by convicts. Mostly black convicts.

The one issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on: slavery is rad gotta be tough on crime.

Quentin Tarantino brought up this idea in an interview about Django Unchained. Was the first time I'd heard about it; damn Hollywood liberals trying to undermine Uncle Sam!

I'm beginning to wonder if the whole idea of the U.S.A. may perhaps be founded on externalities. If the world may neatly be divided into two categories, privileged Americans and everybody else, it might actually be possible to realize American ideals on behalf of the former at the expense of the latter. American republicanism has always been imperfect, but it seems that the former category is ever shrinking. Sure, if a Democrat gets elected he might engage in some superficial wealth redistribution, but society is still eating itself at a rate amplified by privileged government partnerships, and the ethnic communities (black, or just poor) that lack education, connections, and wealth get sucked under.

This radio program was something that really made me finally laugh off the pretense of American democracy. How can a democracy function where Nancy Pelosi attends 400 fundraisers a year?? Or an average congressman spends three hours a day on the phone trying to raise money?!

The idea that is "clearly" passes the bar is nonsense. If this was so clear, the trial wouldn't have even gotten half the attention it received. And do you have a link to an article or something that shows that the other jurors have disavowed this claim by the juror who was interviewed on CNN?





Did you read what I wrote? The article I cited shows that she meant to leave via car, and needed to return to get her car keys. She realized the situation was dangerous so she returned armed to prevent her own life from being taken from her husband and was successful. I'm not sure why you're ignoring that basic fact about the case (that being that she was entering again in order to flee the situation)



Absolutely, the private prison system of the USA needs to be abolished.

Well your comment about Democrats doing some superficial wealth redistribution is on point in a sense. The Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin essentially. Neither is a "working class" Party (even though the Dems used to be tied to labor but no longer are). And even within the context of American politics, they are both center-right political parties, so their policies differ not in their aims but their methods. Just take foreign policy for example: both Democrats and Republicans alike support the expansion of US power, the blockade against Cuba, etc. etc.

Bourgeois parties look out for bourgeois interests

Six people who know more about this case than you ever will, in spite of your fuming and stomping, disagree.

I know this must be a shock to you and the folks from your social justice forum or w/e, but no, it didn't get attention for good reasons, it got attention because it had all of the ingredients to piss you off and keep tuning in. You were deliberately kept angry and misinformed because a major corporation wanted you to choose Wendy's instead of McDonald's.

ty for reading thread

Yes, as I said, she chose to return to the home to retrieve her property (car keys) at gunpoint instead of using either the bay door or man door. She had already chosen to retreat to a position of relative safety instead of defending herself. If she had her gun on her and used it immediately SYG would have applied, but it didn't for this reason.

ty for reading thread

Democrats are still superficially tied to organized labor. The problem is that labor organization as a whole has been eroded over years, so they no longer have enough influence to really affect how the Democrats do things. Kids are being taught in school that unions are evil, state laws are being pushed through to limit them, and nobody really gets a good picture of the benefits of unions to the economy until they take university-level economics courses (and even then, only if they are fortunate enough to have sane professors, not ones from thoroughly-discredited or heterodox schools like Chicago and Austria) which even our politicians are too literally retarded to understand.

In other words: they reached this particular verdict, thus it must be correct! The problem with your sentence of course is that it ignores the divisions within the jury, especially when they first convened.

You're also completely ignoring the reasons that people are expressing dissatisfaction and anger over the outcome.



While I obviously agree that major media corporations are out for ratings and profit margins when they spend this much time focusing on it, this is not why this case was popularized.

It was a popular movement that brought it to trial in the first place, and the media was responding to that movement.



You seem to be unable to actually point to relevant parts of the thread you want to discuss. But keep copying and pasting this, maybe it will gain meaning eventually.



So she should have just stayed in the garage?

I read your comment just fine, and the problem wasn't that I didn't read it (since I did) but that it is a weak argument.

You've yet to even really explain where she made a "wrong move" or how retrieving her keys was not part of an attempt to flee the scene. (Hint: it is quite obvious what the act of getting one's keys is)



I agree with this completely. Although labor will from time to time give lip service to opposing the Democrats, but at the end of they day they seem incapable of doing anything other than writing a blank check to the Dems. It's sad to see.

Florida requires a unanimous verdict.

Because Wendy's has a new flame-broiled pretzel double bacon cheeseburger that has two thick, juicy patties of real meat, unlike the dessicated coasters served by the competition.

A tiny regional non-event thing that nobody heard or cared about until the media realized ~RACE ISSUE~ and then Obama etc.

Just like how nobody heard about the Marissa Alexander case until the SYG defense for Zimmerman "succeeded" (in the opinion of durps, because it wasn't at issue in the trial, the defense never used it) and then ~RACE ISSUE~ because she was black and somehow the same exact law didn't apply to her even though the situation was almost exactly the same (except different)!!!

You seem to be unable to actually read MacFarlane's posts in this thread.

ty for reading it, btw.

Because once you choose to retreat to safety, stand your ground laws no longer apply. Every garage has at least two points of exterior access, a man door and a bay door. If motorized, the bay door can be operated without the use of a remote control.

She didn't need to get her keys to leave. She wasn't "trapped" inside the garage. She chose to go to the garage, get her gun, and return to threaten her husband. If she already had her gun, or if her husband had followed her out to the garage, the law would have applied to her. But that's not what happened.

How are you having so much trouble comprehending this?

Who else are they going to support? The two party system is practically mandated by law. Even if you started an actual pro-sanity political party you wouldn't be able to get on the ballot in many congressional districts.

Okay?



How is this a valid analogy exactly?



You have it backwards, the media (and way later) Obama were reacting to existing outrage over the inaction on the part of the state to intervene in the case.

The incident happened, and news of Zimmerman not being arrested and the like spread over social media and activist circles which in turn grew and put pressure on the state.



Well it is indeed this contrast that makes the race factor relevant. I like how folks like to pretend that race is irrelevant to these cases, as if just ignoring it makes it go away.

And yes you seem to keep repeating the stance that SYG didn't matter, which continues to be contradicted:

http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/07/16/media-neglect-that-stand-your-ground-is-centerp/194916

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/stand-your-ground-george-zimmerman-trayvon-martin

http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/07/18/16-fox-figures-v-zimmerman-juror-on-whether-sta/194956





I have, and I'm still not sure what you're on about here. It doesn't seem important enough for you to actually cite anything from but instead you just keep copying and pasting the same sentence. That's not really worth responding to in all honesty.



It's hilarious you bring up comprehension problems when you keep either willfully ignoring the story at hand or are just confused by it.

By entering the garage, she had not successfully "retreated to safety" as a garage is part of the same house that the threat (her husband) was in.

She quite clearly didn't feel she was out of harms way without fully leaving the house and knew that to get her keys to successfully leave the house she would need the keys to her car. Otherwise, how would she be able to retreat?

What is confusing you here?



I'm quite well aware of this, which is why I oppose the USA's current political and electoral system.