Zimmerman Found Not Guilty

[sheclown]

[KenFSU]

(Just unbelievable to me that it could be viewed any other way.) It was by the jury they found George Zimmerman Not Guilty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As I clearly stated, I can understand the argument for why there wasn't a conviction, but I cannot understand the "Zimmerman as the victim" narrative.

[sheclown]

I know someone mentioned Emmett Till, but the case that this more eerily resembles is the Rudolph Hargett murder that took place in Jacksonville the night after the MLK assassination.

The more things change...



A year later:

+1

[JayBird]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

Thankfully, as noted today, we are beginning to move from drawing lines in the sand and being defensive and starting to meet in the middle to assess and evaluate the situation. Hopefully, this will spur conversation to make less Trayvons and Zimmermans in the future.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

[Cheshire Cat]

It seems two of the forum threads have started a cross over conversation.  I am going to put up a post that was shared on the Profiling thread here because it also speaks to this issue.  Ron Mexico, reply 21.  http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,18960.msg336961/topicseen.html#new

The conversation is continuing on the Profiling thread right now.

By JASON L. RILEY
George Zimmerman's acquittal of murder charges in a Florida court has been followed by predictable calls for America to have a "national conversation" about this or that aspect of the case. President Obama wants to talk about gun control. Civil-rights leaders want to talk about racial profiling. Others want to discuss how the American criminal justice system supposedly targets black men.

All of which is fine. Just don't expect these conversations to be especially illuminating or honest. Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion.

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause.

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and "the system," but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and '80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.

The jury's only job in the Zimmerman trial was to determine whether the defendant broke the law when he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year in a gated community near Orlando, Fla. In cases of self-defense, it doesn't matter who initiated the confrontation; whether Mr. Zimmerman singled out Martin because he was a black youngster in a neighborhood where there had been a series of burglaries by black youngsters; or whether Mr. Zimmerman disregarded what the police dispatcher told him before he got out of his car. Nor does it matter that Martin was unarmed and minding his own business when Mr. Zimmerman approached.

All that really mattered in that courtroom is whether Mr. Zimmerman reasonably believed that his life was in danger when he pulled the trigger. Critics of the verdict might not like the statutes that allowed for this outcome, but the proper response would not have been for the jury to ignore them and convict.

Did the perception of black criminality play a role in Martin's death? We may never know for certain, but we do know that those negative perceptions of young black men are rooted in hard data on who commits crimes. We also know that young black men will not change how they are perceived until they change how they behave.

The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

So let's have our discussions, even if the only one that really needs to occur is within the black community. Civil-rights leaders today choose to keep the focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility, but their predecessors knew better.

"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

Mr. Riley is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

A version of this article appeared July 16, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial

[sheclown]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

Thankfully, as noted today, we are beginning to move from drawing lines in the sand and being defensive and starting to meet in the middle to assess and evaluate the situation. Hopefully, this will spur conversation to make less Trayvons and Zimmermans in the future.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

If both men had been black? 

If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black?

Does anyone SERIOUSLY think the outcome would have been the same?

[4thlittle]

You can't seriously be suggesting that the onus of guilt falls on the threatened kid just going about his business, rather than the armed adult who blindly assumed his behavior criminal and pursued him through the neighborhood?

Whether or not Zimmerman started the actual physical confrontation, he was 100% the instigator in this situation. An adult stalking a child through the neighborhood is a threatening gesture, and one that we've all been warned about since kindergarten. It's a gesture that Martin had every right to defend themselves against, even physically, regardless of the sissified "run home and tell Mommy!" society you'd like us all to live in.

It's just absolute crap that people are so willing to give the benefit of the doubt to and sympathize with an armed neighborhood loon known to call the police about 4' foot tall, 7-year old black kids walking the neighborhood, rather than giving the benefit of the doubt to the dead kid in the street who's only crime was walking home while black.

When an unarmed kid gets shot dead in the street by a gun-toting adult with a vigilante history, you have to blame the adult.

In 50 cases out of 50.

I can completely understand the argument that the state didn't do a good enough job presenting its case, but it just turns my stomach to hear "Poor Zimmerman" crap like this. He's not a victim of circumstance. He murdered a minor in cold blood that he chose, against instruction, to engage. Trayvon Martin isn't dead because he chose not to run home and call the police or tell Mommy, he is dead because a low-life Dog the Bounty Hunter wanna be  decided to take the law into his own hands.

Just unbelievable to me that it could be viewed any other way.

KenFSU: 

You refer to TM as a child but then claim that he need not be "sissified" by calling the police or telling Mommy.  So, GZ made a mistake following TM on foot.  Is it seriously your contention that TM had "every right" to escalate the situation by punching and then beating up GZ?  If your son were faced with a range of choices in that situation, would you encourage him to do the same as TM so he wouldn't take the "sissified" course of action?

[JayBird]

Yes SheClown I do, because race wasn't a factor. Race does not determine thought process, as a matter of fact the genes that determine race have no impact whatsoever on the development of your brain. An Asian kid raised in an environment of extreme poverty will have the same mentality as those around him. Instead of being the stereotypical math/science genius.

Where do you feel race was a factor here? You believe had it been a white 'skater' kid Zimmerman wouldn't have followed? If you are using that basis, than actually it is more probable that he would follow a black person the least, as they are stereotypically more confrontational and aggressive. There are too many holes in the race card, idk why you continue to play it.

[Jameson]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

Thankfully, as noted today, we are beginning to move from drawing lines in the sand and being defensive and starting to meet in the middle to assess and evaluate the situation. Hopefully, this will spur conversation to make less Trayvons and Zimmermans in the future.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

If both men had been black? 

If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black?

Does anyone SERIOUSLY think the outcome would have been the same?

(If both men had been black?) If this would have been the case the MEDIA wouldn't have covered the trial!

I agree. If Zimmerman and Martin were the same race, we would have never heard about the case. The media created and spun the racial narrative to fit their agenda since day one.

[JeffreyS]

Wasn't it a few organized protests that brought the attention to this case?

[KenFSU]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

I guess this is where our opinions differ. To me, the term "instigate" has a very narrow definition. In my opinion, which is only that, Zimmerman initiated the event by following Martin. His pursuit of Martin, against advisement, can only be seen as Zimmerman going on the offensive. Whatever happened next was in direct response of Zimmerman's instigation, which is why I think he deserves the largest slice of whatever blame diagram people want to sketch out. He's also the one who pulled the trigger during a fist fight.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

I posted the article because I found the similarities between the two cases striking. Profiling leads to murder leads to acquittal on self defense grounds. We have come a tremendous way, no doubt. I'm so white that I sunburn on my way to the mailbox, but in this particular case, I think it's impossible to divorce race from the circumstances. It's not even a black/white/hispanic/arab/asian thing, but rather a profiling thing. I don't think we live in this horribly racist country. In fact, things are as good as they've ever been. But it's hard to deny that both the mass media and the courts can still be guilty of putting less value on black suffering than that of whites. Again, things are getting better every year (Axe Handle Saturday wasn't even covered in the Times-Union in the 1960s), but were living in a fantasy land if we don't think that race was one of many components of this case.

[JayBird]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

Thankfully, as noted today, we are beginning to move from drawing lines in the sand and being defensive and starting to meet in the middle to assess and evaluate the situation. Hopefully, this will spur conversation to make less Trayvons and Zimmermans in the future.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

If both men had been black? 

If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black?

Does anyone SERIOUSLY think the outcome would have been the same?

(If both men had been black?) If this would have been the case the MEDIA wouldn't have covered the trial!

I agree. If Zimmerman and Martin were the same race, we would have never heard about the case. The media created and spun the racial narrative to fit their agenda since day one.

100% agree as well, however thankfully the media is not our justice system and the people make the laws, not FOX or CNN.  We all know the news puts their spin on it, however I don't think anyone is looking to them for justice or change so they really don't matter other than to give us pieces of a puzzle. 

[JayBird]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

I guess this is where our opinions differ. To me, the term "instigate" has a very narrow definition. In my opinion, which is only that, Zimmerman initiated the event by following Martin. His pursuit of Martin, against advisement, can only be seen as Zimmerman going on the offensive. Whatever happened next was in direct response of Zimmerman's instigation, which is why I think he deserves the largest slice of whatever blame diagram people want to sketch out. He's also the one who pulled the trigger during a fist fight.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

I posted the article because I found the similarities between the two cases striking. Profiling leads to murder leads to acquittal on self defense grounds. We have come a tremendous way, no doubt. I'm so white that I sunburn on my way to the mailbox, but in this particular case, I think it's impossible to divorce race from the circumstances. It's not even a black/white/hispanic/arab/asian thing, but rather a profiling thing. I don't think we live in this horribly racist country. In fact, things are as good as they've ever been. But it's hard to deny that both the mass media and the courts can still be guilty of putting less value on black suffering than that of whites. Again, things are getting better every year (Axe Handle Saturday wasn't even covered in the Times-Union in the 1960s), but were living in a fantasy land if we don't think that race was one of many components of this case.

I can understand your points and for the most part agree.  The only place I truly differ is that I feel race only plays in on whether or not Zimmerman followed/instigated/murdered purely because Martin was black. Any other way to view the race card is in the eyes of the beholder in my opinion.

[Jameson]

Wasn't it a few organized protests that brought the attention to this case?

The protests were based on race. Of it being a white vs. black issue. This narrative was spun in the media by people like Al Sharpton:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/07/13/Media-Zimmerman-Coverage-Rap-Sheet

[Cheshire Cat]

Ken I don't believe anyone thinks Zimmerman is not at fault.  It is just that fault lies in both parties. You can no more say Zimmerman instigated it than one can say Trayvon shouldn't have confronted. That's the point, had either one made an alternate choice the outcome would've been different.

Thankfully, as noted today, we are beginning to move from drawing lines in the sand and being defensive and starting to meet in the middle to assess and evaluate the situation. Hopefully, this will spur conversation to make less Trayvons and Zimmermans in the future.

Of course, by posting articles like that, we are making it a race issue. Which Martin/Zimmerman wasn't in the eyes of the jury that made the decision.  So as long as we continue to base all opinions on race, we will never progress forward.  And that is our own faults. Either pushing it or allowing it to be pushed.

If both men had been black? 

If Martin had been white and Zimmerman black?

Does anyone SERIOUSLY think the outcome would have been the same?

Gloria, I think history has shown us that ones race as it goes to the propensity for crime is a factor in how the crime is perceived and how it is prosecuted.  I think this case became the media sensation that it is because race was put to the forefront and the reason that happened is different depending on agenda's.  Some of those political and some of those for media ratings. 

I do agree that if this crime had involved individuals of the same race it would have not made headlines.  I look at this particular situation as one where the guy who pulled the trigger was charged, prosecuted and found not guilty under the law as the laws are written and administered.  I think the jury of six women, five White and one not did follow the law without prejudice.  As the one juror who was interviewed said, they never talked about race during their deliberations and that they felt that Zimmerman thought that it was Trayvon's actions and not his race that made him suspect that night.  It was testified to that he was out in the rain, cutting through back yards and stopping to look in windows.  I think those actions could reasonably be viewed as suspicious in a community where there has been a rash of break ins without race being a factor.  I think if my own son was there that night dressed in a hoodie, cutting through back yards and peering into windows his actions would have been viewed as suspicious.  I also do not believe for a minute that the women of the jury did not weigh all of the evidence in order to come to a lawful verdict.

I think there are many cases that scream racism but this is not one of them.  Even if Zimmerman himself is a bigot, I don't believe it was Trayvon's race that called attention to him.  I think it was a variety of factors, perhaps including the hoodie.  I have asked my youngest son to never put up his hoodie when in public because it hides ones face.  I will admit that is a paranoia on my part but not because I think it would cause him to be profiled as a Black but because it could make him appear suspicious to some.

Zimmerman is a guy who was stupid enough to get out of his car a follow someone he found suspicious. It was shortsighted and ended up being tragic.