No. It starts with whoever threw the first legally unjustifiable attack.
I said the time-line for manslaughter. In any case, given the fact that Martin would have reasonably feared for his life at that point, attacking Zimmerman would have been legally justifiable. Also, it bears mentioning every now and then that all of this is assuming that Zimmerman's version(s) of events is/are the full truth.
You're dreaming. It was dark & rainy. Martin isn't reported to have mentioned a weapon on the phone. Martin had minutes of no-visual-contact from Zimmerman, so even if the former divined the presence of a gun, he was in no danger after he got out of sight. Yet he came back.
This was a relatively dense suburb, it was rainy, but there would be lights from houses and street lamps. Any person without compromised night vision would be able to make out such details up close. The no visual contact is about one minute and thirty seconds and, if Zimmerman is to be believed, Martin may have spent that time hiding in the bushes. He also may probably didn't have Zimmerman in his line of sight either. So, when the confrontation happened, it's reasonable to believe that he might have believed that escape attempts had failed. Also, it may have escaped your notice that Florida has a stand your ground self-defense law.
That was when he was already on the ground, being pounded, with clothes in a rather different configuration than normal.
Hmmm. Actually, I just checked and, apparently I was wrong about where Zimmerman had his gun. It turns out it was in a holster on his back, inside his pants. So, that means that either Zimmerman lied about Martin trying to get the gun or that Martin must have seen it before they fought.
Just goes to show the dangers of misinterpreting someone's evasiveness as an impending attack. Guess what, people who study armed self-defense are taught about not over-reacting to mere suspicion.
Yeah, the people who study that sort of thing would be people like gun-owner, neighborhood watch member and criminal justice student George Zimmerman. People who can't reasonably be expected to study that are minors who don't own guns and probably haven't had any gun training or training in dealing with these situations and who don't presume to an authoritarian role where such things should be expected as due diligence. Yet, for some reason, Zimmerman interpreted Martin walking along the street as intent to commit a crime and over-reacted to mere suspicion. The inexperienced kid who was running and hiding in fear for his life has a pretty good excuse for being scared. Let's face it, self-fulfilling prophecy though it may have been, his life was definitely in danger from George Zimmerman.
No, it isn't. The bad judgement was related to following to closely, letting be jumped. A wiser & more attentive person may not have let Martin get that close. But he was, he apparently attacked, and gave the all-important "self-defense" out against manslaughter.
Yes it is. The bad judgment was related to following in the first place, getting out of the car and trying to deceive Martin about his identity and purpose. A wiser and more attentive person wouldn't have suspected Martin of anything in the first place since he wasn't doing anything wrong. They also wouldn't have gotten out of the car to follow him, and they would have, when confronted, said that they were with the neighborhood watch.
As for the all-important self-defense out for manslaughter, that's only the case in few states. Most states don't let you kill someone in a fist fight and claim self-defense. We are talking about Florida here, however, and it does have a "stand your ground" law. The problem there is that Martin was the one running and hiding and Zimmerman was the one chasing. Martin was the one standing his ground. Self-defense shouldn't defend Zimmerman against manslaught
The links of that chain are apprx. irrelevant until the point of the physical altercation.
The links of the chain leading to a homicide are not irrelevant. You're trying to pretend that Martin was some psychopath who randomly attacks innocent bystanders and that Zimmerman was just an innocent bystander. That's obviously not the case. You can't just start the timeline where you choose to make your favorite an innocent victim. The timeline for manslaughter starts and ends with Zimmerman's actions. My example about the homeless people convicted for killing fire-fighters because they accidentally burned down a building shows how causality is usually measured in manslaughter cases.
Your fantastic speculation about the timeline - that Martin confronted, correctly divined the presence of a gun, incorrectly divined the intent of its owner - indicts Martin only barely less than the more plausible story.
It's not fantastic speculation. It's based on Zimmerman's own story and photographs and video from the night in question. Zimmerman's clothing wouldn't have concealed a gun from anything other than the most casual of glances. Zimmerman has stated that Martin was trying to get his gun. What other evidence do you need that Martin knew that Zimmerman had a gun? As for incorrectly divining the intent of the gun's owner, that may have had something to do with the fact that Zimmerman, according to his own story, was intentionally deceptive to Martin.
One of the jurors from the trial has given an interview. During the interview she said that Zimmerman was guilty of "not using good judgement.”. Someone must have messed up on the jury instructions somewhere because manslaughter was on the table. When you kill someone from bad judgement, it's manslaughter.
You're moving the goalposts. "terrified for his life" is different from "scared".
"Scared" is a spectrum in which "terrified for his life" is one small range. I do think Martin was terrified for his life. I wasn't moving the goalposts, you're just quibbling over semantics.
Yes. It is possible that he was hiding out of fear. It is possible that he was counter-stalking.
"Counter-stalking"? Sorry, what alternative reason other than being fearful for his life would he be doing that for? I can't think of any reason that isn't, ultimately, Zimmerman's fault.
There appears to be no evidence that Zimmerman lay hands on Martin (before the gunshot); whereas there is evidence that Martin touched Zimmerman (eyewitnesses & injuries). That kind of "self-defense" will not stand up in court, and may get one killed.
No eyewitness has reported seeing the start of the physical altercation. The injuries say nothing about the order of events. The only evidence that Martin physically assaulted Zimmerman first is Zimmerman's word. Considering that he killed Martin, there's ample cause to consider his word a little tainted. In any case, that's immaterial to charges of manslaughter. Zimmerman's own statements claim that, when Martin confronted him and demanded to know why he was following him, Zimmerman lied to him, then turned away from him while reaching for his cell phone. Zimmerman was lethally armed and, though he had a concealed carry permit, was not dressed in a way that would actually conceal his weapon. So, we have an obviously lethally armed older man, obviously stalking Martin, then lying to him about it instead of identifying himself. He turns away to conceal his movements, then reaches for something in his pocket. It's hard to know exactly what went through Martin's mind at that point, but if I were in that situation I'm pretty sure I would think that Zimmerman was some sort of psycho who was about to kill me. As it turns out, that pretty much turned out to be the case.
There's a chain of events that led to Martin's death at the hands of Zimmerman. It starts with Zimmerman spotting Martin and concluding that he was a criminal most likely based on either racial prejudice or age prejudice or both. His ridiculous theory that no-one would be walking in the rain if they weren't a criminal is exactly the sort of idiocy you'd expect from an armchair criminologist living in a gated community. Whatever happened in between, Zimmerman started it and he ended it. He may not have intended to kill anyone, but he set into motion events which led to him doing so. Any reasonable jury should have found him guilty of manslaughter.
Whatever evidence I've seen suggests that only one person was terrified for his life during the whole episode, and he's currently on trial.
I'm curious, if you think that only Zimmerman was scared during the whole episode, why do you think Martin ran away from him?
people "terrified for their lives" don't usually go "ooh, cowering is beneath [my] dignity, so let's fight".
Actually, they do all the time. There's an instinctive response to danger commonly referred to as "fight or flight". When you're cornered, you fight. Zimmerman has claimed that Martin came at him from the bushes (although his claims on this have varied). If he did come out of the bushes, has it occurred to you at all to wonder why he was in the bushes? Could it be because he was hiding there? So, same question applies to the hiding as to the running: why did he do it? The obvious answer was that an unknown, hostile, creepy, armed man was chasing him. Continuing to hide either seemed to be a losing prospect due to Zimmerman's persistence, or Martin decided to just stand up for himself against a perceived aggressor. Either way, Zimmerman persecuted an innocent kid, made him fear for his life, then killed him when he tried to defend himself. Even if Zimmerman's actions weren't malicious or racially motivated, they were grossly incompetent. Since that incompetence resulted in a homicide, Zimmerman should have been found guilty of manslaughter at least.
I remember reading a story about some homeless people who were squatting in a warehouse and lit a fire to keep warm. There was an accident and the warehouse caught fire. During the blaze, some firefighters went inside and ended up dying. The homeless people who started the fire went to prison for manslaughter. I want to know what kind of excuse for a justice system exists in this country such that Zimmerman walks free and those homeless people both went to prison?
Some of it is leftover mechanical heat from the Earth's formation. Some of it is mechanical heat induced through tidal interactions with the Moon (with the energy ultimately being drained from the Earth's rotation). But a very large chunk of it is from natural radioactive decay.
Wow, so you're concluding that you should blame the person who was terrified for his life rather than the person who persecuted him without cause who made him terrified for his life in the first place.
"Dictionary stalker". Cute. Replace the word "dictionary" with "literal" and you'd have it about right. What you're ignoring here is: where exactly was Martin between the time he ran from Zimmerman and their confrontation? He didn't go home. A little critical analysis should tell you that he wouldn't want to lead a creepy stalker back to where he lived. Most likely, he was hiding somewhere very nearby and concluded either that Zimmerman would eventually find him and that it was better to confront him out in the open or simply that it was beneath his dignity to cower away from some random nut.
You seem to blame Martin for not believing that it was his place to scurry away and hide the moment he drew capricious disapproval from someone. Perhaps you think he should know his place.
If there was something illegal about it (following someone from a distance), one can be sure Zimmerman would have been charged with it.
Martin noticed him and ran from him in fear for his life, so it clearly wasn't much of a distance and was pretty threatening to boot. It doesn't necessarily meet the legal definition of stalking,but it clearly meets the dictionary one. In any case, it doesn't have to be a separate crime in and of itself, it just has to be "culpable negligence" leading to death.
Thing is, that doesn't matter. The events that led up to the fight are relevant, but do not automatically invalidate a self-defense claim.
They actually kind of do. Less so in Florida than nearly any other state, but still there as well. You don't get to start a fight, then kill the other person and call it self defense. Zimmerman started the fight by making Martin fear for his life. There's also the issue of excessive force. A fit, 29 year old former bouncer doesn't really have much of an excuse for needing a gun to settle hand to hand combat with an inexperienced kid he outweighs by at least thirty pounds.
"Kid" isn't a legal term and it implies more than just "under 18."
True. The context, however, was one person saying: "this action lead to the death of a kid carrying skittles", and another saying: "If by "kid" you mean a thug with gold teeth who had been doing drugs close to the time of the event.. yeah".
The fact is, by contemporary usage, he was a kid. There isn't a legal definition for kid, to be sure. In legal history, it probably just means "baby goat". The legal term would probably be "youth", or "juvenile", but it's fairly obvious to most people that those are largely the same thing as "kid".
In any case, saying that he's not a kid due to cosmetic issues or alleged use of illicit substances that it seems the majority of kids in this country make use of, is just an attempt to dehumanize him. It's terrible.
As for age of consent, I'm not just talking about consent for sexual relations, but also for signing contracts, or indeed to have any voice in society. The fact is, without the extraordinary step of legal emancipation, anyone under 18 in the USA is legally just an extension of their legal guardians, they have nebulous property rights, limited rights to travel, and even limited free speech rights. For example, it's not technically legal to publish interviews with anyone under eighteen without parental consent. If you've ever seen a child campaigning for anything, or seeking their civil rights (example: right not to be forced to say the pledge of allegiance in school), etc. you can be guaranteed that they either have full backing by their parents/guardians or they took extraordinary steps to petition a judge to allow them to do so.
By itself, no.. and yes, when I posted my very short description of Trayvon Martin, I only included a few details. I'm not going to give a 1000 word description outlining his thuggish appearance when someone can do a quick image search. If someone said "Huh he had gold teeth, but my mom had gold teeth and she wasn't a thug, let me see what he really looked like" and then did a search and looked at the pics would say "Oh, yeah, I get it, he's a thug." So I really don't think I was distorting anything.
I mean really, what are you trying to argue? We're not talking in a vacuum here, we've both seen pics of Trayvon Martin (here, I did an image search for you [cnn.com]) and we both know he looks like a thug. Everybody reading this thread knows he looked like a thug. I think you're being critical for no reason.
Once again, Martin did not have gold teeth. Having worn cosmetic tooth coverings in some photos doesn't make him a gold-toothed thug any more than wearing plastic fangs in some photos makes any other kid a vampire. As for the picture in the link you provided to demonstrate that he looked like a thug, all it shows is his bare chest, shoulders and face. He's wearing some sort of hat. All I see in that picture is a young man, apparently African-American, with a fairly neutral expression on his face. There's nothing else in the picture that says "thug". Heck, there's nothing else in the picture except the wall behind him. The only way anyone could get "thug" from that picture is if they were using the equivalence: young black man == thug. In other words, you may not think you are one, but you're kind of a racist.
That's ridiculous -- again, look at the pics of the older Trayvon Martin. If you think I'm stereotyping him based on his name or race or something, that's just utterly stupid. Given how he posed for the pictures found on his own cellphone, if anybody was stereotyping Trayvon Martin -- it was himself! He wanted to look like a stereotypical thug, and he did. And I then said he looked like a thug. Mission accomplished, Trayvon.
The critical difference you're missing here is that you said that he _was_ a thug, not just that he'd posed for pictures to look like a thug. Once again, I refer you to vampires. Just because someone wears plastic fangs d
Except self-defense doesn't really apply as a legal defense here. You can argue that they were both acting in self defense against each other at the time of the killing (although, frankly, I think the one actually being chased by an armed man has the stronger claim). Thing is, if you go back a bit, you have an armed man stalking a teenage boy against police advice because he didn't like the look of him. That's the grossly incompetent act that led to the confrontation that resulted in the boy's death and it precedes anything that could be considered justification for an act of self defense.
If by "kid" you mean a thug with gold teeth who had been doing drugs close to the time of the event.. yeah.
I think by "kid" he meant non-adult. If you want to make 17-year olds full adults, fine, just make sure to lower the voting age, the age of consent, etc. As for "gold teeth"... For starters, my mother had gold teeth and fillings. It's superior to standard dental amalgam. Does that make my mother a thug? Then of course there's the fact that he didn't have gold teeth. Here's a clue for you, people who have pictures of themselves on the Internet wearing fake vampire fangs don't deserve to have stakes driven through their hearts. As for drugs, are you telling me that a teenager in the US was doing drugs? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
I don't know if you're just ignorant, or if you're actively false. It looks like what you're trying to do there is dehumanize a person by making them up into a stereotype. It's kind of sick, given the circumstances.
I agree with the claim that Trayvon was standing his ground, just like Zimmerman did... there is no guilty party here either way. Certainly nobody was murdered. Two guys stood their ground and one died. End of story. If we weren't such a PC, litigious society, charges wouldn't have been filed.. just like they weren't initially. Not every death is a "murder" that needs to be prosecuted!
I'm repeatedly stunned by discussion of this case by individuals, the media, and even legal professionals. For some reason everyone, when discussing this case, seems to completely forget about this little thing called manslaughter. It's a simple concept: do something in a bone-headedly incompetent way such that someone is killed and you've committed a crime. It's one of those things that covers edge cases and can be really unfair sometimes. A kid might run out into the street and be hit by a car and the driver is going one mile over the speed limit and they can go to jail. Some chemical company executives might make unsafe decisions about storage of toxic gas and it might escape, sweeping down a valley and over a town killing thousands of people and they can go to jail (Ha! Just kidding, everyone knows the high-level executives won't really go to jail just for killing thousands of people and especially if they're brown people in another country). The point is, maybe you think manslaughter is stupid and should never be prosecuted and you might be able to make a convincing case for it. But there's plenty of legal precedent for people going to jail for manslaughter and, if everything Zimmerman has said is 100% true, he's definitely guilty of manslaughter.
The very fact that you refer to them as "third parties" speaks volumes about what an uphill battle any other political party (or any non-party affiliated non-incumbent) faces. One of the major problems is that most elections are held as simple plurality - one vote per person for one candidate- vulnerable to the spoiler effect. It's the perfect system when there are exactly two choices, and it's proven to be the worst when there are any more than two. It naturally settles to a two party equilibrium. The two major parties recognize this fact, but will never fix the underlying problem. Instead, they hold their own primary elections to intentionally game a system they know doesn't work.
That's right. Murder is unlawful killing. All murder is killing, but not all killing is murder.
There's no rational basis in US Law for killing Snowden and having it not be murder. It would simply be an assassination for revenge purposes. Playing "it's not a crime if the President does it" games doesn't make it legal either. As another poster pointed out to you, any sovereign entity can kill and torture who it pleases and, by your narrow definition, it's not murder or torture if they define it not to be via their laws. I honestly don't understand how anyone can be stupid enough to believe that's how it should work.
You might have a reasonable argument about waterboarding, but that was only done to 3 people by the US, the most recent of which was 10 years ago.
Sure. Also, the US certainly hasn't performed any other torture or had anyone else do it for them. That taxi driver from Afghanistan who was hung from his wrists for four days and given "simply unpleasant" compliance blows until the toxicity of his own dead flesh killed him wasn't tortured. No no no.
The US has waterboarded probably tens of thousands of its own service members as part of their training - and still does. Did the US commit torture of its own service members? Obviously no. If the same was done to al Qaida members, is it torture? Coercive, yes. Unpleasant, yes, very. Torture? At the time, legally no.
On the prisoners, yes it was torture. You have to be a true moron to think that it wasn't. It was also legally torture at the time as well. As for the waterboarding done to some US service members as part of their training, I have a few questions:
Do you understand the difference between a boxing match and a physical assault?
Do you understand the difference between consensual sex and rape?
Do you understand the difference between S&M and torture?
Finally, why don't you understand the difference between a relatively brief, but unpleasant, training exercise done in a safe environment by comrades in arms who don't want anything bad to happen to the subject, with medical personnel standing by and, let's be frank, almost certainly the option to tap out and outright torture with no end in sight done by people who hate you and want to hurt you, possibly with medical personnel standing by (but they also hate you and want to hurt you and might not actually lift a finger to save you), and no way to make them stop? Is it really that hard to understand the distinction. I mean seriously, are the people who make that argument seriously expecting they can trick anyone with half a brain into accepting the false equivalence? Are the people making that argument actually stupid enough to buy it themselves?
Nice fantasy. It's also certainly possible that some people who have performed such experiments were deranged. The fact is, some of the experiments have been successful and have produced combined animals surviving well past decapitation, but paralyzed. Gruesome, but so was much early medical experimentation. The first blood transfusions were mostly fatal. Same is true for most early transplants of any kind. I'm not saying I approve of the mistreatment of animals, I'm just saying that you're wrong if you think that anyone who would ever do such a thing could only have evil or insane motivations.
What sick brain actually thinks "Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat..."
Well, I think what kind of person they are mostly depends on what comes after the ellipses. For example:
Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat... thus paving the way to save countless people from unnecessary medical suffering.
It's gruesome, certainly, but a scientist doesn't have to be insane or evil to wonder about it.
Well, it might happen except for the whole rejection problem. Maybe the blood-brain barrier will protect the brain from rejection, but not the rest of the head, and probably not the brain either. For this to work, it's pretty much going to have to be a clone body.
There was a _Tales from the Crypt_ episode like that with George Burns. He played an old, rich man interested in an attractive young woman. This doctor approaches him and offers him him a donor body for a fortune. It's actually done piecemeal, a bit at a time. At the end, he has all of the young man's body and none of his fortune. The woman he's interested in, naturally, ends up with the donor, who now has the old body, but also is filthy rich.
Hmmm. Also reminds me a bit of a _Twilight Zone_ episode where a couple are interested in new bodies from a company that offers healthy new bodies. They can only afford the ten thousand dollars for one body swap. The husband is in almost constant pain from his age-related medical conditions. There's a subplot where the husband tries to double his money playing poker but nearly loses it all but is let off the hook by the card shark he goes to and, in the end, he gets a new body first. However, he quickly decides to switch back to his original body (they have a money back guarantee) based on some crazy 50's TV moralizing about aging gracefully with his partner, etc. Bear in mind that his original body is in almost constant pain. All I could think watching it was that it was some stupid rigged false dilemma. He should have just used his new, strong, healthy body to work hard for a few years and save up the money for his wife to follow him if he loved her that much. Maybe I'm missing something about this whole dignity of aging gracefully thing, but it seems to me that most of the dignity comes from accepting what you cannot change. As soon as it's actually possible to change it, all of that goes out the window.
So effectively you could keep a clone on ice and when the time comes just transplant your head onto the clones body. Pretty cool!
Sure. Of course we'd have to solve the problem of reviving a frozen human body first. More likely you'd have to do careful planning and start growing the clone at least five or six years (some acceleration might be possible with growth hormones, but even without that, such a body should be able to support an adult brain, carefully monitored) before the procedure. There are some clear potential ethical problems. For one thing, without artificial wombs, you're going to have to have a surrogate mother which raises severe ethical issues. Although, there's no reason the surrogate mother can't be another clone. The other issue is, of course, the question of the rights of the clone. It's possible to grow a clone without the majority of its brain. With some other support systems, it might be possible to grow one without any brain at all. If that can be done, then it's ethically no different than growing organs individually and re-assembling them. Of course, growing headless human bodies inside other headless human bodies (probably stripped down ones with no limbs,extra-bones, etc.) is still very viscerally disturbing and most people can't tell the difference between that and unethical.
Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued. There are boundaries we need to maintain for the safety of humanity.
That doesn't make much sense. What problems are you actually imagining? Body theft? Rejection issues would almost certainly make that a non-starter. Sure it might work if someone had an identical twin to dispose of, but that's going to be a pretty rare situation. This could work with cloned bodies, and then you might have the horror of clones raised to be murdered for their bodies, except that growing a clone without a head is already possible and should be ethically no different than growing a bunch of individual organs, bones, cartilage, muscle, skin, etc. and assembling it together. You would have a hard time arguing that finding a way to grow any of those individually would be terribly unethical. If you're worried about anyone living forever, you just need to talk to an actuary or any other professional statistician to have your fears laid to rest.
But raising a human from fetus to an appropriate age strictly for the purpose of harvesting it's body strikes me as abhorrent.
What if you grew a human with no brain? Would that also be abhorrent? If it still is, then how is it different than growing all the parts separately and then assembling them?
Technically speaking, humans have more than one pump as well. We have one way valves in our veins so that, during vigorous exercise, the repeated compression and decompression pumps blood around our bodies. It doesn't represent a redundant system, however. It's complementary to our hearts, but can't replace the heart.
Russia wants to be seen as a big, serious player, not as a rogue state.
You do realize that you're talking about Russia here, don't you? Biggest country on Earth? Just a tiny bit smaller than South America and larger than three of the other continents. Major military power.
"kill"/= "murder"? As for torture. I believe the official position is that torture isn't allowed, but various things that any sane person would clearly identify as torture are merely "enhanced interrogation".
I'm just curious, is your quote accurate? If it's the State Department spokesperson's error saying "Assange" when he meant "Snowden", that's very interesting. If it was your error, it's not as interesting.
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No. It starts with whoever threw the first legally unjustifiable attack.
I said the time-line for manslaughter. In any case, given the fact that Martin would have reasonably feared for his life at that point, attacking Zimmerman would have been legally justifiable. Also, it bears mentioning every now and then that all of this is assuming that Zimmerman's version(s) of events is/are the full truth.
You're dreaming. It was dark & rainy. Martin isn't reported to have mentioned a weapon on the phone. Martin had minutes of no-visual-contact from Zimmerman, so even if the former divined the presence of a gun, he was in no danger after he got out of sight. Yet he came back.
This was a relatively dense suburb, it was rainy, but there would be lights from houses and street lamps. Any person without compromised night vision would be able to make out such details up close. The no visual contact is about one minute and thirty seconds and, if Zimmerman is to be believed, Martin may have spent that time hiding in the bushes. He also may probably didn't have Zimmerman in his line of sight either. So, when the confrontation happened, it's reasonable to believe that he might have believed that escape attempts had failed. Also, it may have escaped your notice that Florida has a stand your ground self-defense law.
That was when he was already on the ground, being pounded, with clothes in a rather different configuration than normal.
Hmmm. Actually, I just checked and, apparently I was wrong about where Zimmerman had his gun. It turns out it was in a holster on his back, inside his pants. So, that means that either Zimmerman lied about Martin trying to get the gun or that Martin must have seen it before they fought.
Just goes to show the dangers of misinterpreting someone's evasiveness as an impending attack. Guess what, people who study armed self-defense are taught about not over-reacting to mere suspicion.
Yeah, the people who study that sort of thing would be people like gun-owner, neighborhood watch member and criminal justice student George Zimmerman. People who can't reasonably be expected to study that are minors who don't own guns and probably haven't had any gun training or training in dealing with these situations and who don't presume to an authoritarian role where such things should be expected as due diligence. Yet, for some reason, Zimmerman interpreted Martin walking along the street as intent to commit a crime and over-reacted to mere suspicion. The inexperienced kid who was running and hiding in fear for his life has a pretty good excuse for being scared. Let's face it, self-fulfilling prophecy though it may have been, his life was definitely in danger from George Zimmerman.
No, it isn't. The bad judgement was related to following to closely, letting be jumped. A wiser & more attentive person may not have let Martin get that close. But he was, he apparently attacked, and gave the all-important "self-defense" out against manslaughter.
Yes it is. The bad judgment was related to following in the first place, getting out of the car and trying to deceive Martin about his identity and purpose. A wiser and more attentive person wouldn't have suspected Martin of anything in the first place since he wasn't doing anything wrong. They also wouldn't have gotten out of the car to follow him, and they would have, when confronted, said that they were with the neighborhood watch.
As for the all-important self-defense out for manslaughter, that's only the case in few states. Most states don't let you kill someone in a fist fight and claim self-defense. We are talking about Florida here, however, and it does have a "stand your ground" law. The problem there is that Martin was the one running and hiding and Zimmerman was the one chasing. Martin was the one standing his ground. Self-defense shouldn't defend Zimmerman against manslaught
The links of that chain are apprx. irrelevant until the point of the physical altercation.
The links of the chain leading to a homicide are not irrelevant. You're trying to pretend that Martin was some psychopath who randomly attacks innocent bystanders and that Zimmerman was just an innocent bystander. That's obviously not the case. You can't just start the timeline where you choose to make your favorite an innocent victim. The timeline for manslaughter starts and ends with Zimmerman's actions. My example about the homeless people convicted for killing fire-fighters because they accidentally burned down a building shows how causality is usually measured in manslaughter cases.
Your fantastic speculation about the timeline - that Martin confronted, correctly divined the presence of a gun, incorrectly divined the intent of its owner - indicts Martin only barely less than the more plausible story.
It's not fantastic speculation. It's based on Zimmerman's own story and photographs and video from the night in question. Zimmerman's clothing wouldn't have concealed a gun from anything other than the most casual of glances. Zimmerman has stated that Martin was trying to get his gun. What other evidence do you need that Martin knew that Zimmerman had a gun? As for incorrectly divining the intent of the gun's owner, that may have had something to do with the fact that Zimmerman, according to his own story, was intentionally deceptive to Martin.
One of the jurors from the trial has given an interview. During the interview she said that Zimmerman was guilty of "not using good judgement.”. Someone must have messed up on the jury instructions somewhere because manslaughter was on the table. When you kill someone from bad judgement, it's manslaughter.
Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Of course, the "shoulders of giants" thing was meant as a crack at Leibniz, who wasn't very tall.
You're moving the goalposts. "terrified for his life" is different from "scared".
"Scared" is a spectrum in which "terrified for his life" is one small range. I do think Martin was terrified for his life. I wasn't moving the goalposts, you're just quibbling over semantics.
Yes. It is possible that he was hiding out of fear. It is possible that he was counter-stalking.
"Counter-stalking"? Sorry, what alternative reason other than being fearful for his life would he be doing that for? I can't think of any reason that isn't, ultimately, Zimmerman's fault.
There appears to be no evidence that Zimmerman lay hands on Martin (before the gunshot); whereas there is evidence that Martin touched Zimmerman (eyewitnesses & injuries). That kind of "self-defense" will not stand up in court, and may get one killed.
No eyewitness has reported seeing the start of the physical altercation. The injuries say nothing about the order of events. The only evidence that Martin physically assaulted Zimmerman first is Zimmerman's word. Considering that he killed Martin, there's ample cause to consider his word a little tainted. In any case, that's immaterial to charges of manslaughter. Zimmerman's own statements claim that, when Martin confronted him and demanded to know why he was following him, Zimmerman lied to him, then turned away from him while reaching for his cell phone. Zimmerman was lethally armed and, though he had a concealed carry permit, was not dressed in a way that would actually conceal his weapon. So, we have an obviously lethally armed older man, obviously stalking Martin, then lying to him about it instead of identifying himself. He turns away to conceal his movements, then reaches for something in his pocket. It's hard to know exactly what went through Martin's mind at that point, but if I were in that situation I'm pretty sure I would think that Zimmerman was some sort of psycho who was about to kill me. As it turns out, that pretty much turned out to be the case.
There's a chain of events that led to Martin's death at the hands of Zimmerman. It starts with Zimmerman spotting Martin and concluding that he was a criminal most likely based on either racial prejudice or age prejudice or both. His ridiculous theory that no-one would be walking in the rain if they weren't a criminal is exactly the sort of idiocy you'd expect from an armchair criminologist living in a gated community. Whatever happened in between, Zimmerman started it and he ended it. He may not have intended to kill anyone, but he set into motion events which led to him doing so. Any reasonable jury should have found him guilty of manslaughter.
Whatever evidence I've seen suggests that only one person was terrified for his life during the whole episode, and he's currently on trial.
I'm curious, if you think that only Zimmerman was scared during the whole episode, why do you think Martin ran away from him?
people "terrified for their lives" don't usually go "ooh, cowering is beneath [my] dignity, so let's fight".
Actually, they do all the time. There's an instinctive response to danger commonly referred to as "fight or flight". When you're cornered, you fight. Zimmerman has claimed that Martin came at him from the bushes (although his claims on this have varied). If he did come out of the bushes, has it occurred to you at all to wonder why he was in the bushes? Could it be because he was hiding there? So, same question applies to the hiding as to the running: why did he do it? The obvious answer was that an unknown, hostile, creepy, armed man was chasing him. Continuing to hide either seemed to be a losing prospect due to Zimmerman's persistence, or Martin decided to just stand up for himself against a perceived aggressor. Either way, Zimmerman persecuted an innocent kid, made him fear for his life, then killed him when he tried to defend himself. Even if Zimmerman's actions weren't malicious or racially motivated, they were grossly incompetent. Since that incompetence resulted in a homicide, Zimmerman should have been found guilty of manslaughter at least.
I remember reading a story about some homeless people who were squatting in a warehouse and lit a fire to keep warm. There was an accident and the warehouse caught fire. During the blaze, some firefighters went inside and ended up dying. The homeless people who started the fire went to prison for manslaughter. I want to know what kind of excuse for a justice system exists in this country such that Zimmerman walks free and those homeless people both went to prison?
Some of it is leftover mechanical heat from the Earth's formation. Some of it is mechanical heat induced through tidal interactions with the Moon (with the energy ultimately being drained from the Earth's rotation). But a very large chunk of it is from natural radioactive decay.
Wow, so you're concluding that you should blame the person who was terrified for his life rather than the person who persecuted him without cause who made him terrified for his life in the first place.
"Dictionary stalker". Cute. Replace the word "dictionary" with "literal" and you'd have it about right. What you're ignoring here is: where exactly was Martin between the time he ran from Zimmerman and their confrontation? He didn't go home. A little critical analysis should tell you that he wouldn't want to lead a creepy stalker back to where he lived. Most likely, he was hiding somewhere very nearby and concluded either that Zimmerman would eventually find him and that it was better to confront him out in the open or simply that it was beneath his dignity to cower away from some random nut.
You seem to blame Martin for not believing that it was his place to scurry away and hide the moment he drew capricious disapproval from someone. Perhaps you think he should know his place.
If there was something illegal about it (following someone from a distance), one can be sure Zimmerman would have been charged with it.
Martin noticed him and ran from him in fear for his life, so it clearly wasn't much of a distance and was pretty threatening to boot. It doesn't necessarily meet the legal definition of stalking,but it clearly meets the dictionary one. In any case, it doesn't have to be a separate crime in and of itself, it just has to be "culpable negligence" leading to death.
Thing is, that doesn't matter. The events that led up to the fight are relevant, but do not automatically invalidate a self-defense claim.
They actually kind of do. Less so in Florida than nearly any other state, but still there as well. You don't get to start a fight, then kill the other person and call it self defense. Zimmerman started the fight by making Martin fear for his life. There's also the issue of excessive force. A fit, 29 year old former bouncer doesn't really have much of an excuse for needing a gun to settle hand to hand combat with an inexperienced kid he outweighs by at least thirty pounds.
"Kid" isn't a legal term and it implies more than just "under 18."
True. The context, however, was one person saying: "this action lead to the death of a kid carrying skittles", and another saying: "If by "kid" you mean a thug with gold teeth who had been doing drugs close to the time of the event.. yeah".
The fact is, by contemporary usage, he was a kid. There isn't a legal definition for kid, to be sure. In legal history, it probably just means "baby goat". The legal term would probably be "youth", or "juvenile", but it's fairly obvious to most people that those are largely the same thing as "kid".
In any case, saying that he's not a kid due to cosmetic issues or alleged use of illicit substances that it seems the majority of kids in this country make use of, is just an attempt to dehumanize him. It's terrible.
As for age of consent, I'm not just talking about consent for sexual relations, but also for signing contracts, or indeed to have any voice in society. The fact is, without the extraordinary step of legal emancipation, anyone under 18 in the USA is legally just an extension of their legal guardians, they have nebulous property rights, limited rights to travel, and even limited free speech rights. For example, it's not technically legal to publish interviews with anyone under eighteen without parental consent. If you've ever seen a child campaigning for anything, or seeking their civil rights (example: right not to be forced to say the pledge of allegiance in school), etc. you can be guaranteed that they either have full backing by their parents/guardians or they took extraordinary steps to petition a judge to allow them to do so.
By itself, no.. and yes, when I posted my very short description of Trayvon Martin, I only included a few details. I'm not going to give a 1000 word description outlining his thuggish appearance when someone can do a quick image search. If someone said "Huh he had gold teeth, but my mom had gold teeth and she wasn't a thug, let me see what he really looked like" and then did a search and looked at the pics would say "Oh, yeah, I get it, he's a thug." So I really don't think I was distorting anything.
I mean really, what are you trying to argue? We're not talking in a vacuum here, we've both seen pics of Trayvon Martin (here, I did an image search for you [cnn.com]) and we both know he looks like a thug. Everybody reading this thread knows he looked like a thug. I think you're being critical for no reason.
Once again, Martin did not have gold teeth. Having worn cosmetic tooth coverings in some photos doesn't make him a gold-toothed thug any more than wearing plastic fangs in some photos makes any other kid a vampire. As for the picture in the link you provided to demonstrate that he looked like a thug, all it shows is his bare chest, shoulders and face. He's wearing some sort of hat. All I see in that picture is a young man, apparently African-American, with a fairly neutral expression on his face. There's nothing else in the picture that says "thug". Heck, there's nothing else in the picture except the wall behind him. The only way anyone could get "thug" from that picture is if they were using the equivalence: young black man == thug. In other words, you may not think you are one, but you're kind of a racist.
That's ridiculous -- again, look at the pics of the older Trayvon Martin. If you think I'm stereotyping him based on his name or race or something, that's just utterly stupid. Given how he posed for the pictures found on his own cellphone, if anybody was stereotyping Trayvon Martin -- it was himself! He wanted to look like a stereotypical thug, and he did. And I then said he looked like a thug. Mission accomplished, Trayvon.
The critical difference you're missing here is that you said that he _was_ a thug, not just that he'd posed for pictures to look like a thug. Once again, I refer you to vampires. Just because someone wears plastic fangs d
Except self-defense doesn't really apply as a legal defense here. You can argue that they were both acting in self defense against each other at the time of the killing (although, frankly, I think the one actually being chased by an armed man has the stronger claim). Thing is, if you go back a bit, you have an armed man stalking a teenage boy against police advice because he didn't like the look of him. That's the grossly incompetent act that led to the confrontation that resulted in the boy's death and it precedes anything that could be considered justification for an act of self defense.
If by "kid" you mean a thug with gold teeth who had been doing drugs close to the time of the event.. yeah.
I think by "kid" he meant non-adult. If you want to make 17-year olds full adults, fine, just make sure to lower the voting age, the age of consent, etc. As for "gold teeth"... For starters, my mother had gold teeth and fillings. It's superior to standard dental amalgam. Does that make my mother a thug? Then of course there's the fact that he didn't have gold teeth. Here's a clue for you, people who have pictures of themselves on the Internet wearing fake vampire fangs don't deserve to have stakes driven through their hearts. As for drugs, are you telling me that a teenager in the US was doing drugs? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
I don't know if you're just ignorant, or if you're actively false. It looks like what you're trying to do there is dehumanize a person by making them up into a stereotype. It's kind of sick, given the circumstances.
I agree with the claim that Trayvon was standing his ground, just like Zimmerman did... there is no guilty party here either way. Certainly nobody was murdered. Two guys stood their ground and one died. End of story. If we weren't such a PC, litigious society, charges wouldn't have been filed.. just like they weren't initially. Not every death is a "murder" that needs to be prosecuted!
I'm repeatedly stunned by discussion of this case by individuals, the media, and even legal professionals. For some reason everyone, when discussing this case, seems to completely forget about this little thing called manslaughter. It's a simple concept: do something in a bone-headedly incompetent way such that someone is killed and you've committed a crime. It's one of those things that covers edge cases and can be really unfair sometimes. A kid might run out into the street and be hit by a car and the driver is going one mile over the speed limit and they can go to jail. Some chemical company executives might make unsafe decisions about storage of toxic gas and it might escape, sweeping down a valley and over a town killing thousands of people and they can go to jail (Ha! Just kidding, everyone knows the high-level executives won't really go to jail just for killing thousands of people and especially if they're brown people in another country). The point is, maybe you think manslaughter is stupid and should never be prosecuted and you might be able to make a convincing case for it. But there's plenty of legal precedent for people going to jail for manslaughter and, if everything Zimmerman has said is 100% true, he's definitely guilty of manslaughter.
The very fact that you refer to them as "third parties" speaks volumes about what an uphill battle any other political party (or any non-party affiliated non-incumbent) faces. One of the major problems is that most elections are held as simple plurality - one vote per person for one candidate- vulnerable to the spoiler effect. It's the perfect system when there are exactly two choices, and it's proven to be the worst when there are any more than two. It naturally settles to a two party equilibrium. The two major parties recognize this fact, but will never fix the underlying problem. Instead, they hold their own primary elections to intentionally game a system they know doesn't work.
That's right. Murder is unlawful killing. All murder is killing, but not all killing is murder.
There's no rational basis in US Law for killing Snowden and having it not be murder. It would simply be an assassination for revenge purposes. Playing "it's not a crime if the President does it" games doesn't make it legal either. As another poster pointed out to you, any sovereign entity can kill and torture who it pleases and, by your narrow definition, it's not murder or torture if they define it not to be via their laws. I honestly don't understand how anyone can be stupid enough to believe that's how it should work.
You might have a reasonable argument about waterboarding, but that was only done to 3 people by the US, the most recent of which was 10 years ago.
Sure. Also, the US certainly hasn't performed any other torture or had anyone else do it for them. That taxi driver from Afghanistan who was hung from his wrists for four days and given "simply unpleasant" compliance blows until the toxicity of his own dead flesh killed him wasn't tortured. No no no.
The US has waterboarded probably tens of thousands of its own service members as part of their training - and still does. Did the US commit torture of its own service members? Obviously no. If the same was done to al Qaida members, is it torture? Coercive, yes. Unpleasant, yes, very. Torture? At the time, legally no.
On the prisoners, yes it was torture. You have to be a true moron to think that it wasn't. It was also legally torture at the time as well. As for the waterboarding done to some US service members as part of their training, I have a few questions:
Do you understand the difference between a boxing match and a physical assault?
Do you understand the difference between consensual sex and rape?
Do you understand the difference between S&M and torture?
Finally, why don't you understand the difference between a relatively brief, but unpleasant, training exercise done in a safe environment by comrades in arms who don't want anything bad to happen to the subject, with medical personnel standing by and, let's be frank, almost certainly the option to tap out and outright torture with no end in sight done by people who hate you and want to hurt you, possibly with medical personnel standing by (but they also hate you and want to hurt you and might not actually lift a finger to save you), and no way to make them stop? Is it really that hard to understand the distinction. I mean seriously, are the people who make that argument seriously expecting they can trick anyone with half a brain into accepting the false equivalence? Are the people making that argument actually stupid enough to buy it themselves?
Nice fantasy. It's also certainly possible that some people who have performed such experiments were deranged. The fact is, some of the experiments have been successful and have produced combined animals surviving well past decapitation, but paralyzed. Gruesome, but so was much early medical experimentation. The first blood transfusions were mostly fatal. Same is true for most early transplants of any kind. I'm not saying I approve of the mistreatment of animals, I'm just saying that you're wrong if you think that anyone who would ever do such a thing could only have evil or insane motivations.
What sick brain actually thinks "Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat ..."
Well, I think what kind of person they are mostly depends on what comes after the ellipses. For example:
Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat ... thus paving the way to save countless people from unnecessary medical suffering.
It's gruesome, certainly, but a scientist doesn't have to be insane or evil to wonder about it.
Well, it might happen except for the whole rejection problem. Maybe the blood-brain barrier will protect the brain from rejection, but not the rest of the head, and probably not the brain either. For this to work, it's pretty much going to have to be a clone body.
There was a _Tales from the Crypt_ episode like that with George Burns. He played an old, rich man interested in an attractive young woman. This doctor approaches him and offers him him a donor body for a fortune. It's actually done piecemeal, a bit at a time. At the end, he has all of the young man's body and none of his fortune. The woman he's interested in, naturally, ends up with the donor, who now has the old body, but also is filthy rich.
Hmmm. Also reminds me a bit of a _Twilight Zone_ episode where a couple are interested in new bodies from a company that offers healthy new bodies. They can only afford the ten thousand dollars for one body swap. The husband is in almost constant pain from his age-related medical conditions. There's a subplot where the husband tries to double his money playing poker but nearly loses it all but is let off the hook by the card shark he goes to and, in the end, he gets a new body first. However, he quickly decides to switch back to his original body (they have a money back guarantee) based on some crazy 50's TV moralizing about aging gracefully with his partner, etc. Bear in mind that his original body is in almost constant pain. All I could think watching it was that it was some stupid rigged false dilemma. He should have just used his new, strong, healthy body to work hard for a few years and save up the money for his wife to follow him if he loved her that much. Maybe I'm missing something about this whole dignity of aging gracefully thing, but it seems to me that most of the dignity comes from accepting what you cannot change. As soon as it's actually possible to change it, all of that goes out the window.
So effectively you could keep a clone on ice and when the time comes just transplant your head onto the clones body. Pretty cool!
Sure. Of course we'd have to solve the problem of reviving a frozen human body first. More likely you'd have to do careful planning and start growing the clone at least five or six years (some acceleration might be possible with growth hormones, but even without that, such a body should be able to support an adult brain, carefully monitored) before the procedure. There are some clear potential ethical problems. For one thing, without artificial wombs, you're going to have to have a surrogate mother which raises severe ethical issues. Although, there's no reason the surrogate mother can't be another clone. The other issue is, of course, the question of the rights of the clone. It's possible to grow a clone without the majority of its brain. With some other support systems, it might be possible to grow one without any brain at all. If that can be done, then it's ethically no different than growing organs individually and re-assembling them. Of course, growing headless human bodies inside other headless human bodies (probably stripped down ones with no limbs,extra-bones, etc.) is still very viscerally disturbing and most people can't tell the difference between that and unethical.
Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued. There are boundaries we need to maintain for the safety of humanity.
That doesn't make much sense. What problems are you actually imagining? Body theft? Rejection issues would almost certainly make that a non-starter. Sure it might work if someone had an identical twin to dispose of, but that's going to be a pretty rare situation. This could work with cloned bodies, and then you might have the horror of clones raised to be murdered for their bodies, except that growing a clone without a head is already possible and should be ethically no different than growing a bunch of individual organs, bones, cartilage, muscle, skin, etc. and assembling it together. You would have a hard time arguing that finding a way to grow any of those individually would be terribly unethical. If you're worried about anyone living forever, you just need to talk to an actuary or any other professional statistician to have your fears laid to rest.
But raising a human from fetus to an appropriate age strictly for the purpose of harvesting it's body strikes me as abhorrent.
What if you grew a human with no brain? Would that also be abhorrent? If it still is, then how is it different than growing all the parts separately and then assembling them?
Technically speaking, humans have more than one pump as well. We have one way valves in our veins so that, during vigorous exercise, the repeated compression and decompression pumps blood around our bodies. It doesn't represent a redundant system, however. It's complementary to our hearts, but can't replace the heart.
Russia wants to be seen as a big, serious player, not as a rogue state.
You do realize that you're talking about Russia here, don't you? Biggest country on Earth? Just a tiny bit smaller than South America and larger than three of the other continents. Major military power.
"kill" /= "murder"? As for torture. I believe the official position is that torture isn't allowed, but various things that any sane person would clearly identify as torture are merely "enhanced interrogation".
I'm just curious, is your quote accurate? If it's the State Department spokesperson's error saying "Assange" when he meant "Snowden", that's very interesting. If it was your error, it's not as interesting.