I don't know what happened to my friend's killers. His family was upset enough about it and I didn't want to bother them about it any more.
Billy Kuch did nothing that justified being shot. Gregory Stewart was not in danger. He should have stayed inside his home and waited for the cops to arrive, as he admitted himself. It was an unjustified shooting. Stewart's warning was irrelevant. Billy Kuch was incapable of leaving or following orders. Even the gun nuts don't argue that we should kill mentally troubled people when they disturb other people at night. Why the fuck did he leave the safety of his house to play cowboy? And yet Stewart wasn't prosecuted.
Rodney Peairs was acquitted by a jury because the gun laws in Louisianna are so ridiculous that they allow a homeowner to shoot and kill a stranger who goes to the wrong house even on Halloween (where it's customary for people to go from house to house). He was objectively not threatened at all. All he had to do was say the magic words that he "felt threatened" and he could kill anybody he wants not only in his home but anywhere around it, even on a public sidewalk.
This is irresponsible and negligent. It's likely that they will kill an innocent person under those circumstances, and yet the law permits them to do so merely by claiming that they felt threatened. The prosecutors say it's almost impossible to disprove that defense. The law was designed that way by the National Rifle Association. They were bothered by the fact that when a homeowner shot and killed somebody, that homeowner would be investigated and have to defend his actions. They now have a law in which a homeowner can shoot and kill someone not just in his home but anywhere around his home, and not be investigated at all, even if he wasn't really threatened, even if he left the safety of his home while the cops were on the way.
Nobody has cited cases in the U.S. of people who were genuinely defending themselves being imprisoned for life.
Let me tell you something about political science in the U.S. Laws aren't made by a careful balancing of interests and weighing the dangers of innocent people going to jail against guilty people going free. Laws are made by following the power of lobbying groups. The NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying groups. They don't care, beyond crocodile tears, what happens to innocent people who get killed. They're advocates for gun owners. They want gun owners to be able to shoot people with as little restraint or concern for the consequences as possible. They want gun owners to get off, regardless of the circumstances.
If your idea of a weekend's recreation is to go to a bar, get drunk, and get into a frontier fight, yes, if you kill somebody with an unlucky punch and you can't establish self-defense, you might be convicted of homicide or murder, in Australia or the civilized parts of America. That's what homicide is.
This discussion isn't going anywhere. I don't see any rational engagement there.
Billy Kuch was a troubled kid. As an adolescent, he had bipolar disorder diagnosed and he’d been arrested a couple of times for driving under the influence. He drank too much, and he knew it.
So when he was out at a party that August night on Golden Eagle Drive near the intersection of Gun Smoke Drive, he decided he was too blitzed to drive home. He left the party to lock his keys inside his car so he couldn’t get behind the wheel later that night.
Kuch, then 23, stumbled back toward the party but forgot which beige stucco house was hosting the bash. He knocked on the wrong door, the one belonging to Gregory Stewart, a 32-year-old homeowner who did not appreciate having his wife and baby disturbed by a drunk kid after 4 in the morning. Kuch went away and texted his sister that he was totally confused about what was going on.
Then Kuch found what he thought was the party house and tried the door. But he’d landed at Stewart’s place, again.
This time, after Kuch turned the doorknob, Stewart told his wife to call 911. Then he grabbed his Smith & Wesson semiautomatic and went into his front yard.
Stewart said he kept asking Kuch to leave, but Kuch, thinking the guys at the party were playing a joke on him, stayed.
“Don’t make me shoot you,” warned the 6-foot-1 Stewart, according to police records. “I don’t want to shoot you.”
Kuch, who stands 5-foot-9, raised his hands, asked for a light and lurched toward the homeowner. Stewart fired.
Stewart broke down in tears when police arrived. “I could have given him a light,” he said. But he said he had felt threatened.
Police asked Stewart why he hadn’t just waited inside until officers arrived.
“I don’t know,” replied Stewart. His unwanted visitor, he said, was unarmed.
“If I had a crazy drunk guy at my door,” said Jeanann Kuch, Billy’s mother, “I’d have locked my door and called 911.”
Kuch spent five weeks in a coma. He woke with no recollection of the incident.
Before the shooting, Kuch had supported the Stand Your Ground law, his parents said. Stewart’s view of the law is not known. He did not return repeated calls, and no court ever asked, because Stewart was never brought before a judge.
Stewart was arrested that night, but Assistant State Attorney Manny Garcia concluded that his actions were “justified.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/03/why_george_zimmerman_trayvon_martin_s_killer_hasn_t_been_prosecuted_.single.html Why Trayvon Martin’s Killer Remains Free Florida’s self-defense laws have left Florida safe for no one—except those who shoot first. By Emily Bazelon March 19, 2012 (Since Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law was passed in 2005, there have been many cases of people killing unarmed opponents and not being charged. The worst, according to Bazelon, is that the courts gave "true immunity," which means the judge can dismiss the prosecution before the trial begins, and the question of whether the killer was really defending himself doesn't even go to the jury.)
These are "justifiable" homicides because that's the category the stand-your-ground put them in. Under the old law, most of them would have been murders, if they had happened at all.
You may think that if two people get into a fight and one of them "defends" himself by pulling a gun and killing the other guy, who is unarmed, that's a good outcome. I disagree. These are routine assaults, where nobody would have gotten killed without the gun.
How do you know they were getting unjustly convicted? The juries had more of the facts and obviously disagreed with you.
Even the killer of Yoshihiro Hattori was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori These laws protect irresponsible shooters, like Rodney Peairs. Somebody rings your bell on Halloween, and you shoot him? These laws protect people who do that.
(1)He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;
Yes, one of the reasons for torturing captives during the runup to the Iraqi war was to get them to "admit" that Saddam Hussein was working with al Qaeda. They didn't want the facts, they just wanted classified information to tout their war.
The New York Times had an essay by a real interrogator, who interrogated Nazis after WWII, who explained why the CIA was doing it all wrong.
One of the first skills of an interrogator is to know the subject's language with great fluency. The U.S. interrogators after WWII knew German and Japanese sometimes with native fluency. So did the Soviet interrogators. It makes sense (although making sense never counted for much during the Bush Administration). How can you interrogate somebody through a translator?
The FBI wasn't as bad as the CIA, BTW. FBI investigators often refused to have anything to do with the CIA interrogations when they saw what was going on.
Have violent crime rates gone up or down in American states that have liberalized their gun laws? It is my understanding that violent crime rates have gone down, but if you have evidence to the contrary please let me know.
According to the Florida newspapers that have investigated the results of the laws, the rates of justified homicides have tripled. Most of those are cases that the prosecutors would have prosecuted as murder under the old laws, but didn't think they could convict under the new laws. Some of them involved people provoking a fight, getting beaten up, and killing the guy they originally attacked (which is what the prosecutor is charging Zimmerman with). A fair number of them involved drug dealers.
So the result of the laws have been to convert violent crimes to justified homicides, and let people get away with what used to be murder.
The last time I reviewed the literature, the researchers said that data comparing changes in crime associated with changes in gun laws didn't have the statistical power to draw statistically significant conclusions, and it was too difficult to separate the laws from other factors.
You really don't think someone pounding your head against the pavement could kill you? Ludicrous!
In science, we base our conclusions on data, not intuition. I used to work on auto engineering safety studies, and went over a few studies of tests on cadavers to see how much impact the human skull could take, so I know a little bit about the physics. A minor auto collision will give much more of an impact than an adversary could give in a fight. Falling over from a standing position and hitting your head would give more impact. Falling from a bicycle is often fatal. And I've had my head pounded against the pavement myself when I was a teenager. But I've never heard of anybody actually being killed by having his head pounded against the pavement, and I couldn't find one with a quick Google search. If you can find such a case, I'll change my mind.
I wouldn't hesitate to shoot someone doing that if I was the victim. If I was a bystander, the dude doing the pounding would get one verbal warning, and if he pounded the victim's head again, I would shoot him.
That's the problem with handguns. They escalate a fight to a killing -- and often, according to the Florida newspapers, the killer is the one who started the fight. You start a fight, you get your ass kicked, and you kill the guy.
If everybody followed your scenario, we'd have a lot more killings.
If you killed somebody in those scenarios, you would be convicted of murder if the jury agreed with me that the risk of death or serious injury wasn't that great, wasn't reasonable, and that you used disproportionate force.
The other problem with handguns is that you don't usually have time to call a lawyer to find out whether you're justified in using deadly force in that particular situation.
That "One verbal warning" doesn't mean anything if the dude doesn't speak English (which is often the case). And bystanders often don't know what the situation is, which was a problem in the Gabby Giffords shooting. Suppose it turned out that the guy being pounded had tried to rob the other guy.
That said, Zimmerman was a damn fool for playing wanna be cop. Found guilty or not, he is going to pay a huge price for his foolishness. Such is the price of ill-considered action.
Well, I agree with that. I think carrying a handgun was part of his foolishness.
But I also blame the NRA-sponsored gun laws which encourage people to respond to an assault by escalating it to a killing.
I don't know anybody who died getting his skull bashed against the concrete in a fight like that.
If you're going to go around alone at night confronting black guys (who have a perfect right to be there and are minding their own business), stay out of Brooklyn.
I know a lot of people who got their heads bashed against the sidewalk, and I don't know anybody who was brain damaged or killed.
That's the problem with the "reasonably fears" law. The Florida law says that somebody can use lethal force when he "reasonably fears" death or serious injury.
If I provoke some big black guy, and he starts kicking my ass, should I reasonably fear that I'm in danger of death or serious injury? I don't think most gun owners whose asses are being kicked are able to make a split-second decision about that, nor are they're going to call a lawyer in time. If the gun owner makes the wrong split-second decision, he can go to jail for a long time. That's what most homicide cases are about.
If I were on the jury, I wouldn't think Zimmerman was in reasonable fear of death or serious injury. His jury may decide otherwise.
If you go around ignoring police advice and confronting people at night, as Zimmerman did, you're an asshole. If once in the while you get your ass kicked, that's the price of being an asshole. If you additionally carry a handgun, you're an even bigger asshole. If you use that gun, you're liable to go to jail if the cops and the jury disagree with your assessment of "reasonable."
My friend died when some roommates got into an argument and somebody pulled a gun. If there was no gun, he wouldn't have died.
Every time somebody gets killed by a gun, the gun fans claim that if he had a gun, or a bystander had a gun, they could have defended themselves against the shooter. Which is ridiculous. In almost every case, the killings are over too fast to react.
When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, there were people around with guns. They couldn't stop Loughner. By the time they realized what was going on, six people were dead.
There are a few rare cases in which somebody with a gun did or might have stopped a shooter, but they're far outweighed by cases like this in which two people got into a fight, somebody died because of the presence of a gun, and nobody would have died if there was no gun.
Because of the political power of gun owners, it's impossible to get even reasonable restrictions on handgun ownership in this country. There's nothing we can do about it, but it's the cause of something like 50,000 deaths a year.
The other side of the coin is that if you kill somebody with a gun, and the shooting wasn't legally justified, you can go to jail for a long time. Even if the justification was simply unclear, you're liable to spend a long time and a lot of money defending yourself in court.
As it should be. If you kill somebody, the cops should make sure it was justified.
In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin talked to Zimmerman first and said "Why are you following me?" (at that point, Zimmerman was apparently already returning to his truck).
"Apparently"? You're assuming too much. I'll wait until the evidence comes out at the trial.
If Zimmerman was following the dispatcher's instructions, then how did he wind up on the sidewalk with Martin?
You left out Martin's girlfriend's account that Zimmerman caught up to him and Martin asked Zimmerman why he was following him.
Why shouldn't Martin have believed that Zimmerman was a threat? If I was coming home at night from the store, and somebody was following me with a car, and then came out to follow me on the ground, I'd be worried. Especially if there were break-ins in the neighborhood.
Zimmerman never should have left the car. There are rules for neighborhood watch groups, and he violated them. Now he's in a lot of trouble. Yeah, the prosecutor is under political pressure. Yeah, the newspapers are having a field day. Welcome to reality. Why shouldn't the White House put political pressure if they think the DA is going to drop the case (as they were going to)? There was a pattern of black people getting killed and cops doing nothing.
The bottom line is that Zimmerman killed a guy who was going about his own law-abiding business. If you kill somebody, you're likely to get into a lot of trouble.
In the dispatcher's tape, Zimmerman said he was following Martin. In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin was worried and quickly walking away, when the phone went dead and she couldn't call him back. I would call that a confrontation.
In Zimmerman's story, he was returning to the car. when Martin attacked him. We don't know whether that's true or not. It's not consistent with the girlfriend's story, which sounds like Martin was running away when Zimmerman caught up to him. According to the girlfriend, Martin said, "Why are you following me?" Zimmerman said, "What are you doing here?" They each repeated those lines. Then the phone went dead. Martin might have attacked Zimmerman at that point. Zimmerman might have threatened or pushed Martin first. We don't know. (Under Florida law, Martin only had to reasonably believe he was in danger. He didn't have to back down.)
We don't know what all the physical evidence and witness statements are, because the DA hasn't released that information. One of the witnesses said she gave an account to the police, and the police changed her account.
I'd like to see an investigation in which all the witnesses are subpoenaed to testify under oath. I'd like to see them cross-examined by lawyers. We'll never know what happened with certainty, but that's the way to get as close to the truth as possible.
There's a very thin difference in a case like this between justifiable homicide and a barroom-brawl type murder. I don't think Zimmerman's life was in danger when he was getting beaten up. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, it was fairly standard practice in a street fight to pound the other kid's head against the pavement. It happened to me, and I lived. In hindsight, it doesn't look to me like a justified killing. Zimmerman's life wasn't in danger. Nobody wants to get their head bashed against the sidewalk, but you don't kill somebody for that.
It would have been best if Zimmerman hadn't gotten into that situation in the first place. If Zimmerman thought Martin was a dangerous intruder, he should never have gotten out of his car. He never should have tried to follow Martin on foot. After all, Martin might have been legally carrying a gun. Even cops wouldn't approach a potentially dangerous suspect alone. The rules for neighborhood watches tell you not to do that. 911 told him not to do that. That's why, based on the facts that have been made public, Zimmerman is an asshole.
Whether he's guilty of murder, whether he gets convicted of murder, and whether he loses a civil suit, are separate questions.
I don't know of any actual evidence that support the idea that Zimmerman ignored the 911 operator's suggestion and followed and attacked Martin. Maybe you can share what evidence you think there is?
There is no evidence that Zimmerman confronted Martin.
Zimmerman sees Martin, deems him "suspicious" and calls the police. Zimmerman tells the dispatcher he is following Martin. The dispatcher tells Zimmerman "we don't need you to do that." Martin notices Zimmerman is following him and tells his girlfriend, Dee Dee, with whom he is on the phone. She tells him to run, and he agrees to walk quickly.
I hope they can at least get a civil suit against him. Those have a lower burden of evidence.
Unfortunately that law drafted by the NRA and American Legislative Exchange Council also made it more difficult to bring a civil suit against somebody who shoots you.
A lot of shooters lost civil suits around the country, so they tried to change the law to stop it.
In the past, unless it was a clear-cut case of self-defense, people who killed somebody with a gun were arrested and investigated by the cops. They'd have to hire a lawyer and defend themselves.
After examining past cases, the NRA skillfully designed this law to tie the prosecutors up in knots when they tried to prosecute a shooting.
They got the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to lobby the law for them around the country. The members of ALEC are responsible -- including Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, R.J. Reynolds, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
I once read a book on management accounting, which is the specialty of accounting that figures out an organization's internal costs.
The book made the point that, in principle, the allocation of costs is arbitrary.
A hospital spends $10,000 a year on aspirin, and $10 million a year on quality control to make sure that the nurse gives you aspirin rather than a lethal dose of the wrong drug. How much of that $10 million is allocated to your aspirin tablet?
Do they charge you $5 for an aspirin tablet or do they charge you $5 for the service of having a nurse give you an aspirin?
How much of the cost of computers, legal services, medical record-keeping, etc. is applied to each bill?
All companies, including hospitals, wind up with formulas that are reasonable but arbitrary. You can look at the bill and ask, "Why did they do it this way, and not another way?" There is no answer.
I think that you can insist that a hospital give you an itemized bill if they want to get paid. Hospitals in New York are willing to do that, anyway.
You'll probably get a printout that's difficult to interpret. It may be very long.
You may have to go to the radiologist and ask, "what exactly is this item of $1,500 for 'Radiology services'?"
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I don't know what happened to my friend's killers. His family was upset enough about it and I didn't want to bother them about it any more.
Billy Kuch did nothing that justified being shot. Gregory Stewart was not in danger. He should have stayed inside his home and waited for the cops to arrive, as he admitted himself. It was an unjustified shooting. Stewart's warning was irrelevant. Billy Kuch was incapable of leaving or following orders. Even the gun nuts don't argue that we should kill mentally troubled people when they disturb other people at night. Why the fuck did he leave the safety of his house to play cowboy? And yet Stewart wasn't prosecuted.
Rodney Peairs was acquitted by a jury because the gun laws in Louisianna are so ridiculous that they allow a homeowner to shoot and kill a stranger who goes to the wrong house even on Halloween (where it's customary for people to go from house to house). He was objectively not threatened at all. All he had to do was say the magic words that he "felt threatened" and he could kill anybody he wants not only in his home but anywhere around it, even on a public sidewalk.
This is irresponsible and negligent. It's likely that they will kill an innocent person under those circumstances, and yet the law permits them to do so merely by claiming that they felt threatened. The prosecutors say it's almost impossible to disprove that defense. The law was designed that way by the National Rifle Association. They were bothered by the fact that when a homeowner shot and killed somebody, that homeowner would be investigated and have to defend his actions. They now have a law in which a homeowner can shoot and kill someone not just in his home but anywhere around his home, and not be investigated at all, even if he wasn't really threatened, even if he left the safety of his home while the cops were on the way.
Nobody has cited cases in the U.S. of people who were genuinely defending themselves being imprisoned for life.
Let me tell you something about political science in the U.S. Laws aren't made by a careful balancing of interests and weighing the dangers of innocent people going to jail against guilty people going free. Laws are made by following the power of lobbying groups. The NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying groups. They don't care, beyond crocodile tears, what happens to innocent people who get killed. They're advocates for gun owners. They want gun owners to be able to shoot people with as little restraint or concern for the consequences as possible. They want gun owners to get off, regardless of the circumstances.
If your idea of a weekend's recreation is to go to a bar, get drunk, and get into a frontier fight, yes, if you kill somebody with an unlucky punch and you can't establish self-defense, you might be convicted of homicide or murder, in Australia or the civilized parts of America. That's what homicide is.
This discussion isn't going anywhere. I don't see any rational engagement there.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/stand-your-ground-laws-coincide-with-jump-in-justifiable-homicide-cases/2012/04/07/gIQAS2v51S_print.html
Billy Kuch was a troubled kid. As an adolescent, he had bipolar disorder diagnosed and he’d been arrested a couple of times for driving under the influence. He drank too much, and he knew it.
So when he was out at a party that August night on Golden Eagle Drive near the intersection of Gun Smoke Drive, he decided he was too blitzed to drive home. He left the party to lock his keys inside his car so he couldn’t get behind the wheel later that night.
Kuch, then 23, stumbled back toward the party but forgot which beige stucco house was hosting the bash. He knocked on the wrong door, the one belonging to Gregory Stewart, a 32-year-old homeowner who did not appreciate having his wife and baby disturbed by a drunk kid after 4 in the morning. Kuch went away and texted his sister that he was totally confused about what was going on.
Then Kuch found what he thought was the party house and tried the door. But he’d landed at Stewart’s place, again.
This time, after Kuch turned the doorknob, Stewart told his wife to call 911. Then he grabbed his Smith & Wesson semiautomatic and went into his front yard.
Stewart said he kept asking Kuch to leave, but Kuch, thinking the guys at the party were playing a joke on him, stayed.
“Don’t make me shoot you,” warned the 6-foot-1 Stewart, according to police records. “I don’t want to shoot you.”
Kuch, who stands 5-foot-9, raised his hands, asked for a light and lurched toward the homeowner. Stewart fired.
Stewart broke down in tears when police arrived. “I could have given him a light,” he said. But he said he had felt threatened.
Police asked Stewart why he hadn’t just waited inside until officers arrived.
“I don’t know,” replied Stewart. His unwanted visitor, he said, was unarmed.
“If I had a crazy drunk guy at my door,” said Jeanann Kuch, Billy’s mother, “I’d have locked my door and called 911.”
Kuch spent five weeks in a coma. He woke with no recollection of the incident.
Before the shooting, Kuch had supported the Stand Your Ground law, his parents said. Stewart’s view of the law is not known. He did not return repeated calls, and no court ever asked, because Stewart was never brought before a judge.
Stewart was arrested that night, but Assistant State Attorney Manny Garcia concluded that his actions were “justified.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/03/why_george_zimmerman_trayvon_martin_s_killer_hasn_t_been_prosecuted_.single.html
Why Trayvon Martin’s Killer Remains Free
Florida’s self-defense laws have left Florida safe for no one—except those who shoot first.
By Emily Bazelon
March 19, 2012
(Since Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law was passed in 2005, there have been many cases of people killing unarmed opponents and not being charged. The worst, according to Bazelon, is that the courts gave "true immunity," which means the judge can dismiss the prosecution before the trial begins, and the question of whether the killer was really defending himself doesn't even go to the jury.)
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/article1128317.ece
Five years since Florida enacted "stand-your-ground" law, justifiable homicides are up
By Ben Montgomery and Colleen Jenkins
October 17, 2010
These are "justifiable" homicides because that's the category the stand-your-ground put them in. Under the old law, most of them would have been murders, if they had happened at all.
You may think that if two people get into a fight and one of them "defends" himself by pulling a gun and killing the other guy, who is unarmed, that's a good outcome. I disagree. These are routine assaults, where nobody would have gotten killed without the gun.
How do you know they were getting unjustly convicted? The juries had more of the facts and obviously disagreed with you.
Even the killer of Yoshihiro Hattori was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori These laws protect irresponsible shooters, like Rodney Peairs. Somebody rings your bell on Halloween, and you shoot him? These laws protect people who do that.
(1)He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;
"Reasonably."
Yes, one of the reasons for torturing captives during the runup to the Iraqi war was to get them to "admit" that Saddam Hussein was working with al Qaeda. They didn't want the facts, they just wanted classified information to tout their war.
The New York Times had an essay by a real interrogator, who interrogated Nazis after WWII, who explained why the CIA was doing it all wrong.
One of the first skills of an interrogator is to know the subject's language with great fluency. The U.S. interrogators after WWII knew German and Japanese sometimes with native fluency. So did the Soviet interrogators. It makes sense (although making sense never counted for much during the Bush Administration). How can you interrogate somebody through a translator?
The FBI wasn't as bad as the CIA, BTW. FBI investigators often refused to have anything to do with the CIA interrogations when they saw what was going on.
Have violent crime rates gone up or down in American states that have liberalized their gun laws? It is my understanding that violent crime rates have gone down, but if you have evidence to the contrary please let me know.
According to the Florida newspapers that have investigated the results of the laws, the rates of justified homicides have tripled. Most of those are cases that the prosecutors would have prosecuted as murder under the old laws, but didn't think they could convict under the new laws. Some of them involved people provoking a fight, getting beaten up, and killing the guy they originally attacked (which is what the prosecutor is charging Zimmerman with). A fair number of them involved drug dealers.
So the result of the laws have been to convert violent crimes to justified homicides, and let people get away with what used to be murder.
The last time I reviewed the literature, the researchers said that data comparing changes in crime associated with changes in gun laws didn't have the statistical power to draw statistically significant conclusions, and it was too difficult to separate the laws from other factors.
You really don't think someone pounding your head against the pavement could kill you? Ludicrous!
In science, we base our conclusions on data, not intuition. I used to work on auto engineering safety studies, and went over a few studies of tests on cadavers to see how much impact the human skull could take, so I know a little bit about the physics. A minor auto collision will give much more of an impact than an adversary could give in a fight. Falling over from a standing position and hitting your head would give more impact. Falling from a bicycle is often fatal. And I've had my head pounded against the pavement myself when I was a teenager. But I've never heard of anybody actually being killed by having his head pounded against the pavement, and I couldn't find one with a quick Google search. If you can find such a case, I'll change my mind.
I wouldn't hesitate to shoot someone doing that if I was the victim. If I was a bystander, the dude doing the pounding would get one verbal warning, and if he pounded the victim's head again, I would shoot him.
That's the problem with handguns. They escalate a fight to a killing -- and often, according to the Florida newspapers, the killer is the one who started the fight. You start a fight, you get your ass kicked, and you kill the guy.
If everybody followed your scenario, we'd have a lot more killings.
If you killed somebody in those scenarios, you would be convicted of murder if the jury agreed with me that the risk of death or serious injury wasn't that great, wasn't reasonable, and that you used disproportionate force.
The other problem with handguns is that you don't usually have time to call a lawyer to find out whether you're justified in using deadly force in that particular situation.
That "One verbal warning" doesn't mean anything if the dude doesn't speak English (which is often the case). And bystanders often don't know what the situation is, which was a problem in the Gabby Giffords shooting. Suppose it turned out that the guy being pounded had tried to rob the other guy.
That said, Zimmerman was a damn fool for playing wanna be cop. Found guilty or not, he is going to pay a huge price for his foolishness. Such is the price of ill-considered action.
Well, I agree with that. I think carrying a handgun was part of his foolishness.
But I also blame the NRA-sponsored gun laws which encourage people to respond to an assault by escalating it to a killing.
I don't know anybody who died getting his skull bashed against the concrete in a fight like that.
If you're going to go around alone at night confronting black guys (who have a perfect right to be there and are minding their own business), stay out of Brooklyn.
You're the self-appointed captain and only member of the "Neighborhood Watch." Do you:
A) Follow the instructions of the police, and the nationwide watch groups, and not carry a gun, call 911, stay in your car, and avoid confrontation?
B) Carry a gun, ignore instructions, get out of your car and confront people who don't know who you are and whether you're out to give them trouble?
Option B will get your ass kicked. If you use your gun, depending on the details, you might be guilty of homicide or murder.
Whatever. If you kill him, and the jury decides it wasn't reasonable force, you'll go to jail.
I know a lot of people who got their heads bashed against the sidewalk, and I don't know anybody who was brain damaged or killed.
That's the problem with the "reasonably fears" law. The Florida law says that somebody can use lethal force when he "reasonably fears" death or serious injury.
If I provoke some big black guy, and he starts kicking my ass, should I reasonably fear that I'm in danger of death or serious injury? I don't think most gun owners whose asses are being kicked are able to make a split-second decision about that, nor are they're going to call a lawyer in time. If the gun owner makes the wrong split-second decision, he can go to jail for a long time. That's what most homicide cases are about.
If I were on the jury, I wouldn't think Zimmerman was in reasonable fear of death or serious injury. His jury may decide otherwise.
If you go around ignoring police advice and confronting people at night, as Zimmerman did, you're an asshole. If once in the while you get your ass kicked, that's the price of being an asshole. If you additionally carry a handgun, you're an even bigger asshole. If you use that gun, you're liable to go to jail if the cops and the jury disagree with your assessment of "reasonable."
That's the risk of carrying a gun.
My friend died when some roommates got into an argument and somebody pulled a gun. If there was no gun, he wouldn't have died.
Every time somebody gets killed by a gun, the gun fans claim that if he had a gun, or a bystander had a gun, they could have defended themselves against the shooter. Which is ridiculous. In almost every case, the killings are over too fast to react.
When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, there were people around with guns. They couldn't stop Loughner. By the time they realized what was going on, six people were dead.
There are a few rare cases in which somebody with a gun did or might have stopped a shooter, but they're far outweighed by cases like this in which two people got into a fight, somebody died because of the presence of a gun, and nobody would have died if there was no gun.
Because of the political power of gun owners, it's impossible to get even reasonable restrictions on handgun ownership in this country. There's nothing we can do about it, but it's the cause of something like 50,000 deaths a year.
The other side of the coin is that if you kill somebody with a gun, and the shooting wasn't legally justified, you can go to jail for a long time. Even if the justification was simply unclear, you're liable to spend a long time and a lot of money defending yourself in court.
As it should be. If you kill somebody, the cops should make sure it was justified.
In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin talked to Zimmerman first and said "Why are you following me?" (at that point, Zimmerman was apparently already returning to his truck).
"Apparently"? You're assuming too much. I'll wait until the evidence comes out at the trial.
If Zimmerman was following the dispatcher's instructions, then how did he wind up on the sidewalk with Martin?
You left out Martin's girlfriend's account that Zimmerman caught up to him and Martin asked Zimmerman why he was following him.
Why shouldn't Martin have believed that Zimmerman was a threat? If I was coming home at night from the store, and somebody was following me with a car, and then came out to follow me on the ground, I'd be worried. Especially if there were break-ins in the neighborhood.
Zimmerman never should have left the car. There are rules for neighborhood watch groups, and he violated them. Now he's in a lot of trouble. Yeah, the prosecutor is under political pressure. Yeah, the newspapers are having a field day. Welcome to reality. Why shouldn't the White House put political pressure if they think the DA is going to drop the case (as they were going to)? There was a pattern of black people getting killed and cops doing nothing.
The bottom line is that Zimmerman killed a guy who was going about his own law-abiding business. If you kill somebody, you're likely to get into a lot of trouble.
In the dispatcher's tape, Zimmerman said he was following Martin. In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin was worried and quickly walking away, when the phone went dead and she couldn't call him back. I would call that a confrontation.
In Zimmerman's story, he was returning to the car. when Martin attacked him. We don't know whether that's true or not. It's not consistent with the girlfriend's story, which sounds like Martin was running away when Zimmerman caught up to him. According to the girlfriend, Martin said, "Why are you following me?" Zimmerman said, "What are you doing here?" They each repeated those lines. Then the phone went dead. Martin might have attacked Zimmerman at that point. Zimmerman might have threatened or pushed Martin first. We don't know. (Under Florida law, Martin only had to reasonably believe he was in danger. He didn't have to back down.)
We don't know what all the physical evidence and witness statements are, because the DA hasn't released that information. One of the witnesses said she gave an account to the police, and the police changed her account.
I'd like to see an investigation in which all the witnesses are subpoenaed to testify under oath. I'd like to see them cross-examined by lawyers. We'll never know what happened with certainty, but that's the way to get as close to the truth as possible.
There's a very thin difference in a case like this between justifiable homicide and a barroom-brawl type murder. I don't think Zimmerman's life was in danger when he was getting beaten up. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, it was fairly standard practice in a street fight to pound the other kid's head against the pavement. It happened to me, and I lived. In hindsight, it doesn't look to me like a justified killing. Zimmerman's life wasn't in danger. Nobody wants to get their head bashed against the sidewalk, but you don't kill somebody for that.
It would have been best if Zimmerman hadn't gotten into that situation in the first place. If Zimmerman thought Martin was a dangerous intruder, he should never have gotten out of his car. He never should have tried to follow Martin on foot. After all, Martin might have been legally carrying a gun. Even cops wouldn't approach a potentially dangerous suspect alone. The rules for neighborhood watches tell you not to do that. 911 told him not to do that. That's why, based on the facts that have been made public, Zimmerman is an asshole.
Whether he's guilty of murder, whether he gets convicted of murder, and whether he loses a civil suit, are separate questions.
No, a good friend of mine was murdered. I just don't like people getting shot.
I don't know of any actual evidence that support the idea that Zimmerman ignored the 911 operator's suggestion and followed and attacked Martin. Maybe you can share what evidence you think there is?
There is no evidence that Zimmerman confronted Martin.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/11/opinion/hostin-trayvon-martin-jury/index.html
Zimmerman sees Martin, deems him "suspicious" and calls the police. Zimmerman tells the dispatcher he is following Martin. The dispatcher tells Zimmerman "we don't need you to do that." Martin notices Zimmerman is following him and tells his girlfriend, Dee Dee, with whom he is on the phone. She tells him to run, and he agrees to walk quickly.
Confusion is the first step on the road to knowledge.
I hope they can at least get a civil suit against him. Those have a lower burden of evidence.
Unfortunately that law drafted by the NRA and American Legislative Exchange Council also made it more difficult to bring a civil suit against somebody who shoots you.
A lot of shooters lost civil suits around the country, so they tried to change the law to stop it.
In the past, unless it was a clear-cut case of self-defense, people who killed somebody with a gun were arrested and investigated by the cops. They'd have to hire a lawyer and defend themselves.
After examining past cases, the NRA skillfully designed this law to tie the prosecutors up in knots when they tried to prosecute a shooting.
They got the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to lobby the law for them around the country. The members of ALEC are responsible -- including Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, R.J. Reynolds, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
They fired their proofreaders in a cost-saving measure.
He's an asshole because he ignored the 911 operator's instructions to wait for the cops, and got out of his car with a gun to confront somebody.
(Didn't he think it out? What did he intend to do after he confronted Martin? It had to turn out bad.)
It seems harsh to send somebody to jail for a big part of his life because he's an asshole. I feel sorry for him.
But somebody is dead because he's an asshole. I feel even more sorry for Martin, and Martin's friends and family.
In America we do give people long prison sentences for killing somebody in a street fight.
A lot of black people in Florida go to jail for less.
What else can you do with Zimmerman?
Yes, you do go to jail for being stupid.
Recent photos of Trayvon: http://i39.tinypic.com/1yvg5h.jpg
So what's your point? If somebody looks like this, he somehow deserves to get shot?
No. I spend a day coding, I look up at the screen, and I depend on Slashdot to tell me what's going on in the world.
I once read a book on management accounting, which is the specialty of accounting that figures out an organization's internal costs.
The book made the point that, in principle, the allocation of costs is arbitrary.
A hospital spends $10,000 a year on aspirin, and $10 million a year on quality control to make sure that the nurse gives you aspirin rather than a lethal dose of the wrong drug. How much of that $10 million is allocated to your aspirin tablet?
Do they charge you $5 for an aspirin tablet or do they charge you $5 for the service of having a nurse give you an aspirin?
How much of the cost of computers, legal services, medical record-keeping, etc. is applied to each bill?
All companies, including hospitals, wind up with formulas that are reasonable but arbitrary. You can look at the bill and ask, "Why did they do it this way, and not another way?" There is no answer.
I think that you can insist that a hospital give you an itemized bill if they want to get paid. Hospitals in New York are willing to do that, anyway.
You'll probably get a printout that's difficult to interpret. It may be very long.
You may have to go to the radiologist and ask, "what exactly is this item of $1,500 for 'Radiology services'?"