Article from USA Today

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I was so upset when I heard this story. Not only do I feel bad for the boy, but apparently his death was not the first one. According to CNN (where I first heard the story and have yet to find an online article that states this information) other young black boys in that area have been killed in similar ways, and the police have not done anything about it.

I feel so bad for his parents, and his girlfriend who was on the phone with him when he got shot. I would hate to hear that happening to anyone, let alone someone I cared about.

And I was mad when the man (Zimmerman) called the boy suspicious, and said he looked like "he was on drugs" before he shot him. According to witness, all Trayvon had in his hands was a bag of Skittles (candy) and Iced Tea. Candy. Really?! Since when does brightly colored candy and drinks look like drugs or guns?! That crime was so blatantly racist it wasn't even funny. And for some reason, the police are trying to make this man sound like he did nothing wrong.

Really, if the situation was reversed, and the man was black and the boy was white, the man would have been arrested.

Thats what makes me tend to not walk around at night anymore. I always get the feeling that I attract attention whenever I go somewhere in the dark. In fact, in a month or so I'm going to an all-night party, so really not looking forward to walking home afterward.

What worries me is that it seems to me like anyone who seems suspicious would be in danger now. With the way we dress(rather attention grabbing), I always get a sinking feeling someone is watching me somewhere. How could you ever go out anymore, if you have to worry about someone following you?

What angers me however, is that he claims it was self-defense. Neighborhood watchmen are supposed to observe and report. He followed him up the street, then shot him. He made no attempt to harm anyone, or even stopped to survey anyone's house. In my mind, this is extremely unjustified.

Zimmerman shouldn't be free, he's a menace. Did they even take his gun away? That poor father (Mr. Martin) in the interview.

Here's another news story about the shooting that just struck me as stupid and kind of pointless. The headline states that Zimmerman "has Manassas ties." Before I read the article, I was thinking to myself: "Manassas ties? Wtf, is that some sort of white supremacist organization I hadn't heard of before?" Then I read the article and find that the reporter is talking about the town in Virginia (called Manassas) that Zimmerman came from originally.

Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman has Manassas ties. Like, so WHAT? Are news reporters getting dumber, or what?

I want to hear if Zimmerman had a previous history of flying off the handle, did he own that gun legally, and if he did have a history and the cops knew he had a gun, why didn't they take the damn gun away? It wouldn't be like setting a precedent – there have been others who behaved in a threatening manner and have had their guns raided by the police.

-- Nephele

I've seen reports of him getting into trouble over violence before. I think resisting arrest even. Dude was clearly out to kill someone and picked a target that, sadly, appears to be socially acceptable in the area. The level of :psyduck: involved in this case is huge.

Clearly. Also just want to add that my previous comment about how the cops should've taken away Zimmerman's gun is not what I consider "gun control." I call that "asshole control."

-- Nephele

I have been following this since the killing. People are making so much of the Florida stand-your-ground law, but the police handling of the situation is highly irregular regardless of the law.

In South Florida a number of years ago, I was ordered out of my apartment and belligerently interrogated by three policemen, one of whom had a police dog. A neighbor was furious because I complained to the apartment manager about his nonstop, loud blaring music, so he called the police and simply told them I owned guns and sounded "angry" when I complained to the manager. The Sicherheitsdienst, oh, I mean the Police, tried for over an hour to trap me into saying that I had threatened my neighbor, probably so they could boost their arrest stats. Of course, I did no such thing so I did not say that I did. I was then "watched" by the local Police department for over a year, as an officer inadvertently told me much later.

So now, we are to believe that someone who tells the Police that he on the street with a gun, admits that he is chasing someone, and shoots them with no other weapons found on the scene, and he is not even interrogated or taken into custody? There are many, many things that do not add up in Sanford.

Anyone here remember that school laptop scandal from PA where an administrator threatened to punish a boy for taking drugs, because the school supplied/required laptop used its webcam to take pics of him at home where he was eating candy? I think we would be amazed at how often our war on drugs hysteria has caused candy to be redflagged as something it isn't.



The resisting charge might mean a lot less than the public & media thinks it does. It used to be that in order to be charged with resisting you had to try to physically evade capture.. But over the course of the last 10-15 years our police force in this country has become so militarized that you're likely to get a resisting charge for simply doing something [traditionally legal] that the police officer doesn't like. Such as not obeying a command fast enough, or by insulting the officer, or otherwise being "uppity."

If you watch Cops [IDK if it airs in Europe] you'll notice that in the older seasons if someone didn't follow a command like raise their hands or lay down fast enough, the police officer would just keep saying the command until the citizen obeys it. On the newer episodes they'll say the command and then immediately start screaming "STOP RESISTING!" even if the citizen isn't doing anything to physically resist arrest. The reason for them screaming this is so that they can then use it to help support a trumped up resisting charge later on. In practice it is no longer required that you physically make contact to be charged with resisting.

In the 60s/70s era civil rights movements protesters learned that they would be charged with resisting for physically resisting the police brought in to breakup a protest so they started to adopt a civil disobidenace tactic of "going limp" to avoid arrest. Instead of obeying the officer's command to disperse they'd just lay limp and force the officers to physically carry you away. Do that today? You'll be charged with resisting despite all the case law & legal tradition to the contrary. Look at the way resisting charges have been used as a default reaction to people rounded up at OWS functions.

Now if you do actually try to physically resist an officer you're now likely to get not just a resisting charge, but also violent charges like assaulting an officer. Even if you never did.

I don't know anything about Zimmerman besides whats been in the news, so I have no idea what the story is behind his priors. It will be interesting to see what that story is, exactly.

I think that the 911 call center deserves some of the blame in this case because they told him that they "didn't need him to do that" [follow Martin around]. They should have told him NOT to get near or confront Martin. The 911 clips that have been in the news segments I have seen so far make it sound like the 911 center didn't really care whether Zimmerman continued to escalate the event by following this kid around. It also handed him a legal defense on a silver platter, because now Zimmerman can claim that he was just helping the 911 call center by following Martin so the police would know where to go when they got on site. This was a huge blunder. Zimmerman could have done this. From a safe distance. There was no reason whatsoever for him to get so close that a confrontation could occur.

That being said it sounds like Zimmerman was a bigot, and a loose cannon. Not based on any questionable priors, but based on what he had told the 911 call center [i.e. the racial slurs]. Clearly Zimmerman believed that "they always get away" and that he wanted to teach "them" a lesson by shooting the poor kid. Its inexcusable.

The stand-your-ground law gives him a potential legal defense to use in court. It does not give police the right to refuse to do a thorough investigation. It doesn't prevent them with conveening a grandjury to see whether the defense applies in this case. It does not make Zimmerman immune to being charged with something! I can't believe that the system is acting to the contrary, and I am even more surprised that the media is choosing to support using the "stand your ground law" to excuse the blatant malpractice of the system instead of using it to show how wrongly the system behaved!

Eh, it's one thing to be charged but another to be convicted. If you're getting arrested for something genuinely bad then you may as well go hog wild, but if it's something like the OWS issue then just go limp, take the charge and try throw a wrongful arrest suit up there (if you're even allowed do that in the US anymore....).

Zimmerman kept following Trayvon despite being told not to by police, thus making it seem as though he was the instigator of the altercation. This alone should nullify his ability to use any argument of "self-defense" under the Stand Your Ground Law.

On a positive note, Gov. Scott has announced there will be a task force to re-examine the Stand Your Ground Law in light of this case. Even the guy who wrote it is now saying it should be revised or repealed entirely.

~spidey

According to a co-sponsor of the stand your ground law, Rep Dennis Baxley (R): "He [Zimmerman] has no protection under my law. There's nothing in this statute that authorizes you to pursue and confront people, particularly if law enforcement has told you to stay put. I don't see why this statute is being challenged in this case. That is to prevent you from being attacked by other people."

I was actually surprised that this law seems to have been made a central issue of the case, since so many other elements of the the episode and how the police responded are so questionable. My feeling that the authorities simply used the "stand your ground" law to justify their inaction and deflect criticism. I agree with several FL legislators that the law should be revised to clarify that vigilantism of the type Zimmerman was engaged in is not protected.

However, I do not feel that the law should be rescinded. During my 20 years in South Florida, I lived in areas where home invasions and being attacked were quite possible. It was not unheard of for perps to do door to door trying to get into residences. Many apartments do not have a back door or an easy way to exit even if you wanted to flee, and this type of situation is what the law was created to address. Before this law, if someone broke into your house, attacked you, and you shot him, he could sue YOU and you had to PROVE that you tried to flee before using deadly force. No kidding. Another thing I learned was that Police protection was the luck of the draw.

Zimmerman was seeking out a confrontation, which is a vastly different situation. There was no reason for him to be chasing or confronting anyone. An interesting comment made by the Police is that when the dispatcher told him not to follow Martin, it was "not a lawful command" and he was not required to follow it. This seems like deliberate obscurification to me.

A stand your ground law shouldn't be necessary to protect people trapped in their homes during home invasions. A traditional castle doctrine would afford those people a legal protection to use when someone tries to break into their house or their car while they're in it.

I think the media is simply so anti-gun that they're going to take any chance they can to go after gun ownership, and in this case that means they're running with the excuse the local government is desperately grasping at in an attempt to look like they didn't screw the case up [when in fact they totally botched it].

For example there is a story on yahoonews today, supposedly about how bad the "stand your ground" law is for causing incidents like this one. The example they're using to make their case? A story of an ex-cop who shot a neighbor twice in the stomach after an argument outside over trash, who then left the guy to die without calling 911. As if ex-police, DAs, judges, etc don't get extra leeway from the system in places without stand your ground laws. Not surprisingly the police that responded to that incident decided that the ex-cop had to have acted in self defense and didn't investigate the case beyond that or charge anyone.




I am reminded of a story from PA a year or two ago. A lawyer, who is a convicted felon with a long list of violent priors, goes hunting with his uncle [a retired local DA], and a friend of the family.

First problem: A convicted felon cannot legally go walking around in the woods with a RIFLE.

Second problem: This hunting party was riding around on an ATV and hunting from it [against game laws].

Third problem: The rifle was too powerful to be legal for hunting where they were.

The trio then came across a guy near their property who had shot a deer. This lawyer, if we are to believe the stories on this, went ballistic that someone had shot HIS deer so he shot the hunter [who was technically in someone else's property altogether] dead. The trio then spent hours covering up the crime by moving the body, planting evidence, and eventually fabricated a story to blame their groundskeeper. They only then called the police. When the police got here they saw the uncle [a retired DA] and they simply took the trio's word at what happened.

It wasn't until several days later that they realized what really happened but by then the case was thoroughly botched by the lack of a quick prudent investigation. The investigation that did occur discovered that this ex-felon had amassed a giant pile of illegal guns [no less than 53!] and had acquired them by using his relatives & friends as strawman purchasers [now we're talking major federal crimes here]. The local police & DA decided not to charge him with murder, and never notified the ATF. They tried to charge him with manslaughter plus a few minor gaming violations in an attempt to let the guy get away with murder. They also never even thought of charging the rest of the hunting party for lying to police or tampering with evidence. Some time later this lawyer [one of his priors was nearly killing a hunter in a fit of rage under similar circumstances several years earlier BTW] sold the property the crime occured on, and tried to hide the money from the short sale in his relatives' bank accounts so that the widow & her children of the guy he murdered couldn't go after it as easily in a civil suit.

To this I have a couple things to say: 1- Why the hell hasn't this guy been disbarred for all these violent convictions? 2- Clearly the system believes that its "insiders" are not subject to the same laws as normal everyday citizens. I doubt that the Rosenbloom case would have been so open & shut if the guy who shot him wasn't a retired cop, just as I seriously doubt the PA story would have happened the way it did if the guy wasn't a lawyer & the nephew of a retired DA [who 1- should of known better, 2- clearly had a criminal role in this].

I would link it, but I heard this on the news: Apparently Trayvon's body wasn't even identified right away even though his IDENTITY CARD WAS IN HIS POCKET THE ENTIRE TIME. The police didn't bother to call anyone on his cell phone (that was on the ground nearby), and they took him to the morgue labelled as, "John Doe".

the only way his parents found out what happened to him was that they kept calling the police to say that he never returned home from his walk. Everytime they called, the police would give them bullshit blow-off answers.

That makes me so mad. The police were obviously trying to cover for this Zimmerman guy. I really, really feel bad for that boy's parents. As a country, Americans are always trying to call other countries out on their human rights violations, and talk about race wars in other countries, but we have plenty deep-rooted race-issues of our own.

Unfortunately, young Black men still have plenty of prejudice directed towards them by otherwise well meaning white folks. I have no idea if that were the case in this situation, however.

^^Yeah, from the 911 phone calls I heard, Zimmerman was in no way, "well meaning".

Vaguely related, but this story of Trayvon Martin reminds me of Emmett Till:

http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistor ... mmett.html