The Zimmerman Trial

[kentonio]

DP

[kentonio]

The Zimmerman Jury Told Young Black Men What We Already Knew
Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it's a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

When I was junior in college in Virginia, my then-girlfriend and I decided one night to meet up for a quick snack while studying for midterms. We bought some sandwiches at a 24-hour deli and, rather than waste time going to either of our homes, which were in opposite directions, we decided to eat in her car in a parking lot near a fancy hotel off-campus. We were listening to music and laughing about something when I saw a security guard’s headlights in the rear view mirror, and I stopped laughing as I watched him—a white man in his mid-40s—walk up to my girlfriend’s door and ask her to step out of the car. “Uh, OK,” she said, clearly as confused as I was about what we’d done to warrant his attention.

He walked her away from her car toward his, but they were close enough that I could hear their conversation. He asked her her name, a slight southern lilt lengthening his vowels. She told him. Then he said, “Are you OK? “

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Are you safe right now?” he asked again.

My girlfriend was white. I am not.

I leapt out of the car and screamed, “What the hell did you just ask her?” I wanted to see if he had the resolve to say it again, to me this time.

The security guard turned to face me. “It’s standard procedure, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you were alright, too.”

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

“You can think what you’d like,” he said, a smile creeping up his face. “We can also call the police right now and sort this all out, because y’all aren’t supposed to be here and this is private property.”

I wanted to hit him in his ****ing face. I wanted to take his flashlight from his belt and smash his teeth out, giving him a real reason to call the cops, a reason besides the crime of eating a sandwich in a parking lot.

But I was a 20-year-old brown kid in Virginia. It was late. I was with a white girl. I felt embarrassed, and the thought of being surrounded by more inquisitive white men with pepper spray and tasers and handcuffs and guns only made my face hotter. And so I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know this was private property.”

“Well, now you know,” he said.

My girlfriend drove me home, where I stewed for hours and promised myself I’d report the guard in the morning. When I woke, however, I realized I didn’t have the guard’s name, nor did I even know what to report—it’s not against any rules to ask a white woman if the black man in the car with her is attacking her. It’s not against any rules to humiliate someone in a darkened parking lot in front of the person they love. It may, however, be against the rules to eat food in the parking lot in the first place. I never reported it. I think about it to this day.

It is a complicated thing to be young, black, and male in America. Not only are you well aware that many people are afraid of you—you can see them clutching their purses or stiffening in their subway seats when you sit across from them—you must also remain conscious of the fact that people expect you to be apologetic for their fear. It’s your job to be remorseful about the fact that your very nature makes them uncomfortable, like a pilot having to apologize to a fearful flyer for being in the sky.

If you’re a black man and you don’t remain vigilant of and obsequious to white people’s panic in your presence—if you, say, punch a man who accosts you during dinner with your girlfriend and screams “******!” in your face, or if you, say, punch a man who is following you without cause in the dark with a handgun at his side—then you must be prepared to be arrested, be beaten, be shot through the heart and lung and die on the way home to watch a basketball game with your family. And after you are dead, other blacks should be prepared for people to say you are a vicious thug who deserved it. You smoked weed, for instance, and got in some fights at school (like I did)—obviously you had it coming. You were a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later someone was going to have to put you down.

To stay alive and out of jail, brown and black kids learn to cope. They learn to say, “Sorry, sir,” for having sandwiches in the wrong parking lot. They learn, as LeVar Burton has, to remove their hats and sunglasses and put their hands up when police pull them over. They learn to tolerate the indignity of strange, drunken men approaching them and calling them and their loved ones a bunch of ******s. They learn that even if you’re willing to punch a harasser and face the consequences, there’s always a chance a police officer will come to arrest you, put you face down on the ground, and then shoot you execution style. Maybe the cop who shoots you will only get two years in jail, because it was all a big misunderstanding. You see, he meant to be shooting you in the back with his taser.

Trayvon Martin is dead—and so many young men like him are dead or in prison—because in America it was his responsibility to take it. It was his responsibility to let a stranger with a gun follow him at night in his own neighborhood and suspect him of wrongdoing. It was his responsibility to apologize for being a black kid who scared people. It was not George Zimmerman’s responsibility to let a boy get home to his family.

http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury...eady-770650992

[regexcellent]

Don't be ridiculous, you can't just shoot someone and then the prosecution have to prove you didn't have a good reason.

Don't be ridiculous, the police can't just throw you in prison just because you can't prove that you're innocent.

If that's true then your country is a ****ing joke.

Mhm. We have rights, they're a ****ing joke, yes. Definitely the worst thing about this country, I can't think why they're written into our basic law. Maybe we should be more like Europe where they ban "hate speech" and a shopowner has to get written permission from all of his patrons just to put security camera footage on youtube.

[Hauldren Collider]

If that's true then your country is a ****ing joke.

It's usually pretty hard for there not to be enough evidence that it was self defense if it wasn't actually self defense.

[regexcellent]

Let's break this **** down plain and simple for our simple minded friend kentonio. In order for something to be a crime, all of the elements of a crime have to be present. In order to be found guilty of this crime, the prosecution must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that all of these elements were in fact present (because if one of them isn't as mentioned previously it is not a crime). There are a number of elements to murder. In no particular order here is an incomplete list:

1. Someone is dead
2. Because someone else killed him
3. Without justifiable cause

Is that basic enough for you?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury...eady-770650992

Huh. As a white guy who was once out with a white girl when a cop stopped by and asked if everyone was there consensually, I'm going to call that one not helpful.

[kentonio]

Don't be ridiculous, the police can't just throw you in prison just because you can't prove that you're innocent.

If you just killed someone then the burden of proof has to change, otherwise you could just shoot anyone you liked as long as no-one was looking.

[kentonio]

Let's break this **** down plain and simple for our simple minded friend kentonio. In order for something to be a crime, all of the elements of a crime have to be present. In order to be found guilty of this crime, the prosecution must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that all of these elements were in fact present (because if one of them isn't as mentioned previously it is not a crime). There are a number of elements to murder. In no particular order here is an incomplete list:

1. Someone is dead
2. Because someone else killed him
3. Without justifiable cause

Is that basic enough for you?

If you kill someone the onus (in any sane country) is on you to prove you had justification, not on the prosecution to prove you didn't.

[Hauldren Collider]

What I find stunning is that Kentonio thinks that less stringent rules for conviction could make life easier for black kids.

[regexcellent]

If you just killed someone then the burden of proof has to change, otherwise you could just shoot anyone you liked as long as no-one was looking.

Yeah this is kind of like saying the burden of proof has to change because if you kill someone and there were no witnesses and nobody ever finds the body and you had no accomplices and you never said anything about it they can't convict you. We're not about to lower the standards of proof to the point where we can reliably convict people who commit murder where there are no witnesses.

It turns out, conveniently, there are almost always witnesses to a murder and the body typically gets found.

[kentonio]

What I find stunning is that Kentonio thinks that less stringent rules for conviction could make life easier for black kids.

What I find stunning is that a rich white kid from Virginia has no empathy or compassion for a young black kid who got shot for no damn reason.

Ok, that was a lie, that isn't stunning in the slightest.

[Hauldren Collider]

If you kill someone the onus (in any sane country) is on you to prove you had justification, not on the prosecution to prove you didn't.

1 and 2 are merely homicide, but homicide comes in many wonderful flavors, such as:

Justifiable Homicide
Wrongful death
Negligent homicide
Voluntary Manslaughter
Involuntary Manslaughter
1st and 2nd Degree Murder

1 and 2 don't mean **** by themselves.

[Hauldren Collider]

What I find stunning is that a rich white kid from Virginia has no empathy or compassion for a young black kid who got shot for no damn reason.

Ok, that was a lie, that isn't stunning in the slightest.

It's not clear to me that there was no reason. YOU are assuming that zimmerman just came along and shot this kid because he's black. Yet there really is insufficient evidence that this is the case. So you're lamenting the fact that we can't just throw him behind bars anyway. WTF. On the other hand, there's some evidence that he actually had a reason--self defense, in which case you're locking an innocent man up. As they say, it's better to let ten criminals go free than let one innocent man be imprisoned.

[giblets]

If you just killed someone then the burden of proof has to change, otherwise you could just shoot anyone you liked as long as no-one was looking.

Why don't you come to the US, kill someone, and then claim they can't put you in jail because no one saw it happen. Let me know how that works out for you.

[kentonio]

1 and 2 are merely homicide, but homicide comes in many wonderful flavors, such as:

Justifiable Homicide
Wrongful death
Negligent homicide
Voluntary Manslaughter
Involuntary Manslaughter
1st and 2nd Degree Murder

1 and 2 don't mean **** by themselves.

Providing a murder was pre-meditated is fair enough. It's probably equally fair to prove that a suspect could reasonably expect their actions to result in death. That's a world away from the kind of free license to kill that reg was talking about however.