Let's talk about Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and how unbelievably fucked up this all is

"not in any case was i"

The victim, wearing a Mountain Dew shirt, crumpled to the sidewalk and hit his head.

While on the ground, the man was set upon by about ten attackers, who stole his Tag Heuer watch, money, iPhone, and keys to his Audi, according to police. The dazed and defenseless victim is also punched, kicked, and even hit with a shoe by several assailants. In a final indignity, the man is “teabagged” by a male attacker.

i feel like people itt are making a ridiculous jump from my "boy its kinda stupid to wear a $1300 watch out when you plan to get really shitty on St. Patrick's Day" to thinking i meant "he deserved to get the shit kicked out of him and assaulted"

xp God may not always protect fools from the consequences of their poor judgement, but the folks who assaulted him are guilty of far worse faults than foolishness. We should all be able to agree about that.

well, yeah, otm. at no point was i ever defending the attackers.

yeah, i kind of regret getting all po-faced srs about it, but i have personal feelings re shit like this

I know a guy in a Mountain Dew shirt getting teabagged is funny in some contexts but I don't really feel right laughing @ this

im laughing

A WHITE AMERICAN IN A MOUNTAIN DEW T SHIRT WAS TEABAGGED ... WHERE'S AL SHARPTON NOW??

Where's AL & Jesse on this one ????????

Yes apparently now any violent crime that involved members of multiple races must now be analyzed and recontextualized to death by the media.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/img/ba9/ba9057fff37097cb30f543005e3decda_l.jpg

Let's see some Senators wearing Mountain Dew shirts in protest.

they already teabagged, ho ho

why isn't this a clusterfuck yet, get on the ball here guys

knowing dude was wearing a Mountain Dew t-shirt is somehow simultaneously the most inconsequential and the most crucial detail of this story

Most luxury watched come with free Mountain Dew shirts.

watches

most luxury
watched
come with
free Mountain
Dew shirts

otm

Lol

great spam subject

but no really the teabagging thing makes it more horrifying not more funny

nothing about that is funny

Prettymuch fuck anyone who thinks this is funny, but much less so than the assholes who think this relates to Trayvon.

^judging you whilst drunk and smoking

http://blogs.denverpost.com/artmosphere/files/2012/04/ZimSkittles.jpg

http://blogs.denverpost.com/artmosphere/2012/04/13/george-zimmerman-rendered-skittles-denver-artist-points-candy-pointillism/4114/

y'all think zimmerman is a juggalo?

when are they gonna paint the REAL VICTIM out of Mountain Dew?!?!?!

ftr having been assaulted while drunk for my iphone by a group of masked up teenagers i wouldn't say anybody is asking for it

radley balko rounds up summaries/reactions to the affidavit (lots of left-legal bods herein):

http://www.theagitator.com/2012/04/16/the-zimmerman-indictment-reactions/

general attitude among those selected is it looks really thin

I'm no lawyer, but what do her claims in the charge matter before she gets into the court to prove them? I read all those take-aways, and the implication is mostly just that she's made claims that will be hard to back up. To which I say: so? Isn't that why we have trials? Between her claims and Zimmerman's, I think I'd at least give her's the benefit of the doubt. Which isn't to say, full credence. Just perhaps the benefit of the doubt, give the alternative is the neighborhood vigilante who killed a guy.

I don't see how the defense gets around the "Zimmerman pursued a guy in direct defiance of the police" angle

like the whole pursuit invalidates the self-defense claim

i have been thinking about that exchange a lot. from memory it is:

Dispatcher: Are you following him?

Zimmerman: Yeah.

Dispatcher: Yeah, we don't need you to do that.

Zimmerman: OK.

The dispatcher is speaking in this diplomatic/ironic kind of way. It's the way your manager would talk to you. Read literally -- and I'm going to make the assumption that GZ is a rather literal-minded person -- the dispatcher's words contain no elements of command at all. So GZ just saying "OK" may only mean he heard what was just said, not that he is agreeing to the implicit command not to follow TM.

the pursuit itself is kind of more damning than any perceived disobedience tho... no?

following someone is sort of the opposite of self-defense

"Affidavit = FAIL."

except that he's claiming he went back to his car, when trayvon randomly attacked him

xp

The parse is: was he explicitly told not to pursue? That's a legal distinctive, of course, to be debated. But then, I assume they also have recordings of the other 40 times he called the cops on people, and I imagine they will be fair game. Hell, for all we know he's killed someone before but was never arrested, given how this went down. Total conjecture, obviously, but who knows, considering we're dealing with exactly that scenario.

One of the elements of this case is GZ's persistent and regular calls to the police. Knowing that, here's some conjecture: that police dispatch generally or even this individual dispatcher knew who they were on the phone with at the time? And so were speaking with kid gloves, so to speak?

Kinda wonder how this dispatcher feels about all this. Had he just said "Sir, please stop following him," who knows...

xps I guess I'm taking it for granted that GZ's story of going back to his car and then being attacked is a lie. But I don't know that either.

it's about as ridiculous as the other assault defenses I've heard in court, tbh

(my favorite being "I was asleep, and then I was startled awake and flailed my arms a bit and that's how she got all the bruises on her face, the split lip, and her hair pulled out")

I'm tentatively assuming that the legal experts quoted in the Agitator piece goole linked know enough about the typical structure of such indictments and the evidence outlined in this one to speak with some authority, especially given what seems to be (?) their consensus on its deficiencies. Their collective suggestion that the indictment is surprisingly fact-light is at least somewhat convincing to me.

"Tentatively" is crucial here, though. Some of those quotations read more like politicized spin than credible "expert legal opinion". This ridiculous piece of trolling, for instance:

Last week saw the arrest of George Zimmerman for second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin. How far we’ve come since 1963: here the protesters, rather than being willing to go to jail for their principles, wanted the government to put a man in jail for their principles.

yeah no one wanted to put Lester Maddox in jail amirite

well it is radley balko so there are some libertarians in the mix there

The parse is: was he explicitly told not to pursue?

you'd have to be a total idiot (=much of the jury pool, likely) to think that he wasn't.

disagree. you'd merely have to make a distinction between advice and instruction. and even as advice, the dispatcher's phrasing pretty mild. zimmerman was never told directly/explicitly not to pursue martin, only that the police didn't "need" him to do that.

i guess now 9-1-1 operators are going to have to remember to say "DO NOT FOLLOW HIM"