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

It's funny, how little of a shit I give about whether Zimmerman seemed like a nice guy to people or not.

Reading that "Zimmerman isn't such a bad guy, and problems in the neighborhood, blah blah blah," after a complicit media let dead-enders run around for more than a month with all the hoodie- fake Facebook photo- school suspension-thug crap about Trayvon, just makes me absolutely livid.

yeah this. I've tried to keep opinions to myself until the inevitability of the levee breaking, which is difficult when you advise a college newspaper staff whose staff is a quarter black. What's awful is how the media has behaved as shamefully as usual yet we were still swept along.

there are a lot of big questions wrapped up in this case and "does George Zimmerman hate black people?" is kinda not even the central one. It does seem pretty clear that he judged Trayvon based on the color of his skin/his age/his clothes and Trayvon is dead because of it. That the cops didn't see fit to charge him is also pretty clearly institutionalized racism at work but whatever

that article is like Don Rickles' "I'm a nice guy!" routine

the cops didn't charge him because of Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

which I'm sure is judiciously applied in every case regardless of skin color

if Trayvon had shot Zimmerman he would have been arrested and you know it

"He was following me and acting crazy! I thought he had a gun!"

"into the county lockup with you young man"

if Trayvon had shot Zimmerman he would have been arrested and you know it

yup

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20120403/articles/120409919

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/24/justice/ac360-stand-your-ground-law/index.html

Reading that "Zimmerman isn't such a bad guy, and problems in the neighborhood, blah blah blah," after a complicit media let dead-enders run around for more than a month with all the hoodie- fake Facebook photo- school suspension-thug crap about Trayvon, just makes me absolutely livid.

― i love the large auns pictures! (Phil D.), Wednesday, April 25, 2012 10:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what should the media have done? Dig into Trayvon's life to try and refute the "dead-enders"? The media was reluctant to root around in the personal life of a teenager who had been killed, understandably.

media not so reluctant to root around the personal life of man who killed teenager, apparently

that reuters article was depressing as fuck btw

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/24/justice/ac360-stand-your-ground-law/index.html

I was talking about this with my father-in-law this weekend

not really looking good for Florida IMO

I thought that traditional self-defense was based on whether a 'reasonable person' was credibly frightened for their life. SYG law or not, I can see both GZ and the lady in this article trying to make that case, perhaps her more than GZ since her husband had already put her in the hospital and been jailed for it and she didn't even aim her gun at him.

Zimmerman's MySpace "less than flattering"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/zimmerman-myspace-page_n_1471818.html?1335986666&icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl2|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D157289

top two banners:

http://img-cdn.mediaplex.com/0/8975/03565_hoodies_728x90_revised_01.jpg
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/bignews/classic_blog/topics/2649798/image_1335817801.jpeg

Stay classy, Florida

don't even mouseover that link much less click it

yes, but is it racist?!?

awww, i just, awww man

In an email exchange with a reporter from KSAT sister station WKMG in Orlando, the seller wrote, "My main motivation was to make money off the controversy."

mission accomplished

Also, a black woman in Florida has just been sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot at her abusive husband, which she tried to justify under "stand your ground" but got the book thrown at her.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/11/justice/florida-stand-ground-sentencing/index.html

The case was prosecuted by the same state attorney as Zimmerman.

honestly, though i don't know all the details, that case is almost as infuriating as the martin/zimmerman business

seriously.

i've been trying to figure out how the case of cece winans plays in here:

Around 12:30 am, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and either queer or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door began hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation. They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ and suggested that CeCe was ‘dressed as a woman’ in order to ‘rape’ Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers. When CeCe approached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women said, “I’ll take you bitches on,” and then smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland. A fight ensued, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

come to find out after the fact that the guy had a history of violence and a swastika tattooed on his chest, both facts deemed inadmissable in trial (while a bad check cece wrote once was accepted as evidence of her character). the woman who smash the glass into cece's face wasn't charged with anything.

cece was just found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 41 months.

Cece McDonald, it turns out. I was thinking "Cece Winans? That doesn't sound right. Maybe Cece Penniston...nope, not her either." So off to google I went.

i mean it doesn't 'play in' legally obv but the moral territory is interesting for me in that obv i'd like zimmerman to go down like a fuckin battleship but i'm also in a mileu of people yelling FREE CECE and i'm trying to work through whether or not i'm cool with yelling FREE CECE

oh woops lmao xp

The general narrative wrt this stuff is becoming "think twice about defending yourself if you're not white and heteronormative".

This country gets lucky so many times every day that there's no 'DEL U.S.' key on my word processor of the gods.

Assholes are everywhere, not just the U.S. Only we gear the laws in their favor.

The general narrative wrt this stuff is becoming "think twice about defending yourself if you're not white and heteronormative".

yeah, and i'm kind of shocked by my own naivete in being surprised that this is the case

laws geared in their favor everywhere tbh

yea the cece mcdonald case is i guess a little dicier morally than the martin/zimmerman case, still given the details i know p sure i'm in the free cece camp.

yeah

i put a few more seconds thought into this and i'm free cece all the way

kind of difficult to make an informed judgment given only the info in hoos' quote tbh

glass smasher not catching a charge seems weird tho

more here

http://www.citypages.com/2012-05-09/news/cece-mcdonald-murder-trial/

it's interesting to compare these two cases and then try to decide how i feel about "stand your ground" legislation in general. there are circumstances in which i agree that people are justified in responding forcefully to threats and violence. otoh, there are circumstances in which i think the decision to counter perceived danger with violence should not be legally protected. i feel that i can sort the former from the latter in a way that makes sense to me, personally, but it's very hard to clearly articulate the difference in concrete terms.

Based on the city pages article, even in a state without that awful "kill your enemies" law, this ought to have been manslaughter with a much lighter sentence, and maybe even an acquittal on traditional self-defense grounds; in Florida, this should have been the world's easiest stand your ground acquittal.

It's also pretty clear that McDonald's well-meaning attorneys were way out of their league.

cece was just found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 41 months.

41 months is not bad imo obv prison's no cakewalk but if you take a life self-defense or no doesn't it seem like there has to be some penalty attached?

The sentence is about twice as long as I would expect in a fight like that one with a defendant with no record. And in a "Stand Your Ground" state, it's a bizarre conviction anyway. OTHER FACTORS may have been involved.

sentence was the minimum iirc? also MN isn't a stand your ground state

^ this. it's a fucked situation, but not an outrageous sentence, all things considered.

i mean the sentence could be worse but imo she should have been acquitted on account of self defense

maybe so, but this:

A fight ensued, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

is far too sketchy on detail to say either way, really.