Trayvon Martin

[seemslikeadream]

"The end is not near for George Zimmerman,"

- Jose Baez

He shall live in fear the rest of his life...I hope it is a long one.....a very very long life

[Hunter]

Really? I respect your opinion but a jury found the man not guilty and according to our Constitution which I think many here believe in and respect he is now entitled to be left the fuck alone and live his life in peace in the pursuit of happiness.

I will say it again I am no GZ apologist but TM was not completely without fault in alll of this either, sure he was just walking home and he had a right to do that and GZ should have just observed and reported and he escalated the situation but according to the law that doesnt matter, what matters is what happened when they met face to face and who became the aggressor at that moment and there is no disputing that TM hit GZ, that does not mean GZ should have used his gun but it was a judgment call, ONE THAT I DONT AGREE WITH but a jury agreed it was the right call and that HAS to be respected, otherwise I would suggest people think LONG AND HARD what the alternative to our justice system might be and when I do so, I see nothing but ugliness. Our system isnt perfect but it is the best I know of, both sides had their chance to present their case and the state failed, the jurors werent paid off, they were not threatened (although I am sure they will be now by those who hate American Justice System and would prefer a full on police state without a trial by jury). There was nothing unfair about this, I dont have to like the outcome but no way to I wish harm on GZ nor do I wish he live a life of hell, the jury made this decision, he showed up in court and did his pat, cooperated, what more do we want from him? He made a mistake, a VERY BAD ONE AND A CHILD IS DEAD but the jury felt it was justified end of story, GZ is now entitled to live his life and enjoy his life nd do whatever everyone else does and those advocating otherwise might themselves be potential criminals.


Also there is some evidence coming out now that TM may have been drinking PURPLE DRANK which could be consistent with some of his behavior, some of the main ingredients of PURPLE DRANK is Arizona Ice Tea Skittles and other candy like Jolly Ranchers, and lots of cough syrup, I read that his autopsy did show some possible signs of early stage liver damage that could be caused from large overdoes of cough syrup.

I dont know if this was the case but its making the rounds in some pretty credible places right now, I will try and track down some links for us.

[Hunter]

Edit double post.

[Hunter]

The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found innocent: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.

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 fucking 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 “Nigger!” 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.

GEORGE ZIMMERMAN, NOT GUILTY: BLOOD ON THE LEAVES
POSTED BY JELANI COBB

The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial came down moments after I left a screening of “Fruitvale Station,” the film about the police shooting death of Oscar Grant four years ago in Oakland. Much of the audience sat quietly sobbing as the closing credits rolled, moved by a narrative of a young black man, unarmed and senselessly gone. Words were not needed to express a common understanding: to George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old he shot, fit the description; for black America the circumstances of his death did.

The familiarity dulled the sharp edges of the tragedy. The decision the six jurors reached Saturday evening will inspire anger, frustration, and despair, but little surprise, and this is the most deeply saddening aspect of this entire affair. From the outset— throughout the forty-four days it took for there to be an arrest, and then in the sixteen months it took to for this case to come to trial—there was a nagging suspicion that it would culminate in disappointment. Call this historical profiling.

The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found innocent: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty. During his cross examination of Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, defense attorney Mark O’Mara asked if she was avoiding the idea that her son had done something to cause his own death. During closing arguments, the defense informed the jury that Martin was armed because he weaponized a sidewalk and used it bludgeon to George Zimmerman. During his post-verdict press conference, O’Mara said that were his client black, he would never have been charged. At the defense’s table, and in the precincts far beyond it where donors stepped forward to contribute the funds that underwrote their efforts, there is a sense that George Zimmerman was the victim.

O’Mara’s statement echoed a criticism that began circulating long before Martin and Zimmerman encountered each other. Thousands of black boys die at the hands of other African Americans each year, but the black community, it holds, is concerned only when those deaths are caused by whites. It’s an appealing argument, and widespread, but simplistic and obtuse. It’s a belief most easily held when you’ve not witnessed peace rallies and makeshift memorials, when you’ve turned a blind eye to grassroots organizations like the Interrupters in Chicago working valiantly to stem the tide of violence in the city. It is the thinking of people who’ve never wondered why African Americans disproportionately support strict gun control legislation. The added quotient of outrage in cases like this one stems not from the belief that a white murderer is somehow worse than a black one, but from the knowledge that race determines whether fear, history, and public sentiment offer that killer a usable alibi.

The thousands who gathered last spring in New York, in St. Louis, in Philadelphia, in Miami, and in Washington, D.C., to demand Zimmerman’s arrest shared a narrative and an understanding of the past’s grip on the present. Long before the horrifying images of Martin lying prone and lifeless in the grass ever made their way to Gawker, he’d already begun to inspire references to the line about “blood on the leaves” from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Those crowds were the response of people who understand that history is interred in the shallowest of graves.

Yet the problem is not that this entire affair marks a low point in this country’s racial history—it’s that after two centuries of common history, we’re still obligated to chart high points and low ones. To be black at times like this is to see current events on a real-time ticker, a Dow Jones average measuring the quality of one’s citizenship. Trayvon Martin’s death is an American tragedy, but it will mainly be understood as an African-American one. That it occurred in a country that elected and reëlected a black president doesn’t diminish the despair this verdict inspires, it intensifies it. The fact that such a thing can happen at a moment of unparalleled political empowerment tells us that events like these are a hard, unchanging element of our landscape.

We can take from this verdict the understanding that it means validation for the idea that the actions George Zimmerman took that night are those of a reasonable man, that the conclusions he drew are sound, and that a black teenager can be considered armed any time he is walking down a paved street. We can take from this trial the knowledge that a grieving family was capable of displaying inestimable reserves of grace. Following the verdict Sybrina Fulton posted a benediction to Twitter: “Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control.” The Twitter account of Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, features an image of him holding Trayvon as a toddler, a birthday hat perched on the boy’s head. At trial, they sat through a grim procession of autopsy photos and audio of the gunshot that ended their son’s life. No matter what the verdict, their simple pursuit of justice meant amplifying the trauma of their loss by some unknowable exponent.

There’s fear that the verdict will embolden vigilantes but that need not be the concern: History has already done that. You need not recall specifics of everything that has transpired in Florida over the past two hundred years to recognize this. The details of Rosewood, the black town terrorized and burned to the ground in 1923, and of Groveland and the black men falsely accused of rape and murdered there in 1949, can remain obscure and retain sway over our present concerns. Names—like Claude Neal, lynched in 1934, and Harry and Harriette Moore, N.A.A.C.P. organizers in Mims County, killed by a firebomb in 1951—can be overlooked. What cannot be forgotten, however, is that there were no consequences for those actions.

Perhaps history does not repeat itself exactly, but it is certainly prone to extended paraphrases. Long before the jury announced its decision, many people had seen what the outcome would be, had known it would be a strange echo of the words Zimmerman uttered that rainy night in central Florida: they always get away.

GZ was not found INNOCENT by the way, not to nitpik but a verdict of not guilty is not a statement of innocence it is merely a verdict that says that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty and does not mean he is innocent and the jury is aware of that. A lot of jurors after trials will say things like they think the person may have been guilty but the state didnt prove it AND BY LAW they cannot convict if the state doesnt meet their burden.

[LilyPatToo]

I am appalled by this verdict. I lived long enough in Florida to know how deeply entrenched the racism is there, but I'd hoped that in the years since I moved away things had progressed. Guess not

LilyPat

[barracuda]

Emptywheel explains why this verdict was nearly a foregone conclusion.

tl;dr -

there has never been a good factual rebuttal to George Zimmerman’s own account of self defense. You know why? Because there is not any compelling rebuttal within the facts as adduced in the investigation and entered in the record at trial. And the presumption of innocence and burden of proof in the American criminal justice system still mean something.

[Iamwhomiam]

I cannot disagree, Hunter, however It's difficult to call this justice. The incident would not have happened had GZ obeyed his instructions from the police. He pursued and confronted the young man.

From what I understand, cough medicine is a depressant and would make someone under its influence more passive than aggressive, imo.

Also, whether he's hassled by the public is also justice of a sort that goes hand in hand with a killer, justified or not. Aside that, there's his conscience he has to live with, being fully aware of the truth of what actually occurred and who was truly at fault. And it's quite difficult to escape from your own conscience.

As there was only really one eyewitness, GZ, it was nearly a given that he would be found not guilty, which is indeed much different from being found innocent.

[seemslikeadream]

there has never been a good factual rebuttal to George Zimmerman’s own account of self defense. You know why?

Trayvon Martin is dead

oh and in the civil case Zimmerman will have to take the stand

[compared2what?]

Shot the boy dead for being black & in the wrong place: apartheid USA style.

The unofficial criminal penalty for shooting black people in this country is a sentence of somewhere between Nothing and Maybe-a-Trial-But-Don't-Worry-They'll-Acquit. (Unless the shooter is also black.) Been that way for as long as I can remember.

It's pretty unusual for a verdict to be announced on a Sat. night, doncha think? It's like the worst time you could announce this verdict. Or maybe they did it now because they thought it would go unnoticed? Everyone is out partying? I can't figure it out.

This judge was very good she moved things along very quickly unlike a lot of judges, the jury was sequestered and she asked them if they wanted to deliberate on the weekend to speed things along and they said yes, I was surprised to hear it on a saturday as well but this judge wanted to get those families home as soon as possible so they didnt take any days off, good on her for not dragging het feet and dragging this out, You dont see that often.

Because you don't see a sequester like that often. But when you do, ^^that's what you see.

ON EDIT:

GZ was not found INNOCENT by the way, not to nitpik but a verdict of not guilty is not a statement of innocence it is merely a verdict that says that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty and does not mean he is innocent and the jury is aware of that. A lot of jurors after trials will say things like they think the person may have been guilty but the state didnt prove it AND BY LAW they cannot convict if the state doesnt meet their burden.

That really only applies to the Murder Two charges, in this instance. They could have convicted for manslaughter. And I'd say there was a case for that.

[Nordic]

there has never been a good factual rebuttal to George Zimmerman’s own account of self defense. You know why?

Trayvon Martin is dead

Thanks for that. The goddamn OBVIOUS answer to the above STUPID rhetorical question. Obviously written by some white "liberal".

[compared2what?]

there has never been a good factual rebuttal to George Zimmerman’s own account of self defense. You know why?

Trayvon Martin is dead

Thanks for that. The goddamn OBVIOUS answer to the above STUPID rhetorical question. Obviously written by some white "liberal".

They do have that "liberal" thing about always thinking it's unconstitutional for the government to just hustle people into prison without proving they're guilty first, even when they're not accused of crimes against national security.

[Nordic]

White people need to figure out that we're all "black" now. Except for those in the 1% of the 1%.

Black people have had this shit figured out for a long time. White people still aren't catching on.

[slimmouse]

Whilst I might disagree with the "White people arent catching on stuff" or even the idea that Black people get it ( see Obama) thats a mighty fine summary IMHO, Nordic.

[Nordic]

Whilst I might disagree with the "White people arent catching on stuff" or even the idea that Black people get it ( see Obama) thats a mighty fine summary IMHO, Nordic.

Well it is admittedly a generalization.

But it's something I've really noticed lately. And realized to be generally true.

[slimmouse]