COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, July 13, 2013

George Zimmerman is not guilty of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, a Florida jury decided late Saturday. The fact that Zimmerman fired the bullet that killed Martin was never in question, but the verdict means the six-person jury had reasonable doubt that the shooting amounted to a criminal act. The verdict caps a case that has inflamed passions for well over a year, much of it focused on race and gun rights.

14 comments:

  1. Yahoo...

    self defense.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Facts and lack of evidence won out over passion.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yep, I'm sure that if it was the black kid sitting there, and the facts were reversed the verdict would have been the same.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yeah it's a race thing..

      trayvon, the son of a gang banger Crips member, was killed because he was black?


      Not because he was beating the head of a creepy assed cracker...

      criminal scum comes in all colors and races.

      Delete
  4. I put the post of Obama shooting off his mouth, as a president should not, for a reason. Had Obama the maturity, discipline and discretion to know when to express an opinion and not, this trial would have not reached a national level. Zimmerman would have been tried for unlawful death or manslaughter and would probably have been convicted. Instead, the tin eared dope made the trial racial and political.

    Crimes, as bad as this and worse happen all the time in Philadelphia, rarely white on black.

    Zimmerman walks because Obama talks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. .

      I doubt that Obama's words effected the outcome of the Zimmerman trial, but others might disagree.

      Obama’s remarks complicate military sex assault cases, experts say

      President Barack Obama proclaimed that those who commit sexual assault in the military should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged,” it had an effect he did not intend: roiling legal cases across the country.

      In at least a dozen sexual assault cases since the president’s remarks at the White House in May, judges and defense lawyers have said Obama’s words as commander in chief amounted to “unlawful command influence,” tainting trials as a result. Military law experts said those cases were only the beginning and that the president’s remarks were certain to complicate almost all continuing prosecutions for sexual assault.

      “Unlawful command influence” refers to actions of commanders that could be interpreted by jurors as an attempt to influence a court-martial, in effect ordering a specific outcome. Obama, as commander in chief of the armed forces, is considered the most powerful person to wield such influence. The president’s remarks might have seemed innocuous to civilians, but military law experts say that defense lawyers will seize on the president’s call for an automatic dishonorable discharge, the most severe discharge available in a court-martial, arguing that his words will affect their cases...


      When this guy gets on his high horse, it's hard to quiet him down.

      .

      Delete
    2. If Obama hadn't shot his mouth off there would have been no trial at all. No arrest. That chief was fired. The first prosecutor declined to prosecute. Governor appoints special prosecutor. Bypasses the grand jury. It was all a political racial show trial.

      Delete
  5. KYLE HIGHTOWER, The Associated Press POSTED: Saturday, July 13, 2013, 2:45 PM

    A state attorney's office employee has been fired after testifying about concerns that prosecutors didn't turn over photos and text messages from Trayvon Martin's cellphone to the defense in George Zimmerman's murder case.

    Ben Kruidbos received a termination letter Thursday accusing him of misconduct and "violating numerous state attorney's office policies and procedures." It accused him of disclosure of confidential information, sabotage of property or equipment, and misuse of state attorney equipment. Attorney Wesley White says Kruidbos wasn’t surprised by the firing.

    Kruidbos retrieved photos and deleted text messages from Martin's cellphone and testified during a hearing June 6. Zimmerman’s attorneys were seeking sanctions against the state for not properly turning over the evidence from Martin's phone.

    Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20130713_ap_fbfe02cb7a7341f3a465effd9817f2ee.html#rxvWLXgLisQif3Sf.99

    ReplyDelete
  6. Zimmerman Judge Ran Kangaroo Court

    Posted 07/12/2013 06:47 PM ET

    Injustice: There are biased judges, and then there's Debra Nelson, who's presided over what can only be called a kangaroo court in the George Zimmerman trial.

    The bias of Nelson, Florida Circuit Court judge and a lifelong Democrat, in favor of the prosecution and its efforts to railroad Zimmerman as a racist murderer has been palpable throughout the case. Her actions, which have actively aided the state, could poison jurors and factor into future litigation.

    Her shameful rulings and behavior, therefore, are worth cataloging, and include:

    • Suppressing exculpatory evidence recovered from the (double-password-protected) cell phone of Trayvon Martin that reveal deleted texts of the 17-year-old bragging about street-fighting with friends and relatives and photos showing him brandishing guns, gangsta-style. This evidence supports Zimmerman's claim he feared Martin and shot in self-defense.

    • Disallowing Martin's criminal background, including arrests by Miami-Dade school district police for drugs, theft, graffiti and other delinquent behavior. (Martin, in fact, had been suspended from school the week he jumped Zimmerman inside his gated townhouse complex, after police found stolen jewelry and burglary tools inside his backpack.)

    • Excluding any testimony from audio experts who could definitively ID Zimmerman's voice screaming for help on 911 calls as Martin bashed his head against a concrete sidewalk.

    • Allowing, conversely, the last-minute request of plainly desperate prosecutors to have jurors consider an alternative lesser charge of manslaughter to try to secure some kind of conviction, any kind of punishment, in the complete absence of a sound murder case.

    • Never sanctioning the prosecution despite Zimmerman's lawyers justifiably filing no fewer than six formal complaints against the state for withholding exculpatory and other evidence from them in violation of discovery rules.

    • Yet repeatedly overruling — at times even reprimanding — Zimmerman's lawyers when they objected to the underhanded tactics of the prosecution.

    • And even, in one of the most bizarre interventions by a judge many court watchers have ever observed in a criminal case, directly grilling defendant Zimmerman not once, but three times about his intentions to personally testify — while scolding his lawyers not to counsel him in what seemed to many to be an attempt by the court to bully him into taking the stand.

    Seeing prosecutors losing the case, Nelson jumped into the ring to give them a direct shot at Zimmerman in a last-ditch attempt to make him look guilty in front of the jury.

    Even former prosecutors slammed Nelson for her obnoxious impartiality. Andrew C. McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney who has prosecuted major criminal cases, called the trumped-up Zimmerman case a "travesty" of justice from start to finish. Any other judge would have thrown the case out as the garbage it was.

    "In presiding over the trial of George Zimmerman, Judge Debra Nelson has made some awful rulings — none worse than failing to direct a verdict of acquittal on the preposterous second-degree 'depraved mind' murder charge," McCarthy wrote.

    "The state's evidence that Zimmerman had the necessary criminal intent is non-existent, much less sufficient to meet the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard," he explained. "Compelling evidence, moreover, establishes that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, a claim the state has not come close to refuting."

    Yet Nelson prevented jurors from hearing all that evidence. Over and over again, she ruled as inadmissible key facts and data that could have reinforced Zimmerman's plea of self-defense.

    Nelson has higher ambitions, having twice applied for open seats on Florida's supreme court. Let's hope for the sake of impartial justice the governor continues to pass her over. She really has no business sitting on any bench.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You watch. Zimmerman will go after that news network for damages when it edited his words making him sound like a racist.

    You watch. Zimmerman will go after the State of Florida for malicious prosecution.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. hope zimmerman gets paid for the movie "how to legally kill a thug/criminal that is attacking you with intent to murder"

      Delete