George Zimmerman is being prosecuted in Florida for the murder of Trayvon Martin. It may go to the jury today.

Question:
If the Zimmerman case had landed on your desk, would you have proceeded to prosecute him for murder or manslaughter?

Choices:
Yes, I would have prosecuted him for murder or manslaughter.
No, I would not have prosecuted him for murder or manslaughter.

 

I just want to know how the prosecution in this case reasonably believed that applying to be a police officer somehow negated the justification of self defense.

That is an extremely interesting question that the media has not asked yet.

Here are a few more questions I'd like answered:

1) If the person who is pounding your head against a curb is a 17 year old "child" does that negate the justification of self defense?

2) If a person who is having his head smashed against concrete finally pulls a pistol and shoots his assailant, and the assailant ends up being unarmed, does that negate the justification of self-defense?

3) If George Zimmerman had been unarmed, and ended up being killed by Trayvon Martin by having his head smashed against the concrete, would these prosecutors have prosecuted Martin for murder, or would they have determined that under the circumstances this was a justifiable homicide?

Their legal theories are quite novel and I wish the media would explore them with some detail.

I seem to recall reading a case in which the concrete on the ground was considered a 'deadly weapon' for purposes of an Agg Assault w/ a Deadly Weapon conviction. So saying Martin was unarmed seems inaccurate.

Everyone participating in the poll since the result of the Zimmerman prosecution became known has voted that they would not have accepted the case. Guess the decision became a little easier.

For those voting in that way, I would ask whether they also disagree with the prosecutor in Marion County, who achieved a conviction on facts that were not that different from the Florida case, but likely involved even better/stronger evidence of justifiable homicide. See

Long.pdf (67 Kb, 14 downloads) Long

Martin,

I disagree with you: I don't think the Marian Co. case has stronger self defense evidence than the Zimmerman case had. In the Marian Co. case a man advanced towards the shooter 1 step after being warned not to, and was shot and killed. Zimmerman was having his head pounded into a concrete curb when he shot Martin. I think it is completely reasonable to believe one is about to die under such circumstances, and would use a gun to defend oneself.

The exact nature and degree of force Trayvon was using just before he was shot is debatable, or at least is being ferociously debated. "Pounding" and the number of times involved was never clear to me, anyway.

To me, either of the two cases was filled with some significant unpredictability about the outcome, which was my only point. And maybe I am saying that I would expect a larger percentage of people would have agreed with an acquittal in the Long case, if it had turned out that way, than the Zimmerman verdict seems to have attracted. So many cases that we make "prosecutor discretion" decisions about involve tragedies, yet that factor does not help much in deciding what to do or who to try to please.