We have been following the investigation into the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. The shooter, George Zimmerman, 28, has not been charged and reported a suspicious character to 911. Martin was returning from a 7-11 after buying Skittles. He was carrying the candy, a small amount of cash, and an iced tea. The family and many others have called for the arrest of Zimmerman, though the accounts of the shooting have been murky. Previously, we discussed the need to hear the 911 tapes, which have now been released and are linked below.
Zimmerman is reportedly a habitual caller into the police and is heard on one of the tapes complaining that ““These a**holes always get away.” Zimmerman states on the call that Martin appeared “up to no good . . . It’s raining. He’s just walking around, looking about . . . He’s just staring looking at all the houses.” Zimmerman says on the call that it is Martin who confronts him: “Something’s wrong with him. He’s coming to check me out.” However, he later admits that he is following Martin, which the police dispatcher discourages.
Police Chief Bill Lee said the 911 calls show that the incident was not a case of racial profiling. He said Zimmerman could not say whether the suspect was black or white. However, on the tape you hear Zimmerman say “He looks black” and then a few moments later, “He’s a black male.” While he is at first equivocal, he does identify his race. That does not mean that this is a case of profiling, of course.
However, family member have been critical of the handling of the case by the police and what they view as the police bending over backward to defend Zimmerman. The family had to file a lawsuit to get these tapes. After a hearing, the police finally relented.
The tapes certainly contradict some statements by the police. However, I am not sure that they substantially alter the status in the case. The evidence still is largely based on Zimmerman’s account, though such contemporary records are generally admissible. The tapes both help and hurt Zimmerman.
The statement by Zimmerman that “these a**holes always get away” certainly shows animus and he clearly follows the youth. However, that does not translate into evidence of intent to kill. I am more interested in the level of force used by Zimmerman and the two gunshots heard on the tape. It is possible that audio creates a misleading impression of two shots but that would seem an important forensic question. It is hard to believe that Martin would allegedly continue any confrontation of Zimmerman after a warning shot unless the shot was fired in the midst of a struggle over the gun. Zimmerman can cite the tape for his statement that he believed that Martin had something in his waistband and appeared on drugs. He can also cite his contemporary description of Martin approaching him.
Putting aside the complaints regarding the handling of the case by the police and the conflicting statements given by officials, there remains the question of whether there is sufficient evidence to base a charge against Zimmerman. I would like to see the coroner’s report on the trajectory and distance of the gunshot wound as well as audio analysis of the gun shot or shots. I would also like to see evidence of the abrasions on both men. Zimmerman was reportedly bleeding from the struggle but we have not heard many details on Martin’s other injuries.
Zimmerman would be wise to secure criminal counsel. There is probably enough here for an indictment. The most salient facts against him are (1) the statement on the 911 tape showing animus, (2) the disregarded instructions not to follow Martin, (3) the advantage in weight and possession of a firearm in the struggle, and (4) the lack of any weapon or proof of criminal conduct by Martin.
What do you think about the state of the evidence?
Here is the Zimmerman tape: 911 Tape (Zimmerman)
Here is a witness tape: 911 Tape (1)
Here is a witness tape: 911 Tape (2)
Source: CNN
raff,
I’m trying to keep this as math free as possible just for you. The only math you need to know for this is one plus one equals a slightly different other one. 😀
“Something esle is at work.”
Yeah, it’s not just environment.
Simple version? Environmental pressures, mutation, recombination and natural selection a.k.a. evolution.
Complex version? Heredity manifesting variation though random mutation, sex and recombination combined with the mechanisms of natural selection, genetic flow and genetic drift all resulting in adaptation, co-evolution, co-operation and speciation; processes which all fall under the rubric of evolution.
Magic doesn’t have squat to do with it other than magic is the name people ascribe to processes they don’t understand.
Gene,
I have no problem with science. It is just that darn math that keeps getting in the way.
Gene H:
So you think that feet magically turned to flippers because the food was in the water? Come on. Are you serious?
There is something other than environmental pressure at work. My guess is that the changes are genetic mutations brought about by viruses or some other yet to be discovered mechanism.
Environmental pressure will adapt an animal to tolerate a poisonous food or change an animals coloration but that alone is not going to change a wolf-like creature into a whale or a Hyrax like creature into an elephant. Something esle is at work.
“What caused the genetic mutation to change feet into flippers. It wasnt the environment.” Really, Bron? You’re going to go with that answer?
It was exactly the environment creating pressure on shallow water fish or aquatic reptiles through predation that gave the first fish to develop feet like flippers and/or a crude lung a survival advantage when the could pull themselves out of the water and away from predators. Live another day, get another chance to make more babies with feet like flippers and/or a crude lung.
Wow. I used to wonder how American got to be 17th in science education worldwide. Between this and the conversation with Dredd, it’s no longer a mystery. People can’t pusue the study of science when they don’t even know what it is or isn’t.
Deja vu all over again.
“I am using the phrase “metaphysical” in a different way than modern philosophy uses it. I am using it’s root meaning which is: meta- (Greek for higher [than]) and physical (Greek for psukhikos or the “human soul”).”
Then you are misunderstanding and misusing the word.
metaphysics
late 14c., “branch of speculation which deals with the first causes of things,” from M.L. metaphysica, neut. pl. of Medieval Gk. (ta) metaphysika, from Gk. ta meta ta physika “the (works) after the Physics,” title of the 13 treatises which traditionally were arranged after those on physics and natural sciences in Aristotle’s writings. The name was given c.70 B.C.E. by Andronicus of Rhodes, and was a ref. to the customary ordering of the books, but it was misinterpreted by Latin writers as meaning “the science of what is beyond the physical.” Hence, metaphysical came to be used in the sense of “abstract, speculative” (e.g. by Johnson, who applied it to certain 17c. poets, notably Donne and Cowley, who used “witty conceits” and abstruse imagery). The word originally was used in English in the singular; plural form predominated after 17c., but singular made a comeback late 19c. in certain usages under German influence.
“So when I say that I am referring to super-sentient-higher-life-forms that are supernatural and generally exist above the Earth”
See, that word “supernatural” is where you loose contact with science. There is only the natural. Anything else is speculation without proof, again metaphysics are not science. Science requires proof and repeatable experimentation.
“As a whole this system could not have just slowly came into existence without help as they are too complex and interdependent.”
And your proof of that statement is what exactly? Nature is full of self-orgnaizing abiotic and biotic systems and deep time is a scale most people have a real difficult time grasping. Complexity is a function of permutations tried over time. Modern humans have been here a blink of an eye in biological or geological time. The Earth has been around about 4.5 billion years. Modern humans? About 200,000 years give or take. That means Earth has been around 22,500 time longer than all of human history. The abiotic orgins of life have dated to a time window from 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago. That means the chemical building blocks of life have been around 19,500 times longer than humans. That’s a lot of time for things to combine and recombine.
“And especially in the absence of transitional false-starts (i.e. missing links).”
Evolution and the fossil record are incomplete, but there is plenty of evidence for transitional forms. Natural selection, however, is going to limit false starts. If a trait has no true survival advantage, it’s not going to be passed on unless it is by coincidence.
“Also when you have multi-millions of years of sentient-less natural selection WITHOUT some sort of super-sentient-sheparding (i.e. a deity?) you only have empirical decay not progress.”
Natrual processes. Breeding. The swapping of genes. Mutation. Symbiosis. Evolution requires no shepard.
Believe in a God all you like, that’s your prerogative, but there is no scientific evidence for one or for any kind of sheparding force other than the processes of evolution and chemistry combined with time. As limited as we are, we are the highest order of intelligence we have evidence of existing in the universe.
Sotb:
you are fascinating, very interesting stuff.
Yes how do you get a whale out of a wolf like creature and an Elephant out of Hyrax? What caused the genetic mutation to change feet into flippers. It wasnt the environment. Crocodiles and Alligators are pretty much as they were 60 million years ago. And for that matter so are Coelacanths.
@Gene H. – Granted but I am using the phrase “metaphysical” in a different way than modern philosophy uses it. I am using it’s root meaning which is: meta- (Greek for higher [than]) and physical (Greek for psukhikos or the “human soul”). So when I say that I am referring to super-sentient-higher-life-forms that are supernatural and generally exist above the Earth (extraterrestrial – yet NOT Hollywood-based aliens!).
I feel that the scientific empiricals have been mostly satisfied with science itself: i.e. the written record of eyewitness reports of the Bronze Age and 1st century CE, archaeology, anthropology, Earth sciences, and anecdotal evidence of metaphysical historic and contemporary supernatural incidences that can not be easily explained away with jaded and skeptical atheistic explanations.
Even the very complexity of the Universe, the human genome, the human circulatory system, central nervous system, immune system, the ocular system of vision, hearing, olfactory, complex muscle system, etc. as a whole just screams super-sentient architecture. As a whole this system could not have just slowly came into existence without help as they are too complex and interdependent. And especially in the absence of transitional false-starts (i.e. missing links). Also when you have multi-millions of years of sentient-less natural selection WITHOUT some sort of super-sentient-sheparding (i.e. a deity?) you only have empirical decay not progress.
That’s IMO not Christian Fundamentalism which I partially reject as nonsense. However, I hold the antithesis of that as nonsense as well. I am sort of in the middle of the road here.
Believe as you wish, but the phrase “very real and verifiable metaphysical world that exists all around us” is contradictory. One of the key distinguishing features of metaphysics from science is empirical enperiment and testing, i.e. quantification of the real and verifiable. This is why the advent of the scientific method caused the pursuit of what was once called “natural philosophy” – a branch of metaphysics – to break away from philosopy and start calling the pursuit science instead of metaphysics. That which is real and verifiable is the realm of science. That which may be real but isn’t necessarily veriiable is the realm of metaphysics. By way of example; consider “cosmology”. It is both an area of metaphysical and scientific study, but confusing one for the other leads to, well, confusion. 😀
SOTB, what you say is fascinating as usual.
Strangely, I have no curiosity at all about cosmology and no angst about “why we are here.” You will be my main advisor on what to read and watch! This is a prestigious position; Yann Martel himself advises me too!
We may ourselves be a language! Perhaps that is why I am playing with the words like a raccoon fingering his food with that look of intense concentration on his face, before the first taste.
@Malisha – Professor Turley does not see eye-to-eye with many smart people. He seems to think that believers in a Christian God are delusional as he is IMHO a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. I can understand, as did Soren Kierkegaard, that Organized Christianity (et al) has, albeit arguably, utterly failed to interpret the Bible accurately making it easier for people like the good professor to be very uninformed about the very real and verifiable metaphysical world that exists all around us and from well before we existed. Arguably this phenomena explains our true origins better than a failed Protestant minister who incorrectly blamed God for his 5-year old daughter’s early death (i.e. Charles Darwin). Intellectuals can believe in God too. Just without Organized Religion’s philosophical “fruit of the poisonous tree”>.
@Malisha – Even though I slept at Holiday Inn express last night I am not a psychiatrist. 🙂 However, I feel your responses to “right-wing brain” thinkers is totally appropriate. Scientific studies just that they are “low-effort thinkers” according to Dr. Scott Edelman of U. of Ark. However, a more in-depth study was conducted by NYU and UCLA LA Times Article. Click the article and read up on it.
People like Manny O. are IMHO in this category. You and I tend to be liberal-thinkers. One is not better than the other only DIFFERENT. They don’t think deeply about issues and only see things superficially. We however do.
They see the TM/GZ scenario as simply a SYG issue about Armed Grown Man versus Child with just Fists. Ever here the old adage about a man who came to a gun fight with just a knife? That’s kinda’ how they view this. They also see it as a future threat to USA gun laws. Why they need guns at all is baffling. Home protection? Then why carry it away from home. Hunting? Why carry it on the streets? Target practice… it goes on and on.
IMO most threats to people like this comes from people who look nothing like Trayvon. Good guns (vs. Sat Night Specials) are expensive (GZ’s Kel-Tec was $175-$200). Unless the bad guys are into drug dealing they simply can’t afford them (Other 9mm’s range from that to over $1000). So where’s the threat to justify carrying a pistol unless you carry large amounts of money for your business or you work in drug-infested urban hoods?
So please feel very justified in defending your point-of-view aggressively. Yes you and eye suffer from loggeria* (everybody says in unison: “WE KNOW!” (LOL)). But it is not only informative to the masses it’s therapeutic to us. We’re not showing-off; we just have something to say to a larger intellectual audience versus our benighted peers at home/work.
*Loggeria – Verbose (textually and verbally).
Dear co-bloggers, including but not limited to those who have recently given me and co-blogger Boanerges such lovely compliments (see, I’m healing from Bruce Bach telling me that I’m not a nice, sweet woman!):
Wow, thanks!
Originally what inspired me here was the intellectual tone. Professor Turley and I had met (fortunately or unfortunately) on opposite sides of the Eric Foretich case. NOT that I thought that ridiculous federal law passed to make the case go away was constitutional — far from it — but that I thought, “who cares, once the life interest has been aborted before it was even recognized and this country can’t seem to gestate anything that doesn’t mutate into a social disgrace?” and here was the great constitutional scholar devoting himself to THAT CASE when DeShaney was looming over us, strangling us so viciously that we couldn’t scream “help”!
Oh well, here I go again.
But so, there, I jumped in, probably won’t ever jump out. Recently a thumb drive that had a lot of my valuables on it got erased (a kid recorded computer games over my stuff on it, OY!) and I thought, “I had better write some new poetry, QUICK, or I will begin to feel a sense of loss.”
If we weren’t all talking, it would be lonely here.
Haiku:
Sun bakes the earth dry.
Now feet cannot punish it.
Progress is counting.
Before I learned enough to incorporate nature into every haiku, I wrote free-style and back then, my best was:
Haiku Jew.
Many pricks, no blood.
Now I remember Shylock:
No, we don’t bleed, NO!
I do too … and I agree with your assessment.
I agree, Blouise. Malisha has done a notably way above average job for a newcomer. Far better than any in recent memory. I’d go so far as to say excellent . . . and you know that’s not a word I use often or lightly. I hope she sticks around.
I am very impressed with Malisha’s skills.
The Friends (Quakers) want to discuss and dispute in order to reach consensus. This is really the first time I have ever blogged — I admit to having gotten a little obsessed at a few points in time here and I have to observe, about my conduct, that “talk is cheap” — but I went off track a couple of times and sorry for it. This comment, however, is to the rest of my respected fellows on this thread, and related threads on Professor Turley’s blog.
Probably 75% of Americans believed that Zimmerman should have been arrested, and now, he has been arrested. We have lawyers on this blog and they have been good enough to show us the laws as they exist in Florida, and comment on them, and guide us in that respect. We have endured some rather irritable and/or even angry communications with each other. I recently e-mailed a friend who is an intellectual and a psychiatrist in New York, and I told him that I had gotten into a fairly deep, involved discussion of someone (I was describing Manny Orlo) who started out so radically opposied to what I was saying about the case that I could feel real hostility, and he asked, “WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO HIM AT ALL?” I felt a little scolded, and I defended myself by saying, “If he thinks he has something to say to me, even if he’s angry or hostile, perhaps I have something to say to him too.” I could feel my friend thinking, “She’s being such a moron!” But right now I feel like I was just doing what we humans do that the rest of the animals do not do: using language to build something. I don’t even necessarily think I was helping to build anything particularly GOOD — or BAD — just building.
Perhaps I would feel a lot worse about this whole process had Zimmerman not been charged and arrested; I don’t know. But I feel becalmed about my blogging, my conversations, even my missteps and misspeaks and incidences of ignorance or frank error.
Haiku Puzzle
Steady dripping sound:
Could this be a form of speech
from the universe?
Malisha & SoTB,
You have both contributed greatly to this issue and thread. I’ve been so taken by your stuff that I’ve hardly commented since my additions would only be superfluous. Love the haiku, please hang around, you add alot.
Copy and Paste from: http://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/782.07
“782.07 Manslaughter; aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person or disabled adult; aggravated manslaughter of a child; aggravated manslaughter of an officer, a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, or a paramedic.—
(1) The killing of a human being by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another, without lawful justification according to the provisions of chapter 776 and in cases in which such killing shall not be excusable homicide or murder, according to the provisions of this chapter, is manslaughter, a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
(2) A person who causes the death of any elderly person or disabled adult by culpable negligence under s. 825.102(3) commits aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person or disabled adult, a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
(3) A person who causes the death of any person under the age of 18 by culpable negligence under s. 827.03(3) commits aggravated manslaughter of a child, a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
(4) A person who causes the death, through culpable negligence, of an officer as defined in s. 943.10(14), a firefighter as defined in s. 112.191, an emergency medical technician as defined in s. 401.23, or a paramedic as defined in s. 401.23, while the officer, firefighter, emergency medical technician, or paramedic is performing duties that are within the course of his or her employment, commits aggravated manslaughter of an officer, a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, or a paramedic, a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
History.—RS 2384; GS 3209; RGS 5039; CGL 7141; s. 715, ch. 71-136; s. 180, ch. 73-333; s. 15, ch. 74-383; s. 6, ch. 75-298; s. 12, ch. 96-322; s. 2, ch. 2002-74.”
Based on this Zim could face 30 years! Also, under the Florida 10-20-Life system, if a firearm is used in any way then the penalty will be raised to the next degree.
@Malisha – Great Haiku!
@Bron – Steadfast was referring to me as “Gerty”.I think it’s an Australian idiom for “Giggling Gertie”. I believe Steady (and 1 other) were calling me, in a pejorative sense, a child seeking attention with my “intrusive” and prolific textual/verbal diarrhea (i.e. aka “loggeria”) – translation: talk too much and bragging for undue attention. I can only say they came to their own false conclusions about me. I have never identified myself in any grandiose nor declarative sense in such a way to deserve so much angst. I analyze and report. It’s my very raison d’etre so to speak. 😛
@anon nurse – As Sheldon Cooper from TV show “The Big Bang Theory” would say “Neener neener!” – 🙂
@All – Well I’m glad the SpecProc finally did it. She is going for Murder 2 and George turned himself in already. I wish it were more realistic at Man 1 but I guess if you aim high it may get knocked back to Man 1. And the lawyers were lying. George never left the state. I still think George is fishing for a plea bargain. I just hope he’s not doing this pro se. I wish I could find that Orlando lawyer’s name I posted somewhere here earlier in the month. He was the one to get GZ off on that SPD cop bashing and I think his domestic charges dropped. I’m sure they are going with him.
I lost my bet. 99 cents! OUCH!
I thought Zim would be gone by the time the charges were announced. OK, I was wrong. It’s not the first time, either — I was wrong one time in 1976, too. I hope not to make a habit of it.
Now — whoever advised me, way back there in the comments, “You know he can’t be charged under the law,” I just want to redeem a little bit of my credibility because under Florida law, the guy has been charged.
BTW, I think the 2nd degree murder charge is perfect. No grand jury (which you need for first-degree) and no need to wrestle with the death sentence issue (which would be horrible for everyone) and no need to prove premeditation. With a guy like Zim, it’s hard enough to prove MEDITATION much less PRE-MEDITATION. He’s not exactly Rodin’s “Thinker.”