Quote:
Originally Posted by janmcn
Hopefully, these are the thoughts the women on the jury are mulling over and asking themselves, do we want to give this loose cannon his gun back to go out and hunt down more people, as if they are animals, wondering if it could be their children or grandchildren. And then, after the killing, saying he has no remorse and the shooting was God's will.
If convicted, I hope the judge tells Zimmerman that it's God's will that he spend x number of years in jail. He will be in for some fun when his fellow prisoners find out he was convicted for killing an unarmed teenager.
|
You seem to not understand the laws of self defense. Hopefully the jurors do. If this is the exact scenario that happened that night, even if Zimmerman actually confronted Martin and demanded to know why he was there and even if Zimmerman never identified himself as neighborhood watch, it does not give Martin the right to turn this into a physical attack and it certainly doesn't give him the right to sustain that attack for a minute while Zimmerman is crying for help. It definitely doesn't give him the right to escalate the attack into a potential life threatening attempt to bang his head against the sidewalk.
If the jurors see Zimmerman as the initial instigator and hence fully responsible for all events that transpired, that would be a travesty of justice.
Suppose I see Mike Tyson in a bar and I foolishly call him names and even start to push him - all the while Tyson tries to avoid the confrontation. However, suppose at some point Tyson loses his temper or just reacts from my physical confrontation and starts to beat me up. Once he has the upper hand and I no longer present any threat to him, he has an obligation to stop. He is not allowed to continue the attack just because he wasn't the one to initially provoke it. If he were to continue beating me, despite my cries for help, to the point that I feared for my life, I would then have the right to use lethal force to preserve my life - even though the entire incident would never had happened if I hadn't acted foolishly.
There are a lot of people here who seem to think that if Zimmerman's actions caused the confrontation that he forfeits his right to self defense. I hope the jurors are more schooled in the reality of the law.