U.S. Politics

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

So, it's OK to kill an unarmed black teenager walking home with a bag of skittles, if you think they are a punk.

 

Well done America. Absolutely disgraceful. **** fuckweasels.

[Dr_Pangloss]

[peterms]

 

In the UK we have some very dodgy people in the trade unions (or staff associations, more like) of bodies like the Prison Officers Association.  They seem to attract nazis, racists, and other authoritarian scumbags.  I think it's the uniform.  A spot of dressing up, being nasty to black people, and getting paid as well!  Lovely!

Are you familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment... it would seem to indicate that it's the presence of hierarchy which turns people into authoritarian scumbags; this is on top of the self-selection effect that arises from those with authoritarian tendencies seeking such positions.

 

 

Yes, fascinating, and scary.  It's a long time since I read about it, but wasn't it more about showing how easily people comply with perceived authority against their own judgement, rather than them acting in an authoritarian manner on their own account?  So if those same people became prison guards, you could imagine them carrying out cruel instructions, but that wouldn't necessarily say whether they would seek out opportunities to be cruel on their own initiative.

 

The effect of working in a setting where cruelty is routine and accepted is perhaps what makes people accustomed to do this, and more likely to act in such a way.  Perhaps peer pressure in settings like gangs, and institutions shielded from the public gaze like Bagram and Guantanamo is more significant than being ordered to be thuggish?

[leviramsey]

Yes, fascinating, and scary.  It's a long time since I read about it, but wasn't it more about showing how easily people comply with perceived authority against their own judgement, rather than them acting in an authoritarian manner on their own account?  So if those same people became prison guards, you could imagine them carrying out cruel instructions, but that wouldn't necessarily say whether they would seek out opportunities to be cruel on their own initiative.

You're thinking, I think, of the Milgram experiment.

In the prison experiment:

 

The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."

The researchers provided the guards with wooden batons in order to establish their status, clothing similar to that of an actual prison guard (khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store), and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Prisoners wore uncomfortable ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name.

The prisoners were arrested at their homes and charged with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They were transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip searched and given their new identities.

The small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. There was a small space for the prison yard, solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and warden. The prisoners were to stay in their cells all day and night until the end of the study. The guards worked in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards did not have to stay on site after their shift.

After a relatively uneventful first day, on the second day the prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the guards' instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered to work extra hours in order to assist in subduing the revolt, and subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers without being supervised by the research staff....

And as for self-selection:

 

Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with some ads saying "a psychological study of prison life", and some without the words "prison life". It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior.

 

The effect of working in a setting where cruelty is routine and accepted is perhaps what makes people accustomed to do this, and more likely to act in such a way.  Perhaps peer pressure in settings like gangs, and institutions shielded from the public gaze like Bagram and Guantanamo is more significant than being ordered to be thuggish?

 

When acts of prisoner torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicized in March 2004, Zimbardo himself, who paid close attention to the details of the story, was struck by the similarity with his own experiment. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives' shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.

Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing one of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He was granted full access to all investigation and background reports, and testified as an expert witness in SSG Frederick's court martial, which resulted in an eight-year prison sentence for Frederick in October 2004.

Zimbardo drew from his participation in the Frederick case to write the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, published by Random House in 2007, which deals with the striking similarities between his own Stanford Prison Experiment and the Abu Ghraib abuses.

The Milgram experiment, for the record:

 

 

Three individuals were involved: the one running the experiment, the subject of the experiment (a volunteer), and a confederate pretending to be a volunteer. These three persons fill three distinct roles: the Experimenter (an authoritative role), the Teacher (a role intended to obey the orders of the Experimenter), and the Learner (the recipient of stimulus from the Teacher). The subject and the actor both drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but unknown to the subject, both slips said "teacher". The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read "learner", thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the "teacher". At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The "teacher" was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.

2. The experiment requires that you continue.

3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.

4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

The experimenter also gave special prods if the teacher made specific comments. If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on." If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

Milgram also polled forty psychiatrists from a medical school and they believed that by the tenth shock, when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment. They predicted that by the 300 volt shock, when the victim refuses to answer, only 3.73 percent of the subjects would still continue and they believed that "only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board."

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

 

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9lPJX8sv0M

Edited July 14, 2013 by leviramsey

[Chindie]

As galling as it is, the Zimmerman verdict almost entirely comes down to the fact they couldn't prove Zimmerman guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

 

Effectively, the prosecutions case simply wasn't strong enough.

[peterms]

You're thinking, I think, of the Milgram experiment.

Yes, I'm confusing the two.

 

That film is very good (and even has an entry for the Ice Rink thread, at 55.30 ). 

 

Also interesting is how abusive cultures can develop in places which fall short of being total institutions like prisons and the military, places where authority is of a much softer kind and where there's a more explicit ethos of caring, like hospitals and care homes.

[maqroll]

As galling as it is, the Zimmerman verdict almost entirely comes down to the fact they couldn't prove Zimmerman guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

 

Effectively, the prosecutions case simply wasn't strong enough.

Quite right, but **** the USA anyway 

[Jon]

 

As galling as it is, the Zimmerman verdict almost entirely comes down to the fact they couldn't prove Zimmerman guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

 

Effectively, the prosecutions case simply wasn't strong enough.

Quite right, but **** the USA anyway 

 

It really is a crazy arse country. In fact, a very scary country too. Any country that effectively condones vigilante killings is not a country i'd ever feel safe in.

 

The facts of the Zimmerman case are thus:

 

1. Zimmerman spots 'dodgy looking' black kid (Dodgy looking to zimmerman presumablyh meant black kid wearing a hoodie).

2. Zimmerman phones cops, but also decides to follow said kid and 'apprehend' him, whilst carrying a firearm.

3. Trayvon Martin, the young black lad, is unarmed save for a bag of dangerous looking skittles 

4. Trayvon Marting is shot dead by the armed Zimmerman.

 

The rest can't really be proved either way it seems. But round of applause for those crazy yanks for having laws and a society that permits this kind of thing. They don't really care for leaving policing to the police.

[CVByrne]

It's all traceable back to gun laws. Until they are tackled nothing lasting can be achieved.

[leviramsey]

A system which convicted Zimmerman would likely be more racist than a system which acquitted him

I DON'T know what really happened in Sanford, Florida on the night of February 26th, 2012, and neither do you. We do know that George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood-watch volunteer, shot and killed Trayvon Martin. We know that Mr Zimmerman said Mr Martin knocked him down, punched him, slammed his head into the sidewalk, and that he shot Mr Martin in self-defence. (Mr Martin could not relate his side of the story, of course, and there were no other witnesses.) We also know that America is a country still divided by race and fond of guns, and that Mr Zimmerman cursed "punks" who "always get away". But we also know that that's not enough to put a man away for murder. On July 13th a jury acquitted Mr Zimmerman of second-degree murder after 15 hours of deliberation.

Prosecutors were faced with a difficult task, proving a case that was, as the New York Times put it, "weak on evidence and long on outrage". Since the day of Mr Martin's death, Florida's "stand your ground" law has come under scrutiny. The provision, which has been adopted by more than 20 states, permits those who fear grave injury or death not to retreat in the face of a threat of violence, even when a line of retreat is available. However, the law did not play a role in Mr Zimmerman's defence, and seems to have had little or nothing to do with the case.

Now, I don't know it, but I seriously doubt Mr Zimmerman needed to shoot Mr Martin, even if Mr Martin did attack him. And I seriously doubt Mr Martin would have been shot if he hadn't been a black kid. In my heart of hearts, I too think Mr Zimmerman did something terribly wrong, and that this misdeed reflects a number of things that are terribly wrong in our culture. And I share the impulse to identify something in the criminal-justice system that, if fine-tuned, would have drilled down to the honest-to-god truth about the case and rendered perfect moral justice. But it doesn't work that way. I think we know that, too.

Perhaps Mr Zimmerman would have been tripped up and found guilty of rashly killing an innocent were defendants in criminal trials forced to take the stand, but I'm glad they aren't. Perhaps the prosecution could have pinned it on him were it harder and generally less effective to plead self-defence, but I'm mostly glad it's not. I'm certainly open to the possibility that Florida's "stand your ground" law had something to do with the reasons the Sanford police initially declined to arrest Mr Zimmerman, or to investigate Mr Martin's death with all due care and zeal. Yet, as a general matter, the problem with America's criminal-justice system is not that it affords defendants too many protections.

In Texas you can get away with shooting someone to death if they're running away with your property. That's insane, and it's easy to see how a law like that rigs the system in favour of people with a lot of property—a class that remains disproportionately white and male. However, on the whole, our criminal-justice system is so frightfully racist because it's too easy for prosecutors, not because it's too hard. Of course, in a racist society, rules that help defendants are going to help the most privileged defendants the most, and that's maddening. But that shouldn't stop us from recognising that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused. That's why I suspect that a legal system making it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system of even more outrageous racial inequity.

[Chindie]

 

 

As galling as it is, the Zimmerman verdict almost entirely comes down to the fact they couldn't prove Zimmerman guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

 

Effectively, the prosecutions case simply wasn't strong enough.

Quite right, but **** the USA anyway 

 

It really is a crazy arse country. In fact, a very scary country too. Any country that effectively condones vigilante killings is not a country i'd ever feel safe in.

 

The facts of the Zimmerman case are thus:

 

1. Zimmerman spots 'dodgy looking' black kid (Dodgy looking to zimmerman presumablyh meant black kid wearing a hoodie).

2. Zimmerman phones cops, but also decides to follow said kid and 'apprehend' him, whilst carrying a firearm.

3. Trayvon Martin, the young black lad, is unarmed save for a bag of dangerous looking skittles 

4. Trayvon Marting is shot dead by the armed Zimmerman.

 

The rest can't really be proved either way it seems. But round of applause for those crazy yanks for having laws and a society that permits this kind of thing. They don't really care for leaving policing to the police.

 

Effectively condoning it is far too strong.

 

They couldn't prove it. I daresay that Zimmerman is a dodgy bloke who decided, either because he's an idiot or a bigotted nutter, that he was going to shoot that kid with his skittles that were upta naw gurd. Certainly the man has a few questions about his past record.

 

But they couldn't prove it. There wasn't the evidence. I don't want to think about a US that sends down a bloke because they reckon he did it, as opposed to as far as reasonably possible knew he did it.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

We live in a world in which the right to defend one's property trumps the right to life.

 

**** that.

Edited July 15, 2013 by CarewsEyebrowDesigner

[peterms]

We live in a world in which the right to defend one's property trumps the right to life.

 

**** that.

 

That angle seems to have been downplayed in most of the commentary I've seen, but it seems to be the whole basis for Zimmerman doing his neighbourhood watch thing in the first place, the basis for him being suspicious, the basis for him following and challenging Martin.  He thought that Martin might be contemplating property theft.

 

The impression it gives me from afar, especially side by side with the recent Marissa Alexander case, is that the general slant of the law seems to be less about self-protection than about defending property, and elevating property above life.

[villa4europe]

decent article from the americanthinker -

 

Unnerved by an unspoken mix of political bias and racial queasiness, the major media have chosen to know as little about Trayvon Martin as they know about Barack Obama.

As a case in point, consider this boy vs. man fable spun by the New York Times' Charles Blow:

Blow was writing seven weeks after Trayvon's death. He had no excuse for missing the actual story. Worse, since he is a writer for the Times, his reporting has helped set the media tone worldwideA boy's blood had been spilled on a rain-soaked patch of grass behind a row of mustard-colored condominiums by a man who had pursued him against the advice of 911 dispatchers. That man carried a 9-millimeter handgun. The boy carried a bag of candy.

The media's willful ignorance was on display again this past week. In reporting this news of George Zimmerman's return to jail, more than a few media outlets showed the dangerously deceptive image of Trayvon as 11-year-old cherub. They did so in the assumption that the narrative was still theirs to control. It is not. The blogs, which have been doing the real detective work on this case, have long since taken control away from them.

The sites I have found most useful are the Daily Caller and theconservativetreehouse.com. What follows is largely culled from those sites and their independent contributors. By probing Trayon's background and parsing his social media chatter, they have put together a picture of a disturbed young man that begins to makes sense of the events that unfolded on that fateful rainy night of February 26.

6:21

Trayvon Martin is seen on the security video through the 7-11 window approaching the store from the direction of the Retreat at Twin Lakes. He had been staying there at the townhouse of his father's girlfriend, Brandy Green. In major media accounts, the helpful Trayvon ventured out in the rain in a mile-plus round trip to buy Brandy's 14-year-old son, Chad, some Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea. Not likely.

6:22

Trayvon, with his hoodie up, grabs two items from the shelves of 7-11. One is the Skittles. The other is Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail. The media avoid the name of the real drink -- possibly because of the racial implications of the word "watermelon," but possibly to avoid probing the real reason for Trayon's trip.

Trayvon, in fact, had become a devotee of the druggy concoction known as "Lean," also known in southern hip-hop culture as "Sizzurp" and "Purple Drank." Lean consists of three basic ingredients -- codeine, a soft drink, and candy. If his Facebook postings are to be believed, Trayvon had been using Lean since at least June 2011.

On June 27, 2011, Trayvon asks a friend online, "unow a connect for codien?" He tells the friend that "robitussin nd soda" could make "some fire ass lean." He says, "I had it before" and that he wants "to make some more." On the night of February 26, if Brandy had some Robitussin at home, Trayvon had just bought the mixings for one "fire ass lean" cocktail.

6:23

Trayvon pays for his purchases. He then appears to point to an item behind the counter, but the clerk seems to reject that option. Trayvon turns from the counter with a couple of dollar bills still in his hand.

6:24

Trayvon leaves the 7-11, but we do not see him walk in front of the store window back towards Brandy's home.

6:25

Three squirrely young men enter the 7-11, all of them with their faces concealed in part or in full. The clerk had to have been nervous. One of the three (Curly) takes off his hat and shakes out his long, curly dark hair. He is likely either white or Hispanic, or, like Zimmerman, a "white Hispanic."

6:27

Curly appears to be holding the two bills Trayvon walked out with. He approaches the clerk and buys two cheap cigars from behind the counter and then a third one as an afterthought.

6:28

Curly is the first of three to exit. The others will follow in a minute.

6:29

Trayvon, turning as he walks, can be seen through the window heading back towards the Retreat at Twin Lakes and Brandy's house.

7:09

Zimmerman calls police while watching Trayvon near the gated community's clubhouse, less than a half-mile from the 7-11. According to "Dee-Dee," the girl Trayvon was periodically talking to on his cell phone, he was ducking in out of the rain. She also said he put his hoodie up for the same reason. In fact, though, Trayvon had his hoodie up inside the 7-11, and he was walking in the rain when Zimmerman spotted him. The walk to this point should have taken 10 minutes.

It took 40 minutes. Some background may help explain why. Earlier that same month, Trayvon had been caught at school holding a bag with marijuana residue and a marijuana pipe. He was suspended for the third time that school year, this time for ten days. Trayvon may have been dealing as well. As one online friend had communicated earlier, "Damn were u at a nigger need a plant."

Trayvon was partial to "blunts," street slang for cannabis rolled with the tobacco-leaf wrapper from an inexpensive cigar called a "blunt." As a tribute after his death, one friend posted online a photo of a homemade badge honoring Trayvon positioned next to a blunt.

It seems altogether possible that Curly bought at least one of those cigars for the under-aged Trayvon and took those visible dollar bills as payment. Trayvon waited five minutes outside the 7-11 and did not leave until after Curly came out. In the 40 minutes before Zimmerman spotted him, Trayvon could have scraped the tobacco out of the cigar, replaced it with marijuana, and smoked his blunt.

"This guy looks like he's up to no good," Zimmerman tells the police. "Or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about." Trayvon was on drugs or had been recently. His autopsy showed the presence of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, in both his blood and his urine.

It is possible too that Trayvon was up to no good. "He's just staring, looking at all the houses," says Zimmerman. Trayvon had a history. On October 21, 2011, he received his second suspension that school year. A security guard at his school saw Trayvon writing "WTF" on a hallway locker. In looking through his bag for the marker, the guard found 12 pieces of jewelry, a watch, and a "burglary tool."

Zimmerman did the prudent thing by reporting Trayvon to the police. Ever since the Florida real estate bust, the Retreat at Twin Lakes had been troubled by vacancies, foreclosures, and renters of dubious repute. The community had suffered numerous break-ins and home invasions, the perpetrators of which were all young men, most of them black. "We report all suspicious persons & activities to the Sanford Police Department," reads the standard neighborhood watch sign at the community's gated entrance. If Trayvon did not fit the bill, no one did.

7:10

"He's coming towards me," Zimmerman tells the police about Trayvon, who is now walking towards his truck. He makes his first firm identification of Trayvon as "a black male." Adds Zimmerman, "He's coming to check me out. He's got something in his hands." Zimmerman sounds a little anxious: "Please, get an officer over here."

7:11

After Trayvon passes his truck, Zimmerman says, "Shit, he's running." He is heading towards "the back entrance," says Zimmerman. That entrance is in the same general direction as Brandy's townhouse. A question that goes unasked is why Trayvon was running.

7:12

When asked by the dispatcher, Zimmerman agrees not to follow Trayvon, and his heavy breathing ends. "He ran," says Zimmerman. Even if running slowly, Trayvon could have made it to Brandy's house in a half a minute. It was only 100 yards from the truck.

7:13

Zimmerman is hesitant to give out his address. "I don't know where this kid is." He looks around to see where Trayvon has gone, fails to spot him, terminates his call, and heads back to the truck.

7:14 - 7:16

These are the missing two minutes. After receiving a call from Dee-Dee, Trayvon has come back to confront Zimmerman. Their final confrontation takes place 70 yards from Brandy's townhouse and only 30 yards from Zimmerman's truck. No one hunted Trayvon down. Although he has kept the drink and candy on his person, Trayvon does not have a blunt with him.

According to the autopsy report, Trayvon was 5'11" tall and weighed 158 pounds, the "ideal healthy weight" at that height being 160 pounds. He was not the skinny little boy with the Skittles that half of America still believes him to be. He was at least three inches taller than Zimmerman and only about 20 pounds lighter.

His home life a wreck, his school life in disarray, Trayvon had fallen victim to urban America's lost boy culture.

This culture, which the media also choose not to see, has been shockingly destructive. Citing Bureau of Justice statistics, black economist Walter Williams in a recent column notes that "between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims." Of these, Williams estimates that roughly "262,621 were murdered by other blacks."

Trayvon had "statistic" written all over him. In the past year or so, his social media sites showed a growing interest in drugs, in mixed martial arts-style street fighting, in a profoundly vulgar exploitation of "bitches."

Trayvon posed for one photo with raised middle fingers, another with wads of cash held in an out-stretched arm. One YouTube video shows him refereeing a fight club-style street fight. A cousin had recently tweeted him, "Yu ain't tell me yu swung on a bus driver," meaning, if true, that Trayvon had punched out a bus driver.

Zimmerman never saw the cute little boy that the TV audience did. He saw a full-grown man, a druggy, a wannabe street fighter, the tattooed, gold-grilled, self-dubbed "No_Limit_Nigga."

Media obfuscation may still work in the court of public opinion -- it got Obama elected in 2008 -- but it will not work in a court of law. The truth will out. When it does, the major media will lose a good chunk of whatever credibility they have left, and our nation may lose a good chunk of its urban real estate.

 

[LondonLax]

I wouldn't call it a decent article. It's armchair speculation in the same vein as all that crap the internet spewed out after the Boston bombings. 

[peterms]

decent article from the americanthinker -

American Thinker?  If that's what they call thinking, God help the poor sods.

[villa4europe]

nope but i think demonstrates just how easy it is to assassinate his character (no pun / offence intended)

 

can you imagine a team of lawyers getting hold of that profile and how that would play with a jury?

Edited July 15, 2013 by villa4europe

[Chindie]

They wouldn't need to attack his character (and even if they felt they should its not particularly relevant in this case). They knew the prosecution case was flimsy, all they had to do is make sure his story stayed straight (for the look of the thing more than anything, and even saying that his account changed anyway) and point out there simply wasn't any evidence that proves their client guilty.

[peterms]

nope but i think demonstrates just how easy it is to assassinate his character (no pun / offence intended)

 

can you imagine a team of lawyers getting hold of that profile and how that would play with a jury?

 

He smoked weed?  Yes, but did he inhale?

[maqroll]

Chindie is absolutely correct on this. On it's face, it seems like Zimmerman should be heading straight to prison, but the arguable facts of the case could not add up to a conviction, at least for murder. 

 

The best the Martin family can hope for is a wrongful death conviction, which could result in minimal prison time for Zimmerman. But maybe just enough for him to get "prison justice".

 

Anyway you slice it, he's a marked man as long as he draws breath. And his idiot brother would be smart to not give anymore interviews on CNN.

Edited July 15, 2013 by maqroll