Zimmerman Quiz
Take the quiz. Quite a few things I didn’t know, actually. One that struck me:
One of the most important, and remarkably under-publicized facts that came out at trial is that one of the detectives, while interrogating Zimmerman at the police station that night, told him that the entire incident had been caught on surveillance video. The detective was bluffing, but Zimmerman didn’t know that. His reaction: “Thank God”.
July 23rd, 2013 at 10:30 pm
I saw that. It was what they call a “challenge interview”. The interrogator goes in says they’ve got video, eyewitness, etc. then see how they suspect scrambles to tweak his story. Zimmerman’s reaction pretty much kills the trick.
July 23rd, 2013 at 10:39 pm
I’d heard that one. One that I only heard about a couple of days ago was that the same judge in Zimmerman’s trial was also the judge for the trial of one of the burglars that Zimmerman called the cops about before the Trayvon incident, and they found him with stolen goods from one of the houses in the neighborhood. The guy was convicted and she sentenced him to 5 yrs.
July 23rd, 2013 at 10:43 pm
That’s not true every state except for DC and one other (not Florida) only consider physical force provocation.
In addition, even an aggressor can use deadly force to save their life if there is no other option, like being pinned to the ground. They may not however assert Stand your Ground and must try to break off the aggression if at all possible.
Martin could not legally attack Zimmerman for following. In any case, Martin continued his attack even after Zimmerman was no threat and was screaming for his life. You must break off the use of force when the individual is no longer a threat.
July 23rd, 2013 at 11:18 pm
Ah, but what the detective didn’t know was that Zimmerman double bluffed his bluff because as a wannabe cop he knows all the bluffing tricks. /s
There’s always an excuse because racism.
July 24th, 2013 at 12:11 am
“Bluffing”?
Oh, I see–you mean lying. OK when cops do it, a crime when suspects do it.
No, not ok.
July 24th, 2013 at 8:59 am
This case would have been much more interesting if the detectives had brought out the old “Baltimore lie detector” in that interview (e.g., a Xerox machine set to print out copies of a page that says, “You’re lying.”).
There comes a point where you stop getting angry about cops lying to get innocent people to confess, and you start thinking that anyone stupid enough to fall for the particular set of lies really doesn’t belong out on the street.
July 24th, 2013 at 11:00 am
JKB — Not quite true.
You CAN provoke someone into a physical confrontation WITHOUT actually using physical force in all 50 states.
If, for example, Larry Correia were to pop out of the shadows screaming, “I’m gonna kill you, m*****f*****!”, even if he didn’t close with 10 feet of me or have a weapon visible, not a jury in the land would convict me for going to slide lock on him unless it was a “Duty to retreat” state (and maybe not then).
They would, however, likely take offence at me dousing the body with gasolene and lighting it afterwards because, “Kill it with fire!” is not valid self defense.
July 24th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Be careful copypasta-ing.
Software that insists on using fancy apostrophes and quote marks that curl in the both directions create characters that look like shit in internet applications that insist ( quite properly ) on only displaying ANSII standard text.
Apple products and Microsoft Word are infamous for this bad font behavior.
July 24th, 2013 at 12:01 pm
Ah, fixed as I was typing the above comment. Thanx.
July 24th, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Kristophr said: Software that insists on using fancy apostrophes and quote marks that curl in the both directions create characters that look like shit in internet applications that insist ( quite properly ) on only displaying ANSII standard text.
What’s “proper” about not using Unicode?
If they display wrong, your software is broken.
No properly functioning “internet application” should be unable to display curly quotes and real apostrophes – it’s 2013, for God’s sake.
July 24th, 2013 at 2:21 pm
Talk about powerful evidence; not just the vid if it did exist, but the attempted cop ploy and GZ’s reaction. Can’t imagine that question/answer session with the detective would not be admissible, why wasn’t it used? Any ESQ’s out there answer that one?
July 24th, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Sorry, Sig, I’m just an old USENET dinosaur, I guess.
I’ll go back to putting snips of javascript in my sigs, and making Oulook freak out.
July 24th, 2013 at 4:47 pm
The detective did bring the challenge interview up in testimony, including the video allegation and the “Thank God!” reaction. There were several recorded interviews with Zimmerman entered played for the jury, but I don’t know if the challenge interview was one of them.
July 24th, 2013 at 11:07 pm
That interview was probably a strong reason why the PD found that there was not evidence for charges on Zimmerman. We like to bash the police a lot, but in this case, I think the police did a good job.
The reason the interview was not used in court? I think we know the reason, it didn’t fit the narrative of the prosecutors office.
July 25th, 2013 at 1:42 pm
JKB,