What the fucking fuck
Have you guys been reading this Trayvon Martin shit? About the vigilante who hunted and murdered a 17-year-old because he was a black male and therefore "suspicious"? Then, and this is my favorite part, he told the police department "I was just defending myself officers" and the police were like, "Welp, that's our job done then" and didn't investigate it. Like, at all.
There's also a lot of discussion about whether Florida's absurd self-defense law is partly to blame. It's a stupid, unjustified law that has created a lot of problems so that some NRA shills can sit around and feel smug. But I don't think you can pin this one on that law. There isn't even a taste of self defense here- just a man who is a straight up fucking liar. Zimmerman told the cops that he shot Martin because he came up and started choking Zimmerman from behind while Zimmerman had stepped out of his truck to look at a street sign. Even if you just go from the 911 calls, it's obvious that Zimmerman was chasing Martin around the neighborhood. They were nowhere near his truck when they were fighting. And 911 tapes and witnesses show evidence that Martin pleaded for his life before Zimmerman shot him.
The real culprit here is a police department that is at best completely incompetent and at worst a bunch of racist fucktools. Given the troubling history of the Sanford PD with mis-handling/ignoring cases with black victims and the fact that the police chief is basically a shitbag, I kind of suspect the latter. I really hope that the State's Attorney has better sense than this jackhole, who even now is insisting that there's no evidence that Zimmerman wasn't acting in self-defense; I would suggest that he himself is one of the major sources of the "Martin died because of the self-defense law" meme, because he wants to portray himself as "long-suffering police chief whose investigations are constrained by the law."
I'll agree that's certainly a better narrative than "incompetent fuckstick whose officers cared so little about a teenager's death that not only did they not arrest the confessed murderer, they didn't make any effort to identify the victim."
There's also a lot of discussion about whether Florida's absurd self-defense law is partly to blame. It's a stupid, unjustified law that has created a lot of problems so that some NRA shills can sit around and feel smug. But I don't think you can pin this one on that law. There isn't even a taste of self defense here- just a man who is a straight up fucking liar. Zimmerman told the cops that he shot Martin because he came up and started choking Zimmerman from behind while Zimmerman had stepped out of his truck to look at a street sign. Even if you just go from the 911 calls, it's obvious that Zimmerman was chasing Martin around the neighborhood. They were nowhere near his truck when they were fighting. And 911 tapes and witnesses show evidence that Martin pleaded for his life before Zimmerman shot him.
The real culprit here is a police department that is at best completely incompetent and at worst a bunch of racist fucktools. Given the troubling history of the Sanford PD with mis-handling/ignoring cases with black victims and the fact that the police chief is basically a shitbag, I kind of suspect the latter. I really hope that the State's Attorney has better sense than this jackhole, who even now is insisting that there's no evidence that Zimmerman wasn't acting in self-defense; I would suggest that he himself is one of the major sources of the "Martin died because of the self-defense law" meme, because he wants to portray himself as "long-suffering police chief whose investigations are constrained by the law."
I'll agree that's certainly a better narrative than "incompetent fuckstick whose officers cared so little about a teenager's death that not only did they not arrest the confessed murderer, they didn't make any effort to identify the victim."