Zimmerman Jury seated. Trial starts Monday.

[CoryCop25]

Martin's hands were not bagged and his body was at the crime scene for about an hour and a half.
I don't know if there still would have been any DNA but bagging the hands will at least close that argument. Also, other than the fingernails, I don't know if DNA would have been able to be collected from anywhere else.

[Warp]

I didn't watch the trial and if the following is mentioned already then I missed this issue.

I am listening to this local radio station and a liberal program is on. A call in is speaking about Martin and she stated that no DNA from Zimmerman was found on his hands. Of course this implies that Martin did nothing to Zimmerman. I am not doubting Martin did beat up GZ but I need some info from those who did watch the trial.

Mainly for apologetic reasons I am asking this question in case I do get into a debate over this verdict one day this topic may come up.

-Jax

Eye witness testimony puts Martin on top of Zimmerman, ground and pound style.

Forensic ballistic evidence is consistent with Zimmerman's story (and the eye witness) of shooting Martin while Martin was on top.

DNA doesn't just show up everywhere in real life as it does on TV (that ****ing CSI effect).

It was raining, which tends to wash stuff away.

Remember that the way this is unfolding they other side isn't even providing evidence, testimony, facts, etc, supporting anything, all they are doing is attempting to raise doubt regarding the undeniable case of self-defense that the defense put up.

This was the defense's case from the beginning. The state didn't have evidence, testimony, facts, etc to support their bogus charges. All the trial was, was the prosecution emoting all over the place while asking stupid irrelevant questions to which they had no answer. It was pathetic.

[Irish]

The absence of DNA does not in itself prove anything.

[jaxman7]

The absence of DNA does not in itself prove anything.

Well said. Will look into a few things. No need rehashing anything else that I can discover on my own.

-Jax

[tb-av]

Try this witness first... I'm pretty sure she talked about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA6bs...RyOTP&index=79

Actually , try this guy... he must be the DNA guy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLcVgkiMdZs

[HackerF15E]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...599902640.html

Superb article from Shelby Steele:

The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment
Black leaders weren't so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Too much good to quote in this one -- it explains a lot about why there was outrage at Zimmerman's initial non-arrest, and outrage at the verdict.

[ForTehNguyen]

more Massad

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/Massa...round-element/

ZIMMERMAN VERDICT: THE STAND YOUR GROUND ELEMENT
Friday, July 19th, 2013

Few elements of this case have been more widely misunderstood than the “stand your ground” (SYG) element. Quite simply, Florida’s SYG law, statute 776.012, simply rescinded a previous requirement that one had to retreat if possible before using deadly force in self-defense. This did not particularly change the rules of engagement. The previous law had demanded retreat only if it could be accomplished in complete safety to oneself and other innocent people present. It is hard to imagine a situation in which one WOULD kill another person if they could have simply walked away unscathed.

The evidence showed incontrovertibly that Zimmerman, straddled by his attacker in the MMA mount and being savagely beaten while supine, could not possibly have retreated or otherwise escaped at the time he pulled the trigger. His wise lawyers knew that from the beginning, Craig Sonner when I spoke with him in March of 2012, and Mark O’Mara and Don West when I discussed it with them a couple of months later.

The media is largely either confused or deceptive about this, and so I’m afraid are many lawyers, including the Attorney General of the United States, who has called for an end to SYG laws. Florida Governor Rick Scott empanelled a blue-ribbon committee to study the law last year, which included some vociferous anti-gunners. Nonetheless, their collective recommendation was to leave SYG in place. The Governor now stands up in defense of it as well, as seen here: Protesters stand up to ‘stand your ground,’ but laws likely here to stay.

Stevie Wonder has announced that he won’t perform in Florida until SYG is done away with. Stevie Wonder, through no fault of his own, is blind. He has my sympathy for that.

But the other opponents of SYG seem to be willfully blind, and for that, there is no excuse.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/Massa...the-gun-stuff/

ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 5: THE GUN STUFF
Sunday, July 21st, 2013

The firearms and ballistics evidence in this case was very important, one reason why the Kel-Tec PF9 9mm death weapon was first and foremost in the minds of journalists reporting on Eric Holder’s recent decision to have all evidence in this case held pending Federal investigation (again). One of the area newspapers reported in March that the death weapon was found with a spent casing still in the chamber. This would have been consistent with someone’s hand grabbing the gun and retarding the slide mechanism at the moment of the shot, and I surmised as much in the one blog entry I made on it at that time, prior to being contacted by the then-defense team and confidentiality issues kicking in from then on.

It turned out that this was not the case. The officers who recovered the evidence unloaded the death weapon. The spent casing from the one shot fired in the incident was recovered from the ground on which it had ejected, and another live round was ejected from the firing chamber after the officer removed the magazine. All eight cartridges, the gun’s full capacity, were accounted for. The pistol had functioned normally, as designed.

Prosecutor John Guy, in his dramatic opening statement, made a big deal out of the fact that Zimmerman carried the Kel-Tec with a live round in the chamber, as if this implied malice and a man looking to kill someone. Over in CNN Headline News Land, Nancy Grace took up the same cry. Zimmerman’s after-the-assault attackers even made a big deal out of the fact that he had a pistol with no dedicated manual safety. Ms. Grace claimed that he carried it with the safety off, and when a friend of Zimmerman’s was on her show and told her the gun HAD NO safety catch per se, she yelled at him that he was wrong, she knew all about Kel-Tec PF9s, and implied that Zimmerman must have flicked the safety off beforehand. (Premeditation, don’t cha know?)

Of course, the PF9 pistol DOESN’T have a safety catch. Ms. Grace apparently Googled “Kel-Tec PF9” and mistook the slide lock lever for a safety lever. Did any of you folks ever hear her apologize to Zimmerman’s friend, who was right when she was wrong? Let me know, ‘cause I must have missed it if she did.

For perspective, very few American police officers carry guns with manual safety levers. The most popular police pistols don’t have them, including the Glock and the SIG, the two most widely used. The Smith & Wesson Military & Police has an optional ambidextrous thumb safety, but most police departments order those guns without that feature, and the same is true for the majority of defensive pistols bought these days by America’s armed citizens. The old style service revolver didn’t come with a safety either.

Like those revolvers, semiautomatics such as the Kel-Tec are normally carried ready to fire with a simple pull of the trigger, i.e., with a round chambered.

Another element I warned O’Mara and West about back in second quarter 2012 was that they could expect the prosecution to attribute malice to Zimmerman for loading with hollow points. Such ammunition is standard in virtually every police department in our nation, and is the overwhelming (and logical) choice of armed citizens. The expanding bullet is less likely to ricochet, and it is more likely to stop inside the body of the offender instead of passing through to strike an unseen bystander. It also, historically, stops gunfights faster, saving the lives endangered by the attacker who had to be shot. Finally, for that latter reason, it reduces the number of wounds the offender must suffer before he stops forcing good people to shoot him. Except for the ricochet factor, all of those elements were present in the Zimmerman>Martin shooting. The prosecution didn’t harp on this as much as I expected, but prosecutor Richard Mantei did bring it up: http://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpres...s-and-reality/ .

Fortunately, the defense covered this superbly. They did so with the testimony of material witness Mark Osterman, the Federal Air Marshal who trained Zimmerman, told him to get a double action only pistol with no manual safety and carry it with a round in the chamber. His personal knowledge carried more weight than any outside expert could ever have brought to the game, but defense expert Dennis Root did a good job of batting clean-up and filling in other points. Together, they tanked the bogus allegations of the prosecution in this case insofar as guns, ammunition, and malice or premeditation that could be ascribed to either.

The take-away is not to avoid such unmeritorious courtroom attacks by carrying a .25 auto with an empty chamber. The take-away is, be able to logically explain your choice of gun and method of carry. The defense did exactly this, to their credit.

This case, of course, was about much more than guns, and we’ll continue with that in the next entry.

[glocktogo]

Prosecutor John Guy, in his dramatic opening statement, made a big deal out of the fact that Zimmerman carried the Kel-Tec with a live round in the chamber, as if this implied malice and a man looking to kill someone. Over in CNN Headline News Land, Nancy Grace took up the same cry. Zimmerman’s after-the-assault attackers even made a big deal out of the fact that he had a pistol with no dedicated manual safety.

I guess this would make the overwhelming majority of LEO's in this country "a man looking to kill someone."

Seriously, If Nancy Grace choked on a dick until she could never speak again, I'd do a happy dance.

[Belloc]

The Gulag Peninsula
http://takimag.com/article/the_gulag...a_guy_somerset


"Comparing communist Russia and contemporary America is profoundly disturbing for those who have some acquaintance with the Soviet Union, especially watching what was done to George Zimmerman in a Florida courtroom.

It began with Trayvon Martin portrayed as a perpetually angelic child although he was actually a seventeen-year-old violent reprobate who relished physical altercations. Similar photographic chicanery was popular with the Politburo. Lev Bronstein (alias Trotsky) and others were routinely airbrushed out of early snapshots of the Revolution. It sets the stage and molds the public mind."

[Quiet-Matt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebu6...e_gdata_player