I am not a journalist, I don’t need to be balanced, this is my opinion, the truth as I see it. The balance that you think you get from the media, is not balance at all, the justice you think exists is nothing more than a mist.
Ultimately we all draw our own conclusions from what we read, hear and witness, but sometimes we need to question who handed us the pencil.
The tall, white lawyer, a pencil erasing justice as he rewrote it in his image, defended Mr. Zimmerman and planted seeds of doubt in the jury along the way as he did.
There was no way of knowing who screamed he said
There was no way of knowing who the aggressor was he demanded everyone thinks.
He showed pictures of Zimmerman, flat nosed and bruised.
These factors were the defence; the few pebbles needed to crack the glass window of American justice.
Mr. Zimmerman had just phoned 911, because he wanted the acknowledgement of the police. He wanted to be on their side. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be more than he is. He wanted to be the cop in the film, thanked by the public for just doing his job.
Like all of us, in a way. We can all understand what it feels like to want to be noticed, to have a purpose, but unlike most of us, we don’t choose to look for acceptance by cruising the streets with a concealed gun, judging people who we think might be cruising the streets with a concealed gun.
And if we can’t find anything we can help with, we don’t look for our hero status where it doesn’t belong. We don’t want it at any cost, we don’t want to scare a child in the hope we might be proved right. We don’t want to start a fight with someone younger because the chances of us winning are higher, we don’t start a fight with a child because there’s a chance we might find some pot on them which would justify our thought process; and earn a high five from the men in blue.
We wouldn’t, but then none of us are George Zimmerman; a man who protects the peace, by carrying a gun and ending the life of innocent children.
Mr. Zimmerman was recorded stating he was following a kid because the kid was walking in the rain, and so therefore must have been on drugs.
One of the dumbest observations I have heard in a long time.
Mr. Zimmerman was unable to link the connection between the rain and the hoodie.
If only Trayvon had taken an umbrella with him, if only he had been acting like he wasn’t just being himself coming back from the sweet shop.
The jury were manipulated into looking at the case through the eyes of Mr. Zimmerman, and not through the eyes of the victim. Here’s how…
“The post altercation photographs of Mr. Zimmerman show he was a victim too.”
The photographs of Zimmerman after the altercation shown to the jury showed his entire face.
The jury did not just see a picture of his nose. A lip. A lump. A bit of flat skin, raised.
The jury saw his entire face. The jury saw his eyes: the jury saw a person.
The injuries of Mr. Zimmerman were humanised, because the jury could see them on a person.
The photographs of Trayvon Martin the jury got to see? A gunshot wound. A body under a cover, face down, dead.
Dehumanised.
A photograph of the point of entry; a belly, with a man-made hole in.
The gunshot wound could have been on anyone.
The body under the cover could have been anyone.
The body face down in the grass could have been anyone.
In the mind of the jury, seeing a gunshot wound on a faceless body is not the same as showing photographs of the face of a dead child.
If you are going to bring up photographs of the post-fight face of Mr. Zimmerman as a defence, then the prosecution should have shown photographs of the post-fight face of Trayvon Martin.
That would be fair.
That would have altered the mental image being put into the heads of the jury.
But they did not.
From the very beginning George Zimmerman was subtly being humanised, and Trayvon Martin was being depersonalised.
A gunshot wound on an anonymous body, compared to a person.
The media happily showed reel after reel of the injuries to Mr. Zimmerman, but the face of the dead Trayvon was hid under the guise of protecting us from being offended, but a far greater offence has occurred, because the media continued to show us Trayvon smiling, alive and well, right up on the same screen they showed pictures of Mr. Zimmerman battered and bruised.
With the sound down, you would think it was a story of a kid assaulting an adult.
Then you turn the sound up, and realise it is.
The media described Mr. Zimmerman’s injuries as horrific.
The horror is the boy dead on the ground; yet the photographs of the dead boy were described in America’s national press as startling, whereas the photographs of a bruised Mr. Zimmerman horrific.
Anybody else think those two descriptions are the wrong way around?
The lack of balance in the images the jury were shown is not really the point. The point is, for this part of the trial, the focus became not about the taking of a life, but about how the photographs taken of Mr. Zimmerman made him look beaten worse than he actually was.
That was the discussion.
He didn’t wipe his blood away at the time, said the prosecution.
And the defence said no, the pictures show the truth.
And back and forth they went, discussing the nature of Mr. Zimmerman’s bruised left eye.
And so the jury never even thought about the greying, twisted, dead face of Trayvon Martin; a face they were spared because it was too startling to show, so instead they were left to dwell on and think about the horrific photographs of Mr. Zimmerman’s slightly bruised chin and a broken nose they could compute.
The argument is exactly the argument the defence team wanted to have; a completely irrelevant battle they could win, and did.
In the end, the jury thought they agreed that Mr. Zimmerman’s injuries looked genuine in the photographs, and a hole was put in the case of the prosecution because the prosecution sounded like they were exaggerating.
But the thoughts of the jury should have been all about the dead face of a child they never saw; their thoughts should have related to the photograph of Trayvon Martin’s dead face, not Mr. Zimmerman’s slightly bruised one.
Over and over again, the trial focused heavily on small arguments the defence wanted to have, little battles that the defence could win, distracting the entire trial from the bigger picture.
But this is law.
Worse, this is American justice, televised for the world to see.
“There is no way of defining who the aggressor was.”
The jury were told they had to know who the aggressor was.
Without a doubt.
They had to know.
The jury were told they had to know, because the defence team knew the prosecution had no concrete eye witnesses.
So if the defence could get the jury to believe they had to know without doubt who the aggressor was, and get the jury to believe their version of what being an aggressor means, they would win the trial.
Now that entire argument, who the aggressor was, means once again the trial focused on completely the wrong point.
This was a big issue, and yet another issue the defence were allowed to dictate right from the beginning.
What the jury should have been considering is not who the aggressor was, but what it means when the subtext to what the defence were saying is who the aggressor was means we can legally justify a child being murdered.
If I lived in America, according to the law, a seventeen year old child could start a fight with me, and I would be legally entitled to respond to five punches by shooting them through the heart with a gun.
And not only would I not be initially arrested, when I was arrested, I would be let off completely free and handed my gun back; the equivalent to a pat on the back from the police for a job well done.
Playing into the hand of the defence for a second, let’s say for the sake of argument Trayvon Martin did start the fight.
Does that change the moral standpoint of the argument?
No.
The defence’s argument was flawed at the very core, because for them to be right, then they were stating that if Trayvon started the fight, he somehow played a deliberate part in his own death, so that makes murdering him legally moral because he was asking for it.
What total, utter, complete, fucking nonsense.
Manslaughter must have a different meaning in Florida.
George Zimmerman in all definitions of the word was the aggressor.
He followed the kid when he was told not to.
He got out of his car.
He approached the boy.
He had a gun on him.
The question “who was the aggressor?” should not have been asked until the jury had an answer for the question “at what point does aggression begin?”
Start there, answer that question first, and then once the jury understand what’s being talked about, proceed.
The point should have been made to the jury that the aggressor does not decide when aggression begins; the point of aggression is dictated by the individual who is feeling the consequence of the aggression.
As soon as Trayvon Martin knew he was being followed by a car. He was affected.
He was the victim of aggressive behaviour by an aggressor at this point.
As soon as Trayvon Martin called his friend to say he was being followed he was affected.
As soon as Trayvon Martin realised a man was approaching, the same man from the car that had been following him…
He. Was. The. Victim. Of. Aggressive. Behaviour.
Trayvon Martin could not be the aggressor if he was armed with a packet of skittles and riding away from a man following him armed with a gun.
What next for American Justice? The beaten wife, dying on the floor, gets arrested for throwing her face into the path of her violent and paranoid husband’s fists?
After all, according to the defence team’s version of aggressor, the wife in this scenario is the aggressor.
Maybe she didn’t have the dinner on the table in time, or maybe she spilt her husband’s beer?
She deserved the beating, because she was the legal aggressor.
By focusing on the aggressor the prosecution had dropped in another point they never fully explained, giving the jury just enough information to focus on thinking backwards and believing they were legally acting in good conscience.
A dot of information they wanted the jury to focus on.
A magic trick, nobody could see.
Not even the prosecution, by the looks of it.
“Trayvon was on top of Mr. Zimmerman.”
If I am fearing attack from an unknown enemy and I find a way of getting on top of my attacker, there is no way I am going to get off him because I would be scared shitless.
When a robber is pinned down by the public, the public don’t pin them down and then get off them because they might be attacked.
They stay on them, to keep them there, for their own safety, because they have managed to get control of a frightening situation they previously had no control over.
Yet in the trial, Trayvon Martin was seen on top of Mr. Zimmerman, and that fact was used to harm the prosecution.
The jury were told this is evidence Trayvon was the aggressor.
This is only evidence that Trayvon was trying to control a situation he had been forced to deal with through no fault of his own.
The only mistake Trayvon made was backing off Mr. Zimmerman, affording him the time to react like the cold moron he has proven to be.
“The scream could have been from either.”
The father of Trayvon said the scream did not sound like his son.
I imagine, no scream, no primal noise emitted at the time we are going to die, sounds like any noise we have made before in our life.
The father of Trayvon saying he did not think it sounded like his son does not prove it was not his son, nor does it add reasonable doubt when challenged by the fact that as soon as the shot was fired the screaming stopped.
A shot through the heart would silence a scream.
The science geek stated that the human body can live for 10 seconds without its heart, but he made no reference to, nor was asked for, his opinion on how long shock takes to settle after a bullet has ripped you in half.
And then there’s the fact that the mother of Trayvon said she was sure it was the scream of her son.
Does a man armed with a gun ever need to scream for help, like his life is under threat, if he is the man holding the gun?
Who is likely to scream for help, a boy acting as a man, or a man acting as a God?
The defence team led the trial, dictated the thoughts in the head of the jurors and ultimately created enough doubt for a not guilty verdict.
Members of the public who are defenders of the law are stating that the law returned a non guilty verdict so Mr. Zimmerman is not guilty and that is the end of the matter.
This is true, but it’s also so black and white it beggars belief.
Newsflash: American law also allows regular dumb as fuck folk to carry a concealed weapon because the NRA own the people making the rules.
The law can be argued.
The law should adhere to common sense, and when the law stops adhering to common sense, not only can it be argued; it can be re-written and changed.
That’s the beauty of law.
You are not less American if you stand up and shout BULLSHIT at a clearly BULLSHIT verdict, in fact, you are more American.
Look closely America and you will see the laws that govern you are slowly being enforced by crazy billionaire white folk holding guns.
And these billionaire men say if you don’t agree with the law and what they think, then you are not American.
It is a counter argument that works. It is a counter argument intended to make those who do not have the American flag on their bumper sticker feel like the minority.
And it is exactly the same response some Americans come up with when someone questions the people who do their thinking for them.
Idiots inside America tow the line without thinking. They put up the American flag and shout down anyone who might be thinking that a lot of stuff going on at the moment is complete bullshit.
If I was American, and I had a flag in my garden, today I would take it down.
And I wouldn’t put it back up until the powers that be in my country did something I was proud of.
And, before you ask, I’m from the UK and my government are equally capable of fucking us over, and do…but that’s not what this blogpost is about.
I don’t have the English flag in my garden. Not just because I don’t have a garden. If I had a garden, the last thing I would want to stick in it is a label. I don’t cry when someone questions my government, because the government is meant to be accountable, it is meant to be questioned, and the day you cannot question your own government, is the day your government can do anything it wants.
I don’t get defensive when someone criticises the UK government, and so I worry when I hear people passionately defending theirs. Criticising your law makers is healthy; it means that regardless of what your leaders are doing, at the core of what’s going on is a freedom to express what you think.
That freedom is getting smaller and smaller with each voice that decides to stay silent when confronted with what is clearly bollocks.
The other side of that coin is North Korea.
So think before you try to shout someone down for criticising the American government, because a government’s most powerful weapon is the silence of their people, and that weapon becomes loaded when the silence is not enforced by the government, but by a majority who believe they are doing the right thing.
Pledging an allegiance to a flag, whether you can admit it to yourself or not, is grooming a child.
Today America is divided between adults still living by the below pledge because they fit better into their church communities and enjoy being thought of as good people by strangers, who also enjoy being thought of as good people by strangers…
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
…And those who can see that an innocent kid has been murdered and nobody is going to prison.
Nobody is even being fined.
Hell, this twat George was not even arrested to begin with.
This is not one nation under God.
This is division.
This is not liberty for all.
This is not justice for anyone.
