It won't make the Network News and certainly not CNN, what with the disappearing airplane and sinking ferry and the mourning and self pity and claims of heroic strength on the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. It's not likely to join the long, sad stories of the countless people who had to use violence -- or even threaten violence to save themselves from attackers only to spend a fortune, spend a lot of time in jail trying to prove that they really were in danger and had no other possible option in avoiding being maimed or killed.
Former US Army Captain and grandmother of one Valery Lowe is having trouble finding representation. She makes a bit too much to be eligible for a public defender and being on trial for murder, would certainly like the best she can find. She's going to need a good lawyer because, according to her story, her new husband of 6 months became belligerent when she accused him of seeing another woman and raised his fist to her and got her in a choke hold. She claims she grabbed his gun from the dresser and unable to breathe, shot and killed him with it.
Of course I wasn't there and I don't know who to trust, but it may be more than a case of whom the jury believes. She has to prove that she had no other choice beyond a reasonable doubt, that the man strangling her was enough of a threat to warrant using main force. We can be sure that the prosecutors will be just as aggressive in ascribing the blame to the victim as they so often are when it comes to female victims attacked by men.
You'll remember the Jacksonville, FL woman given 20 years for firing a warning shot into a wall to scare away her estranged husband with a restraining order already against him. According to a mandatory sentencing law that was not intended to apply to self defense cases, anyone can get 20 to life for using a gun in a crime and after all, if she had time to pull out a gun, she had time to run away. That law has since been changed and Marissa Alexander is going to get a new trial, but it's not unusual for someone to spend years and a large fortune in litigation, if not jail in cases of self defense. Our laws can be confusing and seemingly irrational, but many feel that they are heavily biased in favor of attackers and that the burden of proof in fact rests on the defense.
Yes, it's so easy to make up Stand Your Ground Jokes and to try to connect it with high profile cases that have nothing whatever to do with it -- easy to ascribe it to racism, to pretend that it's a hunting license for murderers. When we remember that we're liberals and Liberals are certainly right about things and anyone with a gun is probably a murderer as well, we're usually quick to pile on, to make cynical jokes, inflate and distort the story without conscience. We're not so eager to read, not so eager to put ourselves in the shoes of some woman having hell beat out of her by someone twice her size, some guy cornered on a subway by a gang with sharpened screwdrivers. Doing that might call into question our fixed ideas about weapons and the right to have and use them and that might call into question our guiding principle: Our side is always right!
Showing posts with label Stand your ground.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stand your ground.. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2014
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Too much monkey business
No need for me complainin' - my objection's overruled, ahh!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!
-Chuck Berry-
As though to deliberately illustrate what I've been saying, a horde of "impassioned" zealots in liberal clothing rallied in Miami Saturday to hear Bishop Victor Curry, a Baptist church official and South Florida president of the National Action Network tell them that the Zimmerman verdict was a "wake up call" which of course it was not, at least not any more than any case in which the accused was given the benefit of the doubt. The argument that Zimmerman was a murderous racist looking to hunt black people is as disgusting as any of Al Sharpton's accusations, including his portrayal of Bernhard Goetz as a racist for shooting armed robbers. The argument that the verdict was pursuant to the 'stand your ground' law is so blatantly, so earth shakingly false it would show up on a seismometer, so what is this all about? The NAN is the creation of Al Sharpton who makes and has made his living by imaginatively accusing people of racism so egregiously, I'm sure Dr. king would be making speeches against him and his business were he alive today.
Bishop Curry has also staged protests in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more than 90 other cities around the United States. This Zimmerman business is a business and a business that needs to foment race tension as much as the Mason Family did.
Dragging Trayvon Martin's head on a pike around the country is about politics, not justice and I sure as hell don't remember Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman being used similarly. It was far more a travesty of justice that OJ was described as the victim of racism and that science and fact and evidence were laughed at. It's a business and as much as I loathe racism, I loathe the business of using it to sell product, to make money, to build careers on it, to accuse people of it to further a political purpose because it cheapens the real cause, detracts from the real cause and furnishes the real racists a defense they don't deserve.
The death of Trayvon Martin was not about racism, not about a new birth of Jim Crow. Zimmerman wouldn't be allowed into the Klan, nor does he represent some resurgence, some recrudescence of an early 20th century southern white mentality. The verdict was not the result of racism and most of all, neither the verdict, the defense, nor for that matter the facts had anything to do with the law that some people oppose so hysterically that they dishonor the memory of an unlucky kid and a grieving family as well as they dishonor truth, decency and the liberal causes of justice and freedom for all.
Zimmerman got off because the prosecution could not prove that Martin was not holding him down so that he couldn't run away. That is an argument based on the older law requiring the duty to retreat, not the Stand your Ground law which did not permit Zimmerman to pursue or confront Martin nor to threaten him. Such actions would, as I read the law, nullify his claim to self defense and his right to draw a weapon.
Are we willing to dispense with the presumption of innocence because of the presumption of racism?
That Zimmerman was wont to call 911 when seeing suspicious characters in his neighborhood shows only that he was doing what a neighborhood watch participant is supposed to do, and when a preponderance of unidentified people and a preponderance of those engaging in vandalism are black those calls are evidence of racism only to racists.
I'm all for practical gun control. I passionately hate racism and racists and bigots of all kinds, and I hate it when bigotry, stereotyping, racism and outright lies are used by people getting rich pretending to fight it.
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!
-Chuck Berry-
As though to deliberately illustrate what I've been saying, a horde of "impassioned" zealots in liberal clothing rallied in Miami Saturday to hear Bishop Victor Curry, a Baptist church official and South Florida president of the National Action Network tell them that the Zimmerman verdict was a "wake up call" which of course it was not, at least not any more than any case in which the accused was given the benefit of the doubt. The argument that Zimmerman was a murderous racist looking to hunt black people is as disgusting as any of Al Sharpton's accusations, including his portrayal of Bernhard Goetz as a racist for shooting armed robbers. The argument that the verdict was pursuant to the 'stand your ground' law is so blatantly, so earth shakingly false it would show up on a seismometer, so what is this all about? The NAN is the creation of Al Sharpton who makes and has made his living by imaginatively accusing people of racism so egregiously, I'm sure Dr. king would be making speeches against him and his business were he alive today.
Bishop Curry has also staged protests in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more than 90 other cities around the United States. This Zimmerman business is a business and a business that needs to foment race tension as much as the Mason Family did.
Dragging Trayvon Martin's head on a pike around the country is about politics, not justice and I sure as hell don't remember Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman being used similarly. It was far more a travesty of justice that OJ was described as the victim of racism and that science and fact and evidence were laughed at. It's a business and as much as I loathe racism, I loathe the business of using it to sell product, to make money, to build careers on it, to accuse people of it to further a political purpose because it cheapens the real cause, detracts from the real cause and furnishes the real racists a defense they don't deserve.
The death of Trayvon Martin was not about racism, not about a new birth of Jim Crow. Zimmerman wouldn't be allowed into the Klan, nor does he represent some resurgence, some recrudescence of an early 20th century southern white mentality. The verdict was not the result of racism and most of all, neither the verdict, the defense, nor for that matter the facts had anything to do with the law that some people oppose so hysterically that they dishonor the memory of an unlucky kid and a grieving family as well as they dishonor truth, decency and the liberal causes of justice and freedom for all.
Zimmerman got off because the prosecution could not prove that Martin was not holding him down so that he couldn't run away. That is an argument based on the older law requiring the duty to retreat, not the Stand your Ground law which did not permit Zimmerman to pursue or confront Martin nor to threaten him. Such actions would, as I read the law, nullify his claim to self defense and his right to draw a weapon.
Are we willing to dispense with the presumption of innocence because of the presumption of racism?
That Zimmerman was wont to call 911 when seeing suspicious characters in his neighborhood shows only that he was doing what a neighborhood watch participant is supposed to do, and when a preponderance of unidentified people and a preponderance of those engaging in vandalism are black those calls are evidence of racism only to racists.
I'm all for practical gun control. I passionately hate racism and racists and bigots of all kinds, and I hate it when bigotry, stereotyping, racism and outright lies are used by people getting rich pretending to fight it.
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