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Tag Archives: Florida

George Zimmerman: “Sorry” I Killed Your Kid

21 Apr

The killer says "I'm sorry."

George Zimmerman appeared in court yesterday for his bond hearing.  His attorney said his client wished to make a statement.  From the witness stand, the killer of Trayvon Martin addressed his parents and spoke in slightly accented English,  “I am sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am. I did not know if he was armed or not.”

The Martin family had turned down a request from Zimmerman’s attorneys for a meeting.   Now face-to-face with him, Tracy Martin wept angrily and Sabrina Fulton had no outward reaction to the apology.  The family’s attorney, Ben Crump dismissed it as “self-serving.”

I thought Zimmerman’s “apology” to the Martin family for their “loss” was too precious for words. He even managed to work in a preview of his defense strategy when he added he didn’t know how old Trayvon was or if he was armed.

I see what they did there.

Benjamin Crump, attorney for the Martin family did too.

They feel it was just so self-serving, that it was one of those things that was not sincere,” he said. “We can only guess that his motive was to get sympathy. It’s 50 days later at his bond hearing, and for the first time he’s saying, ‘I’m sorry for killing Trayvon.’”

Most people are sorry.  Sorry after they’ve been caught.

Some observers thought the bond hearing was a major setback to the prosecution’s case as the lead investigator said he couldn’t conclude  if Zimmerman’s claim he was attacked by Trayvon was untrue, nor which one was heard crying “help” that night.

The natural urge to declare winners and losers is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.   There are probably odds being given in Vegas whether Zimmerman beats the rap and walks.

Here in the land of snap decisions and short attention spans you get instant analysis by experts on whatever is the burning controversy of the day.   Way back when it used to be the job of the media to simply present the facts and let the public reach their own conclusions, but apparently everyone is so much stupider now and must have everything explained to them or they won’t know what to think.

The justice system doesn’t work well with the 24-hour news cycle.  It moves too slow and doesn’t space its dramatic  moments out between commercial breaks.   This isn’t going to discourage CNN, MSNBC or Fox from offering observations that may be flat wrong, but any sentient human being should understand going in not to fall for the hype.

Zimmerman was given a low bond of $150,000 instead of the $1 million the prosecution wanted.  He will be released and have to wear an ankle bracelet to track his whereabouts.   He isn’t the most popular guy in Florida so he’s probably going to be confined to the homes of whoever takes him in and lets him sleep on their couch.

This is the process.  It’s a long, hard journey to justice and there’s no guarantee Zimmerman will be convicted or if he is it comes along with a plea deal to a lesser charge.

But I’m cool with whatever happens.  Despite all the hand-wringing and fears that Florida would burn to the ground, there’s been no riots and no rampage of Blacks running wild on the street lashing out in rage.

That’s not to say it can’t happen, but as the process plays out everyone seems to be playing it cool and waiting to see if justice is really done.

Trayvon's parents and attorney arrive for the bond hearing.

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Posted by on April 21, 2012 in News & Views

 

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The Affidavit of the State of Florida vs George Zimmerman

14 Apr

OFFICE OF THE STATE ATTORNEY
FOURTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT of FLORIDA
ANGELA B. COREY
STATE ATTORNEY

STATE OF FLORIDA VS. GEORGE ZIMMERMAN
EIGHTEENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT, SEMINOLE COUNTY FLORIDA

AFFIDAVIT OF PROBABLE CAUSE – SECOND DEGREE MURDER

Before me, personally appeared T.C. O’Steen and K.D. Gilbreath, who after being duly sworn; deposes and says:

Your affiants, Investigators T.C. O’Steen, and Dale Gilbreath are members of the State Attorney Office – Fourth Judicial Circuit appointed in the case by State Attorney Angela B. Corey, who was assigned in the case under Executive Order of the Governor 12-72.

Investigator O’Steen was previously employed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and has 35 years of law enforcement experience, including 20 years handling homicide investigations. Investigator Gilbreath was previously employed by the Jacksonville, Sheriff’s Office, and has 36 years of law enforcement experience, including 24 years handling homicide investigations.

Your affiants, along with other law enforcement officials have taken sworn statements from witnesses, spoken with law enforcement officers who have provided sworn testimony in reports, reviewed other reports, recorded statements, phone records, recorded calls to police, photographs, videos and other documents in detailing the following:

On Sunday, 2/26/12, Trayvon Martin was temporarily living at the Retreat at Twin lakes, a gated community in Sanford, Seminole County, Florida. That evening Marin walked to a nearby 7-11 store where he purchased a can of iced tea and a bag of skittles, Martin then walked back to entered the gated community and was on his way back to the townhouse where he was living when he was profiled by George Zimmerman. Martin was unarmed and was not committing a crime.

Zimmerman who also lived in the gated community, and was driving his vehicle observed Martin and assumed Martin was a criminal. Zimmerman felt Martin did not belong in the gated community and called the police. Zimmerman spoke to the dispatcher and asked for an officer to respond because Zimmerman perceived that Martin was acting suspicious. The police dispatcher informed Zimmerman that an officer was on the way and to wait for the officer.

During the recorded call Zimmerman made reference to people he felt had committed and gotten away with break-ins in his neighborhood. Later while talking about Martin, Zimmerman stated “these assholes, they always get away” and also said “these fucking punks”.

During this time, Martin was on the phone with a friend and described to her what was happening. The witness advised that Martin was scared because he was being followed through the complex by an unknown male and didn’t know why. Martin attempted to run home but was followed by Zimmerman who didn’t want the person he falsely assumed was going to commit a crime to get away before the police arrived. Zimmerman got out of his vehicle and followed Martin. When the police dispatcher realized Zimmerman’s was pursuing Martin, he instructed Zimmerman not to do that and that the responding officer would meet him. Zimmerman disregarded the police dispatcher and continued to follow Martin who was trying to return to his home.

Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued. Witnesses heard people arguing and what sounded like a struggle. During this time period witnesses heard numerous called for help and some of these were recorded in 911 calls to police. Trayvon Martin’s mother has reviewed the 911 calls and identified the voice crying for help as Trayvon Martin’s voice.

Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest. When police arrived Zimmerman admitted shooting Martin. Officers recovered a gun from a holster inside Zimmerman’s waistband. A fired casing that was recovered at the scene was determined to have been fired from the firearm.

Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Bao Performed an autopsy and determined that Martin died from the gunshot wound.

The facts mentioned in this affidavit are not a complete recitation of all the pertinent facts and evidence in the case but only are presented for a determination of Probable Cause for Second Degree Murder.

By: Investigator T.C. O’Steen, Affiant
By: Investigator Dale Gilbreath, Affiant

Sworn to and subscribed before me
This 11th day of April, 2012
Jennifer Weigel
Notary Public, State of Florida at Large

 
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Posted by on April 14, 2012 in News & Views

 

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Walking While Black, Dying Too Young

13 Mar

Murdered for the crime of being Black and "suspcious."

I recall exactly where I was on the evening of  February 26. I was dully flipping channels between the usually boring NBA All-Star Game and the always boring Academy Awards.  I thought about getting up to make a beer run, but lazily decided even that required too much effort.  We always casually say how boredom is killing us.  We never imagine something as mundane as a run to the store could have fatal consequences.

It can and it does.  Especially when you’re young and Black and someone thinks you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be.  Like walking through their neighborhood.

Trayvon Martin, 17, was in Sanford, Florida to visit his father Tracy who lives in a gated community. During halftime of the All-Star Game that was lulling me to sleep, he went to the store to buy some iced tea and Skittles. He never made it home because George Zimmerman, part of a neighborhood watch group had been trailing Travyon in his car. He had already called the cops to report the teen as a suspicious person.

Despite being told the police had been notified and not to approach, Zimmerman did exactly the opposite. What happened next is unclear because only one of the two involved can still tell the tale, but some sort of confrontation followed, Zimmerman pulled his gun and shot Trayvon Martin dead, just 70 feet from his father’s home.

Martin, a junior at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in North Miami-Dade, was shot and killed Feb. 26 after an altercation with the head of a neighborhood watch group in Sanford, a suburb of Orlando. Martin had been visiting his father’s fiancée and stepbrother, who live in a gated townhome community, that weekend.


Neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who is white, spotted Martin as the teen was heading back from a snack run to a nearby 7-Eleven store. Zimmerman called police to report a “suspicious person in the area” and followed Martin in his SUV. A police dispatcher told Zimmerman to stand down and let police take over, but that is not what happened.

Zimmerman claims he had to defend himself from a kid armed with a bag of Skittles.

Instead, Zimmerman apparently confronted the Miami teen. They scuffled, and by the time police arrived Zimmerman had a bloody nose, and Martin had been shot fatally in the chest.

Zimmerman, who had a concealed weapons permit and carried a black Kie Tek 9mm semi-automatic pistol, told police he acted in self-defense. Martin was unarmed, with only $22, candy and a can of iced tea in his pockets.

Zimmerman claims self-defense though he was the only one armed.

Being part of a neighborhood watch means you WATCH. It doesn’t give you the right to play Wyatt Earp and start gunning down Black teenagers because you think they’re suspicious.

“My son left Sanford, Florida in a body bag,’ Tracy Martin told a reporter. ‘While George Zimmerman went home to go to sleep in his own bed.”

An armed man stalks, confronts and kill an unarmed teenager and the police shrug it off with a blasé, “Well, he says it was self-defense. That’s good enough for us.”

It’s supposed to matter when you kill someone even if you did so accidentally.  Why hasn’t Zimmerman been arrested?

Racial profiling by any name is still wrong and in this case, lethal. I’m always troubled when a young brother man dies when he is gunned down by a White man. But I’m equally trouble when a young brother is gunned by another young brother. Why does it have to take a White man killing a Black man before it becomes newsworthy to the media?

Zimmerman is still free and Sanford police chief Bill Lee says police don’t have enough evidence to dispute the shooter’s claim that he shot Martin in self-defense.

“Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don’t have the grounds to arrest him,” the chief said. One wonders would this be so if Martin had shot Zimmerman instead?   Call it cynical,  but can anyone believe it would play out this way the other way around?. That somehow police would find just cause to get a Black kid accused of killing a White man behind bars?

Just ask Trayvon Martin’s family.   Walking while Black somewhere a White man didn’t think he belonged was Travyon’s  crime and George Zimmerman killed him for it

We’ve seen this before.  We saw it with Amadou Diallo.  We saw it with Sean Bell.  We saw it with Oscar Grant and damned if we aren’t seeing it all over again..

Since they are too stupid amd incompetent to find reasonable cause to arrest Zimmerman, the Sanford Police punted the case to the Seminole County District Attorney. His name is A. Bryant Applegate and his number is 407-665-6000. If the justice system in Florida is too broken to find a way to arrest and indict someone who stalks and shoots a Black teenager maybe the responsibility should be taken away from them and given to someone who can handle it. The U.S. Attorney’s office is 407-648-7500.

America is a nation of laws, but if it’s not a nation of justice, America will never be a nation at peace.

UPDATED: The family of Trayvon Martin is asking for concerned individuals to support their pleas for justice for their slain son by signing a petition asking for the district attorney to prosecute Zimmerman.  Please give a damn and help them out.

This is what a menace to society looks like?

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Posted by on March 13, 2012 in News & Views, Rantology

 

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Building Up the Tallest Midget

30 Jan

It's not March, but we're down to The Final Four

By any standard, the candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination are a sad bunch of retreads, weaklings, reactionaries and fatally flawed losers. Mitt Romney is the quintessential rich White man who can barely keep up a brave face when he’s mingling with the unwashed masses, but he’s willing to put on a brave face and hold his nose if that’s what it takes to win.

Newt Gingrich is a narcissist and an egotist whose intellectual racism and repulsive personality makes him hard even for conservatives to take. Then there’s Ron Paul. He’s a special case. He’s not a great thinker like Gingrich or a flip-flopping fake like Romney. No other candidate can claim the kind of enthusiastic support as Paul does. No other candidate seems as genuine and unpretentious as Paul.

There’s also no other candidate as extreme and out of the mainstream as Paul. I’ve made my case against Baby Doc Paul that he is an unworthy of the presidency. The Washington Post ripped away Paul’s ass-covering lies that he wasn’t aware of the racist material in his newsletters.

I don’t expect the Paul die-hards and dead enders to be the least bit disabused of their fantasy that he is a kindly old man who speaks truth to power and advocates a handful of positions that attracts uninformed liberals. Theirs is a separate reality where neither light nor truth penetrates.

The true believers are with Paul all the way until the last bomb falls on the bunker. It’s the rail-sitters and undecided who will have to finally make a call and choose between acknowledging Ron Paul either is a racist personally or just a cynical politician and manipulative businessman willing to exploit racial and homophobic fears to make a dirty buck.

What comes next in tomorrow’s primary in Florida?

Romney crushes Gingrich by double digits. The anti-Romney forces will continue to bitch and moan, but their failure to coalesce behind a single candidate makes them an annoyance, not an insurmountable obstacle.  Their choices will come down to holding their nose and pulling the lever for Mitt or watch Obama raising his right hand again next January.  Screw the Tea Party!  They will get nothing but insincere lip service from Romney and they deserve nothing.

Paul soldiers out looking for friendlier (and cheaper) caucus states and other places where the Ron Paul Race War Revolution might play well.  He’ll hang around like a bad odor while he decides whether to launch another rogue run as an independent.  Sonny boy Rand might tell dear old dad to sit his ass down in a rocking chair somewhere as not to cock block his inevitable bid in 2016.

Santorum is toast.  Put the pennies on the eyes.  His moment of glory came and went in Iowa, proving yet again that the best thing that unrepresentative state contributes to presidential contests is exposing weak candidates not ready for the real deal and croaking wannabees who had no business running in the first place.  One less repulsive right-winger gone.  No great loss.

Which doesn’t mean Rick Santorum isn’t deserving of scorn for his reprehensible remarks about rape victims and abortion. Isn’t it always the way that it’s the most pious and supposedly reverentially religious bastards who have so much love in their hearts for the unborn and nothing but contempt for the living?

On the way home the other day I passed a church where there were 150 little white crosses in the ground and a sign that read, “In the last hour there were 150 children destroyed by abortion.”

That’s pretty heavy-handed, but it takes a prick like Santorum to make it even worse for women facing the difficult choice whether to have an abortion. Piers Morgan interviewed Santorum and asked him if he could deny his daughter an abortion if she were impregnated through an act of rape.

Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.

I despise Santorum. He is one of those far Right extremists whom I am incapable of saying a good word about. Beyond his casual racism, there’s his overt hatred of women. I don’t know how you could characterize Santorum’s stupidly sanctimonious remarks as anything but the most repellent kind of misogyny.

Leave it up to a man who will never face an unwanted pregnancy brought out by an act of violence to make an awful situation even worse. Why is the same people who decry government regulation and intrusions into the private life of Americans espouse views where the womb becomes a state-owned asset?

I don’t have an answer, so I turn to the Church of Carlin for one.

Sanctimonious Santorum will be a historical footnote in a matter of weeks or days. Gingrich will soon follow, but after thwarting his threat to Romney in Iowa and again in Florida, the GOP will try to shoot Newt’s zombie campaign of White Rage in the head and put him down once and for all. The powers that be want an electable empty suit to take on President Obama, not a self-centered “big thinker” who wants to colonize the moon.

The Republican establishment wants Mittens vs. Obama and they’re determined to get it.

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Posted by on January 30, 2012 in News & Views

 

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In search of…somebody to beat Obama

24 Sep

The Republican demolition derby continues in this weekend’s Florida straw poll as The Herminator comes crawling from the wreckage.

Former pizza executive Herman Cain surprised rival Rick Perry with an upset victory on Saturday in a Republican presidential straw poll in Florida, dealing a disappointing loss to the Texas governor two days after a shaky debate performance.

Perry, leading in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, had needed a victory in what was an early test of strength to salve the wounds left over from a debate with his rivals on Thursday in which he struggled.

Instead, former Godfather’s Pizza executive Cain, who is far behind the two top-tier candidates Perry and Mitt Romney, won with 37 percent of 2,657 votes cast.

Perry was a distant second at 15 percent, just ahead of Romney, who won 14 percent despite not participating in the poll. Further back were Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann.

Florida’s straw poll is a nonbinding popularity poll and is significant only in terms of showing a candidate’s strength in the state. The state contests to determine the Republican nominee do not start until early next year.

Cain, an African-American who promotes himself as a pragmatic problem-solver with a clear tax reform plan, eagerly welcomed the victory.

“This is a sign of our growing momentum and my candidacy that cannot be ignored,” Cain said after his win.

Most political analysts give him no chance of winning the nomination.

But Florida’s Republican Party had noted that since 1979 every winner of the Florida straw poll has gone on to become the party’s nominee. Senator John McCain won it in the 2008 cycle and defeated Romney to become the nominee.

"Pack your fudge for you, sir?"

As Scooby Doo might say, “R’uh-oh!”

Will the GOP really try to pull an Obama and make an African-American unknown their nominee? Hey, if all else fails,  send a Black guy to get rid of a Black guy.

Thing is they tried that once before in Illinois when the GOP recruited Alan “Carpetbagger” Keyes to knock off a young Democratic up-and-comer. That didn’t turn out so good.

Here’s what winning a straw polls means.  Nothing.  No delegates.  No states.  No nuthin’.  It’s just for bragging rights and ego strokes.

Because nobody really believes a pizza company CEO is going to be the Republican standard bearer next year.  Nobody.  The nice thing about Cain’s meaningless win is how it embarrasses Perry and Romney while emphasizing their considerable weaknesses as national candidates.

Despite the media’s desire to make it seem like the president doesn’t have a hope in hell of winning a second term, Obama was right when he said, “the odds of me being reelected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.”

That’s true and Republican insiders know it.  This is why they continue to look for still more candidates to get in the race.  The hope is someone will turn to be The One to beat Obama.  They thought it might be Governor Goodhair, yet despite vaulting Mittens as the presumed front-runner, Perry has begun reminding everyone why the more there is to learn about him the less there is to like about him.

Somewhere in New Jersey, Chris Christie is brushing pizza crumbs off his shirt and picking up a desperately ringing phone as a near hysterical Karl Rove on the other end begs, “please, baby baby, PLEASE!”

It’s a mighty long way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and until someone emerges Obama is still poised to use and abuse any and all of these chumps.

Cain: "Hey baby. I heard you dig the sexual chocolate." Palin: "Duuuuuhhh."

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Posted by on September 24, 2011 in Rantology

 

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