Professionals in the justice system knew that the prosecution was desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel when they tried to make it look as if George Zimmerman wasn’t justified in shooting Trayvon Martin because Martin hadn’t hurt him badly enough yet.

Anyone smart enough to pass a bar exam and research the laws of self-defense and use of force, would know that you don’t have to sustain a gunshot wound before you shoot the criminal gunman pointing his weapon at you. Similarly, you don’t have to let the guy fracture your skull or spill your brains onto the sidewalk before you are justified in stopping him with lethal force.

The whole purpose of self-defense in any form is to prevent the other man from injuring you. At the deadly force level employed in this case, the force is justified to stop the man before he inflicts a mortal or crippling injury upon you. 

Photos taken immediately after the shooting, along with eyewitness testimony, confirm that Zimmerman’s nose was smashed into a swollen mess, and there was blood all over the back of his head from the lacerations there.  Whether or not the physician’s assistant who saw him later could confirm that the nose was broken, the evidence supports not only the violent sucker punch to Zimmerman’s face that he said began the encounter, but also his contention of his head being smashed against the hard underlying surface of the sidewalk.  It doesn’t much matter whether your opponent is banging a chunk of hard sidewalk into your head, or banging your head into that part of the sidewalk. Either way, profound or fatal brain injury is the likely result if it continues.

Why wasn’t he killed or knocked unconscious by the first few such strikes? The neck muscles are among the strongest in the body. A few months after birth, they become involuntary muscles which hold your head up without having to think about it. When you instinctively resist the hands that are smashing your head into the pavement, those muscles help you mitigate the force to some degree.  But with each blow of the back of your head against that unforgiving surface, you become less and less able to resist. Soon, the inevitable happens, and fatal or crippling brain damage ensues.

From what the evidence shows us, deadly force was indeed warranted at the time Zimmerman pulled the trigger and fired the single shot of the encounter.  The lay jurors, even the one who couldn’t quite distinguish between homicide and murder when she talked about it on TV Wednesday, understood that.

The argument that Zimmerman didn’t sustain enough injury to warrant using deadly force in self-defense is simply a false argument.  An argument so blatantly bogus that the knowledgeable observer can’t help but wonder what motivated the lawyers who raised it in the first place.

 

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1 COMMENT

  1. I propose that any thinking person knows exactly what motivated the lawyers who raised THAT question in the first place…

  2. I’ve been familiar with use of force and self-defense for a while (and very influenced by your teachings on the matter), but the way the case was tried raised a lot of questions for me and the thorough breakdown you’re finally able to give us delivers and has been a great learning tool, Mas. Thank you.

  3. One almost wonders if the jurywoman were not…er…”compensated” to make those statements on TV. Just to keep the race-flames nice and hot, ya know…

  4. “The argument that Zimmerman didn’t sustain enough injury to warrant using deadly force in self-defense is simply a false argument. An argument so blatantly bogus that the knowledgeable observer can’t help but wonder what motivated the lawyers who raised it in the first place.”

    I assumed they raised this argument because they had no evidence and no case. When you can’t convict on evidence try to convict on emotion or the jury relying on “common sense” instead of the law. Of course if you convict on emotion the likelyhood of a successful appeal increases drastically. This one argument by itself doesn’t make sense but in the context of all the other emotional arguments I think it clearly shows a desparate prosecution grasping at emotional straws.

  5. Mas, as you are very aware I’m sure, police officers are trained in and required to operate under the constraints of “Force Continuum” in confrontations. Possibly you could address this in a future post as it would apply not only to law enforcement officers but anyone who finds themselves in a confrontation.

  6. “An argument so blatantly bogus that the knowledgeable observer can’t help but wonder what motivated the lawyers who raised it in the first place.”

    Lawyers know that American juries are made up of stupid, gullible people. Remember O.J.’s and the Menendez’, and the McDonald’s coffee on the lap juries? The lawyers get to pick the members of the juries. Should they be allowed to do this? What’s wrong with random jury members?

    Mas, this may be a little off topic, but I want to ask you about legalese. Reading legalese actually makes me angry. It is so hard to understand, so dry, obtuse, verbose, boring, complicated, and snobbish even. I think it is bad communication. When and why was legalese created? Why does it continue to be used? When will it die?

    If I didn’t hate legalese so much, I might be able to become a prosecutor. I would like to get a job re-writing all the legal books so that they make sense. Like many good ideas, that will never happen.

  7. I hope, when you complete these articles, that you are able to consolidate them into a book or something similar. Thus far these are simply the best analysis of things (based on my distant, lay and armchair opinion) that I’ve had the pleasure to run across.

  9. Thank you for the wonderful assesment. I have been following this case since the MSM made it a national headline. At first, with the spin that was coming out, I believed that Zimmerman was guilty as hell. However many of the facts didn’t make any sense so I dug deeper and eventually uncovered the facts. While understanding that both parties made mistakes I knew that Zimmerman was not guilty and shouldn’t have been tried under Florida law. One point I will make that came up reading the comments in the series of articles after I found them is that Zimmerman should have stayed in his car. While this argument might make sense in many ways there could have also been consequences of this act as well. The first one is that Martin had taken a good look at his vehicle and person. With this information he could have found out where Zimmerman lived and attacked him or God forbid his wife at a later time. Martin was an out of control thug and any course of action was going to have consequences and further harm for the neighborhood until he was sent to jail or the cemetary.

  11. At the risk of seeming overly cynical, my guess would be that the lawyers knew perfectly well that the argument was fraudulent but hoped that the jurors and the public (perhaps, especially the public!) would fall for it.

    It didn’t work as well as they wanted, but it did work with some people.

  13. Mas, aside from the details of the shooting or the trial, I’d like to know:

    What do you think of what this says about the government’s attitude towards guilt? Doesn’t this whole trial and aftermath set a worrying picture of those in power trying to bypass the rule of law to punish someone they *know* is guilty, for purely political reasons, and how that may be applied to other innocent citizens in the future?

    As you well know, we’re all guilty of *something*, if the authorities look hard enough and decide it’s worth their time to pursue it, but we haven’t seen much blatant abuse of that until now, by the same administration that’s targeted tax audits at right-wing organizations, spied on us blatantly (while shrugging and essentially saying ‘what are you going to do about it?’ when caught), given thousands of guns to murderous criminals, and whose only respect for the Constitution is the effort they’ve put into skirting around its edges in the most blatantly way imaginable.

  14. Well, to me it is obvious that the Prosecuting Attorney who used that argument, had been ordered to “Do whatever it takes”, to convict Zimmerman, and put him into prison, for whatever the MAXIMUM SENTENCE FLORIDA IMPOSES FOR CONVICTION OF THAT CRIME.

    Fortunately for Zimmerman, and all the other “Inoccent Util Proven Guilty” Citizens of Florida, and the other 49 States, the Jury saw through the prosecutor’s schemes, and aquited Zimmerman, proving our jury trial system, sometimes works, inspite of the governments attempts to manipulate it.

  15. Mas – Thank you for sharing your knowledge of the case and tempering it with your specialised knowledge of the law relating to self-defence.

    Hmmm . . .

    FWIW a few days back Larry Correia (Fantasy-adventure writer and former self-defence instructor) posted a peice on his blog about the Zimmerman case, It is an interesting peice and though Mr Correia’s style is rather combative, it is also entertaining and thoughtful. He does say he would have done differently than Zimmerman. Though he points out that the law is about what a “reasonable man” would do rather than what he’d do.

    Link is here: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/on-profiling-and-stand-your-ground/

    And interestingly enough one of the responses to the post includes Mas’ video on SYG

  16. To Corporal Punishment: You make a good point about the legalese. I can offer four suggestions.

    — Black’s Legal Dictionary
    — http://www.findlaw.com, ordinary folks’ free version of the pricey Westlaw and Lexis websites attorneys have found so useful.
    — the corpus juris secundum (“the body of the law”); it ain’t “Law for Dummies” but you don’t need a law degree or a major in Latin to understand it. Generally found in legal libraries.
    — your state’s recommended jury instructions on the issues in question, which are particularly crafted to be understandable to lay people.

    To Sian: I’ll comment on that soon. Please bear with me.

    To the newcomer who doesn’t think much of black people: Yours is one of the very few comments I’ve pulled from this blog in the several years I’ve been writing it. We don’t do race-baiting from either side in this space. I’m writing this after attending an NAACP meeting on this matter tonight, for Christ’s sake.

  17. Mas and Friends

    I was doing some research and encountered the story of 28 year old El Paso, Texas, Police Officer and former Marine Jonathan Molina and 17 year old Juan Gonzalez.

    From the El Paso Times and KFOX/El Paso

    On September 25, 2012, Officer Molina, while off duty, was questioning Gonzalez about a criminal mischief offense that Molina had witnessed.

    Without warning, during the interview, Gonzalez struck the officer in the face with his fist, dazing him. Gonzalez then reached down and jerked Molina’s feet out from under him, knocking him to the ground. Gonzalez then mounted the semi-conscious officer and after slamming his head several times against the pavement, commenced to savagely beat him in the face, using his fists, in an MMA style “ground and pound”. He fled before other El Paso officers arrived.

    Molina suffered skull fractures, lacerations and fractures of nose and facial bones and brain injuries. He died several days later, without regaining consciousness.

    Gonzalez will be tried for capital murder of a police officer in January 2014. As a “child” of 17 when the offense occurred, he is not eligible for the death penalty.

    Al Sharpton was unavailable for comment.

    Mrs. Molina is still a widow.

    ———————————————————————————–

    So – for the idiots out there who whine that Zimmerman was just ” in a fight” with an “unarmed child” , I offer this.
    Molina was too stunned to shoot Gonzalez and so he died.

    Zimmerman lived because he didnt lose consciousness and had a gun.

    Regards

    GKT

  18. Lawyers prosecutors ignored facts such as Zimmerman could have been killed from his head being pounded on the cement and did not have to wait at all.

    Here is my 2 cents.

    1. Big mistakes for Z to rush right down to Sanford police head quarters immediately following the shooting and give a detailed taped
    statement without counsel. With his heart pounding, head fuzzy, hyped up…

    2.He should have asked to be seen at the hospital for his injuries then asked for attorney EVOKED MIRANDA!!!!!!

    3. This is an important manner your adrenaline is pumping you cannot think clearly afterwards with the excitement of what just happened to you need time to regain your bearings and make a statement at a later time. Also it would be a shame that you just used your gun and took a life to only turn around and die and hour later of an heart attack. After a shooting your heart is racing and you need to be looked at for your injuries and for your overall well being.

  19. Mas,
    I know I am a little off topic, can will you please address this topic I brought up above? Being retired LEO I thought the state killed him with all the stuff that should not even had come to light. They got inconsistencies out of him because he was so nervous and this is why you cannot make statements immediately afterwards without being checked out by medical personal and have counsel present for detail questions, walk through…
    Thank you for any consideration.
    Jack

  21. Thanks Greg Tag. Some how I missed that news article.

    I am still seeing news stories about the adult male Mr. Zimmerman fighting with “a child” Martin.
    I want the authors of those stories to find a fit and healthy 17 year old “child”, have the “child” knock them to the ground, mount them and proceed to pound the snot out of them.
    Could they possibly refer to Martin as a “child” after they get out of the hospital or worse, the morgue?

  22. For an other view.
    Here is a link. I find our media amazingly one sided, as seen there is no reporting just what they want you to see or know.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebu6Yvzs4Ls
    —–

    Raymond — thank you for this link. It’s on my Facebook now. I’m a writer, but I won’t let anyone introduce me on site as a journalist. Big difference between what I do and journalism. For unlike journalists today, I have to get my facts straight or I’ll lose my job. I’m paid to get it right.

    Watching the news at night, reading print and online news, I’m often shaking my head because I see so many “facts” or perceptions that went unchallenged and uncorroborated. Never verified.

    Now, I’m also in a rush to get my stories in by deadline. So I’ll never buy that as an excuse for the media. Hard as hell not to suspect they purposely steer clear of fact-checking because the truth would make them have to revise something.

    (Still, some of my best friends are reporters. Of course I try not to hold that against them.)

    Zimmerman is not the first victim of the news media. He won’t be the last. Doubt the media flinched much. Couple people got fired. But nothing will change.

    Don’t know what the answer is.

    Anyone?

  23. If Martin was a defenseless child then gang wars are also harmless child’s play and officers patrolling those areas should only be armed with candy and a stern look. I just had to hear another one of those emotional reactions from someone who just can’t understand how this kid “who had done nothing wrong” got gunned down while the shooter walked a free man. And “couldn’t he just talk to him or shoot him in the leg or something?”. Some people are simply impervious to facts and reason – scary to think they could end up on a jury.

  24. @Corporal Punishment: Most people believe legalese exists so that lawyers can make things more complicated and obtuse than they have to be, but the exact opposite is true. Legalese exists because of the need for precision and to avoid ambiguity.

    Think about it this way: the law exists to establish rules for things, but new things keep coming up which don’t exactly fit into the rules that exist, so the rules (which include laws, court opinions, and the language used in contracts) keep getting made more and more specific to not only deal with those increasingly-novel situations but also to make sure that they come out the same way as consistently as possible. That means the rules, and the concepts behind the rules, start becoming more and more sophisticated. That takes increasingly complex language. If you trace the history of the law, some of our laws and concepts originated before the time of Christ, so that’s a lot of time for things to just keep getting more and more complicated.

    When some things get both complicated and common enough, shorthand terms are used to stand for them so that you don’t have to give a longwinded explanation for every little part of what you say. A lot of those terms are not self-explanatory and thus you get legalese (and lawyers and law schools).

    Mas is right that you can learn a lot from legal encyclopedias such as Corpus Juris Secundum (there’s another one called American Jurisprudence), but let me tell you that the old saying that the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client is very, very true and that’s even more true for someone who’s not even a lawyer to start with. The main thing lawyers learn in law school is what you might consider a “base layer” of legal thinking and legal concepts, not how to do legal work. Those encyclopedias are written for use by lawyers and they presume that people reading them know the base layer; reading them without knowing that base layer won’t usually cause you to draw improper conclusions about what you’re reading (though it may cause it to not make much sense to you on occasion) but it certain can do so and, if your luck is like mine, that’ll happen in the worst possible situation and come back to bite you.

    Finally, I hope you don’t mind a personal question: When you get promoted will you eventually become Major Punishment and then later General Punishment?

  25. Oh LORDY NOT AGAIN ! Just read this post from Andrew Branca about a case that happened yesterday in New Orleans. White/Black, 2am, 14 yr old intruder. This time the kid is still alive but was shot in the head.

    Oh course the police charged 2nd degree murder right out of the chute!

    I suspect the Al and Jesse show are making hotel arrangements in NOLA right now !!

    http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/07/zimmerman-redux-the-breaking-louisiana-self-defense-case-of-merritt-landry/?

  26. Mas & Dave,

    Thank you for the helpful comments concerning “legalese.” I can definitely see where, in my opinion, good judges should be given leeway in sentencing to fit the crime. In other words, laws should state general principles to guide judges, but each case will have specifics which have to be taken into consideration. The laws in the Old Testament are concise by today’s standards. I can see how legalese developed to rein in activist judges. In other words, some judges can’t be trusted.

    Dave, when I get promoted, first I will become Major Minor, and then General Motors (or General Electric). 😉