If a person of any color and any sex wants to confront on the street people they suspect to be criminals, they should arm themselves with pepper spray, not guns.
I agree with that. But is it fair to judge Zimmerman by that standard when the law says he had a legal permit?
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
If a person of any color and any sex wants to confront on the street people they suspect to be criminals, they should arm themselves with pepper spray, not guns.
I agree with that. But is it fair to judge Zimmerman by that standard when the law says he had a legal permit?
I'm willing to let the courts judge Zimmerman. But from where i'm sitting, he philisophically lost the right to defend himself under "stand your ground" as soon as he started pursuing Martin.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
What's the difference with this stand your ground law anyway. What exactly does it allow you to do that the common self defense doctrine does not?
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
Atheists are overwhelmingly more likely to be more liberal than the general public and social issues and people who are more liberal on social issues are overwhelmingly more likely to oppose the death penalty. It would be absolutely shocking if atheists, in America, were more in favor of the death penalty than the general public.
Ajax -
Self-defense laws are generally structured to say that a person is obligated to retreat rather than use deadly force if they have the opportunity to do so. A person's life - even an assailant's life - is valuable and you shouldn't take it unless you are in serious peril. If you can retreat, then you aren't in serious peril. In the event of using deadly force, a person would be required to show they had reasonable fear for their safety that they could not retreat from. With the Castle doctrine laws, you are not required to retreat if you are in your own home. The default assumption for the prosecutor is that you were in peril by virtue of being attacked there and asking you to retreat in that circumstance isn't a reasonable requirement. In stand-your-ground laws, this goes one step further. Your obligation to retreat does not apply if you are legally allowed to be wherever the threat took place. This shifts the prosecutorial burden and makes it less likely you'll be charged in the event that you use deadly force in a public space.
I think you can imagine that in real world examples of a person being attacked, there is potential for grey area about whether it is reasonable to expect someone to retreat. That's not exactly easy conditions for a person to make a complex decision in. So you end up with circumstances where it retrospect they probably could have retreated, but many it isn't reasonable to expect them to have done so. Prosecutors have been known to charge people in those cases. And even if they beat that charge, as they normally would, it can be quite expensive to defend yourself. Stand your ground laws make that kind of thing much less likely to happen. They probably also make illegitimate self-defense claims more likely to happen, so I'm not saying this is a net positive, but the rationale behind them isn't simply thuggish vigilantism.
Zimmerman clearly could have got away. That doesn't appear to be in dispute. So if the stand-your-ground law is invoked, which it will be, it will be to assert that he wasn't obligated to retreat first even if he could.
Ajax would argue that "The Castle Doctrine" extends to gated communities :P
Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded.-charity 3/7/07
MASH quotes I peeked in the back [of the Bible] Frank, the Devil did it. I avoid church religiously. This isn't one of my sermons, I expect you to listen.
So to take the case of the Castle doctrine, suppose I'm typing away on mormondiscussions.com as normal while armed to the teeth. All of a sudden I see a guy who is clearly armed break into my front door with ill intentions. I have the opportunity run out my back door or I can pull out my guns and start shooting at what moves.
Under my state's old self defense law, if I shot and killed the guy a prosecutor might charge me with some serious offense like manslaughter because I didn't run out the back. Maybe I'm convicted, but chances are I get off, but not before going under a mountain of debt in attorney's fees. But if someone was breaking into my front door randomly like that, I legitimately would be worried that there also would be a partner waiting in the back for me. I wouldn't want to run there. With the Castle Doctrine, this is no problem. A prosecutor likely wouldn't charge me, because there would be no assumption that I'd have to retreat. I wouldn't be in a life-changing amount of debt and heartache defending myself.
Again, I'm not saying this is a net positive, but it's that kind of stuff the law has in mind. Stand your ground extends that concept further.
Zimmerman clearly could have got away. That doesn't appear to be in dispute. So if the stand-your-ground law is invoked, which it will be, it will be to assert that he wasn't obligated to retreat first even if he could.
It doesn't seem to me like he had much chance of getting away once Travon was on top of him and beating him while he was on the ground. If what Zimmerman is saying and Travon did try to grab his gun, I can see self defense. I guess this case will set a precedent on whether one has the duty to retreat before getting into a verbal altercation or if one can still assert self defense when attacked by someone they were told not to follow.
I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people can just steal my stuff and get into a fist fight with me and be confident that no deadly force will be used against them. Chances are they most often will not be caught or it will take a huge amount of time and resources to prove they actually did it and when it's all over they might go to jail for a few months at worst and then be back out to try again. Often times they don't even have to give the stuff back.
Just having lived around blacks I think this kind of homicide over protection of property is very common in black on black crime. It's unfair to paint this as white on black crime when it's really brown on black crime. But that's exactly what CNN and Al Sharpton tried to do initially. Maybe Jesse Jackson can go back to making his racist comments about New York City and it's large Jewish population.
It'd be interesting to see a poll on how many atheists believe in the death penalty. The atheists I talked with felt like prison was not enough punishment for murder. They're reasoning was that the perpetrator was still alive and death was the worst possible thing that could happen to you. I recognize that most Mormon Christians are more Old Testament and favor death penalty, but Catholic Christias seem to always be protesting executions. To me Christian forgiveness for murder in this sense only makes sense if there is an afterlife. If there is no afterlife, than the atheists I've spoken to are right and life in prison isn't punishment enough for murder.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
EAllusion wrote:So to take the case of the Castle doctrine, suppose I'm typing away on mormondiscussions.com as normal while armed to the teeth. All of a sudden I see a guy who is clearly armed break into my front door with ill intentions. I have the opportunity run out my back door or I can pull out my guns and start shooting at what moves.
Under my state's old self defense law, if I shot and killed the guy a prosecutor might charge me with some serious offense like manslaughter because I didn't run out the back. Maybe I'm convicted, but chances are I get off, but not before going under a mountain of debt in attorney's fees. But if someone was breaking into my front door randomly like that, I legitimately would be worried that there also would be a partner waiting in the back for me. I wouldn't want to run there. With the Castle Doctrine, this is no problem. A prosecutor likely wouldn't charge me, because there would be no assumption that I'd have to retreat. I wouldn't be in a life-changing amount of debt and heartache defending myself.
Again, I'm not saying this is a net positive, but it's that kind of stuff the law has in mind. Stand your ground extends that concept further.
Do you think the boundaries of “stand your ground” are well defined? My impression is that it was conceived for a world where people are either good or bad. If a bad person threatens a good person, then the good person is allowed to shoot the bad person.
But the real world isn’t like that. So where do you draw the line? Say I follow you around, taunt you, flick off your hat, lick my finger and stick it in your ear, etc. Eventually you become exacerbated and take a swing at me. When you finally do that, does stand your ground give me the right to shoot you in self-defense?
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Zimmerman clearly could have got away. That doesn't appear to be in dispute. So if the stand-your-ground law is invoked, which it will be, it will be to assert that he wasn't obligated to retreat first even if he could.
It doesn't seem to me like he had much chance of getting away once Travon was on top of him and beating him while he was on the ground. If what Zimmerman is saying and Travon did try to grab his gun, I can see self defense. I guess this case will set a precedent on whether one has the duty to retreat before getting into a verbal altercation or if one can still assert self defense when attacked by someone they were told not to follow.
He had the chance to get away when he was driving in his car. He had the chance to get away before he started following Martin.
What exactly happened in the altercation? We know that Zimmerman was bigger and that Zimmerman was armed. We know that Zimmerman didn't want another "asshole" to get away. It's quite possible that Zimmerman started the fight and had the upper-hand throughout.
ajax18 wrote:It'd be interesting to see a poll on how many atheists believe in the death penalty. The atheists I talked with felt like prison was not enough punishment for murder. They're reasoning was that the perpetrator was still alive and death was the worst possible thing that could happen to you. I recognize that most Mormon Christians are more Old Testament and favor death penalty, but Catholic Christias seem to always be protesting executions. To me Christian forgiveness for murder in this sense only makes sense if there is an afterlife. If there is no afterlife, than the atheists I've spoken to are right and life in prison isn't punishment enough for murder...
EAllusion is right about this one--most atheists are liberal, and most liberals oppose the death penalty. They generally don't see the world the way you imagine they would.
Here is an example of a common atheist's analysis:
When I first thought I about this I more or less went through the following thought process:
1) What is/are the general purpose/s of the death penalty? a) Revenge b) Crime prevention c) Insulating society from violent miscreants
2) Does it serve these purposes? a) If the victims want it, yes. b) Intuitively, yes. Statistically, no. c) Yes.
3) Is the death penalty the only means of achieving this? a) Possibly, depending the victims. b) - c) No. Life imprisonment is just as effective.
4) Can it be equitably applied? a) No. Human error is unacceptable when deciding who it is okay to kill and still call it justice. b) - c) -
After that I concluded there was no justifiable reason to exercise the death penalty.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
When you finally do that, does stand your ground give me the right to shoot you in self-defense?
It's a good question because I had to put up with that kind of stuff from other kids at school from a very young age. If I hit back, I was the one punished. It's just the way things were. I still don't think it was fair. I don't know what I'll do when they start doing it to my kids. I honestly wanted to kill the other kids when I was in junior high. Can you imagine calling the police and telling them this man won't stop flicking my ear or giving me wet willies. I doubt you'd get much help.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.