Saturday, March 17, 2012 1:32:13 AM
Trayvon Martin Shooting 911 Call
Trayvon Martin Shooting 911 Call Released By Sanford Police Department
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnqKotpSD0 [with comments]
===
Trayvon Martin Case: 911 Audio Released Of Teen Shot By Neighborhood Watch Captain (AUDIO)
Benjamin Crump, attorney, for the family of the late Trayvon Martin, talks to the media after the release of 911 call at the Sanford City Hall on Friday, March 16, 2012 in Sanford, Fla. Martin, 17, was shot to death after being confronted by Sanford neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, 28, on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman, white, told Sanford Police that he shot the unarmed black teenager in self-defense. Family members are calling for Zimmerman's arrest.
Trymaine Lee
Posted: 03/16/2012 9:54 pm Updated: 03/17/2012 12:41 am
SANFORD, Fla. -- Police have released audio 911 tapes in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain while walking home from a store.
In eight chilling recordings, made the night of February 26, listeners can hear the frightened voices of neighbors calling to report to screams for help, gunshots, and then that someone was dead.
In perhaps the most disturbing of the recordings, a frightened voice cries out for help and pleading “No! No!” and then wailing.
And for the first time, we hear the voice of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who admitted to police that he shot Martin, who was walking home from a convenience store to his father's home in the gated community. Zimmerman has not been arrested or charged in the shooting.
LISTEN:
[audio embedded]
“This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something,” Zimmerman tells the 911 operator. “He’s just staring, looking at all the houses. Now he’s coming toward me. He’s got his hand in his waistband. Something’s wrong with him.”
Zimmerman described Martin as wearing a hoodie and sweatpants or jeans. He continues: “He’s coming to check me out. He’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is. Can we get an officer over here?”
“These assholes always get away,” he says to the operator. Zimmerman is then heard giving directions to the dispatcher. “Shit, he’s running,” Zimmerman says.
“Are you following him?” the dispatchers asked.
“Yes,” Zimmerman responds.
“We don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher says.
In other recordings, callers to tell the 911 dispatcher that someone has been shot. One person tells the dispatcher that two guys were wrestling behind his back porch and that one of them was yelling for help. Then the male caller stammers in shock. “I’m pretty sure the guy is dead...Oh, my God!...The black guy looks like he’s been shot and he’s dead.”
[audio emnbedded]
“The guy on top has a white t-shirt,” another caller said.
“Is he on top of someone?" the operator asks.
“Mmmhmmm,” the fermale caller responds.
Yet another caller says, “Someone was screaming "Help! help! help! Then I heard a gunshot.”
One caller, a teenage boy, said that he was walking his dog, and “I saw a man laying on the ground that needed help. He was screaming.”
Then, he told the operator, he heard a gunshot and said the screaming stopped.
Martin's family and their attorneys were allowed to hear the audio before it was made public.
"You hear a shot, a clear shot, that we can only assume is a warning shot," said Natalie Jackson, a family attorney. "Then a 17-year-old boy is begging for his life. Everything tells me that that was Trayvon Martin."
Tracy Martin, the teenager's father, broke down crying as he listened to the audio on Friday, the family lawyers said. "My son was crying for help, and he still shot him," Tracy Martin, the teenager's father said, according to Benjamin Crump, another family attorney.
The local state attorney is reviewing the investigation and will decide whether to prosecute the volunteer watchman.
Police in Sanford initially told Martin’s family that Zimmerman had not been arrested because he had a “squeaky-clean” record, according to Tracy Martin [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/george-zimmerman-trayvon-martin_n_1335984.html ]. Zimmerman had been arrested in 2005 charges of resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer, according to court records. Those charges were later dropped.
"Do we really believe that if Trayvon Martin would have pulled the trigger, he would not be arrested?" said Crump. "This is obviously a cover-up [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/trayvon-martin-case-georg_n_1353522.html ], and we need a sweeping overhaul of the Sanford Police Department.
Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett said he spent Thursday meeting with the state attorney’s office discussing the release of the tapes. “It was as simple as us saying, ‘We’re going to do this, what do you think?'” Triplett told HuffPost.
Earlier Friday, Triplett met with Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), Police Chief Bill Lee, and city manager Norton Bonaparte to discuss the 911 recording.
The police chief serves at the pleasure of the city manager. Bonaparte was asked by HuffPost whether the furor jeapordizes Lee's job. “We’re reviewing all of our options at this point,” he said, adding that he currently sees “no reason” to remove Lee.
Zimmerman had been the subject of earlier complaints by residents of the gated community in which he and Martin's family lived. At an emergency homeowner’s association meeting earlier this month, “one man was
escorted out because he openly expressed his frustration because he had previously contacted the Sanford Police Department about Zimmerman approaching him and even coming to his home,” a resident wrote in an email to HuffPost. “It was also made known that there had been several complaints about George Zimmerman and his tactics" in his neighborhood watch captain role.
The case has drawn national attention, and has outraged many residents of Sanford [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/trayvon-martin-sanford-florida_n_1345868.html ], about 20 miles north of Orlando, particularly in the African American community. Many have suggested a history of strained relations between the police department and blacks.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/trayvon-martin-911-audio-_n_1354909.html [with comments]
===
Witness in Trayvon Martin murder fingers police
The woman [in] whose backyard 17 yr-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in by Geroge Zimmerman comes forward to finger the police. She says the Sanford police were not interested in hearing the truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Rf4G0JOOk [with comments]
===
Police Conduct Questioned After Death of Florida Teen
March 16, 2012
A week after ABC News uncovered questionable police conduct in the investigation of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white neighborhood watch captain in Florida, including the alleged "correction" of at least one eyewitness' account, outrage that the shooter remains free is intensifying.
"It's surprising. It's shocking," said Tracy Martin, father of the slain 17-year-old high school junior, killed by a single shot from self-appointed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman's handgun. "It lets me know that justice is just not being served here. All we want is justice for our son. We're not asking for anything out of the ordinary."
In an interview with ABC News, Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton tearfully said she only seeks an arrest, "let a judge and jury decide the rest."
Meantime that outrage is spreading across the Internet. One of several petitions for Zimmerman's arrest has garnered 250,000 signatures an hour on a change.org site. Signatures have been pouring in at the rate of 10,000 an hour, according to the website – partly buoyed by calls for non-violent action by hip hop luminaries including Russell Simmons who has been tweeting about the tragedy and warning against its possible vigilante violence, writing: "Trayvon Martin didn't die so we can create a race war he died so we can promote better understanding. We must start honest dialogue..."
[...]
http://abcnews.go.com/US/police-conduct-questioned-death-florida-teen/story?id=15937881 [with comments]
===
The Trayvon Martin case exposes the realities of a new generation of self-defense laws
By Julia Dahl
March 15, 2012 11:05 AM
(CBS) - Around 7 p.m. on February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked out of the gated community near Orlando where he was visiting his father to go get some Skittles at a neighborhood convenience store. On his way home, Martin somehow aroused the suspicions of neighborhood watch leader, George Zimmerman, who called 911 to report the boy.
When police arrived, Martin was dead, shot by a bullet from Zimmerman's 9mm semi-automatic handgun.
Zimmerman, 28, who was bleeding from the nose and back of his head when police found him, claimed the two got in a scuffle and that he shot the boy in self-defense. Thus far, no charges have been filed against him.
Martin's family, not surprisingly, is outraged, and calling for Zimmerman's arrest.
"What gave him the right to think he was judge, jury and executioner?" asks Martin's uncle, Ronald Fulton.
The answer to his question may be simple: the state of Florida, which in 2005 enacted one of the nation's strongest so-called "stand your ground" self-defense laws. According to the statute, a person in Florida is justified in using deadly force against another if he or she "reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony."
Was Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed, posing a threat to Zimmerman's life? We may never know for sure, but in Florida - and a growing number of states - what matters isn't whether or not Martin was actually a threat, only that Zimmerman "reasonably" believed he was.
But what is reasonable? Ekow Yankah, an associate professor of criminal law at Cardozo School of Law in New York, says that to some people, it is reasonable to be suspicious of a young black man walking alone in the dark.
"We have to decide what counts as 'reasonable' to be afraid of, and nobody should pretend that that isn't socially and culturally loaded," says Yankah.
Gregory O'Meara, an associate professor of law at Marquette University School of Law, agrees.
"These 'stand your ground' laws license pistol-packing urban cowboys and paranoid people," says O'Meara, who fought the passage of a similar law in Wisconsin. "We've all been trained to be afraid of black men, and if you're afraid enough that justifies everything."
But Allen County, Indiana prosecutor Karen Richards, who has prosecuted cases involving claims of self-defense, says that the new laws simply "solidify what juries were feeling anyway. If you're in a place where you have a right to be and you have a reasonable belief you need to use deadly force, juries don't think you need to retreat."
Of course, that's assuming the case gets to a jury. So far, Zimmerman hasn't even been charged with a crime. Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee did not return Crimesider's call for comment on the case, but at a press conference on Monday he said he did not have enough evidence to arrest Zimmerman.
"In this case Mr. Zimmerman has made the statement of self-defense," Lee said. "Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don't have the grounds to arrest him."
According to the National Rifle Association - which has lobbied for and in some cases assisted in writing laws expanding self-defense statutes - since 2006, at least 29 states have passed amended self-defense laws that the gun rights advocacy group supports, including four last year. Although each state's statute is slightly different, generally, this new crop of laws allows citizens to use deadly force on someone they reasonably believe is a threat to their life. Instead of having a so-called "duty to retreat" from perceived danger, a citizen can "stand their ground" and meet force with force. Some laws also create immunity from civil lawsuits for those found to have reasonably used deadly force.
"We want to make sure if a crime victim acts to save his life they can't be penalized or prosecuted for doing so," says NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam.
Currently, legislatures in Iowa, Nebraska and Alaska are considering bills that would similarly expand where, when and how a citizen can kill someone they perceive as trying to harm them. Bucking the trend, on March 5 Minnesota's governor vetoed a bill that would have expanded the places in which a citizen could use deadly force.
In Oklahoma, which passed a "stand your ground" law in 2006, the new language made it easy for law enforcement to clear 19-year-old Sarah McKinley, who shot and killed a man trying to break into her Oklahoma home on New Year's Eve. McKinley was immediately hailed as a hero. The situation was less clear cut when pharmacist Jerome Ersland shot one of the young men who tried to rob the Oklahoma City drugstore where he worked in 2009. Ersland shot 16-year-old Antwun Parker in the head, chased his accomplice out, then returned and shot Parker five more times as the teen lay on the floor. Ersland pleaded self-defense, but was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He is appealing the conviction.
Thus far, there is no indication that Trayvon Martin was in the commission of any sort of crime when he was approached by Zimmerman, who was reportedly driving an SUV. Still, judging by the fact that he has not been arrested and the case has been referred to the state's attorney, law enforcement seems to be struggling to determine whether Zimmerman's actions fall within the scope of the Florida law.
"The law has made things confusing for law enforcement," says Zachary Weaver, a Florida defense attorney who in 2008 wrote an article on the state's "stand your ground" law for the University of Miami Law Review.
In fact, in several of the states considering "stand your ground" laws, law enforcement has spoken out against expanding the ways and means for a citizen to use deadly force against another.
Dennis Flaherty, the executive director of the Minnesota Peace and Police Officers Association, told Crimesider he believes such a law "will increase the situations where deadly force is used unnecessarily." Flaherty, who has been in law enforcement for nearly two decades, says he can't think of a single case where a Minnesotan has been prosecuted for killing someone in self defense.
"It's a solution to a non-existent problem," he says.
Complete coverage of the Trayvon Martin case on Crimesider [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-504083_162-504083.html?keyword=trayvon+martin ]
Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57398005-504083/the-trayvon-martin-case-exposes-the-realities-of-a-new-generation-of-self-defense-laws/ [with comments]
Uploaded by cjetboy on Mar 16, 2012
Trayvon Martin Shooting 911 Call Released By Sanford Police Department
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnqKotpSD0 [with comments]
===
Trayvon Martin Case: 911 Audio Released Of Teen Shot By Neighborhood Watch Captain (AUDIO)
Benjamin Crump, attorney, for the family of the late Trayvon Martin, talks to the media after the release of 911 call at the Sanford City Hall on Friday, March 16, 2012 in Sanford, Fla. Martin, 17, was shot to death after being confronted by Sanford neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, 28, on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman, white, told Sanford Police that he shot the unarmed black teenager in self-defense. Family members are calling for Zimmerman's arrest.
Trymaine Lee
Posted: 03/16/2012 9:54 pm Updated: 03/17/2012 12:41 am
SANFORD, Fla. -- Police have released audio 911 tapes in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain while walking home from a store.
In eight chilling recordings, made the night of February 26, listeners can hear the frightened voices of neighbors calling to report to screams for help, gunshots, and then that someone was dead.
In perhaps the most disturbing of the recordings, a frightened voice cries out for help and pleading “No! No!” and then wailing.
And for the first time, we hear the voice of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who admitted to police that he shot Martin, who was walking home from a convenience store to his father's home in the gated community. Zimmerman has not been arrested or charged in the shooting.
LISTEN:
[audio embedded]
“This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something,” Zimmerman tells the 911 operator. “He’s just staring, looking at all the houses. Now he’s coming toward me. He’s got his hand in his waistband. Something’s wrong with him.”
Zimmerman described Martin as wearing a hoodie and sweatpants or jeans. He continues: “He’s coming to check me out. He’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is. Can we get an officer over here?”
“These assholes always get away,” he says to the operator. Zimmerman is then heard giving directions to the dispatcher. “Shit, he’s running,” Zimmerman says.
“Are you following him?” the dispatchers asked.
“Yes,” Zimmerman responds.
“We don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher says.
In other recordings, callers to tell the 911 dispatcher that someone has been shot. One person tells the dispatcher that two guys were wrestling behind his back porch and that one of them was yelling for help. Then the male caller stammers in shock. “I’m pretty sure the guy is dead...Oh, my God!...The black guy looks like he’s been shot and he’s dead.”
[audio emnbedded]
“The guy on top has a white t-shirt,” another caller said.
“Is he on top of someone?" the operator asks.
“Mmmhmmm,” the fermale caller responds.
Yet another caller says, “Someone was screaming "Help! help! help! Then I heard a gunshot.”
One caller, a teenage boy, said that he was walking his dog, and “I saw a man laying on the ground that needed help. He was screaming.”
Then, he told the operator, he heard a gunshot and said the screaming stopped.
Martin's family and their attorneys were allowed to hear the audio before it was made public.
"You hear a shot, a clear shot, that we can only assume is a warning shot," said Natalie Jackson, a family attorney. "Then a 17-year-old boy is begging for his life. Everything tells me that that was Trayvon Martin."
Tracy Martin, the teenager's father, broke down crying as he listened to the audio on Friday, the family lawyers said. "My son was crying for help, and he still shot him," Tracy Martin, the teenager's father said, according to Benjamin Crump, another family attorney.
The local state attorney is reviewing the investigation and will decide whether to prosecute the volunteer watchman.
Police in Sanford initially told Martin’s family that Zimmerman had not been arrested because he had a “squeaky-clean” record, according to Tracy Martin [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/george-zimmerman-trayvon-martin_n_1335984.html ]. Zimmerman had been arrested in 2005 charges of resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer, according to court records. Those charges were later dropped.
"Do we really believe that if Trayvon Martin would have pulled the trigger, he would not be arrested?" said Crump. "This is obviously a cover-up [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/trayvon-martin-case-georg_n_1353522.html ], and we need a sweeping overhaul of the Sanford Police Department.
Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett said he spent Thursday meeting with the state attorney’s office discussing the release of the tapes. “It was as simple as us saying, ‘We’re going to do this, what do you think?'” Triplett told HuffPost.
Earlier Friday, Triplett met with Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), Police Chief Bill Lee, and city manager Norton Bonaparte to discuss the 911 recording.
The police chief serves at the pleasure of the city manager. Bonaparte was asked by HuffPost whether the furor jeapordizes Lee's job. “We’re reviewing all of our options at this point,” he said, adding that he currently sees “no reason” to remove Lee.
Zimmerman had been the subject of earlier complaints by residents of the gated community in which he and Martin's family lived. At an emergency homeowner’s association meeting earlier this month, “one man was
escorted out because he openly expressed his frustration because he had previously contacted the Sanford Police Department about Zimmerman approaching him and even coming to his home,” a resident wrote in an email to HuffPost. “It was also made known that there had been several complaints about George Zimmerman and his tactics" in his neighborhood watch captain role.
The case has drawn national attention, and has outraged many residents of Sanford [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/trayvon-martin-sanford-florida_n_1345868.html ], about 20 miles north of Orlando, particularly in the African American community. Many have suggested a history of strained relations between the police department and blacks.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/trayvon-martin-911-audio-_n_1354909.html [with comments]
===
Witness in Trayvon Martin murder fingers police
Uploaded by BlackTalkMedia on Mar 16, 2012
The woman [in] whose backyard 17 yr-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in by Geroge Zimmerman comes forward to finger the police. She says the Sanford police were not interested in hearing the truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Rf4G0JOOk [with comments]
===
Police Conduct Questioned After Death of Florida Teen
March 16, 2012
A week after ABC News uncovered questionable police conduct in the investigation of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white neighborhood watch captain in Florida, including the alleged "correction" of at least one eyewitness' account, outrage that the shooter remains free is intensifying.
"It's surprising. It's shocking," said Tracy Martin, father of the slain 17-year-old high school junior, killed by a single shot from self-appointed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman's handgun. "It lets me know that justice is just not being served here. All we want is justice for our son. We're not asking for anything out of the ordinary."
In an interview with ABC News, Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton tearfully said she only seeks an arrest, "let a judge and jury decide the rest."
Meantime that outrage is spreading across the Internet. One of several petitions for Zimmerman's arrest has garnered 250,000 signatures an hour on a change.org site. Signatures have been pouring in at the rate of 10,000 an hour, according to the website – partly buoyed by calls for non-violent action by hip hop luminaries including Russell Simmons who has been tweeting about the tragedy and warning against its possible vigilante violence, writing: "Trayvon Martin didn't die so we can create a race war he died so we can promote better understanding. We must start honest dialogue..."
[...]
http://abcnews.go.com/US/police-conduct-questioned-death-florida-teen/story?id=15937881 [with comments]
===
The Trayvon Martin case exposes the realities of a new generation of self-defense laws
By Julia Dahl
March 15, 2012 11:05 AM
(CBS) - Around 7 p.m. on February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked out of the gated community near Orlando where he was visiting his father to go get some Skittles at a neighborhood convenience store. On his way home, Martin somehow aroused the suspicions of neighborhood watch leader, George Zimmerman, who called 911 to report the boy.
When police arrived, Martin was dead, shot by a bullet from Zimmerman's 9mm semi-automatic handgun.
Zimmerman, 28, who was bleeding from the nose and back of his head when police found him, claimed the two got in a scuffle and that he shot the boy in self-defense. Thus far, no charges have been filed against him.
Martin's family, not surprisingly, is outraged, and calling for Zimmerman's arrest.
"What gave him the right to think he was judge, jury and executioner?" asks Martin's uncle, Ronald Fulton.
The answer to his question may be simple: the state of Florida, which in 2005 enacted one of the nation's strongest so-called "stand your ground" self-defense laws. According to the statute, a person in Florida is justified in using deadly force against another if he or she "reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony."
Was Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed, posing a threat to Zimmerman's life? We may never know for sure, but in Florida - and a growing number of states - what matters isn't whether or not Martin was actually a threat, only that Zimmerman "reasonably" believed he was.
But what is reasonable? Ekow Yankah, an associate professor of criminal law at Cardozo School of Law in New York, says that to some people, it is reasonable to be suspicious of a young black man walking alone in the dark.
"We have to decide what counts as 'reasonable' to be afraid of, and nobody should pretend that that isn't socially and culturally loaded," says Yankah.
Gregory O'Meara, an associate professor of law at Marquette University School of Law, agrees.
"These 'stand your ground' laws license pistol-packing urban cowboys and paranoid people," says O'Meara, who fought the passage of a similar law in Wisconsin. "We've all been trained to be afraid of black men, and if you're afraid enough that justifies everything."
But Allen County, Indiana prosecutor Karen Richards, who has prosecuted cases involving claims of self-defense, says that the new laws simply "solidify what juries were feeling anyway. If you're in a place where you have a right to be and you have a reasonable belief you need to use deadly force, juries don't think you need to retreat."
Of course, that's assuming the case gets to a jury. So far, Zimmerman hasn't even been charged with a crime. Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee did not return Crimesider's call for comment on the case, but at a press conference on Monday he said he did not have enough evidence to arrest Zimmerman.
"In this case Mr. Zimmerman has made the statement of self-defense," Lee said. "Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don't have the grounds to arrest him."
According to the National Rifle Association - which has lobbied for and in some cases assisted in writing laws expanding self-defense statutes - since 2006, at least 29 states have passed amended self-defense laws that the gun rights advocacy group supports, including four last year. Although each state's statute is slightly different, generally, this new crop of laws allows citizens to use deadly force on someone they reasonably believe is a threat to their life. Instead of having a so-called "duty to retreat" from perceived danger, a citizen can "stand their ground" and meet force with force. Some laws also create immunity from civil lawsuits for those found to have reasonably used deadly force.
"We want to make sure if a crime victim acts to save his life they can't be penalized or prosecuted for doing so," says NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam.
Currently, legislatures in Iowa, Nebraska and Alaska are considering bills that would similarly expand where, when and how a citizen can kill someone they perceive as trying to harm them. Bucking the trend, on March 5 Minnesota's governor vetoed a bill that would have expanded the places in which a citizen could use deadly force.
In Oklahoma, which passed a "stand your ground" law in 2006, the new language made it easy for law enforcement to clear 19-year-old Sarah McKinley, who shot and killed a man trying to break into her Oklahoma home on New Year's Eve. McKinley was immediately hailed as a hero. The situation was less clear cut when pharmacist Jerome Ersland shot one of the young men who tried to rob the Oklahoma City drugstore where he worked in 2009. Ersland shot 16-year-old Antwun Parker in the head, chased his accomplice out, then returned and shot Parker five more times as the teen lay on the floor. Ersland pleaded self-defense, but was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He is appealing the conviction.
Thus far, there is no indication that Trayvon Martin was in the commission of any sort of crime when he was approached by Zimmerman, who was reportedly driving an SUV. Still, judging by the fact that he has not been arrested and the case has been referred to the state's attorney, law enforcement seems to be struggling to determine whether Zimmerman's actions fall within the scope of the Florida law.
"The law has made things confusing for law enforcement," says Zachary Weaver, a Florida defense attorney who in 2008 wrote an article on the state's "stand your ground" law for the University of Miami Law Review.
In fact, in several of the states considering "stand your ground" laws, law enforcement has spoken out against expanding the ways and means for a citizen to use deadly force against another.
Dennis Flaherty, the executive director of the Minnesota Peace and Police Officers Association, told Crimesider he believes such a law "will increase the situations where deadly force is used unnecessarily." Flaherty, who has been in law enforcement for nearly two decades, says he can't think of a single case where a Minnesotan has been prosecuted for killing someone in self defense.
"It's a solution to a non-existent problem," he says.
Complete coverage of the Trayvon Martin case on Crimesider [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-504083_162-504083.html?keyword=trayvon+martin ]
Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57398005-504083/the-trayvon-martin-case-exposes-the-realities-of-a-new-generation-of-self-defense-laws/ [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
