George Zimmerman has been taken into “investigative custody” in Florida after threatening his estranged wife and her father with a gun.
A jury couldn’t do it, but ole George will get himself put away for something, trust me. He is just one angry dude.
From an Express article about Alan Power’s book, The Princess Diana Conspiracy:
“The 300-page book alleges she was murdered on the orders of Buckingham Palace because she was about to release a dynamite dossier chronicling Prince Charles’s sordid sex secrets.
“Mr. Power claims she was killed by an elite team of SAS agents and MI6 operatives codenamed The Increment, acting on orders from the Palace.
“Mr. Power says the hit on Diana was carried out by a team of crack troops on motorbikes posing as paparazzi who forced her Mercedes to crash into the concrete pillars of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel on August 31, 1997.”
As we approach the 16th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death on August 31, Scotland Yard is investigating new allegations that Diana was murdered by a member of the British military.
One of the Zimmerman jurors now says that he “got away with murder.” Um, wasn’t that kind of your job, to keep that from happening?
From “The Truth About Trayvon,” Ekow N. Yankah*, NYT:
“The Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.
“The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. … We are tired of pretending that ‘reasonable doubt’ is not, in every sense of the word, colored.
“I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.
“Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.
“A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.”
* Yankah is a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University
From “What If Zimmerman Had Been Indigent,” Matthew Yglesias, Slate:
“What if George Zimmerman had been poor? What if his legal case hadn’t attracted national attention and raised over $300,000?
“What if Zimmerman, like most criminal defendants in the United States, was relying on a public defender with little emotional or financial investment in winning the case and no resources with which to pursue a robust defense even if he’s been inclined to do so. Wouldn’t that defender have told Zimmerman that the smart way to avoid a second-degree murder sentence was to plead guilty to manslaughter and work out terms of incarceration that would be less onerous than what he’d end up with if he fought and lost?
“Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a very difficult evidentiary burden to meet if the state is facing off against a competent, well-financed, and highly motivated defense team. But all these people sitting in America’s prisons…aren’t losing at trial. Instead 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state ones end in plea bargains. People ask me sometimes why nobody’s gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis. It’s a complicated question, but obviously part of the answer is that you’re not going to resolve a criminal fraud case against a multi-millionaire by railroading him into a plea agreement.”
George Zimmerman was in trouble with the law before he murdered Trayvon Martin (resisting arrest/assaulting an officer, restraining order protecting former girlfriend), and I’m convinced he will get himself in trouble again because that’s just how and who he is. He’ll do another stupid and evil thing, and he won’t get away with it.
I take comfort in the fact that O J Simpson got away with murder, but is now in prison in Nevada — for a long, long time — for other crimes.
You can’t keep a bad guy down, you can just eventually lock him up.
I haven’t followed the Zimmerman trial closely, but I’m a big fan of Josh Marshall, and I wanted to share this.
From “Trayvon’s Dead Body,” Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:
“I didn’t know this until just now. But yesterday MSNBC momentarily aired a courtroom image of Trayvon Martin’s dead body at the crime scene. It was seemingly accidental and they quickly panned away. Our video team saw it but didn’t run it, which was totally the right decision by every standard we’ve always followed. I didn’t see it myself or even know about it until a few moments ago when Gawker ran the image.
“I’m sure it makes me sound a bit naive saying this but I was shocked when I saw it. Of course, I’ve seen dead bodies before. And I’ve seen countless crime scene photos of dead bodies. In terms of who’s guilty and who’s innocent, it is well worth noting just for the record that seeing a dead body is inherently inflammatory and disquieting. It’s not probative at all in terms of determining guilt, which is why there’s usually a lot of jousting in a courtroom about what jurors get exposed to.
“But I wanted to share a personal reaction when I saw it. I felt guilty journalistically that it hasn’t been seen. Not guilty as us, TPM, but guilty in terms of journalism in general. We’re not going to run it because we’ve always had a pretty conservative editorial standard about running images that show gratuitous violence or death, dead bodies, etc. Whatever the merits of that standard, it’s probably not the right decision to depart from it now in this one case at the end of a trial we have not covered closely. And in any case, it’s already published if you want to see it. Before I link to it, seriously, think it over before you click. It’s upsetting. Here it is.
“But back to the image itself. Seeing it, for all the tabloid coverage and endless CNN cable news coverage of the case, a big part of me feels like the real story here has been glossed over. Whatever the ins and outs of the legalities here, the odds of this happening to a white kid are just very slim. I knew that an hour ago. But I’m confronting it in a different way now.”
“George Zimmerman decided Trayvon Martin’s fate on Feb. 26, 2012, and now a jury will decide his. A jury that, by the way, is part of a justice system that is not supposed to exclusively serve the best educated and most articulate of our citizenry. So now would be a good time to point out that Jeantel’s weight, her nails, her sex, her color – these things have precisely jack to do with her account of what happened the night Travyon Martin died. Justice is supposed to serve teenagers too, and people who party and who don’t hide it when they’re angry or flustered, and women who can’t read cursive. It’s supposed to serve people whose dialogue wasn’t written for them by David E. Kelley. Remember that. Remember that Rachel Jeantel is not the one on trial.”
Mary Elizabeth Williams, “The smearing of Rachel Jeantel,” Salon
The father of Ibragim Todashev, the friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev who was shot and killed while being questioned by the FBI in Orlando, says his son was murdered to keep him from talking.
Todashev, who we now know was unarmed, was shot seven times, including once in the back of the head.
Embattled Farmers 