Bingo; I have wondered that for some time. Those injuries could have easily been self-inflicted ... as Zimmerman was following Martin. After all, "these assholes always get away with it".

Scratch up your scalp and slam your nose into a pole; fight-like injuries.

Zimmerman's claim that his nose was broken was obviously false. IMO, had Martin sitting on top if Zimmerman and hitting downward, Zimmerman's nose would have likely been much more damaged. If Zimmerman was on top of Martin and Martin was trying to hit upwards during a struggle, the force of his punches would have been greatly diminished.

I think this case is going to come down to credibility. Zimmerman has a violent past, he ignored the 911 operator's recommendation to stop following Martin and he knew that he wasn't supposed to have a gun if he was on neighborhood watch duty as he claimed. Zimmerman's 46 911 calls for stupid crap decreases his creditability; the guy called about TRASH on the road. However, Zimmerman's words, "these assholes always get away" makes Zimmerman look like a vigilante. Zimmerman's calm response after the shooting won't help him in front of a jury. If the website post Zimmerman wrote after his alleged police ride along is shared with the jury, he will look like an asshole trying to do what he had no business doing.

That said, I think the cops screwed this up pretty badly the night of the shooting. If they had collected Zimmerman's clothes that night, investigators could have found critical evidence explaining what really happened that night.

Question: Wouldn't the fact that Zimmerman followed Martin be enough to disprove "stand your ground"? Martin was walking away from Zimmerman. It was Zimmerman who had to initiate any contact with Martin, unless Martin turned and told Zimmerman to back off. But even if Martin told Zimmerman to back off, Martin still wasn't initiating a threat. My understanding is that the person initiating a confrontation cannot claim "stand your ground". When Zimmerman refused to stop following Martin and told 911 that he wasn't going to stop following Martin, IMO, Zimmerman initiated a confrontation.

I honestly don't see how this can be a "stand your ground" case when it was obviously Zimmerman who initiated contact with Martin.

How would a jury decide if it was Zimmerman or Martin who was "standing his ground"?

Agreed. My guess is that he probably kept the "re-found" passport "just because," and decided to surrender it instead of his real one on the spur of the moment. He probably thought he was being clever, not realizing that someone is almost certainly going to check with the State Department to see if he has any other passports issued. I'm guessing that he didn't think anyone would check, and this gave him a short term option to flee the country if he wanted to.

More news:

Zimmerman's Attorney: Hidden Money has "undermined his credibility"



Trayvon Martin can't go home or to his neighborhood, he can't go to school (or work?), his family can't keep their life together and he and his family have been thrust into the national spotlight. Trayvon and his family have also been ridiculed by racist acting on their own agenda.

Zimmerman is at least alive.



Zimmerman atty: Family "made a mistake" with defense funds



The lies about money was an "oversight"? Ya, setting up a code for telephone calls "just in case" shows the strength of this "oversight". O'Mara needs to STFU now.


The George Zimmerman Legal Case site is up now.



So, the initial fundraising site raised $204,000. The 2nd "independently managed Legal Defense Fund" has raised another $37,000.

Wanna donate? Here's how!

About the new bond hearing:



So, Zimmerman gets to stew for at least a week. Good.

Did Zimmerman testify about the money at his bail hearing? Or was that just his wife?

I think it was a bone headed move on the part of the lawyer to put Zimmerman on the witness stand at the bail hearing in any event, and to put any family member on to testify about finances without the lawyer having first seen the PayPal statements.

O'Mara's an experienced criminal defense lawyer, but he's made some newbie level mistakes, starting with taking what his client or family told him at face value.

Here's what I know from criminal defense: the clients lie. They always lie. Even when they are innocent, they lie. They don't lie about everything and some lie worse than others, but I just think its human nature to resist admitting to wrongdoing, whether the wrongdoing is intentional or mistaken.

So experienced lawyers know to do some fact checking before putting on witnesses. There is no excuse in my mind for the lawyer not having the PayPal statement in hand before the April bail hearing.

(There is a possibility of course that the client lied to the attorney by providing a false PayPal statement -- perhaps a statement of a different account. )

George Zimmerman's wife arrested for perjury.


http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2012/6/12/george_zimmerman_s_w.html

Something tells me that the Zimmerman case will continue to unravel as time goes on.

Well I suppose it's a good thing they got some cash (known amount now) to bail her out.

Idiots... Moving money around in transfers like 9990 and 9999 dollars to hide alerting the government now is good evidence of intent to hide. They deserve whatever comes their way.

Thanks, Emma.

Better to be a woman in jail than a man; women are more supportive of each other. Guys just flex and look mean and stuff.

I wonder what her bail will be...?

Can they get his and hers cells?

The Zimmerman's are idiots.

I looked at the probable-cause arrest affidavit for Shellie Zimmerman. She and her husband really, really screwed themselves.

On April 20th, in an effort to lower the bond amount for her husband, Shellie Zimmerman claimed that the family had very limited funds and that she had no idea how much had been raised on the Zimmerman defense website.

April 15th: The "coded" phone calls between the 2 occurred on April 15th, 5 days before the first bond hearing.

April 16th-19th:
*Shellie transferred $74,000 from her husband's acct to her bank acct ... money from the Zimmerman defense website.
*Transferred an additional $18,000 to an acct at a 2nd bank.
*Transferred $47,000 to Zimmerman's sister's bank acct.

$139,000 was transferred before the April 20th bond hearing. At the April 20th bond hearing, Shellie Zimmerman then testified under oath that the family was broke, other family members couldn't help with bond and that she had no idea how much money had been raised from the defense website.

April 24th:
*$84,000 of that money was transferred back into George Zimmerman's acct ... after all of the family bills were paid off.

1-2 weeks ago, Zimmerman's attorney told the courts that Zimmerman had already spent approx $50,000 of the money raised on his defense website for "living expenses".

Hmmm. $139,000 - $50,000 = $89,000 ... almost the amount transferred back into George Zimmerman's acct on April 24th.

In 6 weeks time, the Zimmerman's drained $50,000 of the $204,000 raised on the Zimmerman defense website. Now we know where that $50,000 went.

I hope donors have a bit of regret about donating to George Zimmerman.


Judge Lester published his revoke of bond order yesterday; the media received the order today:
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/201 ... -zimmerman

I'm still waiting for access to Judge Lester's actual ruling; Orlando Sentinel's website is flooded, so the actual doc isn't available yet. But, from the article ...



Zimmerman is fucked; all he had was his credibility. His next bond hearing is June 29th. I think Zimmerman will be lucky to get house arrest this time.

I will link to Judge Lester's ruling once it is available.

Based on what I believe was a botched police investigation, there's a possibility only Mrs. Zimmerman will serve time.

Agreed. Didn't Zimmerman also commit perjury regarding his assets and passport? IIRC, it was Zimmerman's lawyer who claimed Zimmerman's passport was his only passport. But did G.Zimmerman testify about the family finances?

I would like to see Zimmerman's freedom limited as he awaits trial. I think he has earned that.

I can't believe the cops didn't collect Zimmerman's clothing immediately after the shooting. Much of the forensic evidence is gone.


A new study regarding Stand Your Ground laws was recently released. I haven't read the actual study yet Does Strengthening Self-Defense Law Deter Crime of Escalate Violence?.

The study is discussed here.

A bit of good news regarding the "stand your ground" defense, in Tx called the "Castle statute". In Houston, a retired firefighter & apparent neighborhood busybody a la Zimmerman went to a neighbor's house to complain about noise at a party, armed & carrying a videocam & cellphone. While there he filmed & got the cops on the phone & started babbling phrases he had no doubt picked up in his concealed-weapons class (e.g., "I'm standing my ground here", "I'm in fear for my life"), then shot & killed the offending neighbor & wounded a couple of the neighbor's guests. (Again, at the neighbor's house, not the busybody's.) Yesterday/today, a jury found the busybody guilty of murder.

Something in common in these two cases. These guys weren't "standing their ground", they were expanding their ground by actively seeking confrontation.

Perhaps the victims' families could sue the people who got this law passed and caused this guy to think he could say some magic words and then shoot people with impunity.

If you're talking about suing the state legislators who enacted the statute, esseff, no cigar, I don't think. I'm not a torts lawyer (although I am a lawyer), but I believe the pols would be protected by a doctrine called "legislative immunity". I stand ready for correction by any torts practitioners on the forum, though.

An ironic aspect to the Houston story: one of the guests wounded by the busybody was himself a firefighter (the neighbor who was killed was a P.E. teacher).

I agree entirely, GreatGrey. Leaving aside the merits of these statutes (which IMO are pernicious as hell), the "ground" has to be "yours" in some reasonable sense, not ground you just annexed.

I was thinking more of the NRA lobbyists who pushed for these laws all over the red states.

Or ALEC, who aided and abetted.

I fully agree with both of you on the merits - ALEC & the NRA bear a sizable part of the moral burden here (leaving another part of it for the hack pols whom they successfully lobbied, and another part for the pinheads who elected them). But as for pinning legal liability on ALEC and/or the NRA, I think it would be a long stretch. For one thing, the proximate-cause connection essential to liability would be, IMO, extremely hard to establish. It's a long chain from ALEC's & the NRA's lobbying, through state legislators and a duly enacted statute, to a given individual (a Zimmerman, or in the Tx case, a Rodriguez) who - it would be argued - misinterpreted the statute and killed someone. Again, though, torts litigation isn't my specialty, and I'd defer to the opinion of someone in that field.

Ultimately, I think the remedy lies at the ballot box, which means it lies with the voters who elected the legislators who enacted these statutes. I have my own opinion as to the present likelihood of any sea change in such electorates because of incidents like these, but others may be more optimistic.

I have little objection to the actual substantive content of most of these statutes, except to the extent they have fee-shifting provisions for civil defendants that did not previously exist.

In the context of criminal prosecution, these statutes merely codify what was often already embodied in common law principles like the castle doctrine or the "true man" doctrine, that is, essentially stating that a person who is performing no unlawful activity and is entitled to be present in a public space or, even more so, in a residence, is not obligated to retreat from the attack of a criminal before engaging in self-defense with deadly force.

Where legislators and pundits have been reckless and have encouraged bloodshed, it is in their misrepresentation of what is actually in the statutory language, that gives dim people like George Zimmerman the believe that murder is now lawful. Even in the recent Texas case, a jury convicted of murder when a similar scumbag attempted to use a "stand your ground" defense to justify provoking an altercation then committing murder.

As others have pointed out, there is an absolute immunity for legislative acts, otherwise no legislature in the world could ever pass a law without being instantly embroiled in litigation. By their very nature, laws almost always harm someone's interests.

http://www.axiomamnesia.com/TrayvonMart ... uments.pdf

I don't recall seeing this posted here (apologies if I missed it).

Just skimming the reports now ...

The first-aid kit (photographed) apparently did not belong to police or EMS. It was taken as evidence.
Zimmerman's shoes and clothing were taken at the police station.
The plastic bag (photographed) was brought to officers by a resident and used to attempt to seal Trayvon's chest wound during CPR.
Trayvon's cell was either low on battery or dead from water damage, and the police were unable to download information from the phone (at least using their device brought to the scene). Further down the document it states they couldn't download from the phone because they didn't have the password.
Trayvon had $40+ on him (the autopsy report found 10 cents).
Zimmerman refused medical attention after claiming he was 'light-headed'. The officer also said he saw no evidence that Zimmerman needed immediate medical attention.
The officer who initiated CPR found the ice tea can in Trayvon's pocket, and was the one who placed the yellow plastic sheet over the body and can on top.
Zimmerman's face was "bloodied". The officer took photos with his personal phone; was notified on 3/18 that no photos of Zimmerman's injuries existed, and he then emailed "both" photos to Serino.
Trayvon was running in the direction of his father's apartment.
According to records check, ALL of Zimmerman's calls to police have identified Black males as suspects.
Zimmerman called Sanford Police on the non-emergency line; there are no known witnesses to the initial "harmful event".
Anonymous caller to police states Zimmerman is racist and capable of instigating a confrontation.
(at least) Two witnesses saw a chase, but could not ID who was chasing whom.
Police tell a witness who stated she believed it was Trayvon yelling for help that it was in fact Zimmerman, and that she "should have seen him, he was all scratched and beaten up".

There was blood on the gun, and mixed DNA on the grip of the gun from at least 2 individuals. Zimmerman was the major contributor of the DNA on the grip. DNA from the holster came from at least 3 individuals. Zimmerman was the major contributor. Trayvon was ruled out for that found on the gun.
No foreign DNA on Trayvon's hands.
DNA from both Zimmerman and Trayvon in blood stains on Trayvon's shirt. No foreign DNA on Trayvon's sleeves/cuffs.
Zimmerman's shirt and jacket gave chemical indications for presence of blood, and matched Zimmerman's DNA. Trayon's was found as a possible contributor to two of the stains found.
Trayvon's shirts showed evidence of a contact shot.
No gunshot residue on Zimmerman's jacket or shirt.
EMS report at bottom of page: 1 inch laceration to back of Zimmerman's head; abrasion on forehead, capillary bleed from nose. All injuries have minor bleeding. He denied loss of consciousness, back or neck pain.

http://www.axiomamnesia.com/TrayvonMart ... uments.pdf

Taped interviews:

http://axiomamnesia.com/2012/05/18/tray ... ull-audio/

of note :

He knows Zimmerman as an ex-coworker. They worked together 2008/2009. Zimmerman was already employed when the witness began to work there. He says he is Middle Eastern and the work environment was unwelcoming. Zimmerman noticed that other employees didn’t like him, so Zimmerman chose him as a target of bullying to prove himself to other people.

Witness stated that his mentor said that George was good at his job, and had caught on to the work quickly. As such, he told the witness to ask him or George if the witness had any questions. As a practical joke, Zimmerman made the witness perform menial tasks, then embarrassed him in front of other co-workers for complying with his instruction. He says Zimmerman referred to him as a “fucking moron,” and he did comedy skits about him on the job on multiple occasions.

Zimmerman made fun of the witness and his accent, saying lines from “Ahmed the Terrorist“. This went on for days and days. The witness submitted a letter of complaint to the company after making a verbal complaint to the manager about Zimmerman’s behavior.

The witness said that the taunting got so bad that he felt violent thoughts against Zimmerman. George Zimmerman mocked his accent and made reference to terrorism regarding his background. Zimmerman did comedy shows and jokes about Middle Easterners in reference to the witness while on the job. He constantly called the witness a moron and stupid.

The witness feels like Zimmerman was trying to fit in with the clique and targeted him for that reason. Since the witness was the “new guy,” Zimmerman found him an easy target for entertainment. The managers asked if the witness thought Zimmerman was just playing. The management had a talk with Zimmerman and it didn’t do any good.

The witness says that Zimmerman never threatened him with violence, or put his hands on the witness. It was immature behavior, with racial overtones.

The witness says that Zimmerman would have never messed with Trayvon if he was a big guy. He mentioned that their job hired a new guy who had been in the military, and George Never bothered that guy. He says that George Zimmerman was fired because he called the company hotline excessively. He had a history of filing complaints against managers and how things were run in the store. He was making these complaints to Human Resources. After Zimmerman was fired, the managers told him that HR said the guy was nothing but trouble and to get rid of him.

That answers some of the questions I had ... and brings up more.

Funny how some focused on a miniscule trace of marijuana metabolites in Trayvon's urine, but neglected to mention the rest of the reports that seem to be pretty damning to Zimmerman.