Some kind of "activists" are protesting near Florida Governor Rick Scott's office because he's not calling a special session of the state legislature to revamp the state's self-defense laws.
Knock it off. Zimmerman and his legal team didn't even employ stand-your-ground as the basis for their defense.
Disarm America. Turn it into a nation of neutered cattle, totally dependent on the state. That is the goal of the left-of-center among us.
This article below appears in this morning's Tallahassee Democrat, setting us straight on your contention that Stand Your Ground was not part of the trial. BTW, Scott met with protesters and said he agreed with Stand Your Ground and suggested, get this, a Day of Prayer. Look for things to heat up in the Capitol City this week-end as the protesters still will not leave. I am currently "out of Dodge" back home here in Indiana, but am well-acquainted with this venue and will be watching closely.
ReplyDeleteDon’t deny role of controversial law
ReplyDeleteStand Your Ground was indeed part of trial
Can we get this straight, at least, and agree on the terms of the debate?
The Florida Legislature’s 2005 Stand Your Ground law was definitively and explicitly a part of George Zimmerman’s trial and verdict.
This despite the protestations to the contrary made by the sponsors of the bill and Gov. Rick Scott. It is simply not true that Zimmerman’s trial did not involve Stand Your Ground. This is not open to interpretation. It is not shaded.
In 2005, the Florida Legislature passed SB 436, entitled Relating to Protection of Persons/ Use of Force, popularly known as Stand Your Ground. The bill passed the Senate 39-0 on March 23. The House passed it 94-20 on April 5. Gov. Jeb Bush signed the bill into law on April 26, 2005.
As satirist James Thurber’s short story says, minus the ironic sarcasm, You could look it up.
Here is Section 1, paragraph 3 of of 776.013 in Florida Statutes, as created by SB 436. The words that follow were not in Florida Statutes before Oct. 1, 2005, when the law became effective: “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force 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.”
Did Florida have self-defense provisions in law previous to passage of SB 436? Most certainly. It’s also true that SB 436 expanded those provisions explicitly. Lawmakers knew that it would do so. It was a specific point of debate in committee and on the floor of both chambers.
Here is a paragraph from page 12 of the 27 pages of instructions provided by Circuit Court Judge Debra Nelson to the six women who served on Zimmerman’s jury: “If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
Stand Your Ground was a part of the Zimmerman trial. My insistence on this point is not some straw-man argument against Facebook whack jobs and blithering cable news talking heads.
“It is also important to note that Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was not argued in the Zimmerman case,” Scott wrote in a July 17 letter to Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP.
“This is not relevant to the law we passed,” said former state Sen. Durell Peaden, sponsor of SB 436, on Tuesday.
State Rep. Dennis Baxley, the House sponsor of the Stand Your Ground bill, appeared on CNN Wednesday and insisted Stand Your Ground was not a factor in the Zimmerman verdict. I invite you to read again the passage from Florida law enacted by SB 436 and the Zimmerman jury instructions. It is disingenuous at best to suggest otherwise. If you think otherwise, or wish to assert otherwise, there is no room for further discussion. If you’ll grant this incontrovertible fact, we can go from there.
Scott’s statement could be parsed, but not legitimately. Another part of SB 436 created the right to a Stand Your Ground immunity hearing. In fact, Zimmerman and his attorneys did not assert that right. But that does not mean the verdict had nothing to do with Stand Your Ground.
Peaden said he did not contemplate “vigilante” scenarios when he sponsored the bill. Peaden, a retired physician who also graduated from law school, said the expansive application of Stand Your Ground is the product of wily defense attorneys. (continued below)
Continued from above
ReplyDelete“Lawyers have certainly extended the benefits of what was said in words … to protect their clients,” Peaden said. “That’s what defense attorneys are. If I had a defense attorney, that’s what I’d expect them to do.”
None of that supports the idea that Stand Your Ground was not a part of the Zimmerman verdict.
One of the six women on the jury, Juror B37, told Anderson Cooper on CNN that Stand Your Ground was a part of deliberations.
“We had the second-degree murder charge, the manslaughter charge, then we had self-defense, Stand Your Ground,” the juror said.
Scott, Baxley and Peaden are perfectly free to support and defend Stand Your Ground. Scott is free to decline to call a special session of the Legislature. The Republicancontrolled House and Senate are well within their rights to deny a single committee hearing to Stand Your Ground repealer bills, as they did earlier this year.
They, and others, however, should not, can not, avoid a debate by denying that the Zimmerman verdict had anything to do with Stand Your Ground.
That’s just not true.
Paul Flemming is the Democrat ’s politics and policy editor. Contact him at pflemming@tallahassee.com.
State Sen. Durell Peaden, a retired physician who also graduated from law school, said the expansive application of Stand Your Ground is the product of wily defense attorneys.
Lot of interpretation going on in their argument.
ReplyDeleteIt is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.--Paul Ricoeur (In 1999 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy "For his capacity in bringing together all the most important themes and indications of 20th century philosophy, and re-elaborating them into an original synthesis which turns language - in particular, that which is poetic and metaphoric - into a chosen place revealing a reality that we cannot manipulate, but interpret in diverse ways, and yet all coherent. Through the use of metaphor, language draws upon that truth which makes of us that what we are, deep in the profundity of our own essence".
ReplyDelete