Why George Zimmerman Keeps Getting Away With It

Law enforcement just dropped assault charges against George Zimmerman, who allegedly threw a wine bottle at his girlfriend two weeks ago. According to the Associated Press, Zimmerman’s girlfriendrecanted her statement, continuing a cycle of accusations against Zimmerman followed by recantations that are typical of domestic violence cases.

Darren Wilson And George Zimmerman Described Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin The Same Way

Following the explosive announcement of the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson, documents released to the public reveal for the first time a first-hand account of the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Wilson, who shot the unarmed Brown a total of 12 times, told a grand jury that the high schooler immediately provoked a violent confrontation.

Fuck George Zimmerman and the Culture He Rode In On

For the rest of my life, there won’t be a February that goes by where I won’t reflect on the life of Trayvon Martin and how he went from a boy to a martyr to a symbol of a movement. Trayvon’s death is a painful reminder of the way white supremacy lords over black life in the United States.

And it’s only getting worse.

From CNN:

Let’s get ready to … mumble. As in, what now, George Zimmerman? Seems like the former neighborhood watchman has found yet another way to remain in the public limelight. This time, he’ll be stepping into a boxing ring to fight rapper DMX….

“Prior to the incident, I was actually going to the gym for weight loss and doing boxing-type training for weight loss,” he told Radar. “A mutual friend put me in contact with Damon and provided me with an opportunity and motivation to get back in shape and continue with my weight loss goals and also be able to help a charity out.” Damon is Damon Feldman, owner of Celebrity Boxing and self-described opportunist, whose claim to fame is putting together bizarre matchups. Think Tonya Harding, Michael Lohan. He said last week that he was accepting offers for someone to step into the ring for a three-round, pay-per-view fight with Zimmerman….

George Zimmerman's Estranged Wife: He's 'Like A Ticking Time Bomb'

George Zimmerman's estranged wife says the infamous neighborhood watch guard is now acting "like a monster."

In an interview with Katie Couric, Shellie Zimmerman described how she hopes there are "no more casualties" caused by her husband's erratic behavior. She also remembers how the couple was very much in love when they first married.

"We were great friends and I thought he was a wonderful person -- that's why I married him," she said Thursday on "Katie."

George Zimmerman’s Way Is the American Way

Not long after George Zimmerman was charged with killing Trayvon Martin, his wife, Shellie, called him in jail with an update on the money flooding into his PayPal account.

“After this is all over,” Shellie later told him, “you’re going to be able to just have a great life.”

Steve Bracknell, Lake Mary Police Chief, Walks Back George Zimmerman Comments: Report

Lake Mary, Fla., police chief Steve Bracknell has distanced himself from comments he made in a response to an email from a town resident who was upset that George Zimmerman has not been charged with any crimes following an altercation Monday with his estranged wife and her father.

In a Sept. 10 response to Lake Mary resident Santiago Rodriguez's strongly-worded emails, which called Zimmerman "a ticking time bomb... [and] a Sandy Hook [or] Aurora waiting to happen," Bracknell initially replied "I agree." On Thursday, WTSP reported that the chief walked back his comments about Zimmerman.

George Zimmerman's Biggest Defender: A Racist With a Criminal Past

In April 2012, two days before George Zimmerman was arrested for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he huddled with a fellow neighborhood watch volunteer, Frank Taaffe. According to Taaffe, who disclosed the meeting on Fox News, Zimmerman asked him to share "several talking points" with the media. Taaffe obliged. Indeed, as Zimmerman's legal drama unfolded over the next year and a half, Taaffe emerged as his most visible and outspoken defender. He gave hundreds of interviews to media outlets, ranging from the New York Times to Fox News to CNN, and made near-daily appearances on cable news shows during Zimmerman's trial.

Actually, Stand Your Ground Played a Major Role in the Trayvon Martin Case

Since George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, conservatives have argued that Stand Your Ground, Florida's expansive and controversial self-defense law, was irrelevant to the case. After all, Zimmerman waived his right to a pre-trial hearing that might have granted him immunity under the statute and his defense team chose not to raise it during the trial. Case closed, right?

Race, Law and the Zimmerman Verdict

Thousands have marched, hundreds of thousands have signed petitions, millions have expressed their frustration, grief and outrage at the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, last year. From New York to Los Angeles, protesters flooded the streets on July 14, chants of “No justice, no peace!” ringing through the night.

“No justice” is what many see as the outcome of a trial that would not even have occurred had authorities not been shamed by a similar public outcry into charging Zimmerman. Trayvon Martin’s death struck a nerve for reasons that went far beyond its immediate circumstances, and the not-guilty verdict reaffirms the sense that the whole justice system—from police to prisons—not only fails to protect people of color, but classifies them as criminals by default, even when they are the victims of a violent crime.

Petition Calls For George Zimmerman's Concealed Carry License To Be Revoked

More than 10,000 people have signed a petition calling on Florida officials to revoke the concealed carry permit of George Zimmerman, the man recently acquitted in the 2012 killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

The petition, hosted at Causes.com, suggests that Zimmerman's background makes him unfit to carry a concealed weapon.

    George Zimmerman is a dangerous, violent person. He has been accused of assaulting three people in addition to killing Trayvon Martin. He has even been arrested for assaulting a police officer! George Zimmerman should NOT be licensed to carry a weapon. One innocent person has already died at his hands. It is your job to not let another person be in danger!

The Facts in the Zimmerman Trial

Here’s a hypothetical about the George Zimmerman trial. Imagine that all the evidence is unchanged, with one exception. Suppose there was a dog walker who came upon Zimmerman’s confrontation with Trayvon Martin, saw the whole thing, and testified before the jury. Who threw the first punch? Who was the aggressor? Which one of the two shouted for help? Presumably, all those mysteries would be solved. The facts wouldn’t change, but our understanding of them might be entirely different.

Travon Martin Protest California: Angry Over George Zimmerman Verdict, Demonstrators Raid Wal-Mart And Block Freeway

LOS ANGELES — After a spate of vandalism and violence, Los Angeles police vowed Tuesday to crack down with quick action and arrests if further disturbances arise from street protests over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of a black Florida teenager.

Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti, who took office barely two weeks ago, said peaceful protests are welcome but violence won't be tolerated. Beck vowed that anyone committing violence will be arrested.

After the Verdict: The Zimmerman Non-Riots

At some point in the saga of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, it became a truism in certain quarters that a not-guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial would be greeted by fire, chaos, and mob violence. This idea has apparently survived the almost completely peaceful protests over the verdict that took place this weekend: on Monday, Newt Gingrich—a man who has taught history in the state of Georgia—remarked on CNN that those in the crowds were “prepared, basically, to be a lynch mob.” The faulty narrative of impending doom has yielded to an equally inaccurate story of doom narrowly averted.

Justice Department To Review George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin Case

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department says it is looking into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin to determine whether federal prosecutors should file criminal civil rights charges now that George Zimmerman has been acquitted in the state case.

The department opened an investigation into Martin's death last year but stepped aside to allow the state prosecution to proceed.

In a statement Sunday, the Justice Department said the criminal section of the civil rights division, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office for the Middle District of Florida are continuing to evaluate the evidence generated during the federal probe, in addition to the evidence and testimony from the state trial.

The statement said that, in the government's words, "experienced federal prosecutors will determine whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation."

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Author: AP

White Supremacy Acquits George Zimmerman

A jury has found George Zimmerman not guilty of all charges in connection to death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. But while the verdict came as a surprise to some people, it makes perfect sense to others. This verdict is a crystal-clear illustration of the way white supremacy operates in America.

Throughout the trial, the media repeatedly referred to an “all-woman jury” in that Seminole County courtroom, adding that most of them were mothers. That is true—but so is that five of the six jurors were white, and that is profoundly significant for cases like this one. We also know that the lone juror of color was seen apparently wiping a tear during the prosecution’s rebuttal yesterday. But that tear didn’t ultimately convince her or the white people on that jury that Zimmerman was guilty of anything. Not guilty. Not after stalking, shooting and killing a black child, a child that the defense insultingly argued was “armed with concrete.”

George Zimmerman, Not Guilty: Blood on the Leaves

The not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial came down moments after I left a screening of “Fruitvale Station,” a film about the police-shooting death of Oscar Grant four years ago in Oakland. Much of the audience sat quietly sobbing as the closing credits rolled, moved by the narrative of a young black man, unarmed and senselessly gone. Words were not needed to express a common understanding: to Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old he shot, fit the description; for black America, the circumstances of his death did.

The familiarity dulled the sharp edges of the tragedy. The decision the six jurors reached on Saturday evening will inspire anger, frustration, and despair, but little surprise, and this is the most deeply saddening aspect of the entire affair. From the outset— throughout the forty-four days it took for there to be an arrest, and then in the sixteen months it took to for the case to come to trial—there was a nagging suspicion that it would culminate in disappointment. Call this historical profiling.

What the Zimmerman Trial Was About

A three-week long legal spectacle involving life-size human cutouts, a block of concrete, a forensic dummy, and a poorly considered knock-knock joke can be distilled down to two statements from the trial’s closing arguments: the prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda telling the jury that Trayvon Martin was dead because Zimmerman had profiled him as a criminal, and Mark O’Mara, one of George Zimmerman’s defense attorneys, saying that Trayvon Martin, unfortunately, fit the description of people arrested for burglaries in the retreat at Twin Lakes. The State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman is about many things: what constitutes self-defense, the echoing consequences of an increasingly armed public, the enduring and toxic way that race stains the most basic interactions. But, most fundamentally, it’s about what we’ve decided to do with our fear.

Zimmerman Verdict: Why Is the Right Worried About Race Riots?

As George Zimmerman's much-watched trial winds down, speculation has whipped up in the conservative media and elsewhere about how people—that is, black people—will react if the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin is acquitted. The implication is that if Zimmerman goes free, this racial powder keg of a case could explode into riots.

Ever since Zimmerman shot the unarmed teenager last year after a scuffle in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, the case has been racially fraught. Supporters of the Martin family portrayed Travyon's death as a clear incident of racial profiling and questioned the actions of the Sanford Police Department, which was criticized for initially dismissing the incident as a self-defense case and declining to arrest Zimmerman until more than a month after the shooting. Many on the right, by contrast, have cast Zimmerman as a poster child for Second Amendment rights and a victim of the liberal media.

5 "Stand Your Ground" Cases You Should Know About

The Stand Your Ground law is most widely associated with the February 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain who claimed he was acting in self-defense.

But as a recent Tampa Bay Times investigation indicates, the Martin incident is far from the only example of the law's reach in Florida. The paper identified nearly 200 instances since 2005 where the state's Stand Your Ground law has played a factor in prosecutors' decisions, jury acquittals, or a judge's call to throw out the charges. (Not all the cases involved killings. Some involved assaults where the person didn't die.)

George Zimmerman's 'Cozy' Relationship With Sanford Police Questioned

Neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman had a relationship with members of the police department in Sanford, Fla., long before he shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin to death in February, newly released information suggests.

During a community forum on Jan. 8, 2011, more than a year before Martin was killed, Zimmerman, then a criminal justice student, told city officials he had ridden along with Sanford police officers on patrol. Zimmerman blasted Sanford police as lazy and criticized outgoing Police Chief Brian Tooley, who was forced from office in a scandal involving the son of an officer caught on tape beating a homeless black man.

“I would just like to state that the law is written in black and white, it can not be enforced by those who are in the thin blue line,” Zimmerman told an audience that included newly elected Mayor Jeff Triplett, according to an audio recording published by the Miami Herald. Zimmerman said he saw firsthand how bad Sanford police could be during his ride-alongs.