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Mak, this is bizarre - have you listened to the tapes??? Zimmerman says "these a holes always get away!" just before you hear him start to breath heavily - as if running. I don't think it's unfair to take his own words as evidence of what he was doing.
De Selby -
You are making the ASSUMPTION that his breathing heavily means he was running after Mr. Martin. What if Zimmerman's comment about them, "always getting away," meant that Zimmerman had lost him, and was jogging back to his car?
Your damning of Mr. Zimmerman comes solely from conjecture and assumption. WE DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. You have your interpretation of the tapes. That is all the "evidence" you have. Right now, the only FACTS we have are that Zimmerman was following Martin. Zimmerman at some point was injured (head laceration). And Martin was shot.
Beyond that it is merely speculation, and as an attorney, you should know just how much weight speculation carries in a court of law.
No one here is saying this was a good shoot. Zimmerman made several mistakes. The first of which was getting out of his car to confront Martin. No one is defending Zimmerman's mistakes. In fact, I think the only thing here that everyone agrees on is that his decision to confront Martin was really, really STUPID.
What we are saying is that until he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of his peers, he is innocent. Is he smart? Not at all. Did he make good decisions? Absolutely not. Can we use him as a poster boy for bad decision making? You bet.
Did he commit a crime? WE DON'T KNOW YET.
NO ONE here is saying this is a totally good shoot that we can stand behind. But until we have more evidence (not conjecture, or speculation, or assumption), we simply cannot say one way or the other.