Zimmerman is not looking guilty of murder so far. I offer that after frittering away too many hours watching the trial, from the state's opening vulgarity through Barrister Knock-Knock's greeting to the jury to the Hannity interview.
He's being caught in tiny lies of the sort you and I and Mother Theresa would whip out in a flash to lipstick any incident which turned out badly for us, but his core story still (again, so far) stands. Not even the most rabid anti-Zimmerman, errr, analysts on the teevee can make much of the "inconsistencies."
So the prosecution is left with orts for facts and is hoping, I thiink, to dress the table with two fat capons.
(1) The race bird, of course. The accused is whitish. The dead person is blackish. Ergo malicious racial prejudice. The judge did well to keep the term "racial profiling" out of the arguments, but just plain "profiling" is kosher. She couldn't possibly have barred it without being laughed off the bench. And can any jury, even a knock-knock jury, miss the state's intended meaning?
(2) The emo bird. It isn't hard to believe that prosecutors knew they had a rotten evidentiary case and carefully planned days of relative tedium as stage setting for the great close, parental sobs for such a good boy. Anyone -- any parent, anyway -- understands their grief and wishes to his Heaven that it had not occurred. But their anguish and our empathy have nothing to do with the facts of what happened that night in Sanford. I'm looking forward to seeing the legal artistry each side will use to persuade the jury to believe or disbelieve that.
----
Couple of sidebar notes:
--In the Hannity interview Zimmerman said he never heard of the Florida stand-your-ground law. Very hard to believe. I assume the state will get a few points from this. More generally, you and I face some extra work in explaining that the Zimmerman defense has little, if anything, to do with stand-your-ground. It is a traditional self-defense case.
--The medical examiner's testimony that Zimmerman was not hurt all that badly is going to mislead a fair portion of the GED set. They will understand that a victim must reach some sort of injury threshhold before his right to defend himself kicks in. "Okay. Ya gotta let the guy bang your head on concrete at least seven times and break your nose twice. Then ya gotta ask him nicely to stop before ya can shoot him."
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EDIT TO ADD: That didn't take long. Out of the gate the state is introducing Zimmerman's criminal justice course records to demonstrate he studied stand-your-ground. Teevee says those transcripts show him with a 1.5 GPA, and suggests defense may have to mount a stupidity response.
Jul 3, 2013
Jul 1, 2013
Reflections on the maddening science of physics
The motivation: Yet another effort to tourist-proof the dock before the Independence Day invasion.
The method: Double the designed load-bearing capacity via 4x4 piles and 2x6 cross pieces, assembled with carriage bolts.
The hypothesis: An ordinarily adept American male can install said carriage bolts -- slightly underwater -- while lying on his belly, manipulating a 9/16" wrench blindly behind a longitudinal stringer.
Conclusion: Under such conditions "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" becomes quite a challenging notion.
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The method: Double the designed load-bearing capacity via 4x4 piles and 2x6 cross pieces, assembled with carriage bolts.
The hypothesis: An ordinarily adept American male can install said carriage bolts -- slightly underwater -- while lying on his belly, manipulating a 9/16" wrench blindly behind a longitudinal stringer.
Conclusion: Under such conditions "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" becomes quite a challenging notion.
---
Jun 30, 2013
A good judge is hard to find.*
if you're looking for one, try Iowa. A guy here named David Wiggins makes his living as a supreme court justice. He keeps beating our primitives over their little statist heads, making the point that constitutions are written for reasons -- even that Fourth Amendment which makes life so inconvenient for cops.
Last week he let a drunk (but not very, .088) driver go because officers had only a sorehead's anonymous tip to justify stopping him.
"To hold otherwise would cause legitimate concern because such tips would let the police stop persons on anonymous tips that might have been called in for vindictive or harassment purposes or based solely on a hunch or rumor."
Thank you, Your Honor.
If you're interested in a a lucid explanation of some constitutional limits on a cop's authority to invade your privacy, the Wiggins opinion in the case (PDF) is worth a read.
This is the same guy who wrote another Fourth Amendment stunner saying that if police stop you for a piddly reason, they need to be damned careful about searching you in hopes of finding an unrelated offense. Wiggins warned them to shape up or face the liklihood of being required to explicitly tell you, "No, you don't have to let me search you for pot just because your dog got off his leash." This is State vs. Pals.
One other reason to like this guy. He earned the hatred of Rick Santorum hard-shells in Iowa by ruling -- along with all six other justices -- that banning gay marriage violated the Iowa Constitution. Santorum's alter-ego in these parts, Bob Vander Platts, saw a fund-raising opportunity and led a successful drive to oust three of those justices.
Wiggins came up for retention one cycle later, and VDP went after him, too, but blew it. Many folks in the Vander Platts pews had become less excitable, allowing Wiggins to make his case that that the process of constitutional law was far more important than the outcome of any given issue. (As an aside, that was the same approach Bork took before an audience of excitable senators, and don't we wish he, also, had carried the day.)
I'm trying to phone His Ineptness to suggest he appoint our Justice Wiggins to oversee all FISA court cases. So far the call goes straight to presidential voice mail. I'm not really angry, though. According to the news he is up to his ears in trying to give Africa seven billion of our dollars so they can have electricity to charge their iPads, and isn't that just what we elected him to do?
---
*You often get the other kind.
Justice Waterman dissented in this recent case, continuing his pattern of telling Officer Fife, "Whatever Barney Wants, Barney Gets." (The Pals case again.) Unfortunately, he's a long way from his retention vote.
Last week he let a drunk (but not very, .088) driver go because officers had only a sorehead's anonymous tip to justify stopping him.
"To hold otherwise would cause legitimate concern because such tips would let the police stop persons on anonymous tips that might have been called in for vindictive or harassment purposes or based solely on a hunch or rumor."
Thank you, Your Honor.
If you're interested in a a lucid explanation of some constitutional limits on a cop's authority to invade your privacy, the Wiggins opinion in the case (PDF) is worth a read.
This is the same guy who wrote another Fourth Amendment stunner saying that if police stop you for a piddly reason, they need to be damned careful about searching you in hopes of finding an unrelated offense. Wiggins warned them to shape up or face the liklihood of being required to explicitly tell you, "No, you don't have to let me search you for pot just because your dog got off his leash." This is State vs. Pals.
One other reason to like this guy. He earned the hatred of Rick Santorum hard-shells in Iowa by ruling -- along with all six other justices -- that banning gay marriage violated the Iowa Constitution. Santorum's alter-ego in these parts, Bob Vander Platts, saw a fund-raising opportunity and led a successful drive to oust three of those justices.
Wiggins came up for retention one cycle later, and VDP went after him, too, but blew it. Many folks in the Vander Platts pews had become less excitable, allowing Wiggins to make his case that that the process of constitutional law was far more important than the outcome of any given issue. (As an aside, that was the same approach Bork took before an audience of excitable senators, and don't we wish he, also, had carried the day.)
I'm trying to phone His Ineptness to suggest he appoint our Justice Wiggins to oversee all FISA court cases. So far the call goes straight to presidential voice mail. I'm not really angry, though. According to the news he is up to his ears in trying to give Africa seven billion of our dollars so they can have electricity to charge their iPads, and isn't that just what we elected him to do?
---
*You often get the other kind.
Justice Waterman dissented in this recent case, continuing his pattern of telling Officer Fife, "Whatever Barney Wants, Barney Gets." (The Pals case again.) Unfortunately, he's a long way from his retention vote.
Jun 27, 2013
Freedom can be disgusting
Not to brag, but I have a strong stomach. That happens when a fellow has a life history of summer camp food, Navy chow, church basement cuisine, and his own cooking.
So I didn't heave yesterday morning when my electric teevee got its jollies showing Bruce and Reggie swapping spit on the Supreme Court steps because the justices said they could get married.
It was a close-run thing. Moist PDAs between or among anyone make me slightly uncomfortable. Civilized humanity invented doors and drapes for a reason, and I am personally attuned to the notion that the queerer the foreplay, the thicker the curtains required.
Teevee producers disagree, of course, and there is that pesky First Amendment, so we're stuck with living-room sodomy, or preludes thereto. Fast work with the remote control is one palliative.
---
The Court is to be congratulated for yesterday's slapdown of the DOMA and Proposition 8. It moderated political control over personal intimacies among free adult Americans. Liberty won, and the legal-political complex left me free to publish my annoyance that freedom can lead to things I find somewhere between distasteful and repugnant.
,
So I didn't heave yesterday morning when my electric teevee got its jollies showing Bruce and Reggie swapping spit on the Supreme Court steps because the justices said they could get married.
It was a close-run thing. Moist PDAs between or among anyone make me slightly uncomfortable. Civilized humanity invented doors and drapes for a reason, and I am personally attuned to the notion that the queerer the foreplay, the thicker the curtains required.
Teevee producers disagree, of course, and there is that pesky First Amendment, so we're stuck with living-room sodomy, or preludes thereto. Fast work with the remote control is one palliative.
---
The Court is to be congratulated for yesterday's slapdown of the DOMA and Proposition 8. It moderated political control over personal intimacies among free adult Americans. Liberty won, and the legal-political complex left me free to publish my annoyance that freedom can lead to things I find somewhere between distasteful and repugnant.
,
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