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Jogging in Georgia while black.

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Darat said:
I’m for a lawful society in which we don’t have summary execution of citizens with no judicial oversight. By all means continue to argue for your lawless society, hopefully you will never have the success you dream of.
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I suspect that in Skeptic Tank's vision of an ideal society, stuff like due process and presumption of innocence until guilt is proven apply only to white people.
 
Craig4 said:
Perhaps but I suspect his end will be connected to his murdering of Martin. There are lots of ways to destroy someone.
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If When Zimmerman is 'destroyed' it will be by his own acts.

The only question is why it has been taking so long. I expected him to have gotten himself behind bars (or worse) a while ago.

The only question is how many more people will be hurt by his behavior before he does.
 
I was reading a news story, a couple of days ago, about a completely unrelated case and found myself nodding in agreement with what had happened, and then I realized that it had certain parallels with this case that made me very uncomfortable.

In the case of the McMichaels, I have said that the crime was in threatening the jogger. Having done so, the jogger was entitled to self defense, which, in this case, meant that the jogger, Arbery, grabbed Travis McMichael's gun. The fact that McMichael was in danger at that moment is not a valid legal defense, because he had placed himself in that danger by threatening Arbery.



I'm going to have to be slightly coy about the story I read yesterday in order to not poison the well against one of the participants, but the story had a lot of similarities. A man was seen committing a crime. It was not a crime that put anyone in any danger of death or injury. (i.e, there was no element of self defense involved with regards to the suspect.) Two people, having seen the man, grabbed guns, and chased him. Guns were drawn and pointed at the fleeing criminal. One of the people chasing the man got very close, and the fleeing suspect turned and grabbed the gun. While the two struggled for control of the gun, the second person who had been chasing the fleeing suspect fired multiple shots at and hit the suspect. He did not die, but was taken to a hospital in critical condition.

I found myself thinking very positively about the two gun weilding chasers, but then I thought of the incident that sparked this thread, and started asking myself what was so different. Was it only that I started out with an opinion of the McMichaels as Georgia racist rednecks, or was there something truly different?

So, let's get to one obvious difference. In the story I read yesterday, the two people chasing the suspect actually saw the man committing a crime. In the case of the McMichaels, they merely suspected Arbery had committed a crime. (Trespassing, while technically a crime, is really not worth calling a crime, and would never be prosecuted under the circumstance. They suspected Arbery was a thief, not just a trespasser.)

Other than that, there's a lot of similarity. In both cases, the people chasing the suspect were attempting to effect a citizen's arrest. The suspect fled, but when cornered attempted to take the gun from the chaser, and ended up getting shot himself.

It has all of the elements that I said made the McMichaels guilty. The biggest difference was that they were actually witnesses to an actual crime, instead of just believing that they had caught a criminal, but without evidence. Despite that, I found myself thinking that the people from yesterday's story had done a good deed.

No mention of anyone's race was made in the story.

Ok....the rest of the story.

As I said, I didn't want to poison the well. The crime which the man committed was voyeurism and exhibitionism. He was peeping into the window of a 10 year old girl's room, and masturbating. The people chasing him were the girl's parents. The parents did not set out to kill the man, or even shoot him, but they were trying to arrest him so the cops could pick him up. The woman was the one who got close. The criminal grabbed her gun, and the husband shot the guy.

Now, no jury in the world would convict them. An awful lot of people think it would have been ok if they had just plain shot him without ever trying to apprehend him.

Knowing that he is a super-creepy pedophile, we instantly turn against him, but at its heart, here is the same story. If you ask me in advance, I would say use a camera, not a gun. I wouldn't want private citizens going around and pointing guns at people, even if they think those people are criminals. All the arguments I made in the Arbery case would apply in this case as well.

And yet, I feel like the parents in this story did the right thing. Is it just that I actually believe in the guilt of the man they shot, while I don't believe in Arbery's guilt? If the McMichaels had actually caught Arbery stealing, would their actions have been ok? It just made me think about my reaction to the Arbery case versus this one. Is the difference in my reaction just based on a sympathetic view of the people who pulled the guns?
 
Really?

******* really?

"Well IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SET OF EVENTS a totally different person committed a crime, so isn't the black guy getting shotgunned down in the street sort of okay?"

**** that. **** that so much.

And **** "sHOw mE wheRE anYEONe is SAYing ThAT!" even harder.
 
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