tlcya
Old and Re-Tired Websleuth
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- Oct 28, 2009
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Thanks, someone needed to try and explain that. Just because a person claims that a shooting is in self defense does not make it a fact, not even in Florida. In many and I hope MOST jurisdictions things would have gone very very differently and nobody would be even discussing "Stand your ground"
In normal circumstances when the police roll up on a scene where one person is dead, and the other admits to being the shooter several things happen that simply did not happen here. The police take pictures and document any injuries that the shooter has, they take a statement, they interview neighbors, they collect evidence, the cell phone, they find out about the 911 calls. They have drug and alcohol tests done on both the shooter and the deceased. They look at the totality of the circumstances and turn all the actual evidence they have over to the Prosecutors office.
What they don't do is hear the shooter say it was self defense, and shrug and say OK and send him on his way. They don't NOT ask questions, document evidence, they don't simply NOT bother to try and discover if this was truly self defense....and in this case that will bite them on the butt hard, because there is ample if not an over abundance of actual evidence that shows that this was anything BUT self defense....stand your ground is NOT going to be Zimmermans get out of jail free card because the evidence show quite plainly that he was NOT defending himself.
Just because he says it does not make it so.
BBM Agreed. It does not. But the fact that LE never even bothered to take GZ to the station, question him more closely to try to determine if he was telling the truth with his cockamamie self defense story, indicates that LE is interpreting the law incorrectly and applying it to GZ. That makes the stand your ground law have everything to do with this case IMO. Not because it actually applies, but because it has already been applied in error.