Which has to be earthshakingly important in the grand scheme of things, right?
*The jury had no choice but to acquit Zimmerman given the judge's instructions.
Sure. But which? She said to ignore things--not that the jury had to. But she said what was pretty much required. Nobody knew who threw the first punch, but in any event it didn't matter because of the claims and evidence made in court. No problem there.
* The jury had no choice but to acquit Zimmerman given the content of the Stand Your Ground law.
Well, it certainly did. In fact, it acquitted Zimmerman without the SYG law. The SYG law wasn't an issue one way or the other, and this was a simple self-defense defense. People who say this was a case of SYG or has much of any bearing on SYG are either not paying attention, don't understand what they hear and read, or don't care.
* The jury had no choice but to acquit Zimmerman because the prosecution overreached by asking for 2nd degree murder instead of manslaughter.
The insturctions were clear. If you don't find 2nd murder, you can consider manslaughter. They apparently did. However, if you want to defend against a 2nd degree murder charge and claim self defense, you do the same things as if faced with a manslaughter charge. And if you're challenged with a self-defense claim, you have the exact same burden of proof, whether other parts of the case push for 2nd degree murder or just manslaughter.
If you argue for 2nd degree murder, you're essentially proving manslaughter plus.
* The jury had no choice but to acquit Zimmerman because the prosecution didn't make a good enough case.
And that's where we're left. Yeah, we could assume that because they're racists they acquitted GZ, but we then have to argue that we know they're racist because they acquitted GZ. Round and around we go.
It's possible that the system is broken, but could mean a lot of things. What it boils down to is that the prosecution couldn't prove that a reasonable person wouldn't be in fear of his life and use reasonble force if he were in GZ's position--nor that GZ had a chance to run. GZ's position wasn't at issue in the trial. There was no real discussion of his injuries, for good or for bad. What evidence there was showed that TM was on top and did something, but nobody is going to reasonably argue that he was there before he saw GZ trip and was straddling him so he could tend to his injuries . Was he culpable? Not a necessary question, and both "yes" and "no" are possible answers given what I've seen.
Should the burden of proof be switched? If you can't prove that it was self defense, even if there were no witnesses, then it has to be intentional? That could go horribly wrong--and throws the benefit of the doubt not to the defendent but to the dead person, the non-witness.
Should it be that if you throw the first punch then it's open season and you have no right to defend yourself? Strikes me a squirrelly.
As for civil rights charges, if the context that was available to GZ before that night were read, it would be obvious that they just can't fly.
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