I offered some opinions on the Zimmerman case in response to a post on Brad DeLong’s blog the other day.  My comments were essentially a shorter version of the arguments I offered the other night.  I received some pushback.  For example:

It is a leap, to put it mildly, to assume that [Martin] was running in response to being chased by a stranger, AND that that stranger initiated the violent confrontation.

I disagreed on the first point:

Alternative explanations being Klansmen out for an evening stroll or a pack of wild dogs roaming the area perhaps?

Zimmerman reported to the dispatcher that Martin was running. He also reported that he was following Martin. Can one conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Martin was running from Zimmerman? Absent any other plausible explanations – and I have yet to hear one – I say “Yes.”

Recall yourself as a 17-year-old teenager.  If you were confronted by George Zimmerman while walking home from the store at 3 AM would you run?  I would have.  (That’s a trick question actually.  The only correct answer is to flee.  If you’d have responded to the effect of “Outta my face, m@#$%f*&^#r!” and been sufficiently intimidating in doing so then by FL law he could well have been within his rights to shoot you dead on the spot.  Then again, if he was sufficiently intimidating when he addressed you then you could have shot him first – if you’d had a gun of course.)  I also disagreed on the point about who threw the first punch:

Who threw the first punch is beside the point. If Zimmerman was pursuing Martin then it was Martin, not Zimmerman, who could reasonably claim self-defense.

The pushback continued:

To argue that the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that [Zimmerman] “killed [Martin] because he wanted to” kill him is not supported by any hard evidence.

My response:

Again, not the point. Martin is dead as a result of actions initiated by Zimmerman. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether that’s manslaughter, second-degree murder, or other charge is appropriate. Whatever the charge, Zimmerman was responsible for Martin’s death. In a more just world he would have been punished for it.

Those last two sentences capture my motivation for this post and my previous one on the subject.

Something that puzzles me about the whole case – perhaps because I haven’t paid particular attention to it until the past week or so – is that it doesn’t appear to have been suggested that Martin was acting in self-defense when he was banging Zimmerman’s head into the pavement. Why not? One of the first questions one should ask about a case like this is “Who was the aggressor?”

I infer that Zimmerman was the aggressor both from his statements and from fragments of legal evidence I pick up from listening to the news and reading other sources.  For example, I look at a map of the crime scene and, to my eye, it looks pretty incriminating for Zimmerman.  A Google search led me to this map here.  The map begs some questions:  For example, how is it that Zimmerman initially observed Martin at Location #2 and then Martin ended up dead at Location #7?  What can we infer about what happened between #2 and #7 from the facts available?  First off, if Martin died at #2 or maybe even #3 I could buy that Zimmerman acted in self-defense.  But how does Martin go from being alive at #2 to dead at #7 if he was the aggressor?  (That’s a substantial distance from #2 to #7.)  If Martin was chasing Zimmerman that could account for it.  However, Zimmerman reported to the dispatcher that he was following Martin, not the other way around. That being the case the only plausible explanation for the paths indicated on map is that Zimmerman was pursuing Martin for much of the time.  What’s the significance of Zimmerman pursuing Martin?  From reviewing FL legal code I conclude that pursuing Martin constituted Simple Assault. Simple Assault is unlawful, ergo Zimmerman was not within his rights to use force.

The preceding paragraphs describe how I make sense of the data available to me.  How the legal system processes the data is a different story.  (There’s also information of which I’m unaware.  Perhaps that makes a difference.  Obviously if I’m not aware of it I don’t know.)  If the prosecutor couldn’t prove Simple Assault or a comparable charge then Zimmerman was probably at liberty to shoot Martin and my hypothetical case against him falls apart.  They should have at least made the argument that it was Martin not Zimmerman who was acting in self-defense.

Further reading:

• Ryan Grim, The 6 Decisions That Could Have Saved Travon Martin’s Life (There’s some overlap with my arguments above.)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, How Stand Your Ground Relates To George Zimmerman