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Post by
gamerunknown
presumed innocent until proven guilty
Note: this has always been a requirement for the courts (jury and other members), not on the public or media. We are permitted to speculate as much as we want, it is up to the jury and judge not to be swayed by anything other than the arguments and evidence presented by the prosecution and defence.
Post by
Dragalthor
presumed innocent until proven guilty
Note: this has always been a requirement for the courts (jury and other members), not on the public or media. We are permitted to speculate as much as we want, it is up to the jury and judge not to be swayed by anything other than the arguments and evidence presented by the prosecution and defence.
However, here in the UK, the press can be held in contempt of court, in itself a crime, if they publish anything that might jeopardize a fair trial,
Wiki
. I believe that due to the First Amendment this isn't the case in the US though I wonder how big a difference it would make to just how media outlets portray cases like this if they could be charged for contempt by a court.
Post by
MyTie
We are permitted to speculate as much as we wantMy point has never been the legality of speculation, but the ethics of it. It shouldn't be done. it is up to the jury and judge not to be swayed by anything other than the arguments and evidence presented by the prosecution and defence.This isn't based in reality.
I haven't really gotten involved in the whole "it was race related" argument
That is the only part of this case that really matters. If Martin were white, you never would have heard of him. He'd be just another statistic. Since this crime is against someone BLACK, then it's perceived by society as racist. It's as if I'm living in a cartoon world.
Post by
gamerunknown
Not true, I heard about the murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian.
Also, it's part of voir dire I think.
Strong prejudices
. Seems backed up
here
.
Post by
MyTie
Not true, I heard about the murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian.
Also, it's part of voir dire I think.
Strong prejudices
. Seems backed up
here
.
I'm not saying that you've never heard of a white person being murdered, but that the media frenzy attributed to this case is due to the racism element.
Post by
134377
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
That law doesn't apply to this case, and isn't being used in this case as a defense by his lawyer. Look at
this image
, a protest about the case, read that article, and tell me that the outrage is more about the law than it is about racism. The writer even brings up slavery. Please.
Post by
134377
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Dragalthor
That law doesn't apply to this case, and isn't being used in this case as a defense by his lawyer. Look at
this image
, a protest about the case, read that article, and tell me that the outrage is more about the law than it is about racism. The writer even brings up slavery. Please.
I am having trouble understanding this. If this particular law wasn't being used as a defence at any time throughout this process why was he not arrested at the time when this happened. From all that I have read or heard about the case so far, the police at the time knew that there was a young man who had been shot and killed and they knew the person that had shot and killed him.
Post by
865056
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
That law doesn't apply to this case, and isn't being used in this case as a defense by his lawyer. Look at
this image
, a protest about the case, read that article, and tell me that the outrage is more about the law than it is about racism. The writer even brings up slavery. Please.
I am having trouble understanding this. If this particular law wasn't being used as a defence at any time throughout this process why was he not arrested at the time when this happened. From all that I have read or heard about the case so far, the police at the time knew that there was a young man who had been shot and killed and they knew the person that had shot and killed him.
Because he claimed self defense.Later I'll come up with more statistics about black/white crime. In the US, a white is more likely to be murdered by a black than vice versa, by a large margin.
You haven't posted any of those statistics yet but I have some
the FBI
.
According to this, 13.4% of white people that get murdered are by black people. 8% of murdered black people are murdered by white people.
I don't consider a difference of 5.4 large. However, the numbers are small enough to manipulate and say that a white person is 60% more likely to be killed by a black man than a black man to be killed by a white man.
Thanks for doing that for me.I read the article, and the signs that the two lads are holding up in the image seem inoffensive to me. People with brown skin have had, and still have, injustice and inequality. The article is focusing more on law, and freedom than race. As for the writer "bringing up slavery", it was a quotation from a former slave, Frederick Douglass, who should be eminently qualified to speak on the subject. As to his statement "Power concedes nothing without a demand", I fully agree. History agrees too.I don't see nor agree with the supposition that blacks or as you say "people with brown skin" have injustice and inequality as a standard. Nor do I agree that that is the case here. I dismiss the automatic victimization.Whether folks want to admit it or not, this has always been the story of African-Americans. Go through history and you will find many examples of cases not being investigated or, if they were brought to trial, prosecuted or judged atrociously: Scottsboro Boys. Clarence Brandley. Lenell Geter. Medgar Evers. The Sixteeenth Street Baptist Church bombing.
Justice is supposed to be blind, but for African-Americans, it has commonly been deaf, dumb and blindThe idea that being African-American means you don't get justice is incorrect. It may happen that African-Americans don't get justice at times, but it isn't some sort of automatic thing, nor do I see any indication that is the case here.
Post by
gamerunknown
We have to look at things on a case by case basis, but black criminals do
receive longer sentences
than white criminals.
Post by
MyTie
We have to look at things on a case by case basis, but black criminals do
receive longer sentences
than white criminals.
It says that black males in particular are charged with more severely sentenced crimes than white males. It doesn't say that this is due to injustice, nor should we automatically assume that. Black males are much more prone to violent crime than white males are. That is just a statistical fact. I cannot offer causation. That has been speculated by the best and brightest, but never conclusively defined. To say that the justice system and racism is to blame is an assumption.
Here
is a wiki article that gives plenty of statistics on the matter. The one line out of that article that I think is the greatest argument against the assumption of racism is the one I have bolded: As noted above, scholars acknowledge that some racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, are disproportionately represented in the arrest and victimization reports which are used to compile crime rate statistics in the United States. The data from 2008 reveals that, though White Americans constituted the vast majority of total arrests made, African Americans were disproportionately represented in all forms of violent crime and property crime, as well as in the three measured forms of white-collar crime, with the average rates of representation 2 to 3 times higher than African American representation in the general population.
Such disparities become greater if calculating crimes per person for different races since overrepresentation for one group also means underrepresentation for other groups.
The issue of disproportional minority representation in crime rate statistics has thus become a source of debate and controversy. If I am reading that correctly, it is indicating that not taking per capita criminal into account, but per capita crime into account, shows a greater disparity in race crime. I think that is important. It shows that the same black people are getting arrested over and over. If racism were the sole blame in this, then it seems to me that the additional arrests would be spread more evenly over the blacks. The skin tone, while it may be a target at times, is not the only target of these individuals, but rather, something else about these particular people, within the black community. Therefore, I don't believe that the black community is being targeted, but rather I believe (and I could be wrong) that the black american culture is more likely to produce an individual predisposed to crime. Add in actual cases of racism, and we have the situation we are in.
Post by
gamerunknown
It shows that the same black people are getting arrested over and over
The study corrects for recidivism. So, what you're arguing is apparently that we shouldn't take things on a case by case basis, but we should note that "black males are much more prone to violent crime than white males are" in order to come to our conclusions. Presumably that's what the judges of the cases did. So why can't that be attributable to racism?
Post by
Dragalthor
Looking at a brief précis of the
Florida self defence laws
(particularly point 2 of the summary;
The amount of force that you use to defend yourself must not be excessive under the circumstances
). The argument of self defence doesn't hold up in this case for when the police arrived at the scene either.
Post by
MyTie
It shows that the same black people are getting arrested over and over
The study corrects for recidivism. So, what you're arguing is apparently that we shouldn't take things on a case by case basis, but we should note that "black males are much more prone to violent crime than white males are" in order to come to our conclusions. Presumably that's what the judges of the cases did. So why can't that be attributable to racism?
I'm not saying that the fact that "black males are much more prone to violent crime than white males are" should be used to set judicial precedent. That's not what I'm trying to show. I'm just showing that logically, if racism were the CAUSE of the disparity, then the crime rates should not show more equally across all people of that race, instead of selected few. I'm not saying that statistics can be used to sentence someone based on color, but that the statistics indicate that race is not the factor being used to arrive to justice. Therefore, the jump to "racist" conclusions in the Trayvon case do not resonate with me. This isn't to say that the shooting was not based on racism, but to accuse the justice system of racism without any basis for that other than the race of the two individuals involved in the confrontation, causes me, and I'm sure others, to doubt the accusations, and make it more difficult for the people who "cry wolf" to blow the whistle when there is actual racism.
I'm saying, in summary, that the statistics for the US justice system indicate that the disparity between sentences of whites and sentences of blacks, is not based on racism. The disparity, it seems, is based on individual factors.
Post by
134377
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
134377
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
gamerunknown
Is it because the situation in these places is so self-evident that it doesn't require debate, or because people find one death in the USA more interesting/important than the European economies, or the deaths of thousands in Africa and the Middle East? Just wondering...
I'm guessing people feel they can do more to expose institutional corruption in parts of the world with high media saturation and democratic systems than where there is less infrastructure, corruption and censorship are epidemic and people are largely impotent to help (or attempts to help will be decried from both right - for wasting money - and left - for playing world police).
Greece is an interesting case though: the Spectator ran an ad which said "Most Germans own a second property - Greece", which struck me as a little tasteless. First of all, I'm not sure that Germans assented to the lending of money to Greece, second, the majority of the money probably came from a minority of taxpayers in the country, third, the money is already in the form of debt rather than savings. Not to mention that quite a few Greeks would disagree both with the characterisation of Greece as property and with assuming the debt in the first place (though withdrawing from the EU would probably cripple the country financially). I'm sure there are American elements that'd love another junta.
Post by
Squishalot
Does anyone else find it strange that we are spending so much time and energy on this single incident, tragic as it was, when we could be talking about Syria, Somalia or Greece? Is it because the situation in these places is so self-evident that it doesn't require debate, or because people find one death in the USA more interesting/important than the European economies, or the deaths of thousands in Africa and the Middle East? Just wondering....
It's likely to be the fact that no journalists have been killed / captured in the last few weeks in Syria or Somalia.
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