idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
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Why not number 4? I mean, here's the relevant parts from the transcript of Zimmerman's call:
I reject number 4 because it's blatant assumption.
No. It's a reasonable conclusion based on the facts we have available.
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You start off your defense assuming it's true.
No. I start off with the fact that the best information we have about what happened when Zimmerman first saw Martin and Martin first saw Zimmerman is that contained within the audio recording of the police non-emergency call he placed. It's objective in the sense that what he said is what he said. To dismiss what is said in that call requires that we speculate that Zimmerman knew that people like us would pour over a transcript of his call and try to figure out what was going on, and so he completely fabricated everything he claimed to see that night. Which seems absurd. If that was the case, why leave in the expletives? Why not lie about following Martin?
We kinda have to assume that at least with regards to basic things like "he's walking towards me", and "he's seen me", and "he's running" that they are true. Otherwise we have to reject the entire thing as fabricated and are left with nothing at all.
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No, that's not circular reasoning at all.
It's not.
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But I'll play: We can't assume that's true because we don't know what Zimmerman or Martin were doing. Zimmerman's testimony says one thing. The testimony of Martin's girlfriend says another (that may or may not be compatible with what Zimmerman said). The call to the police says nothing about what Zimmerman was doing before calling.
It does tell us what Zimmerman actually said that night at the time. It's the only "testimony" that we can say can't be tainted by knowledge of what would happen later. His testimony can be. The girlfriends can be. The witnesses can be. The audio recording? Can't be. Because it's a recording. I mean, if we had a video of the fight, you'd accept that over an eye witness report, right? Because it is what was seen. This is the same. It's what Zimmerman said at the time.
From that call, we can actually glean quite a bit of information. One of those things is that Zimmerman was not chasing Martin through the complex in his truck as has often been claimed. Another is that when Zimmerman reports that Martin sees him is almost certainly the very first time that Martin was aware of Zimmerman's existence that night. We can also say that Martin ran from Zimmerman, while Zimmerman was parked in his car, and not *because* Zimmerman was chasing/following him (which I've been trying to get people to accept for some time now).
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Was he just sitting in his truck and Martin walked by, or was he following Martin down the street and then stopped to call the cops?
The former. It's right in the audio recording. If he was following Martin down the street, why was Martin walking towards him when he calls? I suppose it's possible he spotted Martin and then circled around and parked on that street to watch for him, but it's clear that Martin was completely unaware that he was being watched until he got relatively close to Zimmerman's parked vehicle. So the idea that he was already afraid and fleeing Zimmerman at that point cannot be true. And we know that any pursuing that happened after that point occurred on foot (and we know where that ended).
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Finally, the testimony of the person with the most to lose is always the testimony you must treat with the most suspicion.
Except I'm not talking about Zimmerman's testimony. I'm reading the transcript of his phone call to police. He didn't know he might have the most to lose when he made that call. Thus, it can be assumed to be relatively accurate.
What's the alternative? We take the girlfriends testimony at face value? We have no recording of that phone call. To claim the information in the police recording is false would require us to assume that Zimmerman planned the whole thing and staged the police call ahead of time to help exonerate him. Isn't it more likely that the girlfriend just adjusted the details of the call to make Martin look more innocent and Zimmerman more guilty? And let's not forget that nothing in her testimony actually contradicts the information in the police recording. She never claimed that Zimmerman chased Martin in his car. This was pure fabrication via wild speculation and rumors about the case in the early days, yet it persists despite there not being a shred of evidence to support it. She doesn't mention at all when Martin first spotted Zimmerman, or why he was running (except for the whole "creepy *** cracker" comment. Just that he was.
That part isn't really in question. What is in question is why Martin initially chose to run way from Zimmerman. Because everyone seems to want to hinge their opinions about the later events based on the why and how of the chase itself. I'm saying that I believe that the evidence best supports the theory that Martin realized that Zimmerman was calling the cops on him and ran to avoid the cops.
Do you have a better reason? I keep asking people to answer this, and all I get back is either vague statements from Alma "he was suspicious!", or folks running back to emotional rhetoric and ignoring the question. Zimmerman did not follow Martin until after Martin ran. Martin ran *after* he walked close enough to Zimmerman's parked vehicle to see him clearly. So the question is: "Why did he run"? Assuming we all agree that it's not normal to flee from someone sitting in a parked car talking on a cell phone, then why did he run?
Can you answer that question?