I'm not calling George Zimmerman a great man, especially with his actions after his trial. If he abuses his wife/girlfriend, I don't want him in my band of friends. That being said, the (now lame duck) state attorney, after receiving a "no-bill" initially, used another technique to bring him to trial on a murder charge. I looked at this case and I said (for what my legal opinion is worth) there is way this rises to murder. Manslaughter, maybe, but in no way does it reach "knowingly or intentionally" killing someone without justification.
Well the voters have had their say, and Angela Corey is preparing a resume. From Legal Insurrection:
Prosecutor of George Zimmerman Loses Bid for Re-Election
Yesterday Angela Corey, the prosecutor who dragged George Zimmerman into a hapless politically-motivated trial for second degree murder for the lawful killing of Trayvon Martin, has soundly lost the GOP primary race for her re-election as 4th Judicial State Attorney in the Jacksonville area of Florida, reports the Florida-Times Union newspaper. Corey was defeated by a relatively late entrant into the primary, former corporate lawyer and prosecutor Melissa Nelson...
...Corey had proven an extremely polarizing figure as prosecutor. Her decisions, while not always legally inappropriate, too often managed to anger sizable and powerful portions of her constituents.
To readers of this blog Corey will be most infamous for her role in bringing George Zimmerman up on second degree murder charges in what would ultimately prove to be, in this writer’s humble opinion, perhaps the cleanest self-defense shooting ever brought to trial. While Zimmerman’s trial always reeked of political motivations, private conversations I had after the trial with attorneys familiar with the case confirmed this to almost certainly have been the case.
When Corey made the decision to prosecute Zimmerman she was also then facing a tough fight for re-election. Of particular concern to political aspirations was the extent to which Corey had angered the black community in the Jacksonville area. Two cases in particular had raised the ire of this demographic among her constituency: the prosecution of Marissa Alexander under Florida’s “10-20-Life” mandatory minimum sentencing statute for firing a “warning shot” at Alexander’s husband, and the 2011 prosecution of 12-year-old Cristian Fernandez as an adult on murder charges. Both Alexander and Fernandez are black.
For what it’s worth, I believe Corey was appropriate in her approach to the Alexander case. Alexander was first offered a three-year plea deal after she fired a shot past her husband’s head, while he stood beside his two young children (they would testify in court that they thought they were going to die). Other than Alexander’s later self-serving testimony there was no evidence whatever that her husband had presented a deadly force threat to Alexander, and her narrative was not helped when Alexander fled the scene and it was her husband who called the police to report the incident. As for the Fernandez case I have no particular opinion, having not followed the case closely. There appears to have been little question, however, that Fernandez had in fact murdered his victim–the only question was whether as a 12-year-old he should have been tried as an adult.
Regardless of the merits of either the Alexander or Fernandez cases, much of the black community in Corey’s electorate was outraged by these decisions, leading to protest marches led by the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. The danger to Corey’s re-election was clear and present. What to do, what to do, what to do?
That’s when George Zimmerman popped up on Corey’s radar screen, appearing to her eye as the perfect lever by which she could regain favor with the black community. A “white hispanic” named “Zimmerman” shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teenager? Corey grabbed the case with both hands and ran as if her (political) life depended on it, charging Zimmerman with second-degree depraved heart murder in what local prosecutors and police had already correctly concluded was an open-and-shut case of lawful self-defense.
Perhaps no one was more surprised than Corey when the local, national, and even international media decided to come fully on board to help advance her false narrative of second-degree murder. The result was an organized tsunami of false narratives and outright lies intended to railroad George Zimmerman into a wrongful life sentence in prison....
Attorney Andrew Branca and his firm Law of Self Defense have been providing internationally-recognized expertise in American self-defense law for almost 20 years in the form of books, live seminars & online training (both accredited for CLE), public speaking engagements, and individualized legal consultation.
Thank you Mr. Branca, excellent news from Florida. Now if we can bump off Marilyn Mosby, or at least bankrupt her for her abuses of office.
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