Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Premature Judgment; Popular (Mob?) Justice

1. Wouldn't it be advisable to wait until all the evidence comes in before we reach firm conclusions about what happened between Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman? It's hard enough for anyone to make reasoned and supportable inferences from a given body of evidence. It's all the harder for the people passing judgment on the event to do so if they and we know that they have only a portion of the available evidence.
2. I guess we should glad that American no longer has trial travesties and mob justice of the sort Hollywood so ably chronicled as happening in the South in the 1920s and 1930s. Today I'm sure we wouldn't tolerate attempts to influence the course of criminal justice by mass parades and pronouncements by prominent citizens expressing their firm belief in the criminal guilt of the projected defendant. We wouldn't approve of such things today, would we?


 
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The dynamic evidence page
Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law.

See also this post and this post.
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2 comments:

Lulaine @ RD Legal Funding said...

There is a tendency for people to jump to conclusions when situations like the Trayvon Martin case come up. People should always wait until all the evidence comes out before passing judgement but rarely does that happen. The cycle of pre-judgement and hyped up trial is how cases like this usually get handled.

April 2, 2012 at 11:30 AM
Unknown said...

Interesting comment by Shelby Steele (see URL below). Steele sheds light on the huckstering by Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson. He also makes the point that people who look for symbols aren't always terribly interested in the evidence and the facts; they want and need a symbol. (Whenever I think of Al Sharpton, a "civil rights leader" [it is often said], I can't help thinking of Tawana Brawley - another "symbol" - and of Sharpton's shameful prolonged effort, ultimately abandoned, to avoid paying damages to the prosecutor who won a judgment against him for defamation.) Zimmerman, being Hispanic, isn't the perfect exemplar of "White racism" -but never mind, he will do. It does not follow, of course, that Zimmerman's conduct was proper. He may have committed a crime. But it will be hard for much of the press and dignitaries such as Pres. Obama and Spike Lee to pay close attention to all of the evidence. (As this case illustrates, even simple cases are often anything but simple.) But I have some hope that in all of the hubub the Florida prosecutors -- if not the U.S. DOJ -- will do their job properly. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323691134926300.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

April 6, 2012 at 3:36 PM

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