ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 8: THE QUANTITY OF INJURY ARGUMENT

Professionals in the justice system knew that the prosecution was desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel when they tried to make it look as if George Zimmerman wasn’t justified in shooting Trayvon Martin because Martin hadn’t hurt him badly enough yet.

Anyone smart enough to pass a bar exam and research the laws of self-defense and use of force, would know that you don’t have to sustain a gunshot wound before you shoot the criminal gunman pointing his weapon at you. Similarly, you don’t have to let the guy fracture your skull or spill your brains onto the sidewalk before you are justified in stopping him with lethal force.

The whole purpose of self-defense in any form is to prevent the other man from injuring you. At the deadly force level employed in this case, the force is justified to stop the man before he inflicts a mortal or crippling injury upon you. 

Photos taken immediately after the shooting, along with eyewitness testimony, confirm that Zimmerman’s nose was smashed into a swollen mess, and there was blood all over the back of his head from the lacerations there.  Whether or not the physician’s assistant who saw him later could confirm that the nose was broken, the evidence supports not only the violent sucker punch to Zimmerman’s face that he said began the encounter, but also his contention of his head being smashed against the hard underlying surface of the sidewalk.  It doesn’t much matter whether your opponent is banging a chunk of hard sidewalk into your head, or banging your head into that part of the sidewalk. Either way, profound or fatal brain injury is the likely result if it continues.

Why wasn’t he killed or knocked unconscious by the first few such strikes? The neck muscles are among the strongest in the body. A few months after birth, they become involuntary muscles which hold your head up without having to think about it. When you instinctively resist the hands that are smashing your head into the pavement, those muscles help you mitigate the force to some degree.  But with each blow of the back of your head against that unforgiving surface, you become less and less able to resist. Soon, the inevitable happens, and fatal or crippling brain damage ensues.

From what the evidence shows us, deadly force was indeed warranted at the time Zimmerman pulled the trigger and fired the single shot of the encounter.  The lay jurors, even the one who couldn’t quite distinguish between homicide and murder when she talked about it on TV Wednesday, understood that.

The argument that Zimmerman didn’t sustain enough injury to warrant using deadly force in self-defense is simply a false argument.  An argument so blatantly bogus that the knowledgeable observer can’t help but wonder what motivated the lawyers who raised it in the first place.

 

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