Walker wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 10:19 pm
Their conviction was properly attained. They killed. The charge was murder.
While I definitely wish very much that they had not chosen the line of action they did, and the death of the man is highly regrettable, I do not share your view that the verdict is the right one.
Their conviction was properly attained because it was rendered by a jury, under the jury system.
In this you are 100% right. Even if their decision had been one agreed by many, or even all, to have been the wrong one, the verdict is the verdict.
However, mass riots have been started (and other types of social mayhem) because people do not accept the rule of law as it is meted out by juries.
So it is interesting to notice this: when the jury decides what 'the people' (or a mass of people, or certain factions of a people) do not believe is right and proper, they take it upon themselves (sometimes) to oppose the decision with violence and mayhem.
But what you say is right: the jury decided, and that is the way it is.
Your sense of impropriety pertains to the charges, and perhaps the arguments.
No, my sense is that the judge did not properly instruct the jury. If the first clause was ambiguous, then that ambiguity should dis-favor the State, not the accused.
My focus is strictly on the law -- what it says. The law allows (or allowed, I think it has been recently changed) for a citizen to make an arrest for a) a misdemeanor, and b) a felony.
It’s always a matter of proportion. A citizen’s arrest based on the witnessing of a felony should be in proportion to the felony witnessed. The proper proportion is not determined by the legal definition of the felony.
I do not agree with this. And one of the cruxes of my argument is in this area. Either a people, a citizen, has the right to defend his-her property, and this right is real, robust and respected, or the citizen does not. In Georgia, and on the basis of that law as it is written, the right is granted that a citizen can pursue, arrest and hold a suspect if their is sufficient cause to do so.
That law may have had many positive outcomes. It may have been, for many years, a 'good law'. But in this instance we all recognize a non-positive outcome. But the law still stands.
I do not know what ultimate view to take but I am not closed to seeing that those men made a fair, reasonable and respectable effort to pursue and arrest the man who had been trespassing. I think that citizens have sound reasons to protect their domain.
If Arbery had behaved differently -- if he had stopped, allowed himself to be arrested by citizen arrest, the police would have come in a few minutes and sorted it out. He was as obligated as they were -- in a sense more so since he was trespassing -- to know the law, and to obey the law.
The attempt to arrest him was not illegal.
Life is the measure of a proportional response.
This is another issue. It is a valid point but it does not pertain to the strict, legal base.
Trespass is a criminal act but the response to trespass by a witness, as with all crimes witnessed, must be proportional to life, for Life Is The Measure is not just some abstract concept.
The man was shot (if my perception is correct, or my interpretation of it) when he 1) did not stop, did not submit to the citizen's arrest, and b) when he grabbed the shotgun. As the two (or three) witnesses to the event asserted. Their witness is not invalid. (I guess they could have been lying but the video
seems to support their story).
Not being experts in the law, the jury most likely has a better grip on the law in relation to Life.
But my point is that the judge has fault. Because he did not sufficiently explain the law (and the law's ambiguity).
No doubt those crackers now wish they had just followed Aubry to wherever he was going, armed with patience, wheels and cell-phones instead of packing death.
This is a prejudicial statement and you are using a term that
corresponds to the n-word.
What if I were to have referred, in these posts, to Arbery as
n-word? What would you have concluded? Some level of bias perhaps?
Can appeals be based on disputing a jury’s interpretation and application of the law, or are appeals based on improper courtroom proceedings, or both?
This is my question. I would argue that in a strict interpretation of the law those men had justification in pursuing him and arresting him -- on the basis of a misdemeanor.
How things turned out was not 'murder' in any premeditated sense. A series of events followed, and Arbery was a participant in them, that led to a very very bad outcome.