Zimmerman Pulling an Charlie Sheen

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Decision in Trayvon Martin case expected by Friday; Zimmerman goes AWOL from lawyers

With prosecutors saying they will announce a decision in the Trayvon Martin case by Friday, George Zimmerman appears to have struck out on his own.

He launched a website without telling his two attorneys, spoke to a talk show host and put in a call to the special prosecutor investigating him for the Feb. 26 shooting of Martin. After Zimmerman went AWOL from his lawyers for two days, the attorneys held a news conference late Tuesday afternoon and quit.

Hours later, special prosecutor Angela Corey announced she would make an important announcement in the case in the next 72 hours.

"I'd have to count how many text messages I sent saying: 'Please call me. Please call me collect. Please text me. Please email me. Please, so we can go forward,' " one of Zimmerman's lawyers, Craig Sonner, said about his former client. "After I started getting calls from different people saying that he was giving statements to the media, calling the prosecutor's office and not calling me, that's when it started dawning on me that I wasn't the attorney of record anymore."

Now, the parents of the Miami Gardens teenager Zimmerman shot say they fear the man their lawyers call the "neighborhood watch loose cannon" will run. For the first time, Sonner and co-counsel Hal Uhrig acknowledged that Zimmerman is "far from Florida," but still inside the United States.

"He is well hidden," Sonner said.

They stressed that they never considered Zimmerman a flight risk, because he always cooperated with law enforcement and was easily reachable by phone. Even now, the attorneys say that a man who is poised to flee the country to avoid possible criminal charges would not check in with the prosecutors who appear poised to arrest him.

"We were a bit astounded," Uhrig said, stressing that he always tells clients not to talk to prosecutors, cops, reporters or anybody else. "Now he is telling people: 'I don't have an attorney. Those guys were just my legal advisers.' I'm not sure what the difference is."

Sonner said Zimmerman was eager to tell the state attorney his side of the story. "He wanted to give his statement, and I was going to let him," Sonner said. "But he was supposed to call me. Let me make the call. I hope he has found someone else to represent him."

Zimmerman went into hiding after Sanford Police declined to arrest him for Martin's shooting, sparking nationwide outrage.

Read more here: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2012/04/10/2007238/decision-in-trayvon-martin-case.html#storylink=cpy

Edited April 11, 2012 by ☼

[WrightFamily 34]

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me....sorry but I don't believe what anyone reports on this story anymore. :pop:

[Darnell 8,479]

His mom's family is from Cuba? Maybe he's already on the boat back.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You know everybody wants to see the Panda Parade.

er, sorry, wrong graphic!

[lostinblue 1,989]

Lets see......NO Black Panthers have been arrested. A bounty is still on his head....Dead or alive.An unmanned police car shot up near his home. The Sanford Police Department headquarters were shut down. Looks like there has been no police protection for George.Wonder why he decided to run.I doubt he has any guns for protection at this moment.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Lets see......NO Black Panthers have been arrested. A bounty is still on his head....Dead or alive.An unmanned police car shot up near his home. The Sanford Police Department headquarters were shut down. Looks like there has been no police protection for George.Wonder why he decided to run.I doubt he has any guns for protection at this moment.

Like it or not, the wanted poster was protected free speech, or are you suggesting government start arresting people for exercising their 1st Amendment Rights? Sounds like big gubmint.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Like it or not, the wanted poster was protected free speech, or are you suggesting government start arresting people for exercising their 1st Amendment Rights? Sounds like big gubmint.

How do you feel about the 2nd amendment?

[Dan and Judy 614]

Like it or not, the wanted poster was protected free speech, or are you suggesting government start arresting people for exercising their 1st Amendment Rights? Sounds like big gubmint.

I have not studied the subject or read the articles but I don't think advertising a rerward for someone dead or alive is protected.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I have not studied the subject or read the articles but I don't think advertising a rerward for someone dead or alive is protected.

There have been a few cases in recent years, including anti-abortionists making wanted posters of abortion clinic doctors. The Right Wing bigots take the Black Panther's act of a wanted poster to validate their intolerance toward radical (see 'uppity') blacks, while turning a blind eye to White Christian radicalism. Selective outrage to support their agenda.

The legal question is whether the court believes such a wanted poster is a "true threat," which isn't protected free speech.

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that anti-abortion activists who created Wild West-style posters and a Web site targeting abortion doctors are liable because their works were illegal threats and not free speech.

But the sharply divided 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, while calling the works “a true threat,” ordered a Portland, Ore., federal judge to reduce the $107 million in punitive damages a jury awarded to four abortion doctors and two clinics who sued a dozen abortion foes.

The 6-5 ruling by the full appeals court reverses a March 2001 decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit and upholds a 1994 federal law that makes it illegal to incite violence and threaten abortion doctors.

Many members of Congress and others had said that if the three-judge panel’s ruling had stood, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act would have been gutted.

Four doctors testified they feared for their lives, and sued under racketeering laws and the 1994 law that makes it illegal to incite violence against abortion doctors. During trial, targeted abortion doctors testified they used disguises, bodyguards and bulletproof vests, and instructed their children to crouch in the bathtub if they heard gunfire.

“I think it says for the abortion and non-abortion community, if you threaten to kill somebody, the law is not going to protect you,” said Maria Vullo, an attorney for Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider, and the doctors were portrayed on Old West-style “wanted” posters passed out at rallies and featured on the Nuremberg Files, a Web site that listed abortion providers' names and addresses and declared them guilty of crimes against humanity.

A federal judge and the Portland jury found in 1999 that the Web site and some of the posters were “true threats to kill” because the abortion doctors were being tormented and three of them murdered. Once killed, their names were crossed off the list on the Web site.

Neal Horsley, the Carrollton, Ga., man who runs the Nuremberg Files Web site, said he will remain online.

“I'll add six bloody, baby-butchering judges to the Web site,” he said in reference to the six judges who sided with the doctors.

Dozens of Internet service providers have dropped his site, but Horsley constantly shifts to new providers, some of them overseas and immune from a potential order from a federal judge to shut down.

However, Horsley isn't named in the suit decided yesterday. The defendants are a dozen individuals and anti-abortion groups accused of giving Horsley personal information about abortion providers.

Only as the case was headed for trial in 1999 did the doctors figure out Horsley was running the Web site. Adding him to the suit would have caused substantial delays, attorneys close to the case said.

On the Web site, Internet surfers can click an icon “to see the list of baby butcherers and a few of the people who have been killed.” The site notes whether the doctors are “working,” “wounded” or a “fatality.”

The name of Dr. Barnett Slepian was crossed out on the site shortly after he was killed by a sniper at his home near Buffalo, N.Y., in 1998.

The anti-abortion activists, under a group named American Coalition of Life Activists, or ACLA, had argued the posters were protected under the First Amendment because they were merely a list of doctors and clinics — not a threat.

The activists maintained they collected data on doctors in hopes of one day putting them on trial, just as Nazi war criminals were at Nuremberg.

But appeals court Judge Pamela Rymer wrote that there was substantial evidence the posters were disseminated to intimidate physicians from giving abortions in violation of the 1994 act.

“Holding ACLA accountable for this conduct does not impinge on legitimate protest or advocacy,” Rymer wrote in Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists.

In dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski wrote that “the evidence in the record does not support a finding that defendants threatened plaintiffs.”

The anti-abortion activists' attorney, Christopher Ferrara, said he would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling, which he said “means that any poster that condemns an abortion doctor by name is a violation.”

Defendant Andrew Burnett, the former publisher of Portland-based Life Advocate magazine that was shut down after the 1999 verdict, said he was disappointed with the court's decision.

“When you think about it from the perspective of people who want to take advantage of the freedom we have in this country to speak out against the status quo, this chills the ability to do that,” he said.

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/abortion-foes-wanted-posters-web-site-are-true-threats

[one...two...tree 2,762]

How do you feel about the 2nd amendment?

I support the 2nd Amendment, Master Troll. Now try and stay on topic by actually backing up what you've stated before about these Black Panthers put a bounty on Zimmerman and not being arrested. You're pro-choice, right? Where's your support for the 1st Amendment and freedom of choice?