Remix.run Logo
▲ eesmith 13 hours ago

The jury found there wasn't enough evidence to find Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime of murder in the second degree.

That is not the same thing as finding that the person did not murder him. That's why the verdicts are "'guilty' or 'not guilty'", and not "'guilty' or 'innocent'."

Take for example a hypothetical situation where I murdered someone. The prosecutor decides to prosecute me under first-degree murder, that is, premeditated murder. However, the murder was actually in a fit of passion, and the evidence for murder-1 isn't there. The jury can find me not guilty of murder-1, even if they believe I committed the murder, because the prosecution messed up and filed the wrong charge (and didn't also charge me with murder-2 or homicide as a backup). Thanks to double jeopardy, I can't then be re-charged.

Everyone can agree that I murdered that person, including me, even though I was acquitted. Jut because someone was acquitted of murder for a death they caused doesn't automatically mean the the person killed wasn't murdered.

(This is relevant to the Zimmerman's case, where you already read "The prosecution had requested that a lesser charge of third-degree felony murder, an offense that includes the commission of child abuse, be included in the jury instructions. Defense attorney Don West called the possible lesser charge "outrageous" and a "trick" by the state, because they had asked for it to be included at the last minute." That Zimmerman was acquitted of murder-2 does not mean he would have been innocent of murder-3 had the prosecution included that earlier.)

We can see that Wikipedia does not use the acquittal to determine that a killing was not a murder.

Take a look at the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nicole_Brown_Simpson... where it says Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, and says that O. J. Simpson was acquitted for those murders, and it says "In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown."

According to your reasoning, were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murdered?

Quoting now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Coyle:

> James Edwin Coyle (March 23, 1873 – August 11, 1921) was an American Catholic priest who was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, by a Ku Klux Klan member for performing a marriage between Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican Catholic, and a recent Catholic convert, Ruth Stephenson. The killer, E. R. Stephenson, was Ruth's father and opposed what he saw as an interracial union. He would ultimately be acquitted by a jury.

Was Coyle murdered? Wikipedia seems to think so, and lists him under "People murdered in 1921" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_murdered_in_19... .

We know "murder" has a cultural meaning independent of specific determination of a legal charge, which is why things like "unsolved murders" and "murder–suicide" (where the murderer is dead and cannot be tried) exist. The iOS summary is not wrong, you simply disagree with it.