When "Neighborhood Watch" Gets Out of Hand

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Riot

I've tried to post stories from Big Government or World Net Daily, but I find them woefully deficient, generally, in facts

So if I can't find the original AP story, I'll post where I find it, be it Daily Beast or Daily Kos.

I figure most here are smart enough to pick out the factual parts of the story, and separate it from (and ignore if they wish) the opinion if it's there.

Zimmerman profiled a black kid and now that kid is dead because of Zimmerman, at his hand.

We'll see if the court feels there should be a punishment for that. I sure as hell hope so.

Edit: Breaking: CBS Evening News reports that Zimmerman lied to the court regarding how much money he had. They told the court the Zimmerman's couldn't raise bail, that's he's indigent, and the family couldn't make the $15,000 10% of bail.

Whoops. Turns out Zimmerman knew at that time he had over $150,000 cash in his account, raised from his "support me" website. He just wasn't telling anybody about it ... not his lawyer, not the judge.

The real George Zimmerman is a liar, apparently. Can we trust his story about what happened with Trayvon, when he lies to the judge at his bail hearing?

This is a big deal. He may have screwed himself with his lie.

He set up a website to raise money for his defense, not a website to raise money for bail. He probably didn't think of that money as part of his net-worth. On his website, it said that any money raised would go towards his defense and for necessary living expenses.

Zimmerman probably didn't feel like he needed to disclose to the judge that money was being raised on this website. After all, what good does it do to raise money, if the judge is simply going to take all the money away (temporarily) and make you put it up for bail.

It seems like it would kind of be unfair to the donors for the judge to take away all the money they donated that was supposed to pay for Zimmerman's defense and his living expenses and make Zimmerman put it all up for bail.

Technically I guess Zimmerman should have disclosed it. I guess in the future if a guy is accused of a crime and he is going to raise money, he should wait until after the bail hearing to start raising the money. It seems pretty silly but I guess that's what you need to do. Otherwise, if you have already raised $150,000, the judge may make your bail $150,000 higher. It's better to wait until after the bail hearing to raise the money. Then you don't need to disclose it. You obviously couldn't disclose money that you hadn't made yet.

By the way, for all we know Zimmerman didn't even have access to the money at the time of the bail hearing. Was the money already in Zimmerman's bank account? We don't know the answer to this. His website went through Paypal. I don't know exactly how that works. When somebody donates money to you through Paypal, how long before you actually have your hands on that money?

Did Zimmerman have internet access in jail? When was last the time he checked his website to see how much had been raised? The bail hearing was on a Friday. Maybe Zimmerman had no internet access from jail and hadn't checked his website in several days.

No matter what, we know that Zimmerman knew his website had raised some money. He obviously should have disclosed that. But if he had no access to check the site from jail and if he hadn't checked it in several days, for all we know there might have only been $25,000 in there the last time he had checked it. The bottom line is that he should have disclosed it. But I can understand why he didn't.