Comment by nsoam
1 day ago
Interestingly, I didn’t know who that was so I used the “Look up” feature and it said it was a “Murdered” person, but in the Wikipedia entry it says the shooter was acquitted - ie the victim was not found to have been murdered.
I wonder where that summary came from?
Acquitted means that the jury did not find the evidence persuasive enough to decide guilt for the charged person for the charged crime. It does not mean the victim was not found to have been murdered. Juries don't decide that.
Otherwise there would not be things like "List of unsolved murders (2000–present)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_murders_(2000...
I feel like you are really picking apart hairs here.
There is not a huge difference between "the victim was not found to have been murdered." and "the jury did not find the evidence persuasive enough to decide guilt for the charged person for the charged crime". If you want to get really nitpicky, just because "the victim was not found to have been murdered", doesn't mean that they weren't murdered. Whether they were found to be murdered is a different statement than if they were actually murdered.
My reading of nsoam's comment is the implication that they are identical.
Remember, this is someone who never heard of Trayvon Martin, which suggests to me someone who doesn't know much about the US criminal court system. Which makes sense for someone who lives in Europe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377586 .
IMO Trayvon was murdered. But I don't get the same reading from the acquittal that you do. Nobody disputes that Zimmerman killed Trayvon. But murder is a crime, and the jury decided that Zimmerman did not commit murder. Therefore Trayvon is a victim of homicide, but not a victim of murder. Legally, I mean, which is what the jury is deciding.
The unsolved murders list is probably the same deal, it is colloquial and not legal, and with nobody accused and put to trial, it may yet end up legally murder.
Which is why, contra nsoam, it makes sense that Martin's name would be on a list of murdered people.
It's the same standard we use for Nicole Brown Simpson, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nicole_Brown_Simpson... :
> On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered outside Brown's condominium in Brentwood, Los Angeles, United States. Brown's ex-husband, retired football player and media personality O. J. Simpson, was charged with the murders and became a fugitive from justice after failing to turn himself in to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on June 17. ... The subsequent criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court saw Simpson tried and acquitted for the murders.[1] The trial and verdict were divisive. A later civil trial found Simpson liable for the deaths and awarded the Goldman family $33.5 million in damages (equivalent to $67 million in 2025 dollars), though little was paid.
He was acquitted of the crime of murder. A jury determined O. J. Simpson was liable for the killing. People still say she and her friend were murdered.
You really didn't know who that was, but had to look into the Wikipedia entry in detail enough to read about a jury decision and then frame it in a different way than written in Wikipedia (which rightly talks about the judicial process related to specific charges brought against Zimmerman, not an absolute statement of facts, such as "victim was not found to have been murdered").
I'm flagging that this doesn't sound like a good faith discussion. The green account raises my priors.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Apple's policy on censorship is good, quite the contrary.
The person you replied to wrote "shooter was acquitted"
Wikipedia writes in the second paragraph "...but a jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter in July 2013"
How is that framed differently than Wikipedia did?
Or do you mean the part after "i.e.", but i.e. is literally latin for "in other words". So obviously the part after i.e. was reframed, that is what i.e. means.
You alluded to it. Murdered vs. found to have been murdered. There's a conflation going on there and its clear why.
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