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Thursday, August 15, 2013

George Zimmerman's Biggest Defender: A Racist With a Criminal Past

George Zimmerman's Biggest Defender: A Racist With a Criminal Past

[Incarceration is the new slavery]

Frank Taaffe, Zimmerman's unofficial media emissary, is a convicted criminal who recently appeared on The White Voice, a virulently racist podcast.

| Thu Aug. 8, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Frank Taaffe.
In April 2012, two days before George Zimmerman was arrested for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he huddled with a fellow neighborhood watch volunteer, Frank Taaffe. According to Taaffe, who disclosed the meeting on Fox News, Zimmerman asked him to share "several talking points" with the media. Taaffe obliged. Indeed, as Zimmerman's legal drama unfolded over the next year and a half, Taaffe emerged as his most visible and outspoken defender. He gave hundreds of interviews to media outlets, ranging from the New York Times to Fox News to CNN, and made near-daily appearances on cable news shows during Zimmerman's trial.

Taaffe used this platform to cast Martin as a drug-addled hoodlum and Zimmerman as a community-minded do-gooder ("the best neighbor you would want to have") who had every reason to suspect the black teen was up to mischief. He also railed against Zimmerman's critics, whom he accused of staging a witch hunt. "It's really sad that he has already been convicted in the public media and has already been sentenced to the gas chamber," he lamented in an interview with NBC's Miami affiliate last year.
Taaffe was hardly the ideal person to be weighing in on a case suffused with racial angst—or commenting on criminal-justice matters, period. A Mother Jones investigation has found that the 56-year-old New York native has a lengthy criminal record that includes charges of domestic violence and burglary, and a history of airing virulently racist views. Just last Sunday, he appeared on The White Voice, a weekly podcast hosted by a man named Joe Adams, who has deep, long-standing ties to white-power groups and has authored a manual called Save The White People Handbook. (Sample quote: "A mutt makes a great pet and a mulatto makes a great slave.")

During a previous White Voice appearance, on July 27, Taaffe argued that whites and blacks have no business mingling. ("They don't want to be with us and we don't want to be with them.") Taaffe also opined that if Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin, he was justified in doing so because "young black males" had burglarized homes in their neighborhood. "What if I—a middle-aged white man—wore a hoodie and went through Trayvon Martin's neighborhood?" he asked defiantly. Adams replied that "no sane white person" would dare walk down their "local Marcus Garvey Boulevard."
"I'd only be there for one or two things," Taaffe shot back. "And I'm sure the vice squad would want to be interested in that."  READ MORE

Tchoupi says:

@ willis While I agree the events on TTL are ‘what really matters’, I hold out hope that all our efforts (well, manily tchoupi’s…) might someday get a public airing of some sort. In that event, the tighter the accuracy of the whole presentation, the more credibility the presentation will have. Thus, it’s not that [...]
I may have a little difference of view with Willi concerning how much what happened on RVC matters.
There clearly is a spike of traffic by the clubhouse at the time GZ pulled his cellphone out to call SPD’s NEN. This has some significance to me as it indicates that GZ & TM were not alone when it all started. Even if we consider that one of the drivers went back and forth by the clubhouse, there still must be someone witnessing what that REAL suspicious guy was doing in the neighborhood.
Moreover, that traffic spike period is interestingly rich of unique events:
1) It almost begins with a light colored pick up truck that is consistent with GZ’s.
2) That pickup truck briefly makes an angle toward the clubhouse.
3) At least one dark colored vehicle going east on RVC stopped for a noticeable time at the junction with TTL,
4) One vehicle strolled on TTL and stopped by the mailboxes for a noticeable while,
5) The traffic clears up as soon as the NEN call starts.
Finally, none this is consistent with GZ parking by the clubhouse where he said he parked as he called NEN.
I agree with Willi in that showing that GZ stopped by the mailboxes and was already on TTL before his call connected is the main conclusion of that work.

10 Reasons Lawyers Say Florida's Law Enforcement Threw Away George Zimmerman's Case

A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts say Zimmerman didn't face anything like a serious trial.
  Florida law enforcement, from the local police to the special prosecutor overseeing the Trayvon Martin case, did not want to see George Zimmerman convicted of murder and deliberately threw away the case, allowing their prosecution to crumble. A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts who know jury trials and courtroom procedure say this is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the parade of otherwise incoherent missteps by George Zimmerman’s prosecutors.

“I find it personally difficult to believe it was not thrown,” said Warren Ingber, a New York-based attorney who has practiced law for decades. “I am far from alone in this assessment, and it reveals even harder truth why this case was a miscarriage of justice.”  READ MORE