With all the madness surrounding the George Zimmerman verdict Americans are having to deal with a whole series of tragedies. First and foremost is the death of Trayvon Martin. The second tragedy is that the Sanford Police department, inexperienced at handling complex crime scenes, just did a poor job of thoroughly processing the area of the murder. They should have canvassed the entire neighborhood looking for every possible witness. They simply didn’t have all the evidence that could have been gathered and presented to prosecutors.
But there were more tragedies: The political involvement of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who was pressured to appoint a special prosecutor, Angela Corey.
A young man is dead, and that certainly is a massive tragedy. But another man’s life was ruined with all the racial allegations connected with the ‘murder’ of another man, and possibly ruined by a vengeful prosecutor who went to the bar with no evidence.
My big question is, should the prosecutor have charged Zimmerman in the first place? I’ll speak to some of the reasons he should not have, but first let’s look at a case of prosecutorial misconduct that happened at Duke University. Yes, the Duke Lacrosse team.
The Supreme Court of Florida has slapped the pinkies of some municipalities that were trying make a little extra money from homeowners by trying to do what Homeowners Associations do all the time. When a homeowner buys a property in an HOA or CID or condo association, the buyer agrees to pay off his HOA dues before he makes a house payment. Thus the HOA actually has more power to punish miscreants by liening and auctioning off the house before the mortgage company gets its take. Thus, HOAs have a super-priority lien over the main lender on the property. The super priority. The ability to have super-priority status is built into the original developer’s Covenants Controls and Restrictions usually because that’s what the local municipality ordered.
Actually, he was only a potential juror who was tossed out of the jury pool when defense attorneys discovered some prejudicial FaceBook postings.
But this goofball, Jerry Counelis, had apparently posted a comment that said, “Justice for Trayvon” two weeks before George Zimmerman was arrested for Martin’s murder. Then he lied about it during voir dire.
When Counelis was ousted from the jury pool he came back into the courthouse and tried to get into the jury room. He was yelling that his anonymity had been taken away from him. And this is the kind of nut case who could have gotten onto the jury? Dear Lord God!
Boy, howdee folks, this here Colorado cowboy never thought he’d see this day. But it looks like another fascist HOA state has just dipped its little toe into the waters of a free man’s land.
Governor Rick Scott has just signed HB-7119 into law! This law isn’t terribly radical. It just requires that all Homeowners Associations (or common area maintenance communities) in the state get registered. They have to report their federal tax I.D. numbers, the number of parcels within their subdivison. Most radical of all? They have to report their mailing and physical addresses. Ah yes, and they have to report their annual revenues and expenses for each association.
