[WS: I anticipated that move by you Jordan, but it is a technicality that avoids a far more fundamental question about his trial - whether Z claim of self defense is plausible. If a burglar who enters my house and seeing me reaching for a weapon shoots me dead and then claims self defense, that claim would not be considered very plausible, would it? The obvious reason is that the chain of events in this case would start with the burglar entering my house, which would automatically define his shooting as homicide during commission of a crime rather than self defense. So the question is why the chain of events started not when Z decided to stalk and threaten M based on racial profiling, which is a crime, which would make his self- defense claim as plausible as that of the hypothetical burglar, but when M responded to Z's challenge by attacking him, in which case the self defense argument is quite plausible as you claim.
It was clearly a defense strategy to frame it that way and it worked. In other words, the defense used a more effective legal strategy than the prosecutors - as someone else argued on this list - and the jury bought it.
This is indisputable, even though we may speculate why this particular jury bought this way of framing the issue. But does that mean that justice has been served? I do not think so. Contrary to what you feel about court trials, it is not about which team wins, but about justice being served. We hope that winning a case leads to justice being served, but as we all know this is not always the case. And the Z's trial is such a case, because in the end Z got away with manslaughter, if not murder, even though the followed the required technical procedures. That is it was miscarriage of justice - unless you believe that what Z did is "excusable killing of another human being". If this is the case, further discussion is pointless as we disagree on principles.
Over and out.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."