halfcocked catstabator
Lonely Dabbler
It was raining that day and Trayvon was walking around and so Zimmerman obviously found it suspicious that someone he didn't recognize was walking around the gated community in the rain especially in light of recent home break-ins. It wasn't racially motivated, he had also called in on caucasian and hispanic people as well. He wasn't a racist, he had even gone as far as organize a protest for the treatment of a homeless black man by police in the past.
Whether he did anything wrong or not by following Trayvon is debatable, and he did not simply follow him around and then shoot him like the media would have you believe and following someone in public is not against the law. Attacking someone who is following you is, however.
A witness even stated he saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman and went to call 911 while Trayvon was hitting him.
Now if you were a 5'9" and 200 pounds or so being attacked by a 6'0" 160 pound football player and the only way to protect yourself was to use your handgun before your attacker tried to grab it(which Zimmerman said Trayvon was trying to do) what would you do? Unless you're a bleeding heart that would gladly let your attacker bash your head in on the sidewalk(Zimmerman had a large bleeding gash on the back of his head when police arrived) while waiting for the police to show up, I think you would grab that handgun you're allowed to legally carry before your attacker does and defend your life.
Either way one of them were going to end up dead in the confrontation and rather than try to stop it the witness left to call the police while Zimmerman was having his head beaten in.
There is nothing racist about this, despite what the media and the deceased's family are crying out to incite racial tensions. Trayvon did not die with a bag of skittles in his hand, he died with his hands balled into fists that he was using to punch Zimmerman in the face.
Trayvon could have just simply run away instead of trying to act like a thug(he was already suspended had been suspended for being caught with drug paraphernalia at school, which is stupid enough, and certainly carried himself as one as his twitter showed) and attacking Zimmerman, or better yet he could have explained why he was there since he was spending his 10 day suspension living at his father's house. George Zimmerman was knowledgeable about who his neighbors were and would probably have recognized his father.
Instead the exchange of words reportedly consisted of Trayvon asking if Zimmerman had a problem to which the response was "no" and then responded by saying "now you do" and then punching Zimmerman in the face as his bloody nose would attest to.
To charge Zimmerman with second degree murder is downright wrong.
By almost any standard, Zimmerman’s legal defense in the Trayvon Martin shooting case has been a sort of ongoing cautionary tale for exactly what not to do if you’re facing potentially serious criminal charges.
Almost immediately, within around thirty-seven minutes after the shooting, Zimmerman was already waiving his right to an attorney. He then proceeded to interview with the police for five hours without any legal representation present.
Then the next day, still without any attorney present or legal advice, Zimmerman took the police back to the scene of the shooting at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, and reenacted what happened on the evening of February 26th with them, step-by-step on video.
Had Zimmerman’s narrative and recounting of the details of that evening been any less than 100% consistent, that’s the moment when everything would have fallen apart for him — sometime right around February 27th. The police had every reason and opportunity to document and doggedly pursue any differences they saw between Zimmerman’s initial interview and his video re-enactment the following day.
Rather than finding anything they could follow up with, what happened instead? The Sanford Police Department was unable to obtain any evidence that would allow them to press even involuntary manslaughter charges against Zimmerman. And no new evidence changed that, even as days and weeks passed.
As anyone who follows criminal justice knows, under harsh conditions and during long, station-house interviews, many people will end up confessing to crimes they didn’t even commit.
Most people are conditioned from an early age to have a bias towards telling authority figures what they want to hear.
Police have been known to take skillful advantage of this psychological blind spot to extract confessions and other incriminating information from suspects during interrogations.
In one infamous case, four innocent men confessed to committing the same brutal rape and murder after being interrogated without legal counsel.
Even when DNA evidence exonerated them, years later, they were still not immediately released, because of the sheer weight a recorded confession carries.
Zimmerman not only didn’t confess to any sort of impropriety in his police interviews, he seems to have been 100% consistent in his statements.
There was initially a pretty strong assumption by most people (mainly due to the incredibly biased media reporting of the incident) that the Sanford Police Department had somehow been complicit in not charging George Zimmerman.
But as time has gone on, it seems the investigation the department carried out was actually extremely by the book. Lately, people have changed tack; they don’t like the conclusions the investigation reached and feel state law must be to blame.
While the police spent weeks attempting to gather evidence and press charges against Zimmerman, the facts of the case simply didn’t materialize in a way that implicated Zimmerman as having committed manslaughter or ant other crime.
Then the case was blown up by the media, and more and more investigatory branches of the government became involved, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, but evidence against Zimmerman still remained elusive. If there is any strong evidence against him, it hasn’t been released by the prosecutors thus far, and having seen how weak the affidavit to arrest Zimmerman was, it appears as though there is no secret evidence.
While some have said it was reckless for Zimmerman to leave his truck at all, the law simply does not codify that. Leaving one’s vehicle inside one’s own neighborhood cannot legally be considered “reckless” behavior, especially when Zimmerman was well-known as being the neighborhood watch captain for the community.
Of course, it makes sense that Zimmerman would leave his truck to investigate something he considered suspicious, especially when he was relaying information to a 911 dispatcher.
Many people have taken issue with the fact that Zimmerman was armed as well, but legally speaking, it is unlikely to matter.
Around 900000 Florida residents have have concealed carry licenses. Carrying a weapon in one’s own neighborhood is not uncommon, nor does it have any special impact on this case. There is no evidence thus far that Zimmerman was brandishing his firearm or otherwise using it inappropriately.
The crux of the case comes down to what was happening in the sixty seconds preceding the shooting. And those sixty seconds happen to be the part of the encounter we know the most about.
There is hard evidence of screams for help on 911 tapes. There is evidence showing Zimmerman’s injuries, including a broken nose, and there is an eye-witness account of Zimmerman being beaten and yelling for help.
Since that time period is going to be the main focus of any investigation, there may not be much Zimmerman’s legal advisers can do here beyond what essentially comes down to public relations. (This case will be so easy for any defense lawyer to win, lol)
While Zimmerman’s original lawyers withdrawing from the case was certainly confusing and unexpected initially, it makes sense when one considers how transparent Zimmerman has been about what happened from day one.
If anything, hiding away and ceasing to make any public statements for several weeks seems to have been incredibly unnatural for Zimmerman.
This is, after all, a man who was going around town handing out flyers about the Sanford “homeless sucker punch” case last year, a case that didn’t involve him directly whatsoever.
Those flyers began with the same quote currently featured on each page of Zimmerman’s web site.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
- Edmund Burke
Zimmerman now seems to be downright intent on advocating for himself directly and increasing his public visibility. This has created a near-instant backlash against him from many who are still convinced he should immediately be arrested.
But that’s Zimmerman’s character in a nutshell; he’s nothing if not exceedingly independent and vocal.
Zimmerman went further than most would in volunteering to lead his neighborhood watch. He was, by all accounts, extremely thorough over the years in reporting anything suspicious in his neighborhood. He went against all reasonable legal advice when he allowed himself to be interrogated without an attorney present the night of Trayvon Martin’s shooting.
And now he no longer seems to be willing to back down from speaking with the state prosecutor directly, even against his legal team’s wishes. He also has expressed the urge to respond directly to those who are rallying for his arrest.
It’s difficult to tell what will happen with this more cavalier change in attitude. Sanford is, by many accounts, currently a tension-filled powder keg. Easter Sunday, the police station was briefly occupied by protesting students.
The next morning, an empty police cruiser was shot at six times. Not the warmest response for a police department that, thus far, appears to have done a by the books investigation
Some people have impled that there is evidence that proves Zimmerman's guilt. Allow me to demonstrate how the Zimmerman's attorney is likely to destroy it all in court.
A private sound researcher said that Zimmerman was not the person screaming, despite an eye-witness statement to the contrary.:
Voice recognition is not infallible. It is about as accurate as a polygraph when a voice is disguised by normal means. I'll go into more detail following this article:
Now, when I was in High School I happened to study biometrics and much of what was true then is still true now:
Here are the problems. Zimmerman was yelling for help, he was getting beaten up and he was panicked and scared. Those facts alone can make the voice be disguised and come back a false-negative. If you throw in physical blows to the face, belly, or groin that can really throw it off. Also a hit to the throat will almost guarantee a failure to match. The vocal cords are the most important part of the body for this software, so a hit to that spot will make ones voice much less recognizable by the software.
Also, the screams were background noise and there was a lot of interference, making one more obstacle when they tried to isolate just the screams. There may have been leftover interferance not audible to the human ear and that can throw the results off a bit too. In short, all those things made me feel certain that if they used the software it wouldn't match even before the release of these results. By the way, a 48% match is very high, it's not scientifically conclusive, but if you take two random people off the street and compare there voices with voice recpgnition software, more often you'd be less then a 20% match, so really under the circumstances a 48% match is quite impressive. I take that 48% match, combined with all the reasons cited above, to be proof that there is a high probability that it is Zimmermans voice, and that is corrobobated by John's testimony.
Oh yeah, I forgot one more thing. Cell phones compress the voice signal so much that much information is lost. Meaning comparing Zimmermans voice when he was on a cell phone can be yet one more factor that can throw off the results of a a voice analysis.
Considering all these factors, a 48% match is no surprise.
The next issue with the media, is that there remains a mistake that media is STILL making to this day. The liberal stations still say that Zimmerman ignored the dispatchers 'orders' and kept chasing Trayvon
This is a map of where this all occurred:
Point C is where George Zimmerman was parked. When he got out to maintain line-of-sight with Trayvon, he headed towards Point E, passing through a dark area and losing sight of Trayvon. Apparently Trayvon was heading down the dark back area towards point D while Zimmerman stopped around Point E to finish his phone call to the dispatcher. Emphasis on Zimmerman stopped!
After Zimmerman hung up, the facts get sketchy. Zimmerman claims he was heading back to his truck, back through that darker area, and Trayvon attacked him, and in the struggle or something they somehow ended up getting to point F, which is where Trayvon died, which was also right outside the witness John's house.
We can't know everything that happened between Zimmerman hanging up and when John first spotted them, but we do know where Trayvon was when he got away from Zimmerman, and he was heading home, and we know he had a 90 second head start at least, so why didn't he make it that small distance to home in that 90 seconds?
The most probable explanation for all these facts based on where Trayvon was shot in relation to where Zimmerman was parked, is that Trayvon was heading home when his girlfriend called, and he talked to her, and he built up the nerve to go back and confront George Zimmerman.
Teenage boys will do stupid things if they think that they can impress a girl. That's human nature.
Th prosecutor has her work cut out for her if they expects to honestly prove Zimmerman guilty of anything, the facts just aren't there and a lot of what George Zimmerman and the eye-witness said seems very credible.
If, as the evidence suggests, Zimmerman did stop following Trayvon, and if Trayvon truly came back and assaulted Zimmerman, than it was justifiable homicide. By the time John came out and saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman and Zimmerman yelling for help, well, what would you do?
Getting out of the car was foolish to begin with, but not illegal, and prior to the fatal incident there is a 90 second timeframe where Zimmerman stopped to talk to the dispatcher, so the only reason Trayvon wouldn't have made it home is because he chose not to, because he came back to confront Zimmerman, just like Zimmerman claimed.
The last evidence that supposedly incriminates Zimmerman is the statment of Trayvon's girlfriend. According to ABC news she claimed Zimmerman was following Trayvon while he was on the phone with her. She claimed that Zimmerman cornered Trayvon, they argued, and Zimmerman attacked Trayvon.
The problen with that statement is that at the time she called, Zimmerman had already lost sight of Trayvon and stopped looking for him and was talking to the police dispatcher. That's her first lie. The second lie is the fact that she said Zimmerman 'cornered' Trayvon. Take a look at the map again. There is nowhere to corner anyone there.
Anyway, we don't know what really made Trayvon go back, but we do know that the girlfriends credibility is shot since she lied in order to try to incriminate George Zimmerman, so whatelse did she lie about?
JUSTICE FOR ZIMMERMAN
Whether he did anything wrong or not by following Trayvon is debatable, and he did not simply follow him around and then shoot him like the media would have you believe and following someone in public is not against the law. Attacking someone who is following you is, however.
A witness even stated he saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman and went to call 911 while Trayvon was hitting him.
Now if you were a 5'9" and 200 pounds or so being attacked by a 6'0" 160 pound football player and the only way to protect yourself was to use your handgun before your attacker tried to grab it(which Zimmerman said Trayvon was trying to do) what would you do? Unless you're a bleeding heart that would gladly let your attacker bash your head in on the sidewalk(Zimmerman had a large bleeding gash on the back of his head when police arrived) while waiting for the police to show up, I think you would grab that handgun you're allowed to legally carry before your attacker does and defend your life.
Either way one of them were going to end up dead in the confrontation and rather than try to stop it the witness left to call the police while Zimmerman was having his head beaten in.
There is nothing racist about this, despite what the media and the deceased's family are crying out to incite racial tensions. Trayvon did not die with a bag of skittles in his hand, he died with his hands balled into fists that he was using to punch Zimmerman in the face.
Trayvon could have just simply run away instead of trying to act like a thug(he was already suspended had been suspended for being caught with drug paraphernalia at school, which is stupid enough, and certainly carried himself as one as his twitter showed) and attacking Zimmerman, or better yet he could have explained why he was there since he was spending his 10 day suspension living at his father's house. George Zimmerman was knowledgeable about who his neighbors were and would probably have recognized his father.
Instead the exchange of words reportedly consisted of Trayvon asking if Zimmerman had a problem to which the response was "no" and then responded by saying "now you do" and then punching Zimmerman in the face as his bloody nose would attest to.
To charge Zimmerman with second degree murder is downright wrong.
Kasumi of Vientown
By almost any standard, Zimmerman’s legal defense in the Trayvon Martin shooting case has been a sort of ongoing cautionary tale for exactly what not to do if you’re facing potentially serious criminal charges.
Almost immediately, within around thirty-seven minutes after the shooting, Zimmerman was already waiving his right to an attorney. He then proceeded to interview with the police for five hours without any legal representation present.
Then the next day, still without any attorney present or legal advice, Zimmerman took the police back to the scene of the shooting at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, and reenacted what happened on the evening of February 26th with them, step-by-step on video.
Had Zimmerman’s narrative and recounting of the details of that evening been any less than 100% consistent, that’s the moment when everything would have fallen apart for him — sometime right around February 27th. The police had every reason and opportunity to document and doggedly pursue any differences they saw between Zimmerman’s initial interview and his video re-enactment the following day.
Rather than finding anything they could follow up with, what happened instead? The Sanford Police Department was unable to obtain any evidence that would allow them to press even involuntary manslaughter charges against Zimmerman. And no new evidence changed that, even as days and weeks passed.
As anyone who follows criminal justice knows, under harsh conditions and during long, station-house interviews, many people will end up confessing to crimes they didn’t even commit.
Most people are conditioned from an early age to have a bias towards telling authority figures what they want to hear.
Police have been known to take skillful advantage of this psychological blind spot to extract confessions and other incriminating information from suspects during interrogations.
In one infamous case, four innocent men confessed to committing the same brutal rape and murder after being interrogated without legal counsel.
Even when DNA evidence exonerated them, years later, they were still not immediately released, because of the sheer weight a recorded confession carries.
Zimmerman not only didn’t confess to any sort of impropriety in his police interviews, he seems to have been 100% consistent in his statements.
There was initially a pretty strong assumption by most people (mainly due to the incredibly biased media reporting of the incident) that the Sanford Police Department had somehow been complicit in not charging George Zimmerman.
But as time has gone on, it seems the investigation the department carried out was actually extremely by the book. Lately, people have changed tack; they don’t like the conclusions the investigation reached and feel state law must be to blame.
While the police spent weeks attempting to gather evidence and press charges against Zimmerman, the facts of the case simply didn’t materialize in a way that implicated Zimmerman as having committed manslaughter or ant other crime.
Then the case was blown up by the media, and more and more investigatory branches of the government became involved, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, but evidence against Zimmerman still remained elusive. If there is any strong evidence against him, it hasn’t been released by the prosecutors thus far, and having seen how weak the affidavit to arrest Zimmerman was, it appears as though there is no secret evidence.
While some have said it was reckless for Zimmerman to leave his truck at all, the law simply does not codify that. Leaving one’s vehicle inside one’s own neighborhood cannot legally be considered “reckless” behavior, especially when Zimmerman was well-known as being the neighborhood watch captain for the community.
Of course, it makes sense that Zimmerman would leave his truck to investigate something he considered suspicious, especially when he was relaying information to a 911 dispatcher.
Many people have taken issue with the fact that Zimmerman was armed as well, but legally speaking, it is unlikely to matter.
Around 900000 Florida residents have have concealed carry licenses. Carrying a weapon in one’s own neighborhood is not uncommon, nor does it have any special impact on this case. There is no evidence thus far that Zimmerman was brandishing his firearm or otherwise using it inappropriately.
The crux of the case comes down to what was happening in the sixty seconds preceding the shooting. And those sixty seconds happen to be the part of the encounter we know the most about.
There is hard evidence of screams for help on 911 tapes. There is evidence showing Zimmerman’s injuries, including a broken nose, and there is an eye-witness account of Zimmerman being beaten and yelling for help.
Since that time period is going to be the main focus of any investigation, there may not be much Zimmerman’s legal advisers can do here beyond what essentially comes down to public relations. (This case will be so easy for any defense lawyer to win, lol)
While Zimmerman’s original lawyers withdrawing from the case was certainly confusing and unexpected initially, it makes sense when one considers how transparent Zimmerman has been about what happened from day one.
If anything, hiding away and ceasing to make any public statements for several weeks seems to have been incredibly unnatural for Zimmerman.
This is, after all, a man who was going around town handing out flyers about the Sanford “homeless sucker punch” case last year, a case that didn’t involve him directly whatsoever.
Those flyers began with the same quote currently featured on each page of Zimmerman’s web site.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
- Edmund Burke
Zimmerman now seems to be downright intent on advocating for himself directly and increasing his public visibility. This has created a near-instant backlash against him from many who are still convinced he should immediately be arrested.
But that’s Zimmerman’s character in a nutshell; he’s nothing if not exceedingly independent and vocal.
Zimmerman went further than most would in volunteering to lead his neighborhood watch. He was, by all accounts, extremely thorough over the years in reporting anything suspicious in his neighborhood. He went against all reasonable legal advice when he allowed himself to be interrogated without an attorney present the night of Trayvon Martin’s shooting.
And now he no longer seems to be willing to back down from speaking with the state prosecutor directly, even against his legal team’s wishes. He also has expressed the urge to respond directly to those who are rallying for his arrest.
It’s difficult to tell what will happen with this more cavalier change in attitude. Sanford is, by many accounts, currently a tension-filled powder keg. Easter Sunday, the police station was briefly occupied by protesting students.
The next morning, an empty police cruiser was shot at six times. Not the warmest response for a police department that, thus far, appears to have done a by the books investigation
Some people have impled that there is evidence that proves Zimmerman's guilt. Allow me to demonstrate how the Zimmerman's attorney is likely to destroy it all in court.
A private sound researcher said that Zimmerman was not the person screaming, despite an eye-witness statement to the contrary.:
Voice recognition is not infallible. It is about as accurate as a polygraph when a voice is disguised by normal means. I'll go into more detail following this article:
Article on Voice Analysis Technology in this case
Two experts in the field of forensic voice identification, Tom Owen and Ed Primeau, were hired by the Orlando Sentinel to review George Zimmerman’s call to police along with the 911 calls right before the shooting.
They both decided the voice screaming for help on the 911 calls was not George Zimmerman, and each expert arrived at that conclusion by independent methods.
Tom Owen is mentioned first in the article. He’s described as a forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services, LLC.
Let’s take a closer look at the process he used.
That raises some concerns. Tom Owen apparently compared Zimmerman’s normal speaking voice on a dispatch call, with high-pitched, terrified screaming that was recorded in the background of later 911 calls.
I was pretty stunned that he could be so sure. After all, the computer program is looking for similarities in the vocal patterns. How many can it possibly find when pattern A is completely normal, laid back speech and pattern B is hysterical screaming?
I wanted to investigate this a bit further and looked into downloading the software Tom Owen used.
But this proved to be extremely difficult, a license for the software costs nearly $5,000.
That’s a pretty hefty price to pay to test this software out…
After a few more minutes of research, I found out that the Easy Voice Biometrics web domain is actually owned by Tom Owen himself.
So what Tom Owen is actually doing here, is using his own home-grown software to attempt to determine the similarities in speech markers between two radically different types of voice patterns and claiming that it is accurate “beyond scientific certainty.”
Beyond scientific certainty is a pretty strong statement.
There doesn’t seem to be any disclosure in the Orlando Sentinel article that Tom Owen owns EasyVoiceBiometrics.com, nor any that he was using his own software package to do the analysis.
I’m not sure whether the Orlando Sentinel author realizes it, but that could easily be construed as a conflict of interest, particularly when the software is currently being sold for $5,000 per license. There’s an extremely transparent profit motive for Tom Owen to promote his product in any way that he can, especially at that price.
Since Tom Owen has staked his reputation on this, and has said point-blank that this software is so accurate that he knows “with reasonable scientific certainty” that it’s not Zimmerman on the 911 calls, the software must at least be extremely thoroughly tested, right?
I emailed Mr. Owen to double-check.
Doesn’t sound reassuring, does it?
It also says, on Easy Voice Biometric’s own web site, that the software is less than a month old.
This is especially strange, because the Orlando Sentinel article says:
How could Owen have been using the same technology in that case when the web site says the software was only released on March 7th, 2012
Since Owen referred me to TracerTek.com, I checked out that site as well.
TracerTek.com and EasyVoiceBiometrics.com appear to be using the same web site template, just with different information filled in.
It appears Jeff Klinedinst is involved with both. He is listed as the VP of Marketing on TracerTek and he did the YouTube demo videos for Easy Voice Biometrics.
Here’s a demo video Jeff put together for Easy Voice Biometrics.
The software appears to work fine if someone alters their voice slightly, or if there is light music playing in the background.
But there certainly isn’t anything in the demos about Easy Voice Biometrics offering “reasonable scientific certainty” when someone is screaming in panic on the background of a 911 call.
So where exactly is this “scientific certainty” coming from?
The second expert, Ed Primeau, doesn’t “believe” in Biometric Analysis, but doesn’t say why.
Ed simply listened to the recordings. Then he decided the noises were Trayvon Martin because of the “tone of the voice” while reading Mother Jones.
Nevermind that there was an eyewitness to the fight who clearly states it was George Zimmerman yelling out for help. Or that Zimmerman is cited in the original police report as saying he was yelling for help. Or that the yells much more accurately portray someone who is screaming during an assault, rather than someone begging for their life at gunpoint.
Both Primeau and Owen report that they are credentialed by the American College Forensic Examiners Institute.
Sadly, it turns out there is an entire suite of these “American Forensic Board” sites, on almost any topic you can think of, which all seem to be ran by the same person, a gentleman named Dr. O’Block who claims to have nearly a dozen degrees himself.
Once again, most of these sites use the same basic template and only change cursory details, making it difficult to gauge how legitimate the boards are, if at all.
Tom Owen also lists things like this:
As prestigious as the “New York Institute for Forensic Audio” sounds, there is no such brick and mortar institute. It is actually a “division” of Owen Investigations, LLC. Tom Owen is basically claiming he was an instructor at his own unaccredited university.
I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the upcoming weeks, since both of these “experts” have sparked a lot of controversy with their statements and placed their reputations on the line.
They both decided the voice screaming for help on the 911 calls was not George Zimmerman, and each expert arrived at that conclusion by independent methods.
Tom Owen is mentioned first in the article. He’s described as a forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services, LLC.
Let’s take a closer look at the process he used.
Quote:
After the Sentinel contacted Owen, he used software called Easy Voice Biometrics to compare Zimmerman’s voice to the 911 call screams.
“I took all of the screams and put those together, and cut out everything else,” Owen says.
The software compared that audio to Zimmerman’s voice. It returned a 48 percent match. Owen said to reach a positive match with audio of this quality, he’d expect higher than 90 percent.
“As a result of that, you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it’s not Zimmerman,” Owen says, stressing that he cannot confirm the voice as Trayvon’s, because he didn’t have a sample of the teen’s voice to compare.
“I took all of the screams and put those together, and cut out everything else,” Owen says.
The software compared that audio to Zimmerman’s voice. It returned a 48 percent match. Owen said to reach a positive match with audio of this quality, he’d expect higher than 90 percent.
“As a result of that, you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it’s not Zimmerman,” Owen says, stressing that he cannot confirm the voice as Trayvon’s, because he didn’t have a sample of the teen’s voice to compare.
That raises some concerns. Tom Owen apparently compared Zimmerman’s normal speaking voice on a dispatch call, with high-pitched, terrified screaming that was recorded in the background of later 911 calls.
I was pretty stunned that he could be so sure. After all, the computer program is looking for similarities in the vocal patterns. How many can it possibly find when pattern A is completely normal, laid back speech and pattern B is hysterical screaming?
I wanted to investigate this a bit further and looked into downloading the software Tom Owen used.
But this proved to be extremely difficult, a license for the software costs nearly $5,000.
That’s a pretty hefty price to pay to test this software out…
After a few more minutes of research, I found out that the Easy Voice Biometrics web domain is actually owned by Tom Owen himself.
So what Tom Owen is actually doing here, is using his own home-grown software to attempt to determine the similarities in speech markers between two radically different types of voice patterns and claiming that it is accurate “beyond scientific certainty.”
Beyond scientific certainty is a pretty strong statement.
There doesn’t seem to be any disclosure in the Orlando Sentinel article that Tom Owen owns EasyVoiceBiometrics.com, nor any that he was using his own software package to do the analysis.
I’m not sure whether the Orlando Sentinel author realizes it, but that could easily be construed as a conflict of interest, particularly when the software is currently being sold for $5,000 per license. There’s an extremely transparent profit motive for Tom Owen to promote his product in any way that he can, especially at that price.
Since Tom Owen has staked his reputation on this, and has said point-blank that this software is so accurate that he knows “with reasonable scientific certainty” that it’s not Zimmerman on the 911 calls, the software must at least be extremely thoroughly tested, right?
I emailed Mr. Owen to double-check.
Doesn’t sound reassuring, does it?
It also says, on Easy Voice Biometric’s own web site, that the software is less than a month old.
This is especially strange, because the Orlando Sentinel article says:
Quote:
As recently as January, Owen used the same technology to identify accused murderer Sheila Davalloo in a 911 call made almost a decade ago.
How could Owen have been using the same technology in that case when the web site says the software was only released on March 7th, 2012
Since Owen referred me to TracerTek.com, I checked out that site as well.
TracerTek.com and EasyVoiceBiometrics.com appear to be using the same web site template, just with different information filled in.
It appears Jeff Klinedinst is involved with both. He is listed as the VP of Marketing on TracerTek and he did the YouTube demo videos for Easy Voice Biometrics.
Here’s a demo video Jeff put together for Easy Voice Biometrics.
The software appears to work fine if someone alters their voice slightly, or if there is light music playing in the background.
But there certainly isn’t anything in the demos about Easy Voice Biometrics offering “reasonable scientific certainty” when someone is screaming in panic on the background of a 911 call.
So where exactly is this “scientific certainty” coming from?
The second expert, Ed Primeau, doesn’t “believe” in Biometric Analysis, but doesn’t say why.
Quote:
Not all experts rely on biometrics. Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio engineer and forensics expert, is not a believer in the technology’s use in courtroom settings.
Ed simply listened to the recordings. Then he decided the noises were Trayvon Martin because of the “tone of the voice” while reading Mother Jones.
Quote:
“I believe that’s Trayvon Martin in the background, without a doubt,” Primeau says, stressing that the tone of the voice is a giveaway. “That’s a young man screaming.”
Nevermind that there was an eyewitness to the fight who clearly states it was George Zimmerman yelling out for help. Or that Zimmerman is cited in the original police report as saying he was yelling for help. Or that the yells much more accurately portray someone who is screaming during an assault, rather than someone begging for their life at gunpoint.
Both Primeau and Owen report that they are credentialed by the American College Forensic Examiners Institute.
Sadly, it turns out there is an entire suite of these “American Forensic Board” sites, on almost any topic you can think of, which all seem to be ran by the same person, a gentleman named Dr. O’Block who claims to have nearly a dozen degrees himself.
Once again, most of these sites use the same basic template and only change cursory details, making it difficult to gauge how legitimate the boards are, if at all.
Tom Owen also lists things like this:
Quote:
Instructor “New York Institute for Forensic Audio” 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,2006, 2007
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,2006, 2007
As prestigious as the “New York Institute for Forensic Audio” sounds, there is no such brick and mortar institute. It is actually a “division” of Owen Investigations, LLC. Tom Owen is basically claiming he was an instructor at his own unaccredited university.
I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the upcoming weeks, since both of these “experts” have sparked a lot of controversy with their statements and placed their reputations on the line.
Now, when I was in High School I happened to study biometrics and much of what was true then is still true now:
Here are the problems. Zimmerman was yelling for help, he was getting beaten up and he was panicked and scared. Those facts alone can make the voice be disguised and come back a false-negative. If you throw in physical blows to the face, belly, or groin that can really throw it off. Also a hit to the throat will almost guarantee a failure to match. The vocal cords are the most important part of the body for this software, so a hit to that spot will make ones voice much less recognizable by the software.
Also, the screams were background noise and there was a lot of interference, making one more obstacle when they tried to isolate just the screams. There may have been leftover interferance not audible to the human ear and that can throw the results off a bit too. In short, all those things made me feel certain that if they used the software it wouldn't match even before the release of these results. By the way, a 48% match is very high, it's not scientifically conclusive, but if you take two random people off the street and compare there voices with voice recpgnition software, more often you'd be less then a 20% match, so really under the circumstances a 48% match is quite impressive. I take that 48% match, combined with all the reasons cited above, to be proof that there is a high probability that it is Zimmermans voice, and that is corrobobated by John's testimony.
Oh yeah, I forgot one more thing. Cell phones compress the voice signal so much that much information is lost. Meaning comparing Zimmermans voice when he was on a cell phone can be yet one more factor that can throw off the results of a a voice analysis.
Considering all these factors, a 48% match is no surprise.
The next issue with the media, is that there remains a mistake that media is STILL making to this day. The liberal stations still say that Zimmerman ignored the dispatchers 'orders' and kept chasing Trayvon
This is a map of where this all occurred:
Point C is where George Zimmerman was parked. When he got out to maintain line-of-sight with Trayvon, he headed towards Point E, passing through a dark area and losing sight of Trayvon. Apparently Trayvon was heading down the dark back area towards point D while Zimmerman stopped around Point E to finish his phone call to the dispatcher. Emphasis on Zimmerman stopped!
After Zimmerman hung up, the facts get sketchy. Zimmerman claims he was heading back to his truck, back through that darker area, and Trayvon attacked him, and in the struggle or something they somehow ended up getting to point F, which is where Trayvon died, which was also right outside the witness John's house.
We can't know everything that happened between Zimmerman hanging up and when John first spotted them, but we do know where Trayvon was when he got away from Zimmerman, and he was heading home, and we know he had a 90 second head start at least, so why didn't he make it that small distance to home in that 90 seconds?
The most probable explanation for all these facts based on where Trayvon was shot in relation to where Zimmerman was parked, is that Trayvon was heading home when his girlfriend called, and he talked to her, and he built up the nerve to go back and confront George Zimmerman.
Teenage boys will do stupid things if they think that they can impress a girl. That's human nature.
Th prosecutor has her work cut out for her if they expects to honestly prove Zimmerman guilty of anything, the facts just aren't there and a lot of what George Zimmerman and the eye-witness said seems very credible.
If, as the evidence suggests, Zimmerman did stop following Trayvon, and if Trayvon truly came back and assaulted Zimmerman, than it was justifiable homicide. By the time John came out and saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman and Zimmerman yelling for help, well, what would you do?
Getting out of the car was foolish to begin with, but not illegal, and prior to the fatal incident there is a 90 second timeframe where Zimmerman stopped to talk to the dispatcher, so the only reason Trayvon wouldn't have made it home is because he chose not to, because he came back to confront Zimmerman, just like Zimmerman claimed.
The last evidence that supposedly incriminates Zimmerman is the statment of Trayvon's girlfriend. According to ABC news she claimed Zimmerman was following Trayvon while he was on the phone with her. She claimed that Zimmerman cornered Trayvon, they argued, and Zimmerman attacked Trayvon.
The problen with that statement is that at the time she called, Zimmerman had already lost sight of Trayvon and stopped looking for him and was talking to the police dispatcher. That's her first lie. The second lie is the fact that she said Zimmerman 'cornered' Trayvon. Take a look at the map again. There is nowhere to corner anyone there.
Anyway, we don't know what really made Trayvon go back, but we do know that the girlfriends credibility is shot since she lied in order to try to incriminate George Zimmerman, so whatelse did she lie about?
JUSTICE FOR ZIMMERMAN
