Point blank, if someone were to attempt to stop you from going to your place of residence and they were not in any way a legitimate authority like either a law enforcement officer or private security would you just be all "Why yes completely unknown person with nothing to back them up what so ever, I'll do as you say and allow you to dictate where I can go and what I can do."
You know the answer but seem to still want to make some case to either sully Martin or decrease the responsibility of Zimmerman. What nuance is there in trying to somehow exonerate Zimmerman? Whenever this argument is made anyone with a sense of morals need to point out the simple fact that if Zimmerman didn't attempt to stop Martin from going home, there would be no altercation.
If a person is walking down the street and someone out of the blue says "Hey, I'm going to keep you here against your will" very few of us are going to become Buddhist saints and just allow that. If the situation as likely happened then escalates to the person physically trying to stop you from going on your way, well a fight is gonna break out. But the person in the wrong isn't the one that was being stopped.
I think it's often telling that even with placing caveats like "Yeah, sure, Zimmerman was a piece of crap... BUUUUUUT..." there's still some attempt to justify the shooting. Oh, Zimmerman was bloodied? Did that happen out of nowhere? Or did it happen because he accosted a person who was going home, whom he had zero evidence to contain? We all know how we would view that on a personal level if that was us or someone we loved like a girlfriend, wife or family member. Because I guarantee you if someone stopped you from going to your home, you ignored them as you should and then they laid a hand on you to stop you, you'd fight back. And you'd be in the right.
Your's isn't a nuanced reading of the situation. It's giving cover to Zimmerman who instigated a situation that ended in the killing of a teenager who was guilty of nothing but trying to go home and then his shooter was allowed to go free. Zimmerman put himself in harms way for no good reason by stopping a person he had no real authority to stop. Martin's reaction to that is the reaction of 99.9% of the people in the world. Someone tries to physically stop me from going to my home is asking to get into a fight, and there should be no surprise if I react with violence to being physically stopped from going to where I'm going. BUT... for SOME reason Martin is not allowed to have reacted to this the way we all know in our heart of hearts we all would have. I wonder why? I wonder why still to this day people feel the need to make some kind of excuse for Zimmerman's actions?