Race and the American Justice System

It's hard right now to digest this verdict. I've been telling friends and family for a week that I this trial was stressing me out entirely too much, but part of it is that I always knew this is a possibility. The Stand Your Ground law is extremely flawed, and the right lawyer in front of the right jury can get this verdict.

So we've seen the punditry and the arguing and the ridiculousness. Now a man who killed a child - a man who has never denied doing so - is free.

But alas, that's happened before and it will happen again. The real reason we are all so anxious now, more so with this than with Casey Anthony or OJ Simpson or any number of others, is that racial tension is very much in the air, and very few people can or will acknowledge why.

I've been thinking about this a lot since this trial began. I don't know that I'm the best person to try, but I've seen so many people utterly unqualified to say this is not about race do just that. Maybe I can at least try and explain what those people cannot or will not see.

First off, let me make the wild suggestion that I don't consider George Zimmerman a racist. At least not in any significant fashion. Would he have gone stalking a white teenager in the streets? Who knows. But after having the facts of this case hammered in repeatedly over the last few weeks, I have no doubt at this point that he would have shot a 10-year-old girl that not if she came at him armed with a bottle of Snapple.

The point really is, what if he had done that? That may seem a strange mental exercise, but just walk through it. Zimmerman said he feared for his life because the person he was stalking with a loaded weapon came at him, caught him off-guard and put him on the ground, said he would die that night, then seemed to go for his gun.

None of those facts depend on Trayvon Martin being bigger or stronger, or on him knowing mixed martial arts (as this rather disturbing RedState article suggests was important). Virtually anyone could have done the things which George Zimmerman says prompted him to shoot a child at point blank range.

So what if it had been a woman? What if it had been a white teenager, even one build like a fullback? I realize some may argue, but many people, including myself, can only guess Zimmerman would have gone to jail that night, Stand Your Ground likely never would have been discussed, and none of us outside a small neighborhood in Sanford would have any awareness of this case.

That's where the problem lies. We have a justice system today which applies different treatment based on race of the VICTIM.

At the heart of the defense has always been a rather offensive notion: that a black teenaged boy is inherently a threat to your life. Not a black girl. Not a white boy. No, the one time it
s ok to shoot to kill is if a young black man is at the other end of the gun because, who knows, somehow they may have the power to kill you.

There have always been complaints that the justice system is less likely to give the benefit of doubt to a black youth facing charges. But for most of us, at least those who are white like myself, that's a complaint that doesn't consume our thoughts. There may be greater scrutiny on black youths, after all, but if he stays out of trouble, a young black man can still grow up to be president.

This is different, though. Trayvon Martin didn't create this situation, however he responded to it. He died because he was in wrong place at the wrong time and handled it the wrong way. Alas, that too has happened to people before and it will happen again.

But usually, when you bring a gun with you to stalk someone and that someone ends up dead, the justice system will bring you to justice, particularly if they find you standing over the body with a smoking gun.

There are a lot of people in American confused and hurt about what makes this case so different.

Something the SYG apologists should consider

Predictably, a bunch of people who reflexively want to take the side of the shooter in a Stand Your Ground case are these days saying "George Zimmerman's side" of the Trayvon Martin's shooting is revealing more information.

I have said before, and reiterate again, Zimmerman's side of the story is essentially the same as it ever was and the fundamental facts of the case have not moved an inch. The story boils down to this: Zimmerman thought Trayvon looked suspicious and called police. He then tracked Martin down. Zimmerman claims the two got into an altercation and he felt he needed to use deadly force and kill Martin.

That was the Zimmerman side on day 1. Now, Daily Caller is looking at video which most people see as evidence there wasn't much of a scuffle and sees evidence that there was a fight. A growing number of people seem to think hearing Zimmerman claimed his nose was broken adds some new information to the basic facts.

But as people jump on this wagon, they need to consider something very clearly. SYG works both ways. If people say Martin needed to die for this, realize he had every right to kill George Zimmerman based on the very same law which Zimmerman is shielding himself with now.

Zimmerman stalked Martin in the streets and was brandishing a deadly weapon when he did it. Martin, by Zimmerman's own account, confronted Zimmerman from there. Was it not reasonable with a man stalking you in the streets with a handgun for you to feel threatened for your life? Indeed, even assuming everything Zimmerman is saying is the absolute truth, all Martin did was to stand his ground.

Now ask yourself, would police have responded do defensively to the defendant if that was the case? If a 17-year-old black kid in a hoodie had wrestled a gun away from the neighborhood watch guy and shot him in the streets near his home? According to SYG, that is exactly what should have happened.

Zimmerman created the confrontation. Zimmerman introduced the threat of deadly force. Zimmerman employed deadly force and killed a child, hoodie or no hoodie. And Zimmerman still has not been charged with a crime.

None of that changes with a broken nose or a laceration on the head. Zimmerman has yet to show he felt in danger of his life when he had a handgun and Martin had some iced tea. Martin, on the other hand, would be able to make a pretty good cade he had reason to fear for his life. We know that because he is dead.

Standing Down

It feels foolish at this point that I haven't commented yet on the Trayvon Martin incident, seeing as even the president of the United States has weighed in. But in so many ways, I hate when hype takes over such a serious story as this. I think politics should look at systemic problems and solutions, and the failure to arrest the killer of this child is primarilly a matter of poor execution.

There is, though, a systemic issue that deserves fresh attention right now, and one I know quite a bit about. The Stand Your Ground law is one that was controversial from the start, and the attention on the issue in the past few weeks has been woefully confused about the matter. I actually covered one of the first incidents of how Stand Your Ground played out while working for the News-Press. There is no live link anymore, but my articles have been cited in some legal journals since then.

The short version is that a man named Michael Frazzini dressed himself up in dark clothes and hid in his mother's backyard one night to catch a neighbor vandalizing the place. What happened was that neighbor's father, Todd Rasmussen, came out and saw Frazzini getting into a kerfuffle with his son and shot Frazzini in the backyard where Frazzini had grown up. No charges were ever brought forward, and though an assistant state attorney had recommended the matter go to grand jury, it never did.

Race was not a factor, so the story did not draw no much national attention, but the results were very similar in the Martin and Frazzini cases. A man with no reasonable capability to employ deadly force was shot dead in a location where he had every right to be. The Martin case is worse in some respects in that it happened in broad daylight and Martin wasn't wearing anything to cover his face (Frazzini wore a mask), but the justification for letting a killer off without even taking the matter to the courts was the same: the Stand Your Ground law.

In what is really a very good post at RedState, Dan McLaughlin gets something right about the way the law works. It is part of the self-defense statute, not a be-all end-all, so there is no guarantee that George Zimmerman or Todd Rasmussen would have been arrested if not for the existence of this law. McLaughlin correctly writes: "There’s been some discussion about Florida’s particularly strong self-defense law, but in any state in the Union, if a jury believes there is a real possibility that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, he’d be acquitted, and if the jury doesn’t, he’d be convicted."

But those who are guarding this law and saying it was misapplied here miss a greater point. This statute send a message to the public that they can and should use deadly force when they feel threatened.

Now, the law says you can use deadly force if you feel in imminent danger of losing your life or of someone else losing their life. Many of us, myself included, find it extremely doubtful such a thing happened when Zimmerman decided to shoot and kill a 17-year-old in the streets of Sanford. But there is something else at play here which liberals should remain very mindful of, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

With the Stand Your Ground law in place, that becomes a harder threshold to cross. Not impossible, mind you. Indeed, I think it could be done with some ease in the case of Zimmerman, and honestly believe prosecutors should have given it a go with Rasmussen six years ago. But a standard self-defense statute would be easier to deal with. And that gets to the real fatal flaw with Stand Your Ground. Legal laziness.

It is laziness on the part of cops, and laziness of the part of prosecutors (And if I may weigh in with one rather muted criticism in Sanford, why has all the attention been on the police? The State Attorney's Office can bring charges independently, but it is taking intervention by the state and the feds to get something done here. Prosecutors deserve at least as much criticism as the chief of police)

Stand Your Ground has never really seen the day it had to stand up to judicial scrutiny because it is used an excuse to avoid court altogether. In its execution, the law has not been used so often as a defense but as a reason not arrest anyone in the first case. That happened when sheriff's deputies let Todd Rasmussen sleep in his bed the night he killed a man, and it happened when George Zimmerman got trigger-happy in the streets of Sanford.

Were these men justified in what they did in the eyes of the courts? The courts were denied the chance to weigh in at all. In both of these cases, the enforcers of the law chose not to pursue charges, so no judge or jury ever decided if the Stand Your Ground law was a suitable defense.

That is why Stand Your Ground needs to be repealed. We have a law on the books that encouraged people to shoot first when they get twitchy, and the cost of that message has been paid in souls. A drunk driver who killed Trayvon Martin would be in jail right now. But while the whole world, it now seems, feels Zimmerman belongs in jail for what he did, cops at the time, and prosecutors since then, decided it was too difficult to justify an arrest and let him go free.

Yes, something is very wrong here, but that is not the message that was sent when this misguided law was passed.