On the Zimmerman Acquittal

A. W. e-mails and I comment:

I know you've been following this case. I must say I'm impressed by the outcome. Even though I believed that Z's account of the events was consistent and that the prosecution's case was incredibly weak, I was expecting the all-female jury to cave in to the pressure and declare him guilty or, at least, to come back with a lesser charge.

MavPhil:  That's  what I was expecting: a cave-in by the female jurors and a manslaughter conviction.  So I was extremely pleased that justice was done.   The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses.  Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara.  He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free.  A patient, relentless, digger for the truth.  Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.

Zimmerman should not have been charged in the first place, and initially he wasn't.  It was only after the race-baiters got wind of the story that local law enforcement buckled under national pressure.  Among the race-baiters was our very own hopelessly inept president, Barack  Obama, with his irresponsible remark to the effect that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.  Here again we have Obama meddling in a local matter just as he did before about four summers ago in the Henry Gates affair. 

So was the trial about race or not? 

Objectively,  the case had nothing to do with race.  Objectively, the case was about the use of deadly force to repel an attack of deadly force.  A very fit young man physically assaults an obese, out-of-shape older man.  The older guy ends up on the ground with the younger guy on top of him doing the 'pound and ground,' slamming the older man's head into the pavement and telling him that tonight he will die.  Now is it legally permissible to use deadly force in a situation like this, a situation in which one is about to be killed or suffer grave bodily harm?  Yes, the law allows the use of deadly force in such a situation. Note that we are not talking about morality here, but about legality.  Whatever one's moral intuitions or moral theories, there is a hard fact about what the law permits, and that is not in dispute.  The only question is whether on that particular evening George Zimmerman was indeed fighting for his life. 

The defense team made a very strong case that he was on the bottom fighting for his life against the strapping youth who thought of him as a  "creepy-ass cracker."  The defense didn't have to make that strong case; all it had to do was show that the above was a likely scenario in order to raise a reasonable doubt about Zimmerman's guilt.  In a criminal proceeding the probative standard is set very high, and rightly so.  The accused is presumed innocent and the burden of proof rests on the prosecution to show that the accused is guilty of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt.  But the defense succeeded in doing both: it showed that Zimmerman  was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and, as O'Mara remarked after the trial, it proved that he was innocent.

So, objectively, the case had nothing to do with race.  The racial veneer was superadded by the race-baiters of the Left so that they could use this trial to further their own political agenda.  Among the race-baiters are the editors at the New York Times who decided that Zimmerman was a 'white Hispanic.'  They would never refer to Obama as a white black even though he is half-white and half-black.  They applied the 'white Hispanic' appellation in order to inject race into a non-racial case.  If both parties to the dispute were black or both Hispanic we wouldn't have heard about it.  Meanwhile, blacks are killing blacks in record numbers in Chicago and other places.

 

The Left is raging at the moment. They say young blacks aren't safe anymore. But, were they before this single incident? I haven't heard a single word about the dozens of young blacks who are murdered by other blacks every year. All I hear is a lot of moralizing about poverty, racism and gun legislation from upper-middle class people who live in 95% white communities and have never seen a gun in their lives.

 

I think it's something else. Maybe it's the realization that they're not so powerful. That their enormous govt.-approved media campaign to portray this as a racially motivated murder of a kid was not enough convince a jury of six women (which, by the way, included a black hispanic lady). That they could not only notice the absence of racist armed vigilantes on the hunt and young harmless children walking home, but also act accordingly.  Maybe it's too much for them, even after six years of getting everything they wanted.

MavPhil:  I basically agree with you.  Let the leftist loons rage.  It is music to my ears and blog-fodder for my blog.  We conservatives are going to have a lot of fun exposing their contemptible lies and inanities. 

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Race and Grievance

The Case Against George Zimmerman