In a nutshell: due to the weakness
of the evidence that George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin was
not justified by self-defense, Zimmerman’s acquittal was more warranted than a
conviction would have been. Unfortunately, America clearly still has not
learned the main lesson of racially charged criminal cases past: the folly of
judging any criminal defendant in the court of public opinion without—or in
spite of—credible evidence.
A year after the verdict, only the
book-ends of the Zimmerman-Martin confrontation are clear. The critical middle
part of the story—between Zimmerman’s tailing of Trayvon and his shooting of
the youth—was never clear enough to dispel all reasonable doubt about
Zimmerman’s guilt. According
to Zimmerman, at some point during the alteration, Trayvon punched him in
the face, knocking him to the ground, and then repeatedly banged his head into
the sidewalk. Zimmerman claimed that his gun became exposed and Trayvon began
reaching for it, whereupon Zimmerman grabbed the gun and shot Trayvon in the
chest. If this version of the confrontation is true, then it arguably was
objectively reasonable for Zimmerman to think that he was in imminent danger of
death or serious bodily harm. It is this legal
standard that governs the lawful use of deadly force in self-defense.
The prosecution never did manage
to rebut this account of the altercation convincingly. Even if Zimmerman did follow
Trayvon because of his race as the prosecution sought to prove, Trayvon may
still have physically attacked Zimmerman, and thus the latter may still have
fired in self-defense. Trayvon’s mother identified
the voice of a person screaming for help in the background of a 911 call as her
son’s, but of course the defense was able to produce
several friends and relatives of Zimmerman’s to testify that the voice was his.
An FBI voice-analysis expert, Hirotaka Nakasone, testified
that he could not determine who was calling for help on the tape, and that such
recordings tend to be highly unreliable in any case.
Other witnesses didn’t get a clear
view of the incident through the rain or the darkness and thus couldn’t
conclusively identify Trayvon as the person pinned to the ground during any
part of the scuffle. Expert witness Dr. Vincent Dimaio, a forensic pathologist,
testified
that Trayvon’s gunshot wound supported the claim that he was on top of Zimmerman
when he was shot. Apparently Trayvon’s top was hanging away from his chest when
the shot was fired, which suggests that he probably was bent over Zimmerman at
that moment. Moreover, arguably the case’s most controversial witness, medical
examiner Dr. Shiping Bao, testified
that the knees of Trayvon’s pants were stained, and a police officer testified
that Zimmerman’s back was wet and had pieces of grass on it. These claims, too,
were consistent with Trayvon’s having knocked Zimmerman down and kneeled over
him to pummel him.
Dr. Dimaio also testified that
Zimmerman’s injuries were consistent with his having been struck from above and
having had the back of his head banged into concrete. Dimaio stated
further that such an attack can cause serious head trauma, even without
leaving visible superficial wounds. Although medical examiner Dr. Valerie Rao testified—based
on footage and photographs of Zimmerman’s injuries—that she thought the wounds
were “insignificant” and “non-life threatening,” the jury was left to wonder
which expert was more to be trusted. One thing is certain: heads wounds from
simple fistfights can be fatal, as some recent incidents
show.
According to Anthony
Gorgone, a crime lab analyst with the Florida government, the investigation
failed to turn up any of Zimmerman’s blood or DNA on Trayvon’s hands or under
his fingernails. Yet the prosecution left it unclear whether it was possible
for Trayvon to attack Zimmerman without getting the latter’s blood or DNA on
his hands. Without in-depth analysis of this issue and others, the jurors,
lacking expertise in such matters, couldn’t conclude definitively that Trayvon
didn’t attack Zimmerman. The cuts and bruises on Zimmerman’s face and head were
real, whereas Trayvon appeared to have suffered no injuries other than the fatal
gunshot wound to his chest—and broken
skin on his knuckles, which also
suggests that Trayvon did indeed inflict some “whoop ass” on
Zimmerman. (Those are the words of Trayvon’s irrepressible friend Rachel Jeantel,
who was on the phone with him shortly before the shooting and who publicly
conceded after the trial that she
thought Trayvon might have thrown the first punch.) The available evidence,
though hazy, weighed more heavily in favor of Zimmerman’s self-defense argument
than in favor of the prosecution’s case.
For these reasons, the jury was
not to be faulted for coming back with “not guilty” verdicts on both charges in
this case. Florida law required the jury to convict Zimmerman only if the
prosecution proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he shot Trayvon with a “depraved
mind” and if the defense failed to prove that it was objectively reasonable
for Zimmerman to believe that he had to use deadly force in order to protect
himself from death or great bodily harm. The evidence presented at trial arguably
raised that reasonable doubt and supported Zimmerman’s affirmative defense; accordingly,
the acquittal was a fair judgment for the jury to render.
Nothing that I’ve written here
amounts to a personal defense of George Zimmerman. The man always struck me as somewhat
slow-witted, and rather creepy at that—a man who likely suffers from delusions
of crimefighting grandeur and possibly harbors racist prejudices as well. (This
assessment of his character is borne out by a list
of his run-ins with the law, both before and after his shooting of
Trayvon.) I have no doubt about the folly of his decision to follow Trayvon in
the first place, and I agree that he thus bears the lion’s share of the moral
responsibility for this tragedy. It is quite plausible that Trayvon’s race
played some (perhaps subconscious) role in Zimmerman’s decision to tail him.
None of the above factors,
however, made Zimmerman legally guilty. Following a “suspicious” individual
around one’s neighborhood—however unwise it may be, and whatever bigoted motives
one may have for doing so—is not a crime. The police dispatcher advised Zimmerman
not to shadow Trayvon because it was foolhardy and imprudent, not because it
was illegal—and he actually did not
forbid him to tail the boy, but only told him, “We don’t need you to do
that.” Nor did the evidence presented at trial prove that Zimmerman initiated
physical violence against Trayvon; if anything, it suggested the opposite. We
cannot rule out the possibility that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman in a way that
made it reasonable for the latter to think he was in imminent danger of death
or severe bodily harm. For those reasons, acquittal was probably
the appropriate verdict.
This conclusion in no way denies
that the justice system frequently treats
minorities
unjustly,
or that the self-defense laws of Florida and many other states may cry out for
reform. Yet on this last matter, too, misconceptions abound. The Sunshine
State’s much-maligned “Stand Your Ground” law was widely
blamed
for either Trayvon’s death, or Zimmerman’s acquittal, or both. That blame
was misdirected;
the essence of a Stand Your Ground law is that a person under attack no
longer has a legal duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense.
Zimmerman’s story, however, had him pinned to the ground on his back and being battered
by an irate Trayvon immediately before he fired the fatal shot. Even in
non-Stand Your Ground states, a person under attack has a duty to retreat only
where it can be done safely and practically, an option that was foreclosed to
Zimmerman under these circumstances. Therefore, both the erstwhile duty to
retreat and its nemesis, Stand Your Ground, were moot in this case—which would
certainly explain why Zimmerman’s
lawyers didn’t cite Florida’s Stand Your Ground law in his defense.
What is not moot in the sad story of Martin and Zimmerman is the public
reaction to it. Too many observers posited from the beginning—with little or no
firm evidentiary basis—that Trayvon was totally blameless and that George
Zimmerman was as guilty as sin. Too many people reacted to the verdict by
fulminating that the justice
system had failed; that the verdict was the product
of institutionalized racism; that American law regards
black lives as cheap;
that racists now have a veritable license
to kill young black men. Such sentiments made this case the latest in a
long, loathsome line of racial confrontations in which many African-Americans reflexively
took the side of the Black disputants, only for the evidence to reveal in the
end that things weren’t so simple.
In 1987, an African-American teenager
from upstate New York, Tawana Brawley, claimed
that a group of white men, including a police officer and a local prosecutor, had
kidnapped, assaulted and raped her. The Reverend Al Sharpton made his bones as America’s
racial-rabble-rouser-in-chief while “representing” Brawley by hurling a string
of libelous charges against the men she accused. In the end, a grand jury
investigation concluded that the entire affair had
been a hoax—concocted, according to Brawley’s ex-boyfriend, to protect her
from punishment by her stepfather for running away from home.
A generation later, in 2006, an African-American
exotic dancer, Crystal Mangum, accused
three members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of racially slurring, beating
and gang-raping her at a team party. In response, the prosecuting D.A., Mike
Nifong, committed a slew of ethical violations for which he ultimately had to
be disbarred. The media predictably sensationalized the case, students protested
at Duke and on college campuses nationwide, and academics excoriated the
athletes without ever laying eyes on a shred of evidence. Even the Duke
administration abandoned its own students to have their reputations dragged
through the mud. Eventually, however, it emerged that Ms. Mangum—a deeply
troubled and mentally ill woman who has a
history of making false rape accusations and who was recently convicted
of murdering her boyfriend—had fabricated
the story wholesale.
Of course, racially motivated
white-on-black violence is not purely a thing of the past; indeed, a slew of
similar cases garnered attention in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. In
Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July 2013, a 76-year-old Caucasian man, John Spooner,
was found
guilty of first-degree intentional homicide for shooting and killing a
13-year-old African-American boy, Darius Simmons, whom he suspected of breaking
into his house and stealing his shotgun. (The trial court ultimately rejected
Spooner’s plea of innocence by reason of mental disease or defect.) In November
2013 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, homeowner Theodore Wafer shotgunned
19-year-old Renisha McBride to death on the porch of his home after she crashed
her car on the outskirts of Detroit. (The case is currently in the pre-trial
phase.) In Florida in December 2012, a 46-year-old Caucasian man, Michael Dunn,
shot
and killed Jordan Davis, another 17-year-old African-American, at a gas station
after demanding that the youth and his friends turn down their “thug
music”. Dunn’s lawyer—unlike George Zimmerman’s—actually cited
Florida’s Stand Your Ground law in his client’s defense. That case,
however, had a more unexpected outcome: The jury convicted
Dunn on three counts of attempted second-degree murder but was inexplicably
hung on the charge of first-degree murder. (Fortunately, the D.A.’s office
announced that they would seek
a retrial of Dunn on the murder charge, and it now appears
that said retrial will take place in September.)
If all the facts alleged by the
prosecution in those cases are true, these men would be far better candidates
for public flagellation than George Zimmerman ever was. For reasons made
obvious by video footage
of the shooting of Darius Simmons, self-defense was not even an issue in John
Spooner’s trial. Renisha McBride’s killer claims
that he was afraid someone was breaking into his house, but it is hard to see
how he reasonably feared death or great bodily harm given that he had
to open his front door to blast her. While Michael Dunn argued
self-defense, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was of little help to him, and with
good reason. With or without a duty to retreat, self-defense law requires that
a person reasonably believe that
his/her life or bodily safety is in imminent danger before using deadly force. Given
the reported facts in Dunn’s case, his belief was anything but reasonable. He claimed
that the youths threatened him and brandished a shotgun, but no weapon was
found in or near their car, and whatever verbal threats they may have leveled
at him didn’t endanger his life. The evidence in Michael Dunn’s trial militated
heavily against his self-defense claim—unlike the facts in the Zimmerman case.
I fully understand why the
Zimmerman verdict was so hard
to swallow for African-Americans who have become bitterly accustomed to
being railroaded by their country’s justice system. President Obama was
absolutely right when he remarked,
“[W]hen you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s
a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize
that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of
experiences and a history that…doesn’t go away.” There is precisely nothing
wrong with acknowledging those feelings and experiences, and there was plenty
that is wrong with ignoring or dismissing them.
Nonetheless, lambasting a justice
system that actually functioned just as it is meant to function never was an
appropriate response to the outcome of Florida
v. Zimmerman. The right reaction in this and other such cases is to reserve
judgment until courts of law vet the evidence. That approach does not mean cavalierly
dismissing every allegation of criminal bigotry. If juries acquit defendants in
the face of compelling evidence of guilt, then it is legitimate for informed
observers to point out those jurors’ error. In other cases, however, the
evidence is either highly exculpatory or simply too unclear or flimsy to
establish guilt. Defendants in such cases should be acquitted, and the
uninformed masses should admit that they are not qualified to judge what
happened. I and many
other observers stayed
off of the outrage bandwagon in the Zimmerman case not because we are unwilling
to hold homicidal bigots to account, but because legal guilt must be judged
based on solid evidence. For all of their flaws, courts of law are far better
equipped to evaluate that evidence than the court of public opinion is.
Injustice in the American justice
system is a reality, and African-Americans disproportionately fall victim to
it. That fact, however, does not mean that the system failed this time. Nor does it justify the rush
to judgment in this case—one not entirely unlike the mass hysteria that
followed the infamous beating and rape of the Central Park jogger
in 1989. That sensational reaction ultimately sent four young Black men and one
young Latino to jail for more than a decade for a crime they did
not commit. It is fundamentally the same kind of injustice to which the
people wrongly accused in the Tawana Brawley and Duke lacrosse cases fell
victim: the public vilification of criminal defendants by uninformed mobs. The soberer
heads among us must remain vigilant, on the lookout for these public-opinion
stampedes and ready to resist them whenever they rear their heads. In the
meantime, all we can do is keep
an eye on the wastrel George Zimmerman, lest his delusional self-regard
make him a continuing threat to public safety—and continue to pray for the soul
of a young man who met his Maker too soon.
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