Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker:
The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found not guilty: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.
Emily Bazelon at Slate:
You can see the box the jurors might have felt they were in. Even if they didn’t like George Zimmerman—even if they believed only part of what he told the police—they didn’t have a charge under Florida law that was a clear fit for what he did that night.
Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic:
The startling Zimmerman verdict—and the case and trial that preceded it—is above all a blunt reminder of the limitations of our justice system. Criminal trials are not searches for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They never have been. Our rules of evidence and the Bill of Rights preclude it… Trials like the one we’ve all just witnessed in Florida can therefore never fully answer the larger societal questions they pose. They can never act as moral surrogates to resolve the national debates they trigger.
The “stand-your-ground” law – when it interacts with race – can come perilously close to a return to the right to lynch black men in America – just for being be in the wrong place at the wrong time, for doing nothing wrong, except wearing a hoodie and carrying some Skittles… We must respect the jury’s decision. But we need not respect that law. And, unless we are to return to the era of lynching, it needs to be repealed.
The Justice Department said Sunday that it was restarting its investigation into the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin to consider possible separate hate crime charges against George Zimmerman.
Oh hey look, Andrew Sullivan is soapboxing about something he doesn’t understand. Stop the presses. This case had nothing to do with “stand your ground”. It was simple self-defense.
Bazelon and Cohen nailed it. The trial did not exist to satisfy our moral outrage. It was a dispassionate analysis of available fact, of which there was little (which is an indictment of racial bias in policing, but it’s too late to change the way they handled the immediate aftermath). There was simply no option but to acquit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates had a typically profound take as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archiv…
I really agree with Bazelon’s perspective. I sat on a jury earlier this year in Portland that had a strong overreaching-of-police aspect to it. All six of us felt unbelievably trapped by the constraints of the charges and the horrible wording of the laws on the books. None of us wanted to punish the young man we saw in court, but over and over we were told that there was no room for us to interpret the law as we saw fit. The whole process made me sick.
So in some ways I sympathize with these jurors, even though in my gut it seems so straightforward, and so incredibly unjust.
Unjust, unconstitutional laws should not be respected.
@ jriley :
There is the Jury Veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_veto, for when you think a law or charge is unjust.