Dear Diane,
It's hard to not
respond emotionally to the Zimmerman case, whether it's with anger or
frustration or sadness at the not guilty verdict granted to George Zimmerman,
now free of all charges (including second-degree murder and manslaughter) in
the death of Trayvon Martin. All these emotions make it very difficult to
approach this case without seeing 17-year-old Martin with his Skittles and
Arizona drink as the victim, but I really did want to understand the raw
evidence and testimony on the night of the shooting.
So here
is all the evidence specifically in favor of the defense, play by play:
- John Good, who lived at the complex where the struggle happened, testified that a man in dark was straddling someone wearing white or red and using arm motions going down multiple times. Zimmerman's jacket was red.
- Officer Timothy Smith was the first officer to arrive on the scene. He said Zimmerman's clothes were wet on the back with grass. He also said Zimmerman told him he cried for help.
- Zimmerman's police interviews calmly described his version of what happened that night.
- "something was off" about Martin
- Martin emerged from the darkness after Zimmerman got out of the car, punched him, knocked him down to the concrete, suffocated him and bashed his head down while saying "you're going to die tonight." He said he cried for help but shot Martin when it seemed like he was reaching for Zimmerman's gun.
- Officer Doris Singleton said Zimmerman was dismayed and he did not show any ill will or hatred. This hurt the second-degree murder claim, as there needed to be malice or demonstration of a depraved mind.
- The cry for help in the 911 call could not be determined: both Martin's mother and Zimmerman's mother said it was their own son. Martin's father said two days after the shooting, the voice did not belong to his son, but two weeks later, he said it did, a disparity the defense capitalized on. The FBI also said they could not determine whose voice the screams belong to.
- Dr. Vincent Di Maio, an expert in forensic pathology, said Martin's injuries and the bullet trajectory imply he was on top of Zimmerman. He also said that while there only two cuts on Zimmerman's head, bleeding could occur inside the skull.
- Zimmerman chose not to take the stand.
As we
know from our brief youth legislature interlude, to prove beyond a reasonable
doubt to the jury that Zimmerman was guilty of murder or even
the more petty manslaughter is already a challenge, but looking at the
defense's evidence, anybody can see the prosecution really had it hard. There
remains no doubt in my mind, logically speaking, that Zimmerman is guilty.
Based on the testimonies and the evidence, I imagine what happened that night
as Zimmerman saw somebody "suspicious", that is, black and in a
hoodie, and called the police to report what he saw. Despite police orders not
to leave the car, Zimmerman got out of his car with his gun and started
following Martin. There is no way to say who confronted who but there was an
altercation with conflicting accounts, Zimmerman saying Martin jumped him and
Rachel Jeantel saying she heard on the phone with Martin "get off, get
off." But Martin managed to best Zimmerman, only to be
shot in the heart.
Martin
had no criminal history where as Zimmerman has a history of battery and
possible domestic violence. I find it hard to
believe Zimmerman was jumped by this 17-year-old whom the Zimmerman family has
proceeded to make out as a drug addict and weapon procurer, failing miserably to
convey their said "remorse and sympathy for the Martin family". The fact
that he was alone, with a gun, and managed to get into a fight all while
waiting for the police broke all the rules in the National Sheriffs'
Association Neighborhood Watch program.
What this whole trial
came down to was how the jury judged Zimmerman, and the jury was given
directions to judge whether or not Zimmerman responded out of self-defense. And
what is Florida's self-defense law again? Florida's self-defense law, known as
the "Stand Your Ground" law, has appeared twice now in the case's
most pivotal moments. The first time the law appeared was when Sanford Police
Chief Bill Lee (later asked to resign and did) released Zimmerman at 1 AM
following the shooting. He held a press conference to claim that the Sanford Police could not arrest Zimmerman because he was protected by Florida's
"Stand Your Ground" law. The significance of this release shouldn't go unacknowledged because initially, Zimmerman was not even going to be tried for what he did. For this reason, Tracy
Martin's press conference and the NAACP's demand for investigation by the
Department of Justice began a year-long press fiasco surrounding the entire
case. The second time the
SYG appeared was when paraphrased in the jury's directions. So what is this law?
"A person who is not engaged in an unlawful
activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to
be has no duty to
retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force,
including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do
so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a
forcible felony."
This law largely
favors the person alive because even if the prosecution proved that Zimmerman
did provoke a fight with Martin, Zimmerman would only have been found guilty if
the prosecution proved Zimmerman did not fear for his life. The only eyewitness
testimony we have for Zimmerman's case is Zimmerman himself, and naturally, his
freedom depends on him saying he feared for his life. That's it. That's enough
to protect him under the SYG.
What I can't shake is
how the jury may have responded had the six women received different
instructions under the old law pre-SYG:
“The defendant cannot justify the use of force likely
to cause death or great bodily harm unless he used every reasonable means within his power and
consistent with his own safety to avoid the danger before resorting to that
force…The fact that the defendant was wrongfully attacked cannot justify his
use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm if by retreating he
could have avoided the need to use that force. “
Under this
scenario, the prosecution would not have had to prove Zimmerman provoked the
fight nor he believe he was in danger. They would only have had to prove that
Zimmerman had the "reasonable means" to retreat from the fight
instead of killing a 17-year-old boy.
--
Naturally, there are doubts raised that the SYG had
anything to do with the Zimmerman case. In fact, the law was not brought up
during the trial and the defense argues in the narrative that Zimmerman was not
even in the position to retreat. However, it is critical to remember why the
Sanford police were prohibited from making the arrest
in the first place, at which point generated all the media attention. If that's
not enough proof, juror B37 stated in the recent Anderson Cooper interview that
she and the other five members considered SYG significantly when carefully reading their
instructions.
Although
we cannot assume Zimmerman learned how to work the system and SYG, another fact
emerged during the case. Judge Debra Nelson originally showed the jury a TV
interview in which Zimmerman said he had no knowledge of the self-defense law,
but later an army prosecutor who taught
Zimmerman a 2010 college class on criminal litigation testified that Florida's
self-defense and SYG was frequently covered. Zimmerman was one of the better students.
So if you could guess, who the hell came up with this srsly shitty
law ?? Yea well the spawn of all evil: the National Rifle Association. When the
law emerged in 2005, the
legislation won wide support from lawmakers, Governor Jeb Bush saying the
law was a "good common-sense,
anti-crime issue." In response, a national gun control group passed out
fliers telling tourists "please take sensible precautions," such as
"do not argue with local people." Law enforcement officials and
prosecutors also responded critically, saying it desensitized people to gun
violence and death. The law in some form or another now exists in 23 states,
including Alabama.
The SYG in and of itself presents a world view downright
deplorable. Forget taking the high road and fleeing the conflict; "meet
force with force." Even if the force is deadly. It condones gun violence and negates every
citizen's duty to retreat. The years after SYG was passed in Florida, the
number of justifiable homicides has tripled from an average of 34 justifiable
homicides to over a hundred almost every year. What more, further investigation
shows that this law introduces racial bias into justifying a homicide. Just to
show the magnitude of this bias, I charted John Roman's statistical analysis of SYG and non-SYG
states (also see his nice interactive graph):
% likelihood homicide is justified
Non-SYG State
|
SYG State
|
|
White victim /
black shooter
|
1%
|
<1%
|
Black victim /
white shooter
|
11%
|
17%
|
--
Which brings us back to why this murder happened in the first
place. Despite all claims by the defense saying that George Zimmerman did not
racially profile Trayvon Martin, it is pretty easy to infer what would have
happened had Martin been white or even Hispanic… according to him, what merited suspicion was Martin "walking about, looking around" (see phone transcript). What the entire nation
cannot let go of is Zimmerman's decision to even leave the car and following
Martin. Why did he have to do that? And why is the justice system not playing
its part in bring people like Zimmerman to justice? Jenali Cobb's (all her)
article struck me as especially powerful when she says:
"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."
He was guilty for walking down a paved
sidewalk, which Zimmerman's lawyers made out to be possessing a weapon. He was
guilty of wearing a hoodie, but at the very core of it, of being black.
Sometimes we (you and me that is) can become stuck in the bubble
of these wonderful, progressive, smart liberal arts students and it feels like
our nation is in a post-racist era. But America is not colorblind - the United
States is still working towards bringing social equality for all races and
genders and if this individual case, which has been significantly amplified in
importance by the media, can prove anything to the public, it is that time and
progress are not directly related. If anything, we have backtracked. The
absurdities of this whole case continue to be revealed, especially these two
days following the trial, from the
ignorant, condescending, media-hating, bird-obsessed
juror B37 to the fact that
Zimmerman can now have his gun back.
The entire system demands to be reexamined.
When I was
talking to my parents about this case, my dad was quick brush it aside, going
on an off-the-cuff lecture about all the injustices of the world, including the
Chinese justice system. I responded angrily, frustrated that he didn't
understand the weight of the Zimmerman case on the American justice system. My
parents do assume the best of the American system today, perhaps in contrast to
how corrupt the Chinese system is. But I imagine they are not a minority: many,
many, and though I do not dare say majority, people believe that our justice
system is working as the system intended: to bring people to justice. But this
assumption is naïve and in order for any change to be enacted, we have to
challenge the system. We know that more than anybody else.
--
Sorry about the crazy length of this post but I promise it can only get shorter from here. See you Thursday.
Elina
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