Why is this man in jail?

It's a question I've long asked, based on the evidence publicly available. It's also a question asked by Arnold Trebach, a civil rights activist, over at The American Spectator. "The Forgotten Scandal," he calls it. The trial begins in a few days.

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Comments:

8 Responses to Why is this man in jail?
Lydia says:
June 8, 2013 at 4:47 pm (Edit)
The trial is going to be a fiasco, I fear. I have serious doubts about whether Zimmerman is going to get a fair trial, which is really disturbing. More and more I find that I have to put rhetorical asterisks on my statements when I teach my kids things in home school civics like, “Everyone in America is equal before the law and is tried for any crime solely based on the evidence, not on who they are.” Because more and more, it isn’t true, as the Zimmerman case illustrates.

William Luse says:
June 8, 2013 at 10:24 pm (Edit)
For the past 3 days, including today, Saturday, a hearing has been underway to determine whether to admit voice recognition “science” as evidence at trial. There’s the sound of someone yelling for help far in the background of a girl’s 911 call. I get bored watching these things, so I don’t know yet if the judge admitted it. There’s no way on earth anyone could tell with certainty whose voice it is, so if the judge admits it, we can be pretty sure this trial has gone to hell before it even gets started.

Lydia says:
July 8, 2013 at 4:40 pm (Edit)
I wonder if it ever once crosses the minds of the journalists or editors who are ordering and writing the stories right now that the word “walk” used over and over again (“If Zimmerman walks…” “Zimmerman may walk…” “He’s going to walk…”) is rather prejudicial. Do they ever think, “Hmm, that sounds like slang for letting someone go who actually committed the crime and is unjustly acquitted”?

Nah. Of course not.

William Luse says:
July 8, 2013 at 10:40 pm (Edit)
Another phrase the media is fond of is “gunned down.” I’ve heard it on my local stations a number of times, that Trayvon Martin was ‘gunned down’ by the neighborhood watchman, as if Zimmerman had perpetrated a drive-by shooting.

Lydia says:
July 9, 2013 at 12:12 am (Edit)
That’s another good one. “Gunned down” definitely implies the intent to kill as opposed to acting in self defense. For example, if you are gunning someone down, you go on shooting multiple bullets into his body if possible to make sure he’s dead.

You can be dam’ good and sure that if the races were reversed, all these phrases would be different. “If he walks” would be “if he is acquitted” and probably “gunned down” would have no occasion to come up, because Martin’s death would be reported in the passive voice: “He was killed” or “He was shot.”

William Luse says:
July 9, 2013 at 9:54 am (Edit)
It’s kind of frightening, really. The people you expect to protect you against injustice might very well prosecute you to appease the screams of the racial hucksters. It’s important to remember that the original police chief lost his job for refusing to arrest Zimmerman. The local DA was cut out by a state-appointed prosecutor. This was all okayed by our supposedly conservative governor. They had to call some of the original investigating officers to the stand, and it was a disaster for the prosecution. And yet the prosecutors persist as if they actually believe the case they’re presenting. They are demagogues on behalf of the gods of racial correctness. And if the jury convicts Zimmerman of anything based on the evidence thus far presented, they’re a bunch of cowards.

Lydia says:
July 10, 2013 at 1:25 am (Edit)
It’s extremely frightening. It could happen to all kinds of innocent people acting in self-defense. When I teach civics in home schooling, I teach the idea of equality before the law. That’s the old-fashioned idea that when you’re accused of a crime, nobody holds you to a different standard of evidence because of group membership matters like race or wealth (or poverty). The evidence is supposed to be the whole thing. Well. Sure, we all knew that was an ideal and it didn’t always work that way, but it was at least supposed to *be* the ideal. Increasingly, the racial animus is such that any pretense of objectivity is being abandoned.

Yet there are still lefties who seem sincerely to believe that Zimmerman is obviously guilty of murder and that the bare possibility that he might not be convicted thereof is the real scandal, the real thing that tells us something about “American attitudes” and what-not, that this is some kind of paradigmatically racist crime that must be purged by Zimmerman’s conviction.

It’s terrifying, really. There is simply no meeting place between people who think that way and people who think with reasonable common sense about such cases. I suppose they celebrated when OJ was acquitted, too.

William Luse says:
July 10, 2013 at 7:35 am (Edit)
I suppose they celebrated when OJ was acquitted, too.

I’ll never forget that video shot of the Howard University cafeteria, all the students rising as one to cheer when the verdict came through.