"My Client Did Nothing Wrong"

Oh, boy...

Monday afternoon, Shellie Zimmerman called Lake Mary authorities to her parents' home, saying her estranged husband was threatening her and her father with a gun. Days earlier, she had filed for divorce... She later changed her story. According to police, Shellie Zimmerman and her father now say they never saw a gun, and no gun was found. Although CBS affiliate WKMG reports that Zimmerman's attorney, Mark O'Mara, said Zimmerman had a gun holstered to his body.

Shellie Zimmerman has said she won't press charges, but police say video of the alleged dispute on her damaged iPad could play into whether authorities file charges.... In her 911 call, Shellie Zimmerman said: "He then accosted my father then took my iPad out of my hands. He then smashed it and cut it with a pocketknife, and there is a Lake Mary city worker across the street that I believe saw all of it."....

Mark O'Mara, who served as Zimmerman's attorney in his murder trial in the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, said his client did nothing wrong in Monday's incident.

By "nothing wrong", does he mean "nothing criminal"? Let me guess... the iPad was severely depressed, and as much as Zimmerman tried to keep it in his wife's hands he was unable to stop it from taking a suicidal tumble from her hands.¹ Also, if O'Mara was telling the truth and Zimmerman was carrying a gun, where did he and his wife seemingly conceal it while waiting for the police to arrive - and why?

I suspect that the defense fund" gravy train is slowly going off of its tracks....
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1. Or maybe the iPad was wearing a hoodie and he reacted reflexively.

Public Criticism of Verdicts

Jeralyn Merritt sometimes goes a bit overboard:

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the rights of the citizen accused from the awesome powers of the Government. It was not enacted to protect the rights of crime victims.

The presumption of innocence is a bedrock of our criminal justice system that applies to the person charged with a crime, not the victim of a crime.

Self-defense is an affirmative defense that may be raised by a defendant in court in response to a criminal charge.

When partisan politics threatens the Bill of Rights, progressives especially need to get their priorities straight: The Bill of Rights must prevail. Those who disagree do a disservice to the word "progressive." Their backwards thinking is just the opposite.

Merritt has blogged extensively about the Zimmerman prosecution, and she practices criminal defense, so it's reasonable to infer that she's aware of the following:

1. When a defense is available to a defendant as an affirmative defense, the defendant has the burden of proving facts sufficient to support the defense, normally by a preponderance of the evidence.

2. In Florida, a claim of "self-defense" is nominally an affirmative defense, but once the defendant presents any evidence of self-defense, even the defendant's own self-serving statement, the state has to disprove affirmative defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

3. There is no constitutional right (a) to a "stand your ground" rule of self-defense, (b) to have the state disprove your claim of self-defense, or (c) to the ability to raise self-defense at all in most contexts in which the state deems such a defense to be inappropriate.

Merritt asserts,

Trials are conducted in courtrooms, not living rooms. The public has a right to view the proceedings. It does not have a right to inject its opinions into the proceedings or affect the outcome. The jury must base its decision only on the testimony and evidence produced at trial and the law as instructed by the judge. Morality has nothing to do with it.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant the right to a fair trial by a impartial jury. The jury is composed of the six people selected in court after a rigorous process designed to exclude those who cannot be fair. The public is not a member of the jury. It has no vote. Which is a good thing because the vast majority of the public commenting on this and every other high profile trial are all too willing to take an eraser to the Constitution and condemn a person, without having observed the proceedings from start to finish, viewed the exhibits admitted or read the jury instructions.

Merritt has seemingly forgotten that nobody outside of the courtroom owes the defendant a presumption of innocence, and that it is in fact possible for somebody outside of the courtroom to look at a case and conclude that justice was not served.

Taken at face value, who can argue? The public has no right to "inject its opinions into the proceedings or affect the outcome." But the trial is over, criticism of the verdict has absolutely no impact on that verdict.

Merrett seems to have no problem with criticism of a verdict following a conviction. I doubt that Merrett would condemn critics of the wrongful acquittals in the Emmett Till case or other lynching cases . We, outside of the courtroom, do have the right to criticize the conduct of a jury, the procedures followed in a case, and the laws that we believe (rightly or wrongly) led to an unjust verdict.

The right of self-defense is a limited right emerging not from the language of the Constitution itself, but from common law. There is no question that it would be constitutional for the State of Florida to follow the practice of most other states and place the burden of proof for self-defense on the defendant. Were the State of Florida to pass a law that holds that under circumstances in which a person armed with a gun engages in any course of action that culminates with his shooting an unarmed person outside of his his own home, that person cannot claim self-defense or may do so only to mitigate the charge and not to obtain an acquittal, there's a good chance that the law would be held constitutional.

Had Zimmerman been required to prove self-defense in the same manner that is typically required in other states, odds are he would have convicted himself with his own testimony or would have convinced a lot more people of his sincerity. Given Zimmerman's past statements about the case, and the contradictions and holes in those statements, it was anything but a surprise that he chose to stay off of the witness stand. Those holes and inconsistencies don't necessarily establish guilt, but they represent a big part of why a shadow remains over this case.

Whether a person commenting on the verdict has scrupulously reviewed all of the available evidence or is talking through his hat, it's that person's right to look at a verdict and declare, "An injustice was done here, and we need to think about changing the law so that it doesn't happen again - or at least to ensure that it's a lot less likely to happen again." If a sufficient groundswell of opposition to the verdict arises that we have a public policy discussion, that's normally going to be a good thing - even in those situations where people who know the details of the case often find themselves frustrated by how little the general public knows of the actual facts.

Richard Cohen May Not Be a Racist....

But he faces a bigger problem, in that he's not very smart.

What O.J. Simpson did was wrong. It was not, by verdict of his peers, a crime.

Of course he wrote "Zimmerman", but the logic behind the assertion is the same, as it would be if he said "Casey Anthony" or "Michael Jackson". Cohen is not alone in confusing a verdict of "not guilty" both with a declaration of innocence and with an expression about what conduct constitutes a crime. He's been around more than long enough to know better.

I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

My father wears a hoodie. As he recovers from his knee replacement surgery, I hope he doesn't bump into Zimmerman lest "the uniform" make poor Georgie afraid that he's going to get clobbered with a cane. The part that Cohen omits from his statement, "wearing a uniform we all recognize", is that the uniform isn't "wearing a hoodie" - it's "wearing a hoodie while black". And while I'll do my best to take Cohen at his word, for most people who are making similar statements about Trayvon Martin I'm not sure how important the hoodie is to the uniform.

A few years ago one organization or another ran a public service ad in which a black youth and his friends go to a store, and the storekeeper is intimidated by their appearance. The commercial concludes with one of the youths approaching the storekeeper, who is anticipating that it might be a robbery, slaps his money on the counter, thanks the storekeeper and leaves. It was meant to remind the Cohens, Zimmermans, and even those made less nervous about young black men in "uniform" that they should not assume the worst based upon wardrobe and skin color. And that's fair enough. The fashion choices of youths can be confusing to us older folk. If you want to dress in a manner reminiscent of a street thug, people are going to make assumptions about you and your boisterous friends. And sometimes it's fun to have people make assumptions.

But Martin? We know exactly what his "uniform" looked like the day he died - if you want to see it, you can click through to the image from this page. Frankly, as I look at that picture I have a very hard time continuing to take Cohen at his word. (Watch out, dad - your hoodie is scarier than Trayvon's.) To me it looks like the sort of thing you might pull on if the weather was a bit chilly, a bit drizzly and you wanted to be warm. But between the hoodie and the white skinny jeans, Cohen sees a scary "uniform". Cohen attempts to restore my faith in him:

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

Wait... I thought this was about a uniform... about hoodies. So... perhaps what Cohen means is that he gets scared when he sees young black men, and thus believes everybody else should either follow his lead and invest heavily in Depends undergarments, or follow Zimmerman's lead and buy a gun.

In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

In New York City there are about 8.2 million people. By Cohen's measure, that's a bit over two million African Americans, so let's say 1 million African American males of various ages. There were 414 homicides in New York City in 2012. As of December 28, 2012 there had been 1,353 shootings that year. Cohen says that 78% of the suspects were African American, so that means roughly 1,055 shootings. So, assuming that nobody was a suspect in more than one shooting, roughly a 0.1% chance that an African American male in New York city was a suspect in a shooting. Or... whatever "young black males" means... maybe that bumps it up to 0.3%? That's Cohen's statistical case for his apparent fear that he's going to get shot by every young black man he passes in the street?

Oh, but it gets better,

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.

Cohen seems to believe that all shootings in New York City are random. That is, young black men are carrying guns around and, for no good reason, might 'pop a cap' into a random New York Times columnist. A better columnist might have looked at the statistical result of stop and frisk.... a roughly zero percent impact on the number of shootings in the city. Needless to say, shooting incidents are not evenly distributed throughout the city - "they are closely associated with larger geographic crime patterns". In 2011, 43% of criminal shooting incidents occurred in Brooklyn, and just shy of 29% in Bronx. My guess is that if Cohen manages to avoid getting involved in drug deals, or walking through high crime neighborhoods alone at night while flashing the type of watch that has historically been among his obsessions (even then, with there being a high probability that he would still have his watch at the end of his jaunt, and virtually no chance that he would be shot), he's pretty safe.

Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I'm curious about something. How would Cohen propose that the police could tell, simply by looking at somebody, that the person is from Denmark? What about these folks? Wait - I get it - they're not wearing hoodies, right?

Cohen presents the... factually challenged claim,

Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn’t, there’s a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.

There are only 130,000,000 hits on Google for "role of race in crime", and a mere 2.4 million hits on Google News - clearly this is something nobody talks about.

Cohen rambles,

If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.

So kids shouldn't be suspected of being criminals merely because they're black - but in the name of "common sense and common decency" we should "insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior". Thus, Cohen is able to conclude,

There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason.

Understandably suspected of what? If it defies "common sense and common decency" to have suspected Trayvon Martin of criminal activity merely because he was young and black, what is it that Cohen believes constitutes the "other variables such as suspicious behavior" that Zimmerman saw to immediately make him think of Martin as a "f---ing punk" and an "asshole" of the type who "always gets away"?

Oh, that's right. The hoodie.

Is the Zimmerman Case a Recipe for a Miscarriage of Justice

In one sense, there can be no question but that the Zimmerman prosecution is a recipe for at least a perception of a miscarriage of justice, because no matter what the verdict there will be an enormous population of people who will be convinced that the outcome was unjust. Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn suggests that the "Zimmerman trial has all the ingredients for a miscarriage of justice", but in saying that he's concerned only with wrongful conviction - which, in fairness, is a far worse outcome from a standpoint of the integrity of our legal system than a wrongful acquittal.

In following the George Zimmerman trial somewhat closely online last week, I noted a familiar pattern:

A "heater" case that draws intense media interest.

Sympathetic victim.

Unsympathetic defendant.

Evidence of innocence explained away with far-fetched theories or else ignored.

Evidence of guilt magnified and bolstered with irrelevant detail and innuendo.

These are among the key ingredients for all the wrongful convictions I've written about in the last 20 years.

I think that Zorn's statements about the defendant and victim are misleading - I cannot recall a murder case in which I've heard more impassioned defenses of a killer, and I would be hard pressed to find one with greater public vilification of the victim. Even Zorn gets into the mix:

Martin wasn't the slight middle-school student seen in first photos of him made public, but a tall, athletic 17-year-old who'd had plenty of time to walk safely home once he knew he was being followed. Zimmerman was of mixed ethnicity, and he'd lost sight of Martin that night while attempting to keep an eye on him for police.

Zorn later expresses to a critic of that statement,

[H]ere http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/03/trayvon-martin-shooting-death-initial-police-reports.html I accurately report the documents showing him to be 6 feet' 170 lbs.

Actually, here Zorn accurately reports him to be "5-feet-11, 158 pounds, according to his autopsy". The incident report estimates Martin to be 6', 160 pounds, which is a pretty good estimate under the circumstances but still a good 10 pounds lighter than Zorn's "accurate" recitation. A survey of Zorn's comments on the case suggest that he is trying to be reasonably objective but that his sympathies lie with Zimmerman - and that he's inclined to spin up some pretty convoluted theories to try to turn Martin into an aggressor.¹

If Zorn has followed homicide cases, then he knows that if you're claiming to be innocent of homicide you have two basic defenses, the stronger of which is "That other guy did it," and the weaker, "Some other guy did it". When you're in a position where you can't deny committing the homicide, the defense presented is typically, "The victim deserved to die." That is why the Zimmerman team has made a long-term, concerted effort to attack Martin, to raise allegations they know or should know to be false, and bringing media attention or seeking to use at trial evidence that they know is irrelevant to the case but feeds into the anti-Martin narrative his supporters are so quick to grasp - and let's not forget, leaks and sensationalistic claims from both sides can be reasonably be assumed to be intended to influence the jury pool.

I think that Zorn's comments are better viewed as problems with the adversarial system of justice. The prosecutor in a homicide case will typically try to make the defendant look like a bad person and the victim look like an innocent, because that makes conviction more likely. The defense in a "he deserved to die" case will do the opposite because if the jury buys the notion that the defendant is basically a good person and the defendant deserved what was coming to him, the odds of acquittal go up. When you observe that the prosecutor is depicting the defendant as a bad guy who caused harm to a good person, you're doing little more than describing what happens in criminal cases hundreds of times each day, every day of the week.

The same holds true with regard to how the prosecutor explains away theories of innocence, or emphasizes evidence suggesting guilt. That's the prosecutor's job. It's the job of the defense to emphasize theories of innocence and evidence suggesting innocence. This is why we call the system "adversarial" - the two sides are working at opposite purposes. Although Zorn doesn't acknowledge this, you can only push your "explaining away" so far - if you overplay your hand you risk losing credibility with the jury. If the theory of guilt is far-fetched, the jury is much more likely to accept a theory of innocence that is plausible.

In terms of media attention, I suspect that the reason Zorn, a reporter, sees more miscarriages of justice in cases that draw media attention is because he's a member of the media. Certainly, there are some notable cases in which the police were in a hurry to close out a high profile case and a wrongful conviction followed, but those cases typically have what to me are the better predictors of when a case is more likely to result in wrongful conviction:

1. A heavy or exclusive reliance on eyewitness testimony; and

2. A statement that is contended by the police to be self-incriminating, or where the defendant actually falsely confesses to a crime.

I recall one case in which a defendant's "confession" turned out to be a remnant of an interrogation on a different case, with the police recording the defendant's statement on a recycled tape and, with no actual intent to do so, creating for lack of a better word a mix-tape in which the new interrogation ended right before the defendant in the prior case, whose voice was similar to the defendant's, admitted committing a crime. False confession cases can be difficult at times to wrap your head around - and the reasons that defendants give for having made what was later proved to be a false confession don't necessarily help. The defendant is often, but not always, of lesser education, possibly with a cognitive impairment.

Eyewitness testimony is dangerous because it is highly persuasive, but often contains errors and inaccuracies. If you ask enough questions, no matter how good the memory of the eyewitness, they'll get something wrong. The confidence of a witness is his or her testimony is not a good measure of its accuracy, but juries nonetheless tend to perceive confident, forceful testimony as being strong evidence.

Another factor in somee high profile wrongul conviction cases, is police, prosecutorial, or witness misconduct - including witholding evidence, destroying evidence, fabricating evidence, and coaching or influencing witnesses to give statements on matters for which the witness is uncertain or even where up to that point the witness has given contrary testimony that, if not changed, would be harmful to the prosecution.

On the whole, save for the intense publicity and public interest, the most unusual aspect of the case is that the defendant has managed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover his legal fees, expert witnesses, investigators, and the like. The publicity has been at worst a double-edged sword, and arguably has given Zimmerman advantages over a defendant who faces similar charges but makes "too much money" to qualify for a court-appointed lawyer, or lives in a jurisdiction where the compensation given to court-appointed lawyers is a bad joke.

I personally believe that the most important prosecution witnesses are going to be the forensic witnesses who describe the fatal gunshot wound and shooting angle, and George Zimmerman himself, through the statement he has made to the police and media about how the shooting occurred. I personally suspect that it is the forensic evidence coupled with those inconsistent statements, not the public reaction, that led to Zimmerman's being charged. To be specific, I suspect that the state's evidence will be that Zimmerman's stories are not only inconsistent, it's impossible to reconcile any of those stories with the angle of the gunshot wound. The question then becomes, will Zimmerman testify with yet another story - and open himself up to an interrogation that will flyspeck all of his prior statements and scrutinize his motivations - or will he instead try to overcome the contradictions through other witnesses and arguments presented by his lawyers.

Regrettably, only two people are in a position to tell us what actually happened that night, one of whom is dead and the other of whom will likely choose not to testify in his own defense.
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1. In the comments, Zorn argues "Trayvon Martin could easily, at a leisurely walk, have covered the distance between the clubhouse, where he was first spotted, and Brandy Green's townhouse in the elapsed time from the beginning of Zimmerman's 911 call, when Zimmerman first spotted him, to the end of Zimmerman's 911 call", and accuses those who question his interpretation of the time line as engaging in speculation. He argues, "To make your story work, Martin has to simply linger there wondering if he's being followed (since I'm sure you don't want to accept the narrative in which doubles back to challenge Zimmerman)" - implying pretty strongly that, despite possession no evidence beyond speculation over the time line, he believes that last narrative. I would like to hear Zorn's explanation of how Martin would have known, after leaving the roadway and walking down the sidewalk between the houses, that Zimmerman would park, leave his vehicle and continue to either follow or appear to follow him into the area where the shooting occurred.

When All You See is Race, Perhaps Race is An Issue

Pat Buchanan recently made an observation most people would agree with:

If it had been a white teenager who was shot, and a 28-year-old black guy who shot him, the black guy would have been arrested.

So assert those demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

And they may be right.

Unfortunately, he couldn't stop there. His continued argument could reasonably be summarized as, "But why get worked up about it?"

John Casey at The Non Sequitur points out that other mainstream pundits are, in essence, in Buchanan's camp, asserting some form of "relation[ship] between 'unarmed black teenager is shot under puzzling and racially charged circumstances' and 'black people shoot each other all of the time'". Will attempts to characterize the Trayvon Martin shooting as having "been forced into a particular narrative to make it a white-on-black". But unless you're cool with the idea that a black kid can be shot by a white guy, with people like George Will and Pat Buchanan lecturing that it's understandable because black men are so dangerous, and with Buchanan flat-out admitting the credibility of the argument that were the participants races reversed Zimmerman may well be in jail, you can't blame others for injecting race into the discussion.

People like Will and Buchanan should start by examining their own thesis: the idea that nobody cares about black-on-black crime. Via Jamelle Bouie, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a rebuttal to the notion that African American communities are complacent about or indifferent to black-on-black violence. Bouie observes,

In addition to highlighting the obvious truth that black people care about what happens in their neighborhoods, it’s also worth pointing out the degree to which “black-on black” is a stupid way to understand or contexualize crime. Implicit in the description is the idea that crime committed against blacks by blacks has a racial component—that victims are targeted on the basis of their blackness.

The truth is that crime has more to do with proximity and opportunity than anything else. If African Americans are more likely to be robbed, or injured, or killed by other African Americans, it’s because they tend to live in close proximity to each other. Like most people, criminals almost always take the path of least resistance—nine times out of ten, they’ll go for the easy target.

To put this another way, white Americans are most likely to be victims of other whites, but there’s no talk of a “white-on-white” crime epidemic. Not that this is a surprise, but typical, explainable behavior becomes “pathology” when observed in African Americans. That this still has currency is incredibly frustrating.

Pat Buchanan is a great case in point,

It is a country where white criminals choose black victims in 3 percent of their crimes, but black criminals choose white victims in 45 percent of their crimes.

Choose? We're principally talking about opportunistic crime, are we not? But that mindset makes it easier, I suppose, for people who aren't actually victims of crimes to "choose" the race of their make-believe attackers. What's the point of the Will-Buchanan exercise if not to justify treating all young black men as potential criminals, shoot first and check for Skittles later.

Here's something for Will and Buchanan to think about: In the other cases, nobody is claiming that no crime was committed. Nobody is suggesting that the victims deserved to be victimized by virtue of living in dangerous neighborhoods or having the wrong color of skin. Okay, so the clothing argument sometimes does come up if the victim is a woman, but... come on.

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"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to wear hoodies...."

Pat Buchanan complains that civil rights leaders are upset about the Trayvon Martin shooting, and hypothesizes that they would be silent had the races of the shooter and victim been reversed. That's quite possible because, oddly enough, people who focus their attention on civil rights issues tend to speak out on cases that implicate civil rights issues. By way of comparison, you could take a certain Irish Catholic commentator and note that he doesn't spend much time railing about the war on Ramadan or the unfair treatment of Muslims by the media, but if the topic turns to Christmas, away we go.... And yes, even if we weren't talking about a police agency with a spotty history on issues of race, the failure to adequately investigate the shooting of a young black man by anybody is likely to raise the hackles of civil rights leaders, perhaps especially those who lived through the 1950's and 1960's.

You would think we could establish at least this much common ground: Whatever else you think, it is appalling that a teenager ended up being targeted and shot because he was wearing a hoodie with the hood up on a rainy day, and doing absolutely nothing that was illegal or otherwise suspicious. It is appalling that people within the police department responsible for the investigation leaked irrelevant material about Martin in order to discredit him. It is appalling how eagerly some people grasp at any sign of trouble in Martin's background - none of which factored into Zimmerman's choices and decisions - as somehow making him deserving of a bullet.

For most people who are offended by the shooting, it's not primarily a racial issue. It's a case of a young man who was pursued and shot for no good reason, with the police dropping the ball on the case. Sure, race comes into play at the level of the police investigation, where the department's seeming acceptance of the stereotype advanced by Will and Buchanan is viewed by many as playing a role in their casual approach to investigation and the decision not to charge Zimmerman. But what those who snicker, "Zimmerman is a registered Democrat" or "Zimmerman's mom was Hispanic" don't (or perhaps aren't bright enough to) understand is that they are the ones introducing identity politics into the case. It's they who don't understand that the justified anger at the shooting of Martin and the treatment of the investigation (and of Martin's family) by the police is not dependent upon Zimmerman's political beliefs or ethnicity.

Trayvon Martin and Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias involves looking at a situation and emphasizing the details that fit your preconceived notions, while discounting those aspects that conflict with them. In the case of Trayvon Martin, we seem to have one faction who deems it perfectly reasonable to believe that a young African American man in a hoodie, walking alone in the mid-afternoon, must be up to no good - gang activity, drug dealing, burglary, whatever. You find a Facebook page of a man named Trayvon Martin, and he's depicted striking what you believe to be a gangster pose? That can only mean that every black man named Trayvon Martin is a ganster. You see a picture of Trayvon Martin where he doesn't look dark-skinned? That can only mean that the biased media is trying to make him look less scary because, well, no logic there, just prejudice. And of course, despite your own obsession with race, it's tragic that everybody who is critical of the shooting of a 17-year-old who was doing nothing more menacing than walking is turning this into a racial issue. What sounds like a muttered racial slur by Zimmerman, perhaps a completely innocent reference to "bleah" people, right?

From what we've heard so far, it sounds like the police also drew conclusions based upon confirmation bias, failing to adequately challenge the dubious elements of Zimmerman's story and accepting Zimmerman's belief that nobody who looked like Martin belonged in that neighborhood or could be present for anything but nefarious purposes. The fact that they leaked information about Martin's background - facts irrelevant to the shooting incident - suggest that the person behind the leak believes that Martin somehow got what was coming to him, and believes that the fact that he apparently used marijuana supports that position.

On the other hand, you have a documented police officer wannabe with a history of violent confrontations, who likes to tour around his neighborhood playing captain of the neighborhood watch. (That's all documented.) It is pretty easy to go from there to seeing Zimmerman as a guy who wanted to be Dirty Harry - savior of the neighborhood - looking for a "Make my my day, punk" moment until he finally found one. That is, until he made one. The evidence is more sympathetic to this interpretation, given that there's no evidence that Trayvon Martin did anything wrong before being stalked and confronted by Zimmerman, but there is a possibility that Zimmerman has an innocent explanation for what sounds like a racial slur during his 911 call, and that he actually did stop accosting Martin and start to return to his car before a renewed altercation leading up to the shooting.

Let me emphasize, there is a material difference between inferring the worst about Zimmerman and the worst about Martin. With Zimmerman, we're talking about the guy who is still alive and is free to make his case. At any time he chooses he can make a public statement explaining what he really muttered during the 911 call, and provide a plausible explanation of why he would pursue Martin with such vigor, in total disregard of the instruction he was given by the police, then suddenly decide to let him go. He may be entitled to a presumption of innocence if he's prosecuted for a crime, but he is not owed any such presumption in the court of public opinion.

With Martin, on the other hand, there's no evidence that he did anything wrong or suspicious before being accosted by Zimmerman. Even in Zimmerman's own words, Martin's big offenses were walking through Zimmerman's neighborhood, wearing a hoodie on a rainy day, and keeping his hands in his pockets, presumably to keep them warm. Everything else is projection or, in the case of people like Michelle Malkin, opportunistic race-baiting. I don't see any measure by which Zimmerman's actions were reasonable, particularly after being told by the police that they did not need him to follow Martin, and it seems difficult to avoid seeing that his perceptions of race colored his actions, but there's room for a factual explanation that makes him something less than a poster child for a Dirty Harry wannabe who was eager to shoot a "punk".

I'm not going to argue that the public at large should give Zimmerman every benefit of the doubt, or cut him some slack. Given his documented actions, I'm not sympathetic to him. I do think this incident reflects the foolish nature of "stand your ground" laws that transform this type of incident from an "imperfect self defense" - "The fight I started wasn't intended to escalate to this level so I should only be convicted of manslaughter" - to actual self-defense. If the attention that this incident generates causes Florida to restore at least that level of sanity to its statute, that's worth something. Centuries of sound public policy lie behind the idea that you should avoid escalating a conflict to involve deadly force whenever possible, even if that means retreating, and it's a shame that legislators and lobbying groups have played up to the fears and prejudices of... well, people like Zimmerman... and have extended the concept of self-defense to the point of foolishness.

Trayvon Martin, From Pursuit to Gunshot - What Part Am I Missing Here

So far we have a 911 call in which we hear that George Zimmerman is following Trayvon Martin, despite being instructed by the police not to do so. Consistent with Zimmerman's report that, part way through his following Martin, Martin started running, we have the report of a friend of Martin's that he had noticed that he was being followed by a strange man and that she had told him to run.

Next we have the police recitation of Zimmerman's account of how he came to shoot Martin,

Police disclosed to the Orlando Sentinel that there is about a one-minute gap, after Zimmerman called police and before he fatally shot Martin, during which police say they're not sure what happened.

In Zimmerman's version of events, he had stopped following Martin and had turned around and was walking back to his SUV when Martin approached him from behind. The two exchanged words, then Martin punched him in the nose, sending him to the ground, and began beating him.

The police department is apparently attempting to overcome concerns over its competence in handling the investigation by leaking like a sieve - but only information prejudicial to Martin. But what I want to know is this: How did we go from having Zimmerman warm and dry in his car, being told by the police not to follow Martin, to having Zimmerman out of his car and engaging in fisticuffs with Martin?

Even if we assume that Martin got the upper hand at some point, and even if we're willing to take Zimmerman's story at face value, are we to believe that Martin turned around, ran toward Zimmerman, used some form of superpower to stop Zimmerman's moving car, pulled the door open, pulled Zimmerman out and then started to beat him? That doesn't seem very likely, does it?

So what I want to know is how Zimmerman came to be out of his car and in a physical confrontation with Martin, and why it would not have been perfectly reasonable for a 17-year-old who was not doing anything wrong to be very concerned about being stalked then accosted by a man who had no legitimate business accosting him, and who outweighed him by a good 100 pounds. Perv? Mugger? What would go through your mind?

It is inescapable that it was Zimmerman who created the context for Martin's fears, and that it was Zimmerman who in flagrant disregard of the instruction he received from the police chose to continue to chase Martin, and who chose to get out of his car and physically confront Martin. Are we to believe that after all of his bravado, and after starting that confrontation, Zimmerman didn't try to get physical with Martin when Martin continued to try to get away from him? Had Martin shot Zimmerman at that point, wouldn't he have the stronger case for self-defense?

And if that's the case, how the bleep does Martin's act of self-defense, after being stalked by a dim-witted, gun-toting police officer wannabe, become legal grounds for Zimmerman to kill him? Even a keystone kop should be able to see the problem with allowing a person who creates a violent scene to claim self-defense based upon his victim's acts of self-defense. What was Martin's supposed reason for breaking off his stalking of Martin and returning to his SUV, and his explanation for how Martin went from fleeing from being stalked to being a physical aggressor?

Whomever is leaking stuff out of the police department, do us a favor: rather than leaking irrelevant information about Martin, how about leaking the rest of Zimmerman's statement, as surely at least one officer involved in the investigation thought to inquire as to what happened between the time he was safely in his car and when he was being punched in the nose. And how about leaking the autopsy report, as it surely sheds some light on the distance between Zimmerman and Martin at the time of the shooting, and whether Zimmerman was on the ground with Martin on top of him or standing clear of Martin and removed from any reasonable fear of harm.