How the Criminal Justice System Lynched Trayvon Martin

In a grotesque mangling of justice, Trayvon was found guilty of forcing that nice white man to kill him. It was a deliberate, premeditated, cold-blooded crime by the defense, aided and abetted by a prosecution who cared little more about Martin than did the cops who destroyed evidence and let Zimmerman walk

Patricia Williams in The Nation:

Much of it comes down to an all-too-familiar double standard. Sociologist Troy Duster recently summarized the difficulty confronted by prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda when he asked the jury to reverse the circumstances and imagine that an armed 28-year-old black man followed an unarmed 17-year-old white teenager, shot him dead and then pleaded self-defense: “The problem with this invitation to speculate,” he said, “is that it asks that we break frame with ‘common sense.’” For all the legal language of the courtroom, racialized narratives will emerge and form along the very same lines that Gordon Allport and Leo Postman identified in their research more than sixty years ago: in the “retelling,” a razor will leap “from the white man’s hand to… a colored man’s hand.”

And so, by the end of the trial, the 200-pound Zimmerman, despite martial arts training and a history of assaulting others, was transformed into a “soft,” retiring marshmallow of a weakling. The 158-pound Martin had been reimagined as an immense, athletically endowed, drug-addled “thug.”

Consider, by way of inverted contrast, the 2007 conviction of John White, a black man who shot an unarmed white teenager in New York in 2006. According to The New York Times, the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, “showed up at Mr. White’s house just after 11:00 p.m. to challenge his son Aaron, then 19, to a fight.” Waking up to “threats, profanities and racial epithets,” Mr. White “grabbed a loaded Beretta he kept in the garage of his house in Miller Place, a predominantly white hamlet on Long Island.” At the trial, which the Times described as “racially charged,” the prosecution successfully argued that the case “did not hinge on race but the rash actions of a quick-tempered man who kept an arsenal in his house in preparation for such a situation.” White, unlike Zimmerman, was convicted of manslaughter.

SNIP

It helped that the stage was set for this from the start. On February 26, 2012, when Zimmerman killed Martin, the Sanford Police Department quickly and all too casually concluded, after a halfhearted investigation, that they were “prohibited” from arresting him. Martin’s body was shoved in the morgue with little effort to identify it until his parents filed a missing-persons report; his wet clothing was tossed carelessly in a plastic bag to rot, possibly degrading key evidence. Zimmerman was lightly interrogated, then released without charge. No drug or alcohol testing was performed on him.

It would take more than a month of increasing public pressure for the case to be re-examined by a special prosecutor, and for the State of Florida to press for second-degree murder—arguably a curious bit of overcharging, since it imposes a burden as high (depraved or intentional disregard for human life) as the burden in a “stand your ground” defense  (a mere preponderance of the evidence) is low. Also surprising, the prosecution brought forth the charge of manslaughter (reckless disregard for human life) only at the end of the trial, almost as an afterthought.

Tasked with proving that Zimmerman was unreasonable to kill Martin, the prosecution was dismally scattered as a whole. Even the evidence it entered to illuminate the time sequence—a grainy tape of Martin shopping at a 7-Eleven—was freighted with unaddressed innuendo. No one looks innocent on a store’s security camera. Nor did it help that the store clerk was brought in to say he didn’t remember Martin—testimony of so little relevance, it seemed only posited to reassure us that he didn’t rob the place.

Worse, the prosecution repeatedly failed to object at terribly crucial moments, allowing the jury to hear irrelevant rumor, damaging insinuation and general spuriousness. Defense attorneys Mark O’Mara and Don West built their case around profiling Martin: grilling witnesses about other burglaries in the neighborhood, speculating about crime, even hypothesizing about a piece of broken window awning found five days after Martin was killed, in the bushes directly beneath the awning to which it belonged. Could it not be used as what’s called a “slim jim” for break-ins? Could it not have been part of a plot planned by Martin? Wasn’t Zimmerman’s fear about crime in the neighborhood a reasonable one? Wasn’t it true that a young man named Emmanuel Burgess had been prowling around the neighborhood only weeks before? Tall, skinny black guy? Serving five years for burglary now? Hadn’t there been a spree of burglaries? A rash of crime? The defense posited the entire annals of Sanford, Florida, crime into the record, drawing out the details of backpacks and bikes stolen by persons who just happened not to be Trayvon Martin.

And that's not the half of it.  Read the whole thinig.