“These [Expletives] Always Get Away”: George Zimmerman “Gets Away” With Gunplay Yet Again
Once again, a 911 call to police involving George Zimmerman sends chills down the spine. This time it’s Shellie Zimmerman, calling the cops on her estranged husband, the killer of Trayvon Martin who was acquitted of second-degree murder charges in July. And if you have followed the Zimmerman case as closely as I have the five-minute call and the aftermath will give a sickening sense of deja vu.
“[H]e’s in his car,” Shellie tells police. “And he continually has his hands on his gun and he keeps saying, ‘Step closer.” He’s just threatening all of us with his firearm — and he’s going to shoot us.” She tells the dispatcher that George “accosted my father” and “punched my dad in the nose.” In addition, he “took my iPad out of my hands and smashed it.”
As scary as that sounds, it’s what Shellie says next that is frightening. “I’m really, really afraid,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. I’m really, really scared.” At one point, she yells at her father to “get back inside; George might start shooting at us.”
Listening to the call, my thoughts went to Witness No. 9 in the Zimmerman case. She was the relative who called the Sanford Police Department just days after Zimmerman killed Trayvon on Feb. 26, 2012. During the call, she accused Zimmerman of being a racist she said, “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that.”
The punch to Shellie’s father’s nose reminded me of the altercation between Zimmerman and Trayvon. Remember, Zimmerman said Trayvon “sucker punched” him in the nose before the tussle that led to the unarmed 17-year-old’s death. And George’s counter-claim that Shellie was the aggressor today at her parents’ home in Lake Mary, Fla., is a near-replay of what happened in Aug. 2005. Back then, Zimmerman’s former fiance sought a restraining order against him because of domestic violence. So, he sought a restraining order against her in return.
Since Zimmerman was acquitted in July, he has been in the news for touring the headquarters of the manufacturer of the gun he used to kill Trayvon and for two speeding violations. He was let off with a warning each time. Today, Zimmerman was not arrested today, but he was questioned by police. And because Shellie and her father have declined to press charges against Zimmerman, he was free to go. “We have no victim, no crime,” Lake Mary police chief Steve Bracknell said.
The night Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon he called the non-emergency line at the Sanford, Fla., police department. “These [expletive], they always get away,” he said. Just a little bit of history repeating, I suppose.
By: Jonathan Capehart, The Washington Post, September 9, 2013
“A Pattern For The Court”: SCOTUS’s Meaningless Death Penalty Rules
Monday evening, the state of Florida executed John Errol Ferguson. This was not an act of injustice because Ferguson was innocent—he brutally killed eight people. It was an act of injustice because Ferguson was mentally ill. The Eighth Amendment forbids his execution.
In 2008, the Supreme Court held that a person cannot be executed if he or she is insane at the time of his or her execution. To the extent that the term has meaning, it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t apply to Ferguson, who experts have testified has a “genuine belief” that he is the “prince of God” and has the power to control the sun. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones details Ferguson’s history of mental illness:
Ferguson’s story, and long-documented record of mental illness, starts back in 1965, when records show Ferguson was suffering from hallucinations. In 1971, he was committed to a state mental hospital after being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. For the next several years, court-appointed doctors repeatedly reported that Ferguson was psychotic and in need of long-term hospitalization.
In 1975, a court-appointed psychiatrist reported that Ferguson was “suffering from a major mental disorder and is extremely dangerous to himself and others. He is dangerous to the point where he is considered homicidal … He should be in a maximum security ward … He should not be released under any circumstances.”
As Mencimer goes on to explain, Ferguson was nonetheless released from custody, a decision and failure of judgment that cost eight people their lives. Yet Florida continues to deny the obvious about Ferguson’s paranoid schizophrenia. Despite its earlier command, the Supreme Court allowed him to be executed without comment.
This kind of outcome is becoming a pattern for the Court, as we saw earlier this year with respect to its formal holding that executing someone with a severe mental handicap violates the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court’s prohibition on executing the mentally handicapped or severely ill have become more of a Potemkin village façade of fairness than the real thing because of its refusal to define or enforce any kind of substantive standard to determine whom the rule applies to. The Court’s deference to state determinations—no matter how implausible they are—means that the only states that won’t execute those with severe mental incapacities are those already committed not to doing so. Any state that lacks that commitment can proceed as before.
This is illustrative of the larger problem with the death penalty: The American criminal-justice system does not appear capable of rationally designating only those most clearly culpable of heinous crimes for execution. It remains true, in the memorable phrase of Justice Potter Stewart, that capital punishment as applied by the states is “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” Some people are executed while others found guilty of more horrible crimes in the same state are not, and some people who are executed are probably not guilty of anything. The Supreme Court’s occasional gestures towards making the death penalty less arbitrary have done almost nothing to alter this fact.
And yet, as Sarah Muller of MSNBC points out, not only is Florida refraining from tightening its procedures, it’s actively seeking to speed up executions with its “Timely Justice Act.” It’s become increasingly hard to imagine that the Supreme Court will stand in the state’s way, which will have the effect of making an already unjust and error-prone process for killing people even more so.
By: Scott Lemieux, The American Prospect, August 7, 2013
“Fear And Consequences”: George Zimmerman, The Not-So-Faceless Bogeyman, And The Protection Of White Womanhood
My first week of college, I had a heated debate about abortion with two new friends—both were white, and one, Nancy, was extremely pro-life. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having such an “adult” conversation—we disagreed, but everyone was being respectful. Then my other pro-choice friend asked Nancy what she would do with a pregnancy if she was raped. I will never forget what Nancy said: “I think it would be cute to have a little black baby.” When we expressed outrage at her racism, Nancy shrugged. It never occurred to her a rapist would be anyone other than a black man. (DOJ statistics show that 80 to 90 percent of women who are raped are attacked by someone of their own race, unless they are Native women.) When this young woman imagined a criminal in her mind, he wasn’t a faceless bogeyman.
I hadn’t thought of this exchange in years, not until I was reading the responses to George Zimmerman’s acquittal—particularly those about the role of white womanhood. When I first heard that the jurors were women, I naïvely hoped they would see this teenage boy shot dead in the street and think of their children. But they weren’t just any women; most were white women. Women who, like me, have been taught to fear men of color. And who—as a feminist named Valerie pointed out on Twitter—probably would see Zimmerman as their son sooner than they would Trayvon Martin.
Brittney Cooper at Salon expressed the same sentiment: “I am convinced that at a strictly human level, this case came down to whether those white women could actually see Trayvon Martin as somebody’s child, or whether they saw him according to the dictates of black male criminality.”
And indeed, Anderson Cooper’s interview with juror B37 sheds light on who was considered deserving of empathy and humanization. Hint: it wasn’t Trayvon Martin. As Igor Volsky of Think Progress pointed out, “B37” used Zimmerman’s first name in the interview frequently and twice used the phrase “George said” even though Zimmerman didn’t testify. She also indicated that she wasn’t moved by Rachel Jeantel’s testimony because of her “communication skills” and that “she was using phrases I had never heard before.”
Perhaps most tellingly, though, “B37” told Cooper that Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done.” (The phrase “above and beyond” is interesting, given it’s generally understood as a positive.) To her, Zimmerman was a protector. Sure, maybe he went a bit overboard but “Trayvon got mad and attacked him,” and Zimmerman “had a right to defend himself.”
This juror’s comments cannot be divorced from our culture’s long-standing criminalizing of young black men, and white women’s related fears. As Mychal Denzel Smith pointed out here at The Nation and on MSNBC’s Up With Steve Kornacki, defense attorneys stoked this fear deliberately and broadly.
To my disgust, O’Mara literally invoked the same justification for killing Trayvon as was used to justify lynchings. He called to the witness stand Olivia Bertalan, one of Zimmerman’s former neighbors, who told the story of her home being burglarized by two young African-American boys while she and her children feared for their lives. It was terrifying indeed, and it had absolutely no connection to the case at hand. But O’Mara presented the jury with the “perfect victim,” which Trayvon could never be: a white woman living in fear of black criminals. Zimmerman had offered to help her the night her home was robbed. Implicit in the defense’s closing argument: he was also protecting her the night he killed Trayvon Martin.
They carefully made Martin—the victim—into that not-so-faceless bogeyman. Now, I don’t know what was in the jurors’ hearts—but the story the defense told and that juror B37 parroted is not a new one. It’s a story that ends with fear trumping empathy and humanity. (A fear that even now is being grossly defended as justified.)
Yes, white women—all of us—are taught to fear men of color. We need to own that truth, own that shameful fear. Most importantly, we need to name it for what it is: deeply held and constantly enforced racism.
I’d like to think if I was on that jury I would look at pictures of Trayvon Martin and see him for the child he was. I hope I would.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Nation, July 16, 2013
“Trayvon Martin Could’ve Been Me”: A Difficult Journey To Becoming A More Perfect Union, Not A Perfect Union, A More Perfect Union
Last weekend, not long after the jury delivered its verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, President Obama issued a written statement, urging all Americans to “respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son.” Today, however, the president made an unexpected appearance at the White House press briefing room to speak to the issue in more detail.
For those who can’t watch the video, this was a rather remarkable moment for the nation’s first African-American president, who reflected on the story and race in America with an eloquence that has sometimes been lacking of late.
President Barack Obama emerged Friday to give voice to African Americans’ reaction to last weekend’s verdict in the George Zimmerman case, saying that Trayvon Martin “could have been me 35 years ago.”
He also suggested that the outcome of the case could have been different if Martin were white. “If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario,” he said, “both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
Obama went on to reflect on his own experiences as a black man, drawing scrutiny in department stores, hearing car-door clicks as he walked down sidewalks, and seeing women clutch their purses nervously with him in an elevator. “The African-American community is looking at this through a set of experiences and history that doesn’t go away,” he said.
Obama also broached the subject of “racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws” — including the death penalty and drug laws — which generally is left out of our public conversation.
But perhaps most provocatively, the president reflected on an imaginary scenario. “If Trayvon Martin was of age and was armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” Obama asked. “If the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we should examine those laws.”
It was a rather remarkable display. A transcript of the remarks is below.
The president said the following:
I wanted to come out here, first of all, to tell you that Jay is prepared for all your questions and is very much looking forward to the session. The second thing is I want to let you know that over the next couple of weeks, there’s going to obviously be a whole range of issues — immigration, economics, et cetera — we’ll try to arrange a fuller press conference to address your questions.
The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week — the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling. I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday. But watching the debate over the course of the last week, I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.
First of all, I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.
The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there’s going to be a lot of arguments about the legal issues in the case — I’ll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues. The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that’s how our system works. But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling.
You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.
Now, this isn’t to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.
And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.
I think the African American community is also not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied. And that all contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Now, the question for me at least, and I think for a lot of folks, is where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through, as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family. But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do.
I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government, the criminal code. And law enforcement is traditionally done at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.
That doesn’t mean, though, that as a nation we can’t do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I’m still bouncing around with my staff, so we’re not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.
Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it would be productive for the Justice Department, governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.
When I was in Illinois, I passed racial profiling legislation, and it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.
And initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way that it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them and, in turn, be more helpful in applying the law. And obviously, law enforcement has got a very tough job.
So that’s one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought to bear if state and local governments are receptive. And I think a lot of them would be. And let’s figure out are there ways for us to push out that kind of training.
Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.
I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the “stand your ground” laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case. On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?
And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.
Number three — and this is a long-term project — we need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?
I’m not naïve about the prospects of some grand, new federal program. I’m not sure that that’s what we’re talking about here. But I do recognize that as President, I’ve got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes, and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed — I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation. And we’re going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.
And then, finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.
And let me just leave you with a final thought that, as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I seem them interact, they’re better than we are — they’re better than we were — on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.
And so we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues. And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union — not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 19, 2013
“A New Low Even For Lawyers”: Defense Attorney Don West Gives A Despicable Reaction To The Zimmerman Verdict
It was clear from the start that whatever happened in the George Zimmerman case would produce a strong reaction – especially if, as happened, Zimmerman was found not guilty. And one would hope that in the midst of all of the heavy emotion and tragedy of the case, a dialogue would ensue over race relations, over the vastly different experiences of adult white men and black teenagers wearing hoodies, and over what makes us afraid and how we’re allowed to react to that fear. There have been some insightful and impressively soothing statements and behavior from people – President Obama’s pitch-perfect statement, for example, and Trayvon Martin’s own parents spending the day after the verdict in church, urging peace and calm.
The word “despicable” is not part of that dialogue – especially when it is uttered not only by an attorney arguing the case, but by one of the defense attorneys.
Lawyer Don West – who distinguished himself early on by opening his defense arguments with a wildly inappropriate knock-knock joke – told the Orlando Sun Sentinel after the verdict:
I think the prosecution of George Zimmerman was despicable. I’m glad this jury kept this tragedy from being a travesty.
This is the sort of talk one expects to find on Twitter or on some anonymous comments section on a newspaper website. This is not the sort of remark to be made by someone who is ostensibly committed to the criminal justice system.
Trayvon Martin was 17 years old, unarmed, and on his way back home after picking up candy and iced tea at the market. Now he is dead, and the person who shot him is on record having spotted Martin, declared him as a kid up to no good, gotten out of his car and shot him dead. The facts of what happened are somewhat murky, in part because Zimmerman gave conflicting accounts, and in part because the only other witness to the episode is in a grave.
Even if, as the jury found, Zimmerman rightly felt in danger of death or grievous bodily harm, Martin’s death was a horrible tragedy. Florida law gives wide latitude to people claiming self-defense, and the jury was required to listen to the facts and decide whether the prosecution had proven, without a reasonable doubt, that Zimmerman did not feel in danger. That’s a hard standard to reach, so as distressing as the not guilty verdict is to many people, it’s an understandable conclusion.
But the idea that there was something offensive about even prosecuting Zimmerman, about putting him through the stress of a trial after taking the life of an unarmed boy, is stunning. West’s self-righteous comment suggests that Zimmerman was the victim here, and that his insistence – despite his behavior and conflicting statements – that he killed someone only because there was no other way to protect himself is not just disrespectful to the dead boy. It’s disrespectful to the criminal justice system. It is, arguably, despicable.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, July 15, 2013
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