Tag: Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman Tragedy Update

Over a year ago I expressed confidence that our judicial process and public good will would clarify the facts of the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman:  https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/the-trayvan-martin-tragedy/. Indeed, after carefully listening to and weighing the evidence presented to it the six women jury rendered its unanimous verdict a week ago that Zimmerman had lawfully, but no less tragically, shot and killed Martin in self-defense and was therefore not guilty of the charges against him. At the time a year ago, the failure of local Florida law enforcement officials to arrest Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, seemed to me and many others a potentially racially tinged judgment. I supported the call for his arrest. Once all of the obtainable facts had been presented and evaluated by the Jury that earlier decision turned out to be a sound professional judgment by the police. But I still think it was desirable to go through the process of this trial.

I did not follow the trial closely but have no reason to question the judgment of the jury. The utterly disgraceful misreporting and doctoring of the conversation between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher aired by NBC made it seem that Zimmerman might be racist in his reaction to Martin (a claim no one made during the trial because there is apparently no basis for it) tarnishing the professionalism of at least NBC. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-trayvon-martin-tragedy-continues/.  Sadly the press has continued to reproduce the young, handsome picture of Martin and the thuggish picture of Zimmerman long after more neutral pictures became available.

The slanted reporting of the press is nothing, however, compared to the highly inappropriate statements from our increasingly discredited Attorney General, who suggested that the federal government was investigation the possibility of trying Zimmerman for civil rights violations for which no evidence was introduced in the just finished trail. But my heart stopped when President Obama chimed in that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” How could the President of the United States join the cheap political babbling of Attorney General Holder? And thus I started this blog.

This is an example of how fragments out of context can be totally misleading. The President’s full statement yesterday, when he joined the White House press briefing unannounced, was quite the opposite of my impression from the news headline. President Obama has disappointed me on many things (promoting bigger government generally, higher taxes, expanding snooping on Americans, drone assassinations of Americans without trial, and poor leadership in general), but I have always found him an honest and thoughtful commenter on race issues. His statements yesterday were no exception. Zimmerman’s trial produced no evidence of racism in anything that happened that tragic night in Florida, but the President rightly noted that each of us carries impressions (“priors”), often from personal experience, that frame our views of the world and events and that it is better that we acknowledge them and open ourselves to an examination of the role they play in our everyday judgments. This was exactly the point I was trying to make a year ago, though Obama said it better. The President is right on this issue and an excessive political correctness has stifled this discussion for too long.

The Trayvon Martin Tragedy continues

The Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman story has a way to run.  Every day seems to bring something new. Last week’s doctoring of audio tapes between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher aired by NBC (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/nbc-to-do-internal-investigation-on-zimmerman-segment/2012/03/31/gIQAc4HhnS_blog.html?hpid=z6 ) are now under internal investigation by NBC (a once reputable news source).

Yesterday David Franke passed along the following article by friend Walter Williams and his own observations that:

“Walter Williams is SO good!

“Right now we are witnessing the biggest lynch mob in the U.S. since the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan.  I refer to the mob out to lynch that “white” hispanic, Zimmerman.  This is a lynch mob made up of “black leaders” and MSNBC white-as-white-bread liberals.

“I have no idea whether Zimmerman is guilty or not, but I am willing to wait and let the police and courts and lawyers on both sides—and a jury, no doubt–go through the process of determining that.  And then, based on the evidence, I might venture whether I agree or disagree with the jury and the authorities.

“Not this lynch mob, however.  They KNOW who is guilty, and don’t confuse them with any facts or due process. “

http://www.lewrockwell.com/williams-w/w-williams117.html

The Trayvon Martin Tragedy

The shooting death of an unarmed black boy, Trayvon Martin, in the Florida town of Sanford, by a white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, has raised many questions and issues. The positive side of this tragedy for me is that almost everyone wants to know the truth of what happened and to proceed from there. Moreover, our system of justice has procedures and mechanisms that maximize the prospects of uncovering and sorting out the truth from what is still a very confused mix of partial facts and assertions by interested parties (the friends and parents of Trayvon and of George).

When Trayvon’s death first rose to national attention, everyone’s initial reaction was colored by his or her personal biases (“priors”). If you are black, you initially and immediately accepted the outrage of Trayvon’s parents at the failure of the police to arrest the shooter of their unarmed son. If you are one of George’s friends you immediately accepted George’s claim of self-defense (the somewhat later revealed claim that he had been attached and beaten by Trayvon and fired in self-defense).

For most of the rest of us, the fact that Trayvon’s pictures depict him as a handsome, smiling, friendly youth (looking, as President Obama ill advisedly claimed, much like his own son would if he had one), while Zimmerman’s pictures depict him as, well, more or less the opposite, activated a bias toward beauty.  Because Russian President Putin (and even more so outgoing President Medvedev) is handsome and fit, we assume he must be a better guy than fat and ugly Nikita Khrushchev (I just reviewed Khrushchev’s picture for the first time in many years and he actually isn’t THAT ugly). Because Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is handsome and speaks excellent American English, we assume that he must be right and good for Israel (despite all the evident to the contrary).

These are natural biases. We shouldn’t pretend that they don’t exist. What is important is that we can move beyond them when faced with contrary evidence. As allegations from each side of the Stanford tragedy (everyone agrees that it was a tragedy) along with bits of actual evidence accumulate, what seemed clear in the beginning to each of us (depending on where we started – i.e., our biases) becomes less clear. Trayvon’s past is not spotless. Did Zimmerman have blood on his cloths from being beaten by Trayvon as he claims (a surveillance video when he was taken into custody suggests not)? Whose voice was it shouting on the 911 recording (not Zimmerman’s according to two unofficial expert analyses)? ETC. ETC. With the passage of time and the collection of and vetting of more facts, the truth should clarify and emerge.

The positive side of the sad story is that virtually everyone outside of the immediate families genuinely wants to know the truth of what really happened. Hometown power figures have always been more able to bend our rules and procedures of justice to their interests than others but not without limit. Those limits in many ways have grown tighter. In this case, a southern town is bending over backward (after a slow start) to be and to appear to be fair. I suspect it would have been different fifty or a hundred years ago. Public opinion (i.e., our priors –biases), an important foundation of our conception of justice, has changed for the better.

I have no doubt that we will eventually know the truth of that night as fully as it is possible to know it.