So Just How Hard Should Zimmerman Have Allowed Martin to Beat Him?

So being in the trenches in the intellectual war over the Zimmerman acquittal, what has occurred to me is that the problem with Martin’s supporters, fundamentally, is an inability to feel empathy with all parties involved.  There has been a lot of talk doabout empathy in the law recently, and I don’t think it is inherently bad.  I think a good judge, for instance, needs to have empathy, not just for one party, but for all parties.  The ability to place yourselves in the shoes of every participant, in my opinion is a valuable skill that a judge should cultivate.  And a good litigator, for instance, learns to see things from the other side, if only to anticipate their attacks and prepare an appropriate parry for them.  It is no accident that the best defense lawyers tend to be former prosecutors.

I have striven to do that from the beginning of the case and indeed I have striven to do that my entire adult life.  For instance, while I disagree with the Martin’s family’s crusade against Zimmerman, I have no anger at them over it.  They have, after all, lost a child.  When a parent loses a child, they are allowed to get a little irrational.  I said that when people attacked Rick Santorum for his arguably weird reaction to losing a child, and I say the same to the Martins.  They lost a son.  You’re allowed to be a little irrational about that.

I have even tried to empathize with Trayvon Martin himself.  I don’t know if he was a bad kid, or just one who liked to seem tough, to seem “gangsta.”  Dan Collins wrote an excellent piece that digs deep into the possible motivations for why he struck first—as all of the available evidence shows.  Collins’ picture is one of understandable anger.  I mean it would still be assault, maybe even aggravated assault, but anyone who has ever been a young man knows how this is.  Mike Judge once talked about being a teenage boy and said  

It’s just this funny, awkward moment in life when you want to be super-macho and show everyone you're not a kid anymore. You wear serious, bad-ass death-rock T-shirts, but you've got to put rubber bands on your braces.

That tension between wanting to be an adult and the world still treating you like a kid can very often explode into violence.

And there is the very real possibility of Martin acting in lawful self-defense himself.  Indeed, while “Stand Your Ground” had nothing to do with the Zimmerman defense, if Martin had lived and faced charges of assault, he would have had to invoke it himself.  The evidence clearly shows that he could have run home, but instead chose to confront Zimmerman and strike him.  If Florida imposed a duty to retreat, he would have been automatically guilty of assault, if not aggravated assault.  But with no duty to retreat, if Martin was charged with assault, he might successfully pled self-defense.

And I will reiterate that even if Martin acted in self-defense, it doesn’t mean that Zimmerman was deprived of the right to self-defense.  Self-defense isn’t about blame.  It’s about danger.

But people cannot get that.  So you see me ask some version of the question in the title on twitter: how hard should Zimmerman have allowed Martin to beat him?

We can talk about why Zimmerman got out of the car.  Did he pursue Martin or not?  But none of that matters in the law.

The only question is the circumstances when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin.  Did he reasonably believe deadly force was necessary to protect himself from death or great bodily harm?

So imagine you are Zimmerman.  You are walking in your neighborhood when Martin emerges from the bushes and sucker punches you.  Hell, if it helps you to get over whatever racial hang ups you might have, imagine Martin is white, or the same race as you are, or whatever race you think is the most wonderful (if you have a preference).  Hopefully for most of you, there is no need to do that sort of thing—you don’t care what color Zimmerman or Martin were.

So you are sucker punched.  Your nose is broken....

...And then he pins you to the ground and continues to pummel you.  He bashes your head against the concrete.... 

...You are screaming for help.  A man (Good) emerges from a nearby home and tells your attacker to stop.  But the beatings continue.  Will the beating ever stop?  And how much longer will you remain conscious at this rate?  And if you passed out, do you feel any assurance that this person would stop beating you?  Or would it continue until you are dead?

So finally, you pull out your gun and shoot.

If you think he was wrong to shoot, then you necessarily believe that Zimmerman should have let himself be beaten even more.  You have to believe that in that situation Zimmerman had no reason to believe he would have faced great bodily harm as required by the self-defense statute before he was allowed to use deadly force.  You would have to believe this is true despite the fact that his injuries might have already constituted great bodily harm.

A rule that would keep Taryvon Martin alive, would require Zimmerman to take an even greater beating and to risk his own life, as is often the case in England.  From a classic piece by Mark Steyn:

Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are "hot" burglaries, and in my part of the world it's statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it's more than 50 per cent and climbing. Which is hardly surprising given the police's petty, well-publicised pursuit of those citizens who have the impertinence to resist criminals.

These days, even as he or she is being clobbered, the more thoughtful British subject is usually keeping an eye (the one that hasn't been poked out) on potential liability. Four years ago, Shirley Best, proprietor of the Rolander Fashion emporium, whose clients include Zara Phillips, was ironing some clothes when the proverbial two youths showed up. They pressed the hot iron into her flesh, burning her badly, and then stole her watch. "I was frightened to defend myself," said Miss Best. "I thought if I did anything I would be arrested." There speaks the modern British crime victim.

There is no alternative.  Either Zimmerman is allowed to shoot in those circumstances, or he is required by law to let himself be beaten.

Indeed, it’s funny how all of the liberals who oppose the “torture” of suspected terrorists, while simultaneously supporting the president in ordering them killed summarily, suddenly think that Zimmerman should have allowed himself to be beaten, rather than kill Martin.  For that matter, how many of the people who felt that Rodney King would have been justified in pulling out a gun and shooting the cops who beat him are upset that Zimmerman refused to let himself be beaten?

And empathy for the person being attacked, George Zimmerman, requires us to recognize another thing.  He very well might have thought he was going to die.  He claimed to the police he felt Martin’s hand near his gun.  Martin might have just coincidentally put his hands there, but can you imagine the panic Zimmerman might have felt?  “Oh my God, he is going for my gun!”  In those circumstances, is it unreasonable to think maybe Zimmerman thought, “it is better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”  Okay, okay, in Florida he ended up being judged by six, but you get the idea.  It is better to shoot and live and face charges for murder, than to allow oneself to be beaten to death.  Perhaps the maximally moral thing to do is to literally lay down your life for someone else in almost a Christ-like fashion, but the question we have to ask is if we are going to require him to go to prison because he refused to do that.

But empathy is impossible for too many.  To borrow the liberal language over the last few years, in their minds Zimmerman became the Other, a foreign and terrifying thing.  Despite his part-black Hispanic heritage, he became in their minds a dishonorary white man.  He became a member of the good old boys.  He became just a “creepy a-- cracker.”  Regionalism played a role here, too, where the common assumption that racism is much worse in the south came into play (in fact it is roughly equally bad all over America).  And thus he becomes like the Klansmen who murdered the black child Emmet Till for whistling at a white woman, instead of a man who was already arguably suffered great bodily harm and was more than likely afraid for his life.

Indeed, a little empathy for Mr. Zimmerman, would make civil rights charges impossible even as they are being contemplated against him.  I talked about this in my last post, but here is the statutory language again (truncated for relevance):

Whoever... willfully causes bodily injury to any person ... because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person...

...and causes death shall be sentenced to up to life in prison.  These laws were passed specifically in order to address terrorist violence by the Ku Klux Klan, which generally have no relationship to self-defense that the law recognizes.

So in order to convict him you have to prove that he pulled the trigger because Trayvon Martin was black.  But any slight empathy for Zimmerman makes the claim ludicrous.  Again, go back to that evening.  Imagine you have a man straddling you, pinning you down.  He already broke your nose.  He was smashing your head against the concrete.  Do you really think Zimmerman thought, “if he was white, I would let myself get beaten.  But since this kid is black I am going to shoot him.”?

I mean you don’t even have to get to whether this was lawful self-defense or not (you can read about federal doctrine here).  Just start with whether the Federal Government can prove he was motivated by racism, as opposed to simply the desire to end the beating.  The simplest answer is presumptively the best, and the simplest answer is he shot Martin because he was beating him.

Indeed, the FBI has already said that there is no evidence of racial bias at all.  But I would submit that even if Zimmerman was in fact the head of the KKK—which would only be slightly less ridiculous than this...

...(go here if you can’t see the video)—I would submit that even then the most logical inference is that he shot him because Martin had done this...

...and this...

...to him.  A racist is a person who has difficulty seeing beyond a person’s color.  He represents the opposite of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.  He judges a person not by the content of their character but the color of their skin.  But I submit that if a guy is beating you that hard, ironically, at that moment the race of the person beating you is not likely to be relevant even to David Duke himself, or to Louis Farrakhan.  At that moment, even a virulent racist is forced to judge by conduct and not color.

Now some will say, “yes, but he wouldn’t have interacted with Martin but for racial profiling.”  Never mind the complete lack of evidence suggesting that Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin.  Indeed, Martin called Zimmerman a racially charged term: “creepy a-- cracker.”  But as I explained here, that just isn’t how it works.  The chain of events that led to a moment when Zimmerman decided to pull the trigger to stop the beating isn’t relevant.  What is relevant is the moment when he pulled the trigger.

So normally I wouldn’t even be worried about prosecution, but then again this is the same administration that did this:

That is the filmmaker that the government investigated criminally for making a film insulting Mohammed, and managed to find something to charge him for.  The Obama administration has made it clear that if you say the wrong thing, or if you just prove to be a sufficiently convenient scapegoat, they will investigate you and, by God, find something to charge you with.

So the fact that Zimmerman evidently committed no crime, the fact that the state of Florida already went through his rodeo and failed to get a conviction, doesn’t comfort me as it should.  Ordinarily a loss in the state court would give the Federal Government serious pause.  While the Federal Government is not bound by the decisions of the state courts on this subject, if the state court evidently felt that it was self-defense why should the Feds think a Federal jury would think differently?  If the state of Florida couldn’t convince six, why should the federal government believe it can convince twelve, beyond a reasonable doubt?  Ordinarily a prosecutor would tell the administration that there was virtually no hope of winning this case and that they shouldn’t bother.

But I fear that with this politicization of the Justice Department, that they will charge him again based on the racist uproar we are seeing now.  The Sixth Amendment doesn’t apply in these circumstances but we the people should take it guidance to the basic unfairness of this situation.  He was already found to have reasonably acted in self-defense.  The matter should rest.

And I will note, to any prosecutors in the DOJ, that Florida Rules of Professional Conduct state that “[t]he prosecutor in a criminal case shall: refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause[.]”  That applies as much to attorneys for the federal government as it does to state prosecutors, and therefore if they charge Zimmerman with a crime, they will be extremely likely to face sanctions for it.

Perhaps what is needed is a rule of collateral estoppel that applies to the disadvantage of the federal government in criminal cases.  For non-lawyer types, collateral estoppel says that once a question is litigated, it is decided for cases going forward.  For instance, my stalker Brett Kimberlin is a convicted terrorist.  Therefore if I call him a terrorist and he sues me for defamation for calling him a terrorist, I can simply point at the cases where he was convicted of terrorism.  In that case the court would look and make sure that Kimberlin was given the opportunity to defend himself and if he had been, the court would rule simply based on the fact he is a convicted terrorist that he is in fact a terrorist and therefore it is not defamation to call him one.

Indeed, it is for that reason that I could call OJ Simpson a murderer without fearing any defamation suit from Simpson himself.  While he was found not guilty in his criminal trial, he was subsequently found liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.  Therefore if OJ dared to sue me for defamation, I could use that previous ruling to have him declared responsible for their deaths, and then I would only have to prove they didn’t die by accident to prove OJ murdered them as far as the law of defamation is concerened.

Applied here, I would argue that the that facts found in a state criminal case that benefit the Defendant should be binding on the federal government in a federal criminal case, unless they can show that bias or other unfairness occurred.  It would not quite be the same as applying a double jeopardy rule to this case, but it would have the effect of relieving most defendants of the need to re-litigate a question they already won in state court.

Another example of the failure of empathy I have been discussing is in the latest diatribe over the case, this time from Edward Wyckoff Williams.  Writing for Salon (of course), in his piece called Our Real Problem is White Rage he nearly crosses the line into criminal incitement.  Allow me to fisk this thing (his words in red):

If there is no justice, there can be no peace. But in the American South it seems white folks suddenly believe that decorum and charm are a proper response to unspeakable acts of violence and unconscionable injustice.

Um, seriously, “unspeakable?”  It’s a single gunshot.  An unspeakable act of violence would be more like the killing of James Byrd, where they tied him to a car and dragged his body behind them until he died.  Shootings themselves are not only “speakable” but downright common.

And injustice?  Because a jury thought that a man who had his nose broken was allowed to stop the beating?

The day before a jury delivered an acquittal in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger and Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith gave a national press conference to appeal for a peaceful reaction to the verdict — regardless of its outcome.

Eslinger, who is white, said, “We will not tolerate anyone who uses this verdict as an excuse to violate the law.”

The veiled threat of an aggressive police response...

Actually that seemed like a threat, rather than a veiled one and an appropriate one.

And notice the race obsession, having to note the color of the person who said this.  As if there were not black leaders also calling for non-violent responses.

...to imaginary civil unrest...

Actually the word isn’t imaginary, but anticipated.  And given the unrest we have seen so far, as well as thousands of thugs on twitter suggesting they would riot, it seems like a reasonable concern.

...belies the very logic that led to Trayvon Martin’s death to begin with. For, you see, African-Americans are never protected or served by the law enforcement apparatus — yet they are always subject to its military might.

Never?  Really?  Well, let’s take one example, Virginia v. Black (2003).  For the record, Mr. Black is actually white:

On August 22, 1998, Barry Black led a Ku Klux Klan rally in Carroll County, Virginia. Twenty-five to thirty people attended this gathering, which occurred on private property with the permission of the owner, who was in attendance. The property was located on an open field just off Brushy Fork Road (State Highway 690) in Cana, Virginia.

When the sheriff of Carroll County learned that a Klan rally was occurring in his county, he went to observe it from the side of the road. During the approximately one hour that the sheriff was present, about 40 to 50 cars passed the site, a "few" of which stopped to ask the sheriff what was happening on the property. App. 71. Eight to ten houses were located in the vicinity of the rally. Rebecca Sechrist, who was related to the owner of the property where the rally took place, "sat and watched to see wha[t] [was] going on" from the lawn of her in-laws' house. She looked on as the Klan prepared for the gathering and subsequently conducted the rally itself. Id., at 103.

During the rally, Sechrist heard Klan members speak about "what they were" and "what they believed in." Id., 349*349 at 106. The speakers "talked real bad about the blacks and the Mexicans." Id., at 109. One speaker told the assembled gathering that "he would love to take a .30/.30 and just random[ly] shoot the blacks." Ibid. The speakers also talked about "President Clinton and Hillary Clinton," and about how their tax money "goes to ... the black people." Ibid. Sechrist testified that this language made her "very ... scared." Id., at 110.

At the conclusion of the rally, the crowd circled around a 25- to 30-foot cross. The cross was between 300 and 350 yards away from the road. According to the sheriff, the cross "then all of a sudden ... went up in a flame." Id., at 71. As the cross burned, the Klan played Amazing Grace over the loudspeakers. Sechrist stated that the cross burning made her feel "awful" and "terrible." Id., at 110.

When the sheriff observed the cross burning, he informed his deputy that they needed to "find out who's responsible and explain to them that they cannot do this in the State of Virginia." Id., at 72. The sheriff then went down the driveway, entered the rally, and asked "who was responsible for burning the cross." Id., at 74. Black responded, "I guess I am because I'm the head of the rally." Ibid. The sheriff then told Black, "[T]here's a law in the State of Virginia that you cannot burn a cross and I'll have to place you under arrest for this." Ibid.

Black was charged with burning a cross with the intent of intimidating a person or group of persons, in violation of § 18.2-423.

No actual black people were hurt, but Black was charged with a crime and convicted, in part for intimidation of African Americans.  And the Supreme Court upheld that conviction.

Or take another famous example: the murder of James Byrd.  I already discussed it above, but this is what I wrote when we executed one of his savage murderers:

In 1857, the Supreme Court declared that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Texas affirmed today that the right of James Byrd to his life was one that three white supremacists not only were bound to respect, but that the violation of that right would cost at least one of them his life. It is a grim moment for which Texans can rightfully feel a solemn sense of pride.

So the notion that the law and the power of the state never protects black people is objectively untrue.  There are plenty of white people who have been punished for crimes committed against black people.

Sanford police coyly “tolerated” the actual killing of an unarmed black child, but yet refuse to “tolerate” any anger expressed for the acquittal of his murderer.

They “tolerated” the killing of a man by a man who was actually being beaten by him, arguably committing aggravated assault.  And as for being intolerant of anger, that charge is false.  They can be as angry as they want and it will be tolerated.  What they will be intolerant of is actual unlawful violence, as well they should be.

This is the new Jim Crow realized.

The joke of that comment is that under the racial classification laws that existed in the day of Jim Crow, Zimmerman himself would have been classified as “not white.”  He would have been segregated from white children in school.  His parents might very well have been arrested for race mixing.  But it is important in Williams’ mind to make him a “dishonorary white man.” 

It bears reminding that it was Sanford’s police who first allowed Zimmerman to walk away uncharged — his gun in tote. The story of self-defense seemed logical to them given the brown body lying on the ground.

Right, as if their supposed racism would not be cancelled out by the brown skin of the man who shot him.  Although to be fair, maybe they didn’t realize he was not a white man under all that blood.  (Note: I am being sarcastic.)

It was their decision not to investigate the case as a crime that led to public outcry, rallies and marches. It is only because of their total failure to do their jobs that the world now knows the name and face of Trayvon Martin.

It is their jobs to charge part-black Hispanics with crimes when there is zero chance of conviction?

The complete incompetence (or indifference) of Sanford police is why certain evidence that could have more easily convicted Zimmerman was inadmissible at trial — the most glaring example being their failure to perform a toxicology test on Zimmerman the night he shot Martin. Had they done so, it would have revealed whether he was under the influence of either illegal substances, alcohol or the two prescriptions drugs he had admittedly been taking — Temazepan and Adderall — the side effects of which include hallucinations, insomnia and aggressive behavior.

If you know what he was on, why do you need the toxicology examination?  The answer is he is assuming the worst about Zimmerman, which is a clear demonstration of prejudice, though not necessarily racial prejudice.  As I wrote in another context:

To pre-judge a person is to literally “judge before.”  Before what?  Before it is appropriate, before you have all the facts.  Of course normally we think of prejudice as being based on specific traits.  Racial prejudice is to judge a man by his skin color, rather than getting enough facts to judge him as an individual.  But it can be based on anything.

You can judge for yourself what inspires this pre-judgment.  I think it is pretty obvious by the end of the piece.  And by the way, millions of ADD sufferers take Adderall.  I don’t but I know many ADD sufferers who do.  It doesn’t make everyone crazy and murder a kid.  This is disability prejudice, pure and simple.

Instead, Sanford police let Zimmerman walk away, quietly into the night, as he did again yesterday. But the same police now threaten a quick and forcible response to any violence perpetrated in reaction to injustice their own department has engendered.

Yes, because rioting is generally violence directed at random innocent people because you are angry.  By contrast, George Zimmerman shot a person who was beating him senseless.

This arrogant call to remain calm in the face of such fatal injustice reveals a basic disregard for the humanity of black people. It is this fundamental disconnect — an unwillingness or inability to see African-Americans as fully realized human beings — that allows whites to blindly ignore the need for equal treatment and equal justice.

No, as best as I can tell, his outrage stems from your inability to see George Zimmerman as a fully realized human being, who has a right not to be beaten senseless.

It is this warped mentality that led George Zimmerman to murder an unarmed child, feel no remorse and say it was “God’s plan.”

Except of course he did feel remorse, and as for the “God’s plan” comment he was simply struggling with the question that many faithful persons struggle with: how can bad things happen to good, or at least undeserving, people?  Throwing up your hands and saying, “it was God’s plan” is simply a way of coping.  It is no different than Dr. King standing at the graves of four little girls murdered while attending Sunday school and saying "God still has a way of wringing good out of evil."  It’s the same thing a parent is likely to say when their child is struck by lightning.  But it’s hard to see that if you have constructed Zimmerman into an “Other.”

He goes on to accuse the jury of racism:

Human beings are allowed to be angry. They are allowed to emote fear, love, joy, relief, pride and pain. Perhaps if the white women on this jury could see a murdered child — as opposed to a “black” child — they would instinctively know that Trayvon was afraid of Zimmerman, confused by this man following him in the dark, and perhaps they could intuit Trayvon screaming for his life.

By “intuit,” they mean ignore all the evidence that demonstrated that it wasn’t Trayvon, such as the fact that at first Tracey Martin himself said it was not his son, among other data points (including the eye witness testimony of Good that he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman).

There is, after all, no other way to see the facts of this case — beyond a reasonable doubt or otherwise.

It’s impossible that Zimmerman’s mother, uncle, friends, etc. were telling the truth when they said that it was Zimmerman screaming for help, hoping to find some way to stop the beating before he had to shoot Martin?  Thankfully, six jurors unanimously saw that differently.

And then he hits another historically ignorant point:

But neither justice nor humanity are colorblind in the eyes of American law. The nation’s sociopolitical consciousness remains plagued by a three-fifths compromise that devalues the lives of black people in general, and black boys and men in particular.

Do we have to go over this again?  First, the three-fifth compromise concerned slaves, not free black people.  Second, it was slaveholders who wanted slaves counted as full persons for representation.  Since the slaves couldn’t’ vote, the result of that approach would be to increase the power of the slaveholders, so as to better secure slavery.  So the insult wasn’t that non-voting slaves were counted as only three fifths of a person in representation: it was the fact they were counted at all.

And when the criminal justice system —  in the hands, as it was, of two white defense attorneys, two white prosecutors and a mostly white jury presided over by a white judge — choose to disregard the life of an innocent black teenager, it can hardly be a surprising result. Trayvon Martin was profiled not just by Zimmerman on the night he was killed, but by the very people charged with adjudicating justice on behalf of his senseless death.

So he thinks the prosecutors were racist now?  Is he aware of the fact that they were so enthusiastic in their pursuit of Zimmerman that they are being reported to the bar for potential unethical conduct?  Does he think they should have done even more of that sort of thing?

For African-Americans this is not new. The paradox of being implicitly excluded from the guarantee of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has been reiterated and reinforced by public policy and social malaise for centuries. President Barack Obama is not immune — as he’s become the target of incessant “white rage”: race-baiting attacks, prejudice and bias even prior to his election. The Republican Party and its neo-Confederate Tea Party wing has been committed to invalidating his political and legislative legacy as much as the Zimmerman jury invalidated the civil rights of Trayvon.

Apparently, Mr. Williams was not ready for a black president.

The disparate precedent set, therefore, becomes all the more insulting when we’re told to simply shut up and bear it.

Right.  Because what the court ruled was that self-defense was available to a man as black as Herman Plessy, but not one as black as Trayvon Martin, or something.

Melissa Harris-Perry, on her eponymous MSNBC show, explained this weekend that “race riots” is a biased term that dismisses the underlying calls for justice, which are often the primary purpose for protests by black and brown people. She highlighted the key fact that in America’s history the worst “race riots” featured violent attacks perpetrated by whites against blacks: The Tulsa race riot of 1921 and the Rosewood, Fla., riots of 1923.

Yes, well, in case you missed it, on MSNBC everything is racist if serves the Democratic agenda to say so.

In Tulsa, a mob of armed white men charged into a black neighborhood, burning homes, killing over 300 victims and leaving an estimated 8,000 people homeless. In Rosewood, a series of lynchings escalated into hundreds of angry white rioters killing an unknown number of black citizens and leaving the entire town in waste.

Yet white rage is never articulated by America’s law enforcement as a reason to fear or strategically organize against.

Really?  What was that whole Virginia v. Black case about?  The fear of white racist rage.

White males aren’t stopped by police in disproportionate numbers nor frisked before entering movie theaters and first-grade classrooms. But there are many angry white people out there.

The image of a threatening black male prevails in the minds of white prosecutors, juries and average citizens alike — and the Zimmerman verdict will only serve to solidify that concept and embolden like-minded vigilantes to behave recklessly and act with impunity against the lives, bodies and souls of black folks.

Um, Martin wasn’t “threatening” to Zimmerman.  He was actually beating him.  To the extent that Zimmerman felt threatened, he was threatened with more beating, which given the fact that he had been continually beaten up until then seems pretty logical to me.  But alas, Williams seems to be another person who can’t see past the skin colors—or indeed the perceived skin colors—of the people involved.

African-American civil rights leaders, politicians and religious authorities have all echoed the call for calm in the wake of the verdict.

Which means his condemning a white man for saying the same thing to be kind of racist, right?

But what is most confounding is the fact that a black male who chooses to riot is as likely to be met with violent and deadly force as if he were walking quietly home with Skittles and iced tea in-hand.

Which is a distortion of the facts.  He was not just “quietly walking home.”  He was violently beating a man.

This is the ultimate tragedy that  Zimmerman’s trial has unleashed in the so-called “post-racial” age.

Black males, regardless of age, environment, lack of criminal record, activity and intent are treated as suspects, never presumed innocent.

Tell that to OJ Simpson.  Or Michael Jackson.  Or Kobe Bryant.

Their lives are reduced to a cautionary tale — denied of due process and equal protection.

What words written here can suffice to argue on behalf of an innocent dead child, as his murderer walks free — absolved by the system that failed to hold him responsible from the very beginning?

Ah, so Salon is not upset if it is sued for falsely calling him a murderer.

The very logic that precipitated Trayvon’s death and rendered jurisprudence to justify his killing reflects the misguided principles at the heart of Zimmerman’s defense: that this black boy had no right to live.

Oh, stop with the hysterics.  They never once argued that Martin had no right to live.  But Williams plainly believes that Zimmerman had no right not to be beaten.

How is this possible 60 years after Emmett Till’s fatal demise?

Because today a part-black Hispanic can get a fair trial.  Yay!

What progress can be gleaned from Obama’s ascendance if black children can’t be judged by the content of their character, instead of the color of their skin?

As far as Zimmerman knew at the time of the shooting, Martin was a young man who was beating the hell out of him.  I doubt the color of Martin’s skin was high on Zimmerman’s list reasons why he shot.

Trayvon Martin, and all of us by proxy, has been weighed in the balances and found guilty of his own murder. The sentence is death without parole.

Oh not this again.  No, Martin was not found guilty.  Self-defense is not about fault, but about danger.  As in, did Zimmerman reasonably believe the only way to prevent death or great bodily harm was to shoot.  You will notice nowhere in that did I say that the person striking him had to be a bad person or indeed guilty of any crime.

But by the same logic, apparently Williams would hold that Zimmerman was guilty in his own aggravated battery at the hands of Martin.  And apparently if he had his druthers, Zimmerman would have been required to just take it.  Because Williams has constructed Zimmerman into the frickin’ Ku Klux Klan, and therefore he deserved every blow of his beating.  Because Zimmerman has ceased to be human in Williams’ eyes.

So, let me address my question to Mr. Williams.  Just how hard should Zimmerman have allowed Martin to beat him?  The fact you think he wasn’t beaten enough tell us volumes about you.

---------------------------------------

Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.