A Defeat For Common Sense, Decency, In Florida

A great national tragedy befell the United States yesterday evening. George Zimmerman murdered a boy named Trayvon Martin and a jury decided that Mr. Zimmerman, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, should go free.

The situation may have been best summed up by civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton when he branded the outcome of the Zimmerman case “an atrocity.” He went on to succinctly explain what the impact of this ruling will be for America:

“What this jury has done is establish a precedent that when you are young and fit a certain profile, you can be committing no crime … and be killed and someone can claim self-defense … we had to march to even get a trial and even at trial, when he’s exposed over and over again as a liar, he is acquitted.”

Mass protests grip the country over George Zimmerman’s escape from justice.

Today mass protests against this travesty of justice were conducted, and they will almost certainly continue during the week ahead. The nation needs this catharsis, this chance to vent our collective anger at the failure of the court. The U.S. justice system missed the forest for the trees, becoming obsessed with technicalities. The court’s main concern should have been the life that was lost – the life of a child, which taken by a Bernie Goetz-style racist toting a gun.

Concealed carry, stand your ground laws, racial profiling – take your pick. All of them were in the spotlight these last few weeks, and all of them got a pass. This is a shameful day for Florida, a shameful day for the United States and a shameful day for human progress.

Despite his youth, Trayvon has become a martyr of the civil rights movement. While some believe it was little over the top for Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump to compare Trayvon to men like Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, I disagree. The comparison, I feel, is not far off, particularly in the case of Till. Emmett was even younger than Martin when he was lynched for talking to a white woman, a.k.a transgressing an imaginary and arbitrary social boundary placed upon him by people who deem themselves superior. Emmett and Trayvon both went to a place that someone else considered wrong, and they both paid with their lives for it. The parallel is eerie, but what is eerier still is that while Till was killed before the civil rights movement had gained traction, Martin was executed almost 50 years after King gave his iconic I Have A Dream speech.