Here is an excerpt from “George Zimmerman: Not Guilty, but Hardly Innocent,” July 15, 2013, which I wrote after a Florida jury acquitted him of killing Trayvon Martin.
____________________
While most Blacks (being led by the NAACP no less) are now calling for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to file criminal civil rights charges against Zimmerman, I am calling on the DOJ to stay out this case. Not least because, as I indicated in my original commentary, “The Vigilante Killing of Black Teenager Trayvon Martin,” March 12, 2012, a successful civil rights action could be sustained based solely on public outrage/pressure, not legal reasoning.
I fully appreciate that this was the recourse Black supporters of Rodney King were forced to take to get justice for him. But, as systematic attempts by Whites to suppress the votes of Blacks in last year’s presidential and congressional elections attest, the NAACP and DOJ have far more consequential civil rights battles to fight.
I stand with those who want to make the killing of innocent Black kids the civil rights cause of our times. But Zimmerman has nothing on Black men who kill Black kids every day in even more depraved and indifferent ways. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a single civil rights leader who has demanded the DOJ file civil rights charges to render justice in those cases.
I say let Zimmerman’s fate take its course. For I suspect that, just like O.J., he will eventually get what’s coming to him. The last time I checked O.J. was rotting away in prison on a 33-year sentence stemming from a completely unrelated crime – for which he was probably (legally and factually) innocent. How’s that for poetic justice….
____________________
I am loath to dignify Zimmerman by commenting on the living purgatory his life has been since his sensational trial and stunning acquittal. Except that, given the above, I feel obliged to share this:
The Justice Department said Tuesday its independent investigation found ‘insufficient evidence’ to charge George Zimmerman with federal civil rights violations in the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the evidence did not meet the ‘high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution,’ but the decision should not end efforts to explore racial tensions in the justice system.
(USA Today, February 24, 2015)
Granted, those who took to the streets to avenge Trayvon’s death will not see this DOJ decision as justice served. What’s more, I am all too mindful that they are the same protesters/rioters who took to the streets to avenge the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
But this Zimmerman decision should temper their equally restive demands for the DOJ to file charges against White officers Wilson and Pantaleo – who killed Brown and Garner, respectively. After all, even a civil rights agitator like Rev. Al Sharpton must concede that, if facts in the Zimmerman case ‘did not meet the high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution,’ facts in these two other cases don’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of meeting it.
AG Holder made quite a public show of going to Ferguson. But this only raised unreasonable expectations among Brown’s avenging supporters. Because Holder knew, or should have known, that his DOJ investigation would not lead to federal charges in any of these cases. So, if you’re wondering why he went there, I have two political, not legal, words for you: racial pandering: racial pandering….
Mind you, for the Black lawyers and civil rights leaders involved, justice in these cases comes with their cut of millions from inevitable civil settlements. And that’s not me just being my cynical self:
Al Sharpton is all about the Benjamins, a daughter of police chokehold victim Eric Garner claims in a bombshell videotape.
(New York Post, February 24, 2015)
In any event, it was awfully shrewd of the DOJ to announce this decision in the dead of winter. After all, common sense might not cool off misguided passions, which could compel folks to take to the streets again, but Mother Nature surely will. Not to mention that their rallying cries of “no justice, no peace” will now ring hollow – given that justice in this case was dispensed by a DOJ headed by a Black man, for a government headed by another … brother.
Related commentaries:
Zimmerman…
Garner, Brown cases…