If George Zimmerman had obeyed the 9-1-1 operator's instructions, the whole sorry episode could have been avoided.
Although George Zimmerman got out of his car and ignored the 9-1-1 operator's instructions, those actions do not constitute criminal activity. He had a right to be where he was and to do what he was doing.
Trayvon Martin also had a right to be where he was and to do what he was doing.
If Trayvon Martin had walked to his father's fiancee's apartment, the whole sorry episode could have been avoided.
Trayvon Martin resented being followed by George Zimmerman. He called George Zimmerman a "creepy-ass cracker" while he was speaking on his cell phone.
George Zimmerman suspected that Trayvon Martin was associated with criminal activity. He resented that young black males avoided punishment for criminal activity in his neighborhood, generalizing that "these f-ing punks always get away." He was intent on following Trayvon Martin and preventing whatever crime might have been planned, regardless of the instructions he had received from the 9-1-1 operator.
George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin racially profiled each other and resented each other but Trayvon Martin used a racial slur to refer to George Zimmerman while George Zimmerman did not reciprocate.
Trayvon Martin decided to escalate the situation by ambushing George Zimmerman, knocking him to the ground, climbing on top of him, slamming his head into the sidewalk and pummeling him with his fists. The injuries inflicted were recorded by the Sanford, Florida, Police Department and were consistent with the physical assault that George Zimmerman reported.
While he was pinned to the ground and being beaten by Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman felt that his life was in jeopardy. He was aware of Florida's Stand Your Ground law (though he would later state otherwise) and he could not physically retreat, so he unholstered his pistol, which was registered and for which he had a concealed carry license, and fired one shot at Trayvon Martin at near-contact range, killing him. Although he had ignored the 9-1-1 operator's instructions not to follow Trayvon Martin, at no time did George Zimmerman surrender his right to defend himself.
George Zimmerman called 9-1-1 immediately after the shooting, waited for the police to arrive and cooperated fully with their investigation, which included five hours of interrogation during which he did not ask for a lawyer. Over the course of the next sixteen months, his version of events remained consistent.
At the time of the shooting, George Zimmerman had a police record, having been previously arrested for drug possession and assaulting a police officer. Since his arrests, he had attended community college where he excelled at law enforcement classes and learned about the Stand Your Ground law. He wanted to become a police officer himself and joined his neighborhood watch program because he was concerned about a series of recent burglaries and acts of vandalism.
At the time of the shooting, Trayvon Martin had been suspended from school for the third time that school year, his offenses including spray-painting graffiti on school property, possession of a burglary tool and suspected stolen property (women's jewelry) and possession of a plastic bag in which marijuana residue was found.
The Sanford Police Department's investigation concluded that George Zimmerman was justified in shooting Trayvon Martin and the Seminole County state prosecutor declined to press charges.
Six weeks after the shooting, Bill Lee, chief of the Sanford Police Department, was forced to resign and was replaced by Cecil Smith , who was black. Also, Florida Governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pamela Bondi forced state prosecutor Norm Wolfinger to recuse himself and replaced him with Angela Corey, a more politically-reliable prosecutor and an ally in the Florida Republican Party.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared with Al Sharpton at a rally in Sanford on 11 April 2012, promising Federal support for the state investigation and to investigate George Zimmerman independently. The Department of Justice also provided taxpayer funds to support anti-Zimmerman protests intended to pressure Florida to charge George Zimmerman with murder, yet after interviewing 36 witnesses, the FBI concluded that George Zimmerman had no history of racism and thus charging him with a Federal hate crime was not justified.
On 12 April 2012, George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. In a television interview, he denied knowing about Florida's Stand Your Ground law and later lied about the value of a legal defense fund he had accumulated, perhaps to prevent seizure of those funds and to ensure that he could defend himself adequately. His bail was subsequently revoked.
During the trial, Judge Debra Nelson denied a number of defense motions and overruled a number of defense objections, the effect of which was to help the prosecution. Ben Kruidbos, an information technology employee at the state prosecutor's office, was fired for leaking information to the press, information that indicated that the prosecution was withholding evidence from the defense. Judge Nelson also instructed the jury prior to deliberations that they could consider convicting George Zimmerman of manslaughter if they could not convict him of second-degree murder, although Zimmerman had not been charged with that crime, in an apparent attempt to facilitate Zimmerman's conviction of something. However, the jury acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges.
Since the verdict, George Zimmerman has gone into hiding because of threats to his life. (He did, however, help rescue a family that had been involved in a car accident two weeks after he was acquitted.) Riots and protests broke out across the country after the verdict, property was vandalized, stores were looted, people have been assaulted in Trayvon Martin's name. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, Priest-King himself and assorted other race baiters have poured gasoline on the fire. Stevie Wonder refuses to perform in Florida as long as the Stand Your Ground statute remains in effect, and the NAACP insists that George Zimmerman be charged with a Federal hate crime, but what really does all this mean?
a) The case against George Zimmerman should never have been brought. Unrelenting political pressure from weak-kneed Republicans in Florida and hardcore Leftists across the country overcame experience and professional judgment. Eric Holder and Priest-King focused Federal attention on what was simply a local police matter, Bill Lee and Norm Wolfinger were sacked to ensure that George
Zimmerman would be prosecuted regardless of the merits of the case, that the prosecution would focus on race and only race and The New York Times would invent a new term, "white Hispanic," to shoehorn Zimmerman into the liberal template of violent white-on-black racism.
b) The evidence and the verdict disproved the racism theme. For all the politically-driven machinations to portray George Zimmerman as a deranged racist white cop wannabe who stalked and murdered a helpless Trayvon Martin, the prosecution simply couldn't prove their case. They had no witnesses, no testimony, absolutely zero proof that George Zimmerman acted out of racial hatred, and neither do the Feds: Their own investigation came up empty.
c) Trayvon Martin wasn't the innocent, cherubic teenager that the prosecution, the Leftist media and the politicians portrayed him to be. He was a discipline problem at school who liked to smoke dope, burglarize people's homes, steal their property and beat people up. (Text messages and photos found on his cell phone that confirmed his violent, anti-social behavior were suppressed at trial, as were his school records.) He thought George Zimmerman was a "creepy-ass cracker" who had no business following him that night so he jumped Zimmerman and was beating him senseless when he was shot. As with the illegal immigration debate when the Left purposely omits the word "illegal" to frame the people in question as innocent working-class victims of a heartless society, the Left is purposely omitting proof of Trayvon Martin's true character to press their theme that he was killed because he was black, yet another hapless victim of white racist America, and it insults our intelligence. Maybe the hard truth is that Trayvon Martin didn't deserve to be followed but deserved to be shot.
d) For the Left, America is and will always be a black-hating racist country. Nothing can be done to expunge the sins of slavery and Jim Crow racism. Three hundred-sixty thousand Union dead in the Civil War fighting to end slavery, sixty-five years of legal and social breakthroughs including the first black President are wonderful facts but prove nothing. America's character is still unchanged, America still resembles 1925 Indiana, the Ku Klux Klan runs the country, flaunts its power, and lynches, shoots, burns and terrorizes blacks (and recalcitrant whites) into submission. The Supreme Court's recent nullification of that part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required states of the Old South to submit their election laws to the U.S. Attorney General for review and approval, recognizing that racial progress has indeed been made since the law's adoption, has caused an uproar among the Left because in their minds objective evidence can never be enough. America will always be guilty, will always be prejudiced, will always need strict policing and thus the law should never, ever be changed, and the Trayvon Martin verdict just fanned the flames. The evidence - Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white; Trayvon Martin had a history of criminal behavior in his neighborhood and discipline problems at his school; had marijuana in his system at the time of the shooting; had a history of violent behavior; used a racial slur to refer to George Zimmerman while Zimmerman had to be prompted by the 9-1-1 operator to describe Martin as black; Martin initiated the physical confrontation - is angrily dismissed by the Left because it conflicts with their template of a cross-burning lynch mob America.
e) Fifty years' worth of social programs have destroyed the black community in the United States. Although they represent only 13% of the general population, blacks account for 38% of all murders and 48% of all murder victims and blacks are far more likely to be murdered by other blacks than by any other racial group. Alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, poverty, bankruptcy, divorce, fatherless children, illiteracy, suicide, unemployment, every metric of human misery has skyrocketed under the well-meaning but destructive oversight of the Left and there is a seething outrage and frustration among the black community at their state: How did this happen to us? Who did this to us? But these are rhetorical questions. Intelligent African-Americans know very well that socialism has ruined them but to admit it would invalidate everything they believe in, so they march, they protest, they riot and they search for someone else to blame than the liberal politicians and race hucksters who promised them the moon, they condemn the verdict, they condemn George Zimmerman, they condemn Stand Your Ground laws, they want revenge. But what would they have preferred to Trayvon Martin's shooting? If George Zimmerman had been left beaten and bloody on the sidewalk, it would hardly have made the news, and if Trayvon Martin had killed George Zimmerman, it would have been reported as simply a neighborhood dispute gone bad and it would have been forgotten. After all, that sort of thing goes on all the time - people die violently by the hundreds in Chicago every year and the Feds don't descend on the city the way they did upon tiny Sanford, Florida. What made the Zimmerman case different was George Zimmerman broke the rules by retaliating when Trayvon Martin attacked him. George Zimmerman was supposed to have allowed himself to be beaten and if he had been in his own apartment when Trayvon Martin was burglarizing it, he would have been expected to run away rather than defend his person and his property. The status quo was upset, and if this is really the reason why people burned cars and smashed store windows and looted businesses, then my friends, we need to change the status quo.
When people can't find jobs to support themselves, they turn to crime. When people think they're not responsible for themselves, they father and abandon their children. When they have no hope, they turn to drugs or the bottle. Socialism destroys the very people it claims to help. Jobs are replaced by subsidies, responsibility is replaced by bureaucracy, hope is replaced with dependence and an entire culture takes root. The fatal confrontation between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin absolutely could have been avoided but it wasn't, in large part because Trayvon Martin (despite a history contradicting it) thought that he was exempt from suspicion and once suspected, that physical violence was acceptable. His culture accepted that behavior, a culture anathema to a healthy, functioning society, and it has to be changed. Priest-King and his cluster of confederates earnestly believe, in the face of piles of empirical evidence that proves otherwise, that socialism will turn America into a paradise if only we abandon the traditional values of self-reliance, responsibility, hard work and free enterprise. Socialism has begotten the culture in which Trayvon Martin was raised and if we are to prevent other teenagers from suffering the same fate, we have to dig up the root of the problem, so let's mourn Trayvon Martin, learn from this sad episode and grab a shovel.That would be a proper legacy.
