I'm going to postpone the Leno/Conan stuff a day because I feel like writing about the Trayvon Martin case here. Like more of you than will admit it, I don't know exactly what happened that night. George Zimmerman does seem to have gone after Martin based on some sort of personal assumption that a black guy walking in a high-crime neighborhood was suspicous just because he was a black guy. For all the attempts by some to portray Martin as a bad person, he seems to have been utterly innocent of anything but being the kind of person who'd arouse Zimmerman's suspicions…and then there was a confrontation in which Zimmerman claims he was forced to shoot in self-defense. His story sounds fishy to me but we don't convict people in this country because their stories sound fishy.
Guilty people do get off because there just plain isn't enough hard evidence. Reporters and pundits who've been following the trial closer than I have mostly seem to think that's what's going to happen here. Maybe so…though I can't help but note that the results of other recent trials have surprised the commentators. The judge is now allowing the jury to consider Manslaughter as a possible verdict and that may be of value if the six jurors are on the fence. Perhaps one of those civil "wrongful death" suits will follow, regardless.
Here's kind of what's on my mind here…
Back when this incident happened, an acquaintance of mine — notice the absence of the noun, "friend" — told me he prayed Zimmerman would be acquitted. The acquaintance, who is white, didn't really know the details of the case but he lived with a constant fear of violence from minorities — an excessive one, I thought. He admitted to me that he identified with Zimmerman. He was naturally suspicious of non-Caucasians. When I pointed out that even Zimmerman admitted that when he started following Martin, Martin had not done one thing to warrant suspicion, the acquaintance said, "He didn't have to. He was black." And out of his mouth then tumbled all sorts of dubious stats about how a random black guy is X% more likely than a random white guy to be guilty of something. That, to this guy, was good and sufficient cause to treat Martin as a suspect.
The acquaintance then noted, "If a suspect is stopped by the police and he doesn't cooperate, he could be hurt or killed." I pointed out George Zimmerman was not a policeman. Just because a guy acts like a cop doesn't mean we have to treat him like one. The acquaintance said, "If he has a gun, you'd damn well better treat him like one." You can imagine where the discussion went from there.
We (of course) didn't resolve anything but it bothered me that the reason this fellow wanted to see Zimmerman walk is because, you know, if he treated a black guy as a criminal, his heart and mind were in the right place. That he was confronting an innocent black guy was irrelevant. The acquaintance's attitude was that we need to reward people who do that kind of thing, not scare them into not stopping other black guys. He thinks we need more George Zimmermans out there.
If Zimmerman walks and he walks because there isn't enough evidence to prove he broke the law, okay. That's how the system sometimes works and I would hope people would see that as the reason he went free. What I would really hope is that most folks wouldn't interpret it the way that acquaintance of mine will. Frankly, I see more to be scared of from the George Zimmermans than from the Trayvon Martins.