By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
There are no winners in the trial of George Zimmerman.
The only question is whether the damage that has been done has been transient
or irreparable.
Legally speaking, Zimmerman has won his freedom. But he
can still be sued in a civil case, and he will probably never be safe to live
his life in peace, as he could have before this case made him the focus of
national attention and orchestrated hate.
More important than the fate of George Zimmerman,
however, is the fate of the American justice system and of the public's faith
in that system and their country. People who have increasingly asked, during
the lawlessness of the Obama administration, "Is this still America?"
may feel some measure of relief.
But the very fact that this case was brought in the first
place, in an absence of serious evidence -- which became painfully more obvious
as the prosecution strained to try to come up with anything worthy of a murder
trial -- will be of limited encouragement as to how long this will remain
America.
The political perversion of the criminal justice system
began early and at the top, with the President of the United States. Unlike
other public officials who decline to comment on criminal cases that have not
yet been tried in court, Barack Obama chose to say, "If I had a son, he'd
look like Trayvon."
It was a clever way to play the race card, as he had done
before, when Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard was arrested.
But it did not stop there. After the local police in
Florida found insufficient evidence to ask for Zimmerman to be prosecuted, the
Obama administration sent Justice Department investigators to Sanford, Florida,
and also used the taxpayers' money to finance local activists who agitated for
Zimmerman to be arrested.
Political intervention did not end with the federal
government. The city manager in Sanford intervened to prevent the usual police
procedures from being followed.
When the question arose of identifying the voice of
whoever was calling for help during the confrontation between Trayvon Martin
and George Zimmerman, the normal police procedure would have been to let
individuals hear the recording separately, rather than have a whole family hear
it together.
If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you
don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less
allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.
When the city manager took this out of the hands of the
police, and had Trayvon Martin's family, plus Rachel Jeantel, all hear the
recording together, that's politics, not law.
This was just one of the ways that this case looked like
something out of "Alice in Wonderland." Both in the courtroom and in
the media, educated and apparently intelligent people repeatedly said things
that they seemed sincerely, and even fervently, to believe, but which were
unprovable and often even unknowable.
In addition, the testimonies of the prosecution's witness
after witness undermined its own case. Some critics faulted the attorneys. But
the prosecutors had to work with what they had, and they had no hard evidence
that would back up a murder charge or even a manslaughter charge.
You don't send people to prison on the basis of what
other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like "shooting
an unarmed child," when that "child" was beating him bloody.
The jury indicated, early on as their deliberations
began, that they wanted to compare hard evidence, when they asked for a
complete list of the testimony on both sides.
Once the issue boiled down to hard, provable facts, the
prosecutors' loud histrionic assertions and sweeping innuendos were just not
going to cut it.
Nor was repeatedly calling Zimmerman a liar effective,
especially when the prosecution misquoted what Zimmerman said, as an
examination of the record would show.
The only real heroes in this trial were the jurors. They
showed that this is still America -- at least for now -- despite politicians
who try to cheapen or corrupt the law, as if this were some banana republic.
Some are already calling for a federal indictment of George Zimmerman, after he
has been acquitted.
Will this still be America then?
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