Much will be said about the verdict, handed down July 14 in Seminole County, Fla., which acquitted George Zimmerman in the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin 17 months ago after the two were involved in a violent, late-night altercation. Most of what is said will be woefully misguided.
The jury made the right and just decision in finding Zimmerman not guilty.
The case should have never made it to trial. And were it not for overzealous prosecutors who succumbed to the court of public opinion which, 17 months ago, sharply turned against Zimmerman, it never would have.
The ill-considered attempt to hold Zimmerman — one man alone — legally culpable for an entity such as a law, namely the stand-your-ground law (a self-defense principle which allowed Zimmerman to walk free the night of the shooting), amounted to a grave injustice to the justice system and to the concept of law, and it was an attempt to pin responsibility for and accountability to the stand-your-ground law, and its perceived injustices, on a citizen to whom that law simply conferred protection.
Attributing the flaws of the law itself to a man whom the law protected, together with bringing legally-groundless moral outrage — which is based on the unfortunate reality that we are ignorant about what likely happened that night — into the courtroom produced dangerous “compromise verdicts” which only compromised the law’s bedrock principles: presumptions of innocence, reasonable-doubt standards and the identity of the party which bears the burden of proof. There cannot be not any compromising when it comes to justice.
There is a long-standing precedent that instructs the jury that when two narratives are presented in court — both of which could be equally reasonable or true — the jurors must always presume the reasonable claim of the defendant’s innocence is the true claim, and therefore must acquit the defendant. The ill-advised public has not heeded this important precedent, though the jury rightfully did.
What’s more, it is patently the job of the defense to produce a reasonably possible alternative, or hypothetical, to the prosecution’s narrative, not the job of the prosecution to engage in presenting ‘what-ifs.’ These roles in the Zimmerman trial seemed to be reversed. It was as though the burden of proof had been shifted onto Zimmerman’s defense team such that it had to prove his innocence rather than where it belongs — on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury rightfully rejected this role reversal.
Had the public’s perception of the shooting been adopted in deliberations by the jury, the jury would have improperly permitted itself to concede that, though the evidence was not nearly sufficient to support the charged-with second-degree murder, Zimmerman must be guilty of “some” serious crime — given that he did, after all, shoot a minor — and thus that Zimmerman must be convicted of “something.”
The jury would be led to feel OK with convicting Zimmerman of “anything,” even a lesser-included-offense which, likewise, the evidence did not sufficiently support, based merely on the seemingly morally repugnant yet clearly legally permissible notion that a minor can die while his shooter can walk free. The jury rightfully refused to harm the concept of law in this way.
A conception of the law that found Zimmerman guilty might serve to comfort us as to the perceived unfairness of the stand-your-ground law, which the jury found justified Martin’s being killed, but it could not possibly do right by the greater concept of law. Neither does it demonstrate any fidelity to and respect for the law.
While the collective sense of moral outrage at the jury’s not-guilty verdict would seem to suggest that our moral compasses are tuned steadfastly toward justice — how can a minor such as Martin be killed, we ask, yet his shooter, Zimmerman, not be punished — nothing could be a more perfunctory judgment of the case.
For were we to adopt this approach, we would merely orient our moral compasses toward reciprocity, penalty and retribution rather than the more important goal of justice, the justice system and the law: truth.