Charging George Zimmerman

“I will confirm that Mr. Zimmerman is indeed in custody,” Angela Corey, the special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case, said at a press conference on Wednesday night. She said that she had started the process of charging George Zimmerman with second-degree murder, and that before stepping up to the microphone she had spoken to “those sweet parents”—Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin—and told them what she was doing to get “justice for Trayvon.” The first time she met them, she said, they had prayed together, but she told them she couldn’t promise anything. This evening, she helped to deliver them some compensation for their tenacity and love in pursuing the case, if not—and this would have been impossible—for the loss of their son.

“Let me emphasize that we do not prosecute by public pressure or by petition,” or in the media, Corey said. And yet one has to wonder if Florida would have managed this without those factors. That advocacy worked is not a bad thing. Being a country of laws also means being a country where someone can stand in the middle of a public square, or post a petition, and ask one’s fellow citizens if the facts make sense—if it really looks like there has been justice under the law. In this case, it did not. The police in Sanford, Florida, hadn’t even managed to investigate the death of an unarmed seventeen year old, or to go and find his parents that night when they sent his body to the morgue as John Doe. Zimmerman told them that he acted in self-defense, and that Martin, walking in the rain, looked like someone who was where he shouldn’t be. Zimmerman walked away after the shooting, on February 26th, and kept walking for more than forty days and forty nights after that. Now, finally, he’s back.

Zimmerman apparently turned himself in, thus avoiding becoming a fugitive. One can be grateful for that, for his sake as much as anyone’s. The last thing this case needed was a contemporary version of the slow-motion car chase that transfixed the country in the O. J. Simpson case. (Over at Daily Comment, I have a post on the parallels—including false ones—between the Martin and Simpson cases.) A high-speed chase would have been even worse. Justice means seeing Zimmerman standing in court, not hurtling across the country, or getting injured, or truly lost. There’s been enough pain here and enough mourning.

After the press conference, Sybrina Fulton said that all she had ever asked for was a child. She thanked Jesus Christ, and everyone who had helped, and said that hearts weren’t black or white but red. She cried. (Benjamin Crump, the lawyer for Martin’s parents, said of his clients, “If they can continue to carry themselves in a dignified manner, we all should.”)

What now? Zimmerman deserves to have a thoroughly fair trial—one that is not a farce. Florida owes it to Trayvon to make sure, finally, that his death is treated with the respect and care that match the value of his life. Zimmerman now has a new lawyer, Mark O’Mara, which was inevitable after the very strange press conference yesterday during which his old lawyers quit the case. They said then that they didn’t have the foggiest idea where he was and maybe never did: “You can stop looking in Florida…. Look much further away than that.” At any rate, after Corey’s press conference, the rest of the country can now look at Florida with slightly less dismay than before.

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Amy Davidson