Justice?

Back in April I went to a conference in Rhode Island and one night, as I talked to my friend in her hotel room, we heard some noise outside and went to the window to look out in the street at the back of the hotel.

It was a very small, but very organized protest against the Trayvon Martin murder. Mostly African American young people wearing hoodies and screaming for justice (we opened the window to hear them better) at 9:30 pm on a city street that had no traffic at that hour.

I told my friend that I was glad to see the protest (though saddened by the murder), especially at how it was bringing young people together. Then we went down for a late dinner. I didn't think too much more about the case and I even had a pretty "sterotyped" reaction when I saw photos of the women in the jury -- I thought that they would for sure incriminate George Zimmermann.

This evening I had just opened facebook when I saw some disgruntled posts from my African-American friends here and there... "WHAT?!" from my dear (girl) friend, a resident MD in NYC. "F...!" from a blogger friend, and then... more detailed posts from another dear (guy) friend (also a resident MD) from Connecticut. So I headed to CNN and was pretty stunned at the verdict.

And then, ironically, I went and read Fang's great post from a few days ago -- "The Spectacle of Murder" (his discussion on how this murder was politicized is great, BTW).

I don't really know a lot about law, but my gut feeling right now tells me that in this particular case the defense did a really fantastic job putting "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the jury.

I liked what Katie Allison Granju also wrote on facebook: "Our laws should be constructed so as to PROTECT unarmed children walking thru their own neighborhoods from adults with guns, not the other way around." and she also wrote something like (I'm paraphrasing here), "if I were being followed in the dark I might also have punched someone on the nose" and she ends with (direct quote) "No one wins here. No one. The only winner is a badly constructed law that doesn't actually protect anyone from violence."

Also, have you seen/hear of the case Marissa Alexander, a Florida mother (who is African American) who was sentenced to 20 years for firing a gun -- NOT killing anyone! -- in what she alleged was self-defense against an abusive husband? The judge determined that she didn't fit into the same "stand your ground" law that motivated today's acquittal. Isn't that unbelievable?

This continue to be very complicated in this country concerning race, that's for sure!