Saturday, April 21, 2012

George Zimmerman: guilty until proven innocent


Trayvon Martin
George Zimmeran

Americans like to boast that a person is innocent until proven guilty. But forget that when an American citizen abroad is a terrorist suspect. Then it’s okay to program a Predator drone to assassinate said suspect.

Here at home, the media has preemptively convicted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin, and one has to wonder how the justice system can come up with an unbiased jury in this case.

(Keep in mind that I’ve consistently supported stricter gun control laws, and I believe Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law guarantees an increase in violence in that state’s culture.)

In the meantime, Patrik Johnson, staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor, offers another  look at George Zimmerman:

George Zimmerman, charged with the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin, stood up for the downtrodden and wanted to become a magistrate judge to help society. How does this square with depictions of him as a racist vigilante?

The depictions of George Zimmerman that have emerged since he killed Trayvon Martin in the Retreat at Twin Lakes neighborhood in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26 have trended mostly around suspicions that he is a racist vigilante, a product of a “shoot first” mentality.
But as more information about Mr. Zimmerman’s past surfaces, a contrasting picture is emerging that  suggests his values may also align closely with those of social justice activists who have sought his arrest and prosecution for murder.

Suggestions by his parents that their son worked to protect society’s have-nots raise a question: Is Zimmerman, a registered Democrat of mixed ethnicity who views himself as a Hispanic, actually a different breed of citizen altogether: a social justice activist with a gun?

At a bond hearing Friday, Zimmerman’s Hispanic mother, Gladys Zimmerman, disagreed with prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda’s suggestion that a 2005 arrest for assaulting a police officer showed a violent streak in the married 28-year-old, who stands accused by the state of second degree murder

Instead, she said it fit his personality in another way: His zeal to intervene to protect a friend who was being pushed up against a wall by men who turned out to be two plain-clothes law enforcement officers. (A first time offender, Zimmerman escaped a conviction by agreeing to a judge’s request that he take an anger management course.)





1 comment:

  1. The comments by the five black men were very insightful.

    ReplyDelete