The Zimmerman jury's not-guilty
verdict was seen by many within America's black communities as a heartbreaking
decision not just bereft of compassion for the victim, but also as an
indication that no exercise in basic common sense was part of that jury's
deliberation process. The lack of a violent
response to the decision came as no surprise to me. People's shock and sadness seemed to
override anger -- at least initially. I
thought about how Trayvon's parents probably felt. It must have been as if they were literally
experiencing the lyrics of an old song by Syl Johnson, "Is It Because I'm Black" in which Johnson plaintively sings:
"The dark brown shades of my skin, only add
color to my tears. That splash against my hollow bones, and rocks my soul."
The feeling here is that this
verdict merely helps corroborate the scant value American society holds for the
lives of its black youth. It supports
the belief by some about a post-antebellum-era notion regarding the position of
blacks in American society: that we hold
claim to "no rights which the white man (is) bound to respect."
Why? Because if you strip away all the opaque legalese
about self-defense, the subjective vagueness involved in discerning ill-minded
intentions, the ambiguity related to degrees of culpability and the mind-numbing
legal minutia that entails jury instructions, you're likely to find -- as I did
-- no common-sense justification for a civilized society permitting an
individual to initiate an event that involved pursuing, engaging, and finally
killing an innocent unarmed child without society calling upon that individual
bear some form of personal
responsibility.
But that's essentially what our
legal system seems established to do: create just enough space to enable a
system of justice to be perverted into an unjust system. The legal profession, like the field of
psychology, is a layperson's nightmare of seemingly pointless yet deliberate complexity
in its attempt at establishing the means toward an end that is supposed to
result in due process. Yet, also culled from it are many official avenues that
easily lead society's culprits not toward legal culpability but instead toward a
successful circumvention of personal responsibility. Think
not? Ask Casey Anthony's lawyers. Or, O.J. Simpson's. Or, Robert Blake's. Or Lindsay Lohan's. Ask any police officer who hauls a
streetwalker into central booking only to find her back on the stroll within 24
hours of her arrest.
If you were to ask a
psychologist, for example, why little Johnny lights fires all the time, the
shrink is likely to unleash a stream of clinical-sounding Freudian gobbledygook
that will get your head spinning but won't get you any closer to the answer you
seek. Perhaps Johnny is -- as you are
likely to hear -- a compulsive fire-starter, something that's not all that rare
among pre- and early-teen boys. But then again, maybe it's simply because
little Johnny is unendingly bored, has a little too much free time, and way too
much free access to matches and other incendiary devices.
The point here is that sometimes
"keep it simple, stupid" is the best road to take because it's a penchant for
over-analysis that can cause things to take a wrong turn. Why did John Dillinger rob banks, for example? Perhaps little Johnny's shrink will work up a
clinical diagnosis of kleptomania in dismissal of Dillinger's stated reason:
"because that's where the money is."
Yet, in the Zimmerman case,
like many similar cases of claimed self-defense, the legal system also demands
that jurors become both legal scholars and quasi-psychologists with its
requirement that they essentially ignore the most damning aspect of Zimmerman's
culpability -- that he initiated the
deadly event. Instead, they were asked
to psycho-scrutinize Zimmerman's inner thoughts that fateful night for legal evidence
of "malicious intent." Was Zimmerman a
mean-spirited racist on the prowl or were the events that transpired -- as Zimmerman
has publically
stated -- part of "God's plan" for the neighborhood watch captain
to specifically track down and kill Trayvon Martin? One can only speculate whether Zimmerman's reading
of the Ten Commandments was as off-base as how he read Martin's actions. But in case a reminder is necessary, the
Commandment pertinent to Zimmerman's claim reads: "Thou
Shalt NOT Kill."
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