Black man shoots and kills white 'child' and is acquitted. The Zimmerman case with colors reversed. Here is how the piece ends:
This is what’s wrong with the culture of New York State. Our state values victims over victors. It enshrines passivity over direct action to preempt or thwart criminal activity. It excuses the acts of teenaged thugs, revising history to absolve them of blame for their petty crimes, while pillorying good citizens who dare to defend themselves with legally permitted arms.
In a state with the strictest gun control in the union, to own a legal handgun is no small thing. Roderick Scott is a decent person who did everything legally and correctly… yet in the minds of many, he is the villain simply because he dared not to do nothing. Had this shooting occurred in another state with less liberal hand-wringing underlying its legal code, it’s possible Roderick Scott would never have stood trial. It is, quite frankly, a miracle that the jury — deadlocked just a few hours before it came to the “not guilty” verdict — eventually granted Scott his life back.
Fortunately, Roderick Scott is not bitter. “I feel that justice was served today,” he said after his legal ordeal.
His lawyer was diplomatic but more pointed: “I just want to say that I hope this case sends a message to families out there to watch their kids, to know where they are and what they are doing.”
That lawyer’s message is clear: If your kids live like garbage, trade in garbage, and contribute nothing to their community but garbage, they very well may die like garbage. If that happens they have no one to blame but themselves… though their parents ought to think good and hard about whether they share responsibility.
Exactly right. Live like a punk, die like a punk. Equal justice for all, no matter what the race or ethnicity. No excuses for blacks.
. . . Trayvon Martin would not have been shot. On the other hand, had he been unarmed, it is highly likely that Zimmerman would be either dead or permanently injured.
So much for the fallacious 'disproportionality argument.'
If you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response. If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.
Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family. Weakness does not justify.
The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas. The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.' Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.
Nowhere in the article or in the video is it mentioned that the rioters are black. You can see that they are from the video.
The liberal media falsely portrayed the Hispanic, George Zimmerman, as white in order to fit him into their 'America is racist' script; but they refuse to report the truth when blacks rampage.
No surprise: the truth would not fit the liberal-left 'narrative.'
'Narrative' is one of theose POMO words that a conservative should be careful about using. As I have said more than once, only the foolish conservative talks like a liberal.
Here is yet another example of leftist lunacy from the editors of The Nation:
The real problem is not that jurors were willing to accord Zimmerman the presumption of innocence—a bedrock of our justice system. It is that Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was never accorded the same presumption—and that so many defendants who look like him are denied this right every day.
This is just breathtakingly idiotic. First of all, it is not up to the jurors to will or not to will to accord the accused the presumption of innocence. It is required that they do so. It is one of the constitutive rules of our legal system that in a criminal proceeding such as a murder trial the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Being a constitutive rule, the presumption of innocence is not something jurors have any say about.
Second, it is the accused who is presumed innocent until proven guilty, not the victim. For it is the accused who is on trial. Zimmerman was on trial, and he was accorded the (defeasible) presumption of innocence, a presumption that was not defeated. Hence he was exonerated. Martin was not on trial, hence presumption of innocence did not come into play in his case.
Third, Martin was not the defendant in the case; Zimmerman was the defendant.
Fourth, Martin's being an unarmed teenager is irrelevant to the question whether Zimmerman acted lawfully in shooting Martin. The aptronymically appellated Charles Blow opined in a similarly moronic manner when he mentioned the 'disproportionality' of armament as between Martin and Zimmerman. Again, utterly irrelevant.
So there's the Left for you: willful stupidity, verbal obfuscation, lies, agitprop.
Addendum: Chad McIntosh, upon reading the above Nation quotation, subsumed it under what he calls the Madman Fallacy.
Robert Paul Wolff here vents "a rage that can find no appropriate expression" over "The judicially sanctioned murder of Trayvon Martin . . . ."
"Meanwhile, Zimmerman's gun will be returned to him. He would have suffered more severe punishment if he had run over a white person's dog."
What fascinates me is the depth of the disagreement between a leftist like Wolff and a conservative like me. A judicially sanctioned murder? Not at all. A clear case of self-defense, having nothing objectively to do with race, as I have made clear in earlier posts. And please note that "Stand Your Ground" was no part of the defense. The defense was a standard 'self defense' defense. Anyone who is not a leftist loon or a black race-hustler and who knows the facts and the law and followed the trial can see that George Zimmerman was justly acquitted.
Wolff ought to be proud of a judicial system that permits a fair trial in these politically correct times. But instead he is in a rage. What would be outrageous would have been a 'guilty' verdict.
Was the blogger at Philosopher's Stone a stoned philosopher when he wrote the above nonsense? I am afraid not. And that is what is deeply disturbing and yet fascinating. What explains such insanity in a man who can write books as good as The Autonomy of Reason and In Defense of Anarchism?
Does the good professor have a problem with Zimmerman's gun being returned to him after he has been cleared of all charges? Apparently. But why? It's his property. But then Wolff is a Marxist . . . .
It is sad to see how many fine minds have been destroyed by the drug of leftism.
Piers Morgan and many others think that someone ought to 'pay' for Trayvon Martin's unfortunate death, and that that person ought to be George Zimmerman. Morgan demands justice for Trayvon and thinks that this can be achieved only be convicting Zimmerman of some crime. But what murk and muddle in Morgan's mind makes him think this?
I conjecture that he is failing to distinguish among three senses of 'responsibility,' the causal, the legal, and the moral.
There is no doubt that Zimmerman caused, and is therefore causally responsible for, Martin's death. There was no 'whodunit' aspect to the trial. It is clear 'whodunit.' But it doesn't follow that the Hispanic is either legally or morally responsible for the black youth's death. As we saw from the trial, Zimmerman was acquitted. There simply was not the evidence to convict him of murder two or manslaughter. To say it one more time: the probative standard is set very high in criminal cases: the accused must be shown to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Zimmerman was found to be not legally responsible and so not subject to any legal sanctions.
What's more, the judgment was correct. To be found not guilty is not the same as to be not guilty –remember the O. J. Simpson case — but in the Zimmerman case he was not only found not guilty, but in reality is not guilty, as any objective observer should be able to see.
But suppose you disagree with the last thing I said, namely, that Zimmerman is not guilty of the crimes with which he was charged. Still, that doesn't matter for practical purposes. The jury has spoken and we all must accept the result, just as we must in the Simpson case.
The result, again, is that Zimmerman is not legally responsible for Martin's death. I conjecture that Morgan cannot grasp this because he fails to distinguish causal from legal responsibility.
Does Zimmerman bear any moral responsibility for Martin's death? Some will say that he does and some that he doesn't. But it doesn't matter for practical purposes. All that matters is that Zimmerman was acquitted in a fair trial.
It is worth saying again that the purpose of a criminal trial is not to secure justice for the victim. If that were the purpose, every such trial would have to end in a 'guilty' verdict. The sole purpose of a criminal trial is to secure justice for the accused. Nobody can be made to 'pay' for Martin's death since the only person who could is not guilty of any wrongdoing. Zimmerman was merely defending himself against a deadly attack. If anyone is to blame for Martin's death, it is Martin himself for attacking Zimmerman.
In case you missed it last night, here is Larry Elder attempting to pound some sense into the the benighted Piers Morgan.
So, what exactly do Stand Your Ground laws have to do with Zimmerman and Martin? Absolutely nothing, of course. Outside your own home, common principles of self-defense dictate that unless you have reasonable fear of deadly force or harm, you must flee if possible rather than use deadly force. But a “duty to retreat” rests on the ability to retreat. And “duty to retreat” was irrelevant in Zimmerman’s case because — pinned to the ground with Martin on top of him, bashing his head on the concrete — he was unable to retreat.
This is good. By Peter Machera, former professor of English at New Mexico State University. The 'former' comports well with the intelligence and honesty of the piece which ends thusly:
It’s almost startling to see individuals on television who are intelligent, articulate and fight for a worthy cause. We have plenty of smart people deceiving the public, but not much of the sort who actually speak truth to power, and this is what the O’Mara-West defense team represents, considering the power structures they were up against.
In the end, the jury made the only sensible decision. However, speaking on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Al Sharpton reminds us ominously that the advocates for Trayvon have not “exhausted their legal options.” One can just hope that Mr. O'Mara and Mr. West will continue to play the virtuous lawyers against the cynical — and significant — political forces that oppose them.
Here is what I said about O'Mara a few days ago:
The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses. Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara. He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free. A patient, relentless, digger for the truth. Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.
Professor Campos is a very intelligent man, and morally decent to boot, an inference I draw from having read most of the posts on his now-defunct Inside the Law School Scam. I'll leave it to you to speculate about how such a person could write his Salon dreck column.
The significance of the Zimmerman trial is that it is emblematic of the deep and ever-deepening racial divide in this country despite the successes of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s and the increasing participation of blacks in all institutions of our society, a participation culminating in the election of a black president in 2008 and his re-election in 2012. Deeper than the racial divide, however, is the left-right divide with the latter fueling the former. I call it 'planetary' because it is as if conservatives and leftists have no common ground and inhabit different planets.
Let's look at two examples.
On Sunday morning, in a short post entitled Justice Denied, Robert Paul Wolff writes, "I awoke this morning to learn that the Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman. Is there anyone on the face of the earth who believes that, had the race of Zimmerman and Martin been reversed, the verdict would have been the same?"
Despite the foolishness of what he posted on Sunday morning, Professor Wolff is not some two-bit cyberpunk with a blog. I used to have a high opinion of him, on the basis of two books of his I read. One of them is The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Harper & Row, 1973). The flyleaf of my copy bears the annotation, "I first read this book in the fall of 1980. It is an excellent study!" I was teaching a graduate seminar on Kant and found Wolff's book extremely useful. The other book I have read is his In Defense of Anarchism which I also found impressive. In November of 2009 I wrote three long entries about the anarchism book. They can be found in my Anarchism category.
Now in what sense was justice denied? The state's case against Zimmerman was so weak as to be nonexistent. So justice was served by his acquittal. Had Zimmerman been found guilty of second-degree murder, that would have been the height of injustice. That ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone who followed the trial. So justice was not denied to Zimmerman. He was justly treated.
If Wolff means anything, he means that justice was denied to Trayvon Martin. But if that is what he means, then he doesn't understand the purpose of a criminal trial. The purpose of a criminal proceeding is not to secure justice for the victim. If that were the purpose, then every defendant would have to be found guilty. For in every acquittal there is no justice for the victim, or victims as in the O. J. Simpson case.
A criminal trial can issue in the correct result whether or not justice is achieved for the victim. If the correct result is an acquittal, then of course there is no justice for the victim in that trial. But if the correct result is a conviction, then there is, per accidens, justice for the victim in that trial. The main point, however, is that a criminal trial is not about seeking justice for the victim, but about making sure that the accused is not wrongly convicted.
The glory of our system of justice is the (defeasible) presumption of innocence: the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. This presumption of innocence puts the burden of proof in a criminal trial where it belongs, on the state. The prosecution must prove that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; the defense is under no obligation to prove that the defendant is innocent. In a criminal proceeding all the defense has to do is raise a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the accused.
It is of course deeply unfortunate that Trayvon Martin died young of a gunshot wound. But he brought about that result himself by recklessly attacking a man who then, naturally, defended himself against Martin's deadly attack using deadly force. Zimmerman did nothing legally impermissible.
I wonder if Wolff thinks that Martin would have received justice if Zimmerman had been wrongly convicted. I hope not. Again, the crucial point here is that the purpose of a murder trial is not to secure justice for the victim, but to see if the accused is first of all a killer, and then whether he is a murderer. There is no doubt that Zimmerman killed Martin. The question is whether or not the killing was legally justifiable. And indeed it was found to be legally justifiable.
If Zimmerman had been black and Martin Hispanic would the verdict have been the same? Yes. Why not? O. J. Simpson is black and the two people he slaughtered (Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson) were white, and yet O. J. was acquitted.
My second example is Roger L. Simon. He thinks, as I do, that Zimmerman should never have been charged. But he goes a step further when he writes:
Congratulations to the jury for not acceding to this tremendous pressure and delivering the only conceivable honest verdict. This case should never have been brought to trial. It was, quite literally, the first American Stalinist “show trial.” There was, virtually, no evidence to convict George Zimmerman. It was a great day for justice that this travesty was finally brought to a halt.
We all know Al Sharpton, the execrable race baiter of Tawana Brawley and Crown Heights, agitated publicly for this trial more than anyone else. But he most likely would not have succeeded had it not been for Obama’s tacit support. As far as I know this is unprecedented in our history (a president involving himself in a trial of this nature).
Looks like we have a nice little 'conversation' about race going here. Too bad the conversants live on different planets.
I know you've been following this case. I must say I'm impressed by the outcome. Even though I believed that Z's account of the events was consistent and that the prosecution's case was incredibly weak, I was expecting the all-female jury to cave in to the pressure and declare him guilty or, at least, to come back with a lesser charge.
MavPhil: That's what I was expecting: a cave-in by the female jurors and a manslaughter conviction. So I was extremely pleased that justice was done. The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses. Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara. He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free. A patient, relentless, digger for the truth. Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.
Zimmerman should not have been charged in the first place, and initially he wasn't. It was only after the race-baiters got wind of the story that local law enforcement buckled under national pressure. Among the race-baiters was our very own hopelessly inept president, Barack Obama, with his irresponsible remark to the effect that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. Here again we have Obama meddling in a local matter just as he did before about four summers ago in the Henry Gates affair.
So was the trial about race or not?
Objectively, the case had nothing to do with race. Objectively, the case was about the use of deadly force to repel an attack of deadly force. A very fit young man physically assaults an obese, out-of-shape older man. The older guy ends up on the ground with the younger guy on top of him doing the 'pound and ground,' slamming the older man's head into the pavement and telling him that tonight he will die. Now is it legally permissible to use deadly force in a situation like this, a situation in which one is about to be killed or suffer grave bodily harm? Yes, the law allows the use of deadly force in such a situation. Note that we are not talking about morality here, but about legality. Whatever one's moral intuitions or moral theories, there is a hard fact about what the law permits, and that is not in dispute. The only question is whether on that particular evening George Zimmerman was indeed fighting for his life.
The defense team made a very strong case that he was on the bottom fighting for his life against the strapping youth who thought of him as a "creepy-ass cracker." The defense didn't have to make that strong case; all it had to do was show that the above was a likely scenario in order to raise a reasonable doubt about Zimmerman's guilt. In a criminal proceeding the probative standard is set very high, and rightly so. The accused is presumed innocent and the burden of proof rests on the prosecution to show that the accused is guilty of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt. But the defense succeeded in doing both: it showed that Zimmerman was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and, as O'Mara remarked after the trial, it proved that he was innocent.
So, objectively, the case had nothing to do with race. The racial veneer was superadded by the race-baiters of the Left so that they could use this trial to further their own political agenda. Among the race-baiters are the editors at the New York Times who decided that Zimmerman was a 'white Hispanic.' They would never refer to Obama as a white black even though he is half-white and half-black. They applied the 'white Hispanic' appellation in order to inject race into a non-racial case. If both parties to the dispute were black or both Hispanic we wouldn't have heard about it. Meanwhile, blacks are killing blacks in record numbers in Chicago and other places.
The Left is raging at the moment. They say young blacks aren't safe anymore. But, were they before this single incident? I haven't heard a single word about the dozens of young blacks who are murdered by other blacks every year. All I hear is a lot of moralizing about poverty, racism and gun legislation from upper-middle class people who live in 95% white communities and have never seen a gun in their lives.
I think it's something else. Maybe it's the realization that they're not so powerful. That their enormous govt.-approved media campaign to portray this as a racially motivated murder of a kid was not enough convince a jury of six women (which, by the way, included a black hispanic lady). That they could not only notice the absence of racist armed vigilantes on the hunt and young harmless children walking home, but also act accordingly. Maybe it's too much for them, even after six years of getting everything they wanted.
MavPhil: I basically agree with you. Let the leftist loons rage. It is music to my ears and blog-fodder for my blog. We conservatives are going to have a lot of fun exposing their contemptible lies and inanities.
This is an entry from the old blog, first posted 28 December 2005. It makes an important point worth repeating, especially in light of such recent scandals as the harassing by the Internal Revenue Service of individuals and groups whole political views differ from those of the current administration.
…………..
In an age of terrorism, enhanced security measures are reasonable (see Liberty and Security). But in response to increased government surveillance and the civil-libertarian objections thereto, far too many people are repeating the stock phrase, "I have nothing to hide."
What they mean is that, since they are innocent of any crime, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and so there cannot be any reasonable objection to removing standard protections. But these people are making a false assumption. They are assuming that the agents of the state will always behave properly, an assumption that is spectacularly false.
Most of the state's agents will behave properly most of the time, but there are plenty of rogue agents who will abuse their authority for all sorts of reasons. The O'Reilly Factor has been following a case in which an elderly black gentleman sauntering down a street in New Orlean's French Quarter was set upon by cops who proceeded to use his head as a punching bag. The video clip showed the poor guy's head bouncing off a brick wall from the blows. It looked as if the thuggish cops had found an opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being under cover of law, and were taking it. And that is just one minor incident.
We conservatives are law-and-order types. One of the reasons we loathe contemporary liberals is because of their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. (We loathe them qua liberals: the cynosure of our disapprobation is the sin, not the sinner.) But our support for law and order is tempered by a healthy skepticism about the state and its agents. This is one of the reasons why we advocate limited government and Second Amendment rights.
As conservatives know, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have no illusions about human nature such as are cherished by liberals in their Rousseauean innocence. Give a man a badge and a gun and the power will go to his head. And mutatis mutandis for anyone with any kind of authority over anyone. This is the main reason why checks on government power are essential.
The trick is to avoid the absurdities of the ACLU-extremists while also avoiding the extremism of the "I have nothing to hide" types who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of secure pottage.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Seven Saudi men convicted of theft, looting and armed robbery were executed on Wednesday, according to the country's official news agency, more than a week after their families and a rights group appealed to the king for clemency.
The executions took place in Abha, a city in the southern region of Asir, the Saudi Press Agency said. A resident who witnessed the execution said the seven were shot dead by a firing squad, a first in the kingdom, which traditionally has beheaded convicts sentenced to death.
[. . .]
The original sentences called for death by firing squad and crucifixion.
That's the one extreme, justice Sharia-style. Here is the other, justice liberal-style, if you want to call it 'justice':
Amnesty International called the executions an "act of sheer brutality."
"We are outraged by the execution of seven men in Saudi Arabia this morning. We oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, but this case has been particularly shocking," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director. (emphasis added)
I say that what we have here are equal but opposite forms of moral insanity. That Sharia is morally insane needs no argument. But anyone who opposes the death penalty in all circumstances is equally morally obtuse and has no conception of justice at all. I argue this in detail in my Crime and Punishment category and I won't repeat myself here. In any case, argument with the morally obtuse is pointless since their lack of sound moral sense prevents them from accepting the premises from which alone one can fruitfully argue.
Arguing with the morally obtuse about moral matters is like arguing with the empirically uninformed about empirical matters
Many liberals feel that civilian gun ownership is unnecessary because adequate protection against the criminal element is afforded by the police. I advise them to think through the following considerations:
Misinformed people oppose self-defense objections to gun ban laws, urging victims to instead rely on police. This misunderstands what policing is and does. Accordingly, when criminals rob or injure them, misinformed victims try to sue the police for not protecting them. Whereupon the police send forth lawyers invoking the universal US rule that the police duty is to discourage crime only indirectly by patrolling the streets and by apprehending criminals after their crimes.
While police should stop crimes they observe, criminals take care to strike when police are not present. In fact, police almost never (less than 3 percent of cases) arrive in time to help victims. For that reason, the statutory or common law of every state exonerates police from suit for non-protection, e.g. California Government Code §§ 821, 845 and 846: “[A police department and its officers are] not liable for an injury caused by … failure to enforce an enactment [nor for] failure to provide police protection service or … provide sufficient police protection service [nor for] the failure to make an arrest or [the] failure to retain an arrested person in custody.”
Misinformed persons also urge victims to depend on restraining orders instead of self-defense. But restraining orders are just pieces of paper. A five-year study [PDF] in Massachusetts found that almost 25 percent of domestic murderers were under a restraining order when they killed.
