At Louie’s Bar in midtown Miami, about three and a half hours south of the Sanford, Florida courtroom, the verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial caused very little storm. As MIA’s Paper Planes, with its simulated rhythmic gunfire, played over the bar’s sound system, CNN, on silent with subtitles, strove in vain to whip the patrons into a frenzy of something. Outrage, perhaps. Or sadness. Or maybe: excitement. Network news is entertainment, after all. It’s a dog-and-pony show.
There have been protests in Sanford, outside the White House in Washington DC, and in Los Angeles, all calling for “justice for Trayvon”, the black teenager shot and killed by Zimmerman last February. The Rev Al Sharpton is coordinating around 100 “Justice for Trayvon” marches for this Saturday.
But they all have the wrong word. What they want is something more than mere justice. People want revenge, restitution, closure, and not just for Trayvon, but for the thousands of black kids and young adults killed every year – in 2010 black people constituted 55 per cent of the victims of firearm homicide, according to a recent paper by the PEW Research Center, despite being just 13 percent of the population.
His parents want their son back. They did not get him back this week, and the man who shot him walked free. It is impossible to imagine how that felt for them. But justice, court justice, isn’t the opposite of injustice. It is just a process.
After the shooting, campaigners sought their moment in court, and got it. But there simply wasn’t enough evidence for a jury to find beyond all reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman had not been acting in self-defence. Witnesses on both sides gave contradictory and confusing testimony, muddying even the shreds of evidence available to the jury. So they did the only thing they could in all conscience do: acquit.
Under Florida’s ludicrous Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman at first was not even charged. A young man lay dead, and Zimmerman had been acquitted without facing trial. But when the – absolutely righteous – outrage at that law, by local civil rights groups and, eventually, even President Obama, led rightfully to a trial, everyone seemed to take the message that it was their right to demand Zimmerman’s eventual conviction, too. And it just was not to be.
But the problem is that, in reality, nobody alive but Zimmerman knows exactly what happened that night. He claims to have been acting in self-defence. To assume he is lying is perhaps almost as much an act of prejudice, though of a different sort, as to assume that Martin was attacking him. I am not speculating either way. I do not know. Neither do you. But the burden of proof was not with Zimmerman. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty; and there just wasn’t the proof. All else is speculation.
Maybe the jury – on which it is true that no black person sat – acquitted George Zimmerman because they all felt that it is a white man’s inalienable right to shoot a black kid. Maybe the system still remains racist to the core.
Maybe. But more likely, faced with the vast responsibility of coming to a decision in full view of the might of the American media, the jury came to the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to convict a man of murder, or even manslaughter, beyond reasonable doubt.
Of course America is a country still riven by racial tension. It would be stupid to pretend otherwise. Perhaps Zimmerman truly was, as many claim, a murderous racist. Perhaps, as his defence claims, he was a scared man under attack. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere inbetween, a man whose racial prejudices led him to read violence and malice into the hooded face of a young black man. But there just wasn’t the proof.
The root cause, whether accident or self-defence or racism, is secondary. In the end, Trayvon Martin was killed because Zimmerman had a gun. He had a gun, and he had, as many do, an understanding given of long national experience that the law affords him impunity to use it.
President Obama gave a statement in response to the verdict. He said that people ought to honour Trayvon’s memory by asking “if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence”. The answer is no. The administration’s current efforts to impose even small measures of gun control are proving a Sisyphean task, because somehow after each tragic shooting, after a while, America fails to muster the outrage to overcome the gun lobby. Despite the public outcry around the trial, despite the thousands of other shootings this year, and last, and the thousands that there will be next year, few protesting the court’s verdict seems to be calling for gun control. Just nebulous “justice”.
And at the bar in Miami, the patrons shrugged into their beers. There was baseball on the other screens.
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