I know this is a blog about raising vegetables, but there
are times when I feel that I have to say something about the current state of
affairs and this is one of them. I
thought about the best way to get people to think about this and came up with
the idea of a thought experiment. I’m
imagining a scenario in which someone is shot dead. Two people are involved, one real and one
fictional.
The fictional person’s name is Travis Maxwell, a name I just made
up. Travis is a teenager, his parents
divorced. Normally he lives with his
mother in Springfield, Missouri but this week he is staying with his dad, who
lives in a condo in Sanford, Florida where he moved after the divorce and
started a small electrical contracting business. Travis is a typical
teenager, an average student, been in a few scrapes, likes music that adults
hate, wears his cap backwards, can be truly obnoxious at times, smokes some
weed once in a while, and tries to talk tough, like he’s a real player. He grew up in a rural area of west Missouri,
some would say redneck, before his parents moved to Springfield. Travis knows how to hunt and fish, and can handle
a gun. His family life has been a little
rocky with the divorce, but his parents made sure he was taken care of, and Travis
has got enough smarts not to go down the rabbit hole, even though he may
sometimes come across as a real dillweed. The night of the NBA all-star
game, Travis leaves his dad’s condo at halftime to go to the 7-11 and buy some snacks. He’s heard the stories about crime in
Florida, and stuffs his dad’s .22 pistol into his jacket.
Here’s the other player in this fantasy, George Zimmerman, a
real person. George has been in a few
scrapes himself. In 2005 he was charged
with resisting arrest and battery on a police officer, a result of getting into
an argument with a cop at a party and pushing him. The charges were later dropped as George
agreed to go into an alcohol rehabilitation program. This is probably a good time to point out
that George’s father worked in law enforcement.
A few years later his ex-fiancee requested a restraining order against
George for domestic violence. She said
that George was trolling her neighborhood.
One night he came to her apartment.
She asked him to leave. George
insisted that he take some of his things first.
They were yelling at each other.
Her dog bit him. George claimed
he was the victim and countersued her.
The judge told them to stay away from each other.
George especially liked his role as an unofficial*
neighborhood watch person in his gated community in Sanford, the Retreat at
Twin Lakes. George was the kind of guy
who wanted everything to be in order, in fact he had made numerous calls to the
police dispatcher over seemingly trivial things like trash out of place, or
people walking through the neighborhood that comported themselves in what he
thought was a suspicious manner.
Sometimes George went out of his way to help people in the neighborhood,
but he also antagonized some residents who had filed complaints with the
homeowner’s association and the Sanford police about his aggressive
behavior. At an emergency meeting of the
association one resident was escorted out after loudly asserting that he had
made numerous calls to the Sanford police about Zimmerman, who had previously
approached him and and at one point came to his house. George was the kind of guy who wanted order
in his environment.
The night of the NBA All Star game George is driving in his
car and spots Travis near the north entrance.
Travis sees him – they make eye contact. There’s something about this kid that George
doesn’t like, he looks like he’s up to something. George parks in front of the clubhouse and
calls the police, tells the dispatcher
that this kid with the baseball cap on backwards looks real suspicous. As Travis continues along the street George
moves his car several times to keep him in sight. By now Travis is acutely aware that this
strange guy is following him. Where the
street curves to the right there’s a sidewalk that cuts across to the next
street over. This sidewalk connects to a
sidewalk that runs down the middle of the block, between and behind the two
rows of houses that front each street.
Travis decides to get to his father’s house on this sidewalk, which goes
right behind his dad’s house, away from the street and away from this guy in
the car.
George says he’s lost sight of the kid and is going to get
out and follow him on foot. The
dispatcher tells him he doesn’t need to do that, the police are on the
way. George says he doesn’t
have an address that he can give them, in a small neighborhood that he patrols
regularly with only a few streets, so he’ll have to get out and find an address
so they know where to find him. George
walks over to the sidewalk between the rows of houses. He’s got his 9mm handgun with him,
loaded. At some point the two men’s paths
cross. Travis sees this guy is not a
cop, and says “Why are you following me?”
He’s not a big kid but he’s wiry and knows how to take care of
himself. Then he sees the gun in
George’s hand as he walks toward Travis.
Travis pulls his own gun out of his jacket and squeezes off a single
shot that hits George in the heart.
George collapses and falls to the ground.
Travis is charged with manslaughter. In the trial he argues that under Florida’s
Stand Your Ground laws he has a right to defend himself from what he perceives
as a deadly threat. Under this law
Travis was "justified in using deadly force if he reasonably believes that
such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to
himself." Travis "was not
engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a
right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground
and meet force with force.” The jury
agrees, Travis is not convicted. His gun
is returned to him.
Of course we know that scenario never happened but a similar scenario did. In the
reality the teenager’s name is Trayvon Martin, and in the real outcome Martin
was shot dead by George Zimmerman. In
the real trial neither George’s past history of stalking his girlfriend,
hitting a cop, nor his heavyhanded tactics as neighborhood watch volunteer were
allowed into the trial. George claimed
that he was merely defending himself the night he shot Trayvon Martin and
Martin was the aggressor. The defense
pointed out that in Florida it is not against the law to follow someone. The jury did not convict. In both the real case and the hypothetical
case one of the two people ended up dead, and the jury did not convict the
shooter. A plausible outcome in either case.
So what is the difference?
Why can Travis claim self-defense in one scenario while George can claim
self-defense in the real case? One
reason is that under Florida’s law the shooter is almost always right. It’s his word against a dead man’s. Under this law the burden of proof is on the
state, in other words the state has to prove that the shooter did NOT act in
self-defense. That’s a high bar, and in
most cases the state considers it hopeless and doesn’t press charges.
The stand your ground law seems like a very bad law, a law
that encourages two people having an argument to simply go for their guns to
settle it with the winner, the one still alive, getting off Scot free. But it has one rule that, if applied, makes
the law a little more reasonable, the initial aggressor rule. This rule states that if one person initiates
a confrontation that results in another persons injury then he cannot claim a
stand your ground defense. In the trial
of George Zimmerman the judge denied the state’s request to instruct the jury
on that part of the law. Without the
knowledge of the initial aggressor rule, the entire confrontation lost the
context of George watching and following Trayvon. The meeting between the two men was framed as
something of a chance encounter, existing in its own independent universe, not something
that was the culmination of Mr. Zimmerman’s actions. A conviction would never happen.
What actually did happen in the last minute of Mr. Martin’s
life? We’ll never know, we have only Mr.
Zimmerman’s version of the events to go on.
I would argue that the chain of events leading to this boy’s death began
long before their meeting that night.
George was an accident waiting to happen, a cop wannabe who played out
his cop fantasies as neighborhood watch guy.
He’s got a police scanner in his vehicle, thinks he’s a real-life
criminal investigator, a real crusader for righteousness . With his history he should not have been an
armed neighborhood watch guy, but he was.
He sees everybody not like him as a criminal.
When George Zimmerman got out of his car that fateful night,
after being told not to, he should have lost any right to claim
self-defense. When he got out of his car
to pursue Mr. Martin, he assumed the role of a police officer, a role for which
he did not have the training, the capability, the psychological fitness, the
experience, and most of all, the authority to assume. He literally took the law into his own
hands. Mr. Zimmerman had no more
business pursuing that kid on foot than someone who took a course in first aid
has to perform an emergency appendectomy after being told that the ambulance is
on the way. And yet George played cop,
and that kid wound up dead.
Suppose the hypothetical Travis had left the house without a
gun, and he met the same fate at Zimmerman’s hands as did Trayvon. It shouldn’t make any difference whether
Travis is a white kid from the Missouri ozarks or Trayvon is a black kid from Miami Gardens. When you look at this
from the 10,000 foot level it’s clear that Mr. Zimmerman began the
chain of events that led to this boy's death.
You can chalk Zimmerman's reasons up to bad judgement, delusional thinking, or a hateful
agenda, but whatever his reasons the act constitutes manslaughter. Mr. Zimmerman killed someone and got away
with it.
What’s really disheartening is the reaction of some of the
so-called pundits on Fox News. It’s not
enough to argue the case for George Zimmerman’s innocence, Geraldo Rivera and
others make the assertion that Trayvon Martin had it coming because of the way
he looked, he was wearing a hoodie, or because he smoked pot or had been
suspended from school. He was unarmed,
carrying Skittles and iced tea back from the store, but according to them
Trayvon had it coming. What could be
more divisive than what these people are saying?
*George claimed to be a neighborhood watch captain but the
group had never gotten recognition from the USAonWatch-Neighborhood Watch
organization. The National Sheriffs Organization, its
parent, issued this statement after the killing: “The alleged action of a
‘self-appointed neighborhood watchman’ last month in Sanford, FL significantly
contradicts the principles of the Neighborhood Watch Program.” A spokesman for Miami-Dade Citizens Crime
Watch said “In no program that I have ever heard of does someone patrol with a
gun in their pocket. Every city and
municipality has their own policies. Here in Miami-Dade we train people only to
be the eyes and ears of their communities. Not to follow and most definitely
not to carry a weapon.”
