George Zimmerman, Failed Justice, and the Depredations of PILPUL
David Shasha
George Zimmerman, Failed Justice, and the Depredations of PILPUL
We are still processing the enormity of the George Zimmerman case and what it means to American society.
What I believe is the first and most important take-away from the case is the lawlessness that now permeates elite sections of our society. Zimmerman was not a policeman but, according to “laws” basically designed by the NRA and other Right Wing extremist groups, he was legally permitted to carry a concealed weapon that gave him free reign to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager walking to his father’s house after a trip to get some snacks.
I have recently read the excellent book The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and learned that Florida – where the Zimmerman case took place – was one of the most racist American states during the Jim Crow era. This honestly came as a surprise to me as I never thought of Florida in the same way as I did Mississippi and Alabama. But Florida has a tragic legacy of violence towards African-Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Oshinsky-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Here is a current post from History News Network on the town of Sanford and baseball icon Jackie Robinson that confirms the point:
http://hnn.us/articles/sanford-fla-tried-lynch-jackie-robinson
With such infamy one would think that Florida might have learned its lesson, but in point of fact we are now living in a time when the gap between rich and poor, Black and White, has remained quite wide. Black men now make up the vast majority of our prison population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_African-American_males
http://www.alternet.org/print/7-ways-zimmerman-mindset-permeates-americas-criminal-justice-system
It is therefore taken for granted that a young African-American male is a criminal waiting to commit a violation of a wealthy community such as that patrolled by the civilian Zimmerman.
It is then little wonder that Zimmerman was not arrested immediately; no evidence-gathering took place with the idea that no crime actually took place:
The murder took place on February 26th, the arrest took place after much agitation from outside pressure groups on April 11th, a substantial lag in time which indicates that in Florida it is routine to have ordinary citizens take the Law into their own hands.
Believing that there is no objective Law, and no civil right to freely walk the streets of his own neighborhood, a young Black man like Trayvon Martin was profiled by Zimmerman who phoned the authorities and contrary to their instructions decided to take the Law into his own hands. It appears that a jury of 6 non-African-American women believed that taking the Law into your own hands is legitimate.
A shocking interview conducted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper with one of the jurors, identified only as Juror B37, illuminates many of the problems in the case and provides strong indication of how the defense narrative was accepted lock, stock, and barrel by those charged to protect the integrity of our legal system:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/justice/zimmerman-juror-book
http://www.alternet.org/print/zimmerman-juror
There are a number of critical points that emerge in the interview:
The juror fully accepts the contention of self-defense vigorously argued by Zimmerman’s defense attorneys. The NRA understanding of the law is affirmed as completely valid; there is no sense that carrying a firearm carries with it serious responsibilities. It is taken as axiomatic that initiating a confrontation without probable cause is legitimate. Civilians who act the part of police officers has become a routine and unquestioned matter.
In other words, the juror clearly admits prejudice in favor Zimmerman who was the person who aggressively confronted an unarmed teenager, the latter unaware of who he was. The juror confirmed that she and her fellow jurors emotionally identified – not with the murder victim – but with the aggressor, and saw the struggle exclusively out of his eyes.
The juror admits that at the outset of deliberations the six women were split down the middle; three voted to convict Zimmerman, three to acquit. Like a perverse inversion of the classic 1957 movie “Twelve Angry Men,” the prevailing emotion of the Zimmerman jury was to acquit rather than to convict. In the movie the jurors diligently work to reconstruct the events while in the Zimmerman case the pro-Zimmerman jurors use their skills to persuade the pro-conviction jurors to accept the emotional defense to acquit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Angry_Men
In “Twelve Angry Men” the Liberal side – initially led by one lone juror standing against the others – ends up convincing the Conservative side that the accused did not commit the murder he was accused of. In the Zimmerman trial the murder is never contested; it is rather the justification provided for the murder that becomes the contested issue.
The facts of the case are never in question: it is accepted that Zimmerman was the aggressor and that he was the one carrying a weapon which was used to kill the young man. Critical here was not the law of murder or manslaughter, but the highly-charged concept of self-defense that is so central to the NRA-“Stand Your Ground” worldview; a concept denied to the victim whose own right under the law to defend himself from a man commonly thought to be a vigilante who made serious errors of judgment in leaving his car and stalking his victim.
In spite of these uncontested facts and the Law against taking an innocent life, the juror insists that Zimmerman was right to kill Trayvon Martin.
Also critical to the juror is the testimony of an outside medical examiner Dr. Vincent DiMaio who is presented as authoritative even though he did not physically conduct the autopsy:
http://www.ksdk.com/news/article/387513/28/Pathologist-supports-Zimmermans-description-of-attack
Without having direct forensic evidence, Dr. DiMaio reconstructs from photographs and court transcripts what he believes might have happened. And it is this paid testimony that proved to confirm the jury’s prejudice.
In assessing the revelations of Juror B37 we must never forget the history of juries in the South and the way in which they enabled Jim Crow racism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02jury.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Southern juries rubber-stamped lynchings by exonerating defendants and making a mockery of our justice system. So when we hear about the integrity of our jury system and how it must never be questioned, we should recall the history of Jim Crow racism and how it was the jury system that gave it much-needed support.
But more important than any of this is the tacit admission by Juror B37 that the legal issue was “extremely confusing.” In spite of this “confusion” the overarching feeling of the pro-Zimmerman faction prevailed; ignoring the civil rights on the victim, the jury ended up standing with the aggressor and believing that his vigilantism was completely legitimate. A moral equivalence between Zimmerman and Martin is presented as if each of the men was in the same position; even as Zimmerman had a gun and Martin was unaware of who Zimmerman was and what he was up to.
A recent case in the same state of Florida tells a very different story when the same situation involves an African-American with a gun looking to defend herself:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/52484826
In the case of the African-American woman Marissa Alexander who fired a warning shot in the air to scare her estranged husband who had a long record of physically abusing her, the same police authorities who would not arrest Zimmerman charged and convicted her. This conviction was attained under the leadership of the same prosecutorial leadership as that in the Zimmerman case.
Alexander is now serving a 20 years sentence for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The jury in that case deliberated for 13 minutes before bringing in a guilty verdict. It is worthy to note that the judge in that case remarked that Alexander had no right to discharge her firearm when she had the chance to leave the scene; a chillingly similar situation to that of George Zimmerman, though in the Alexander case no one was killed. But Alexander was deemed culpable and sent to prison while Zimmerman is now free after killing an unarmed Trayvon Martin.
A particularly relevant post from The Root website reviews the data on African-Americans and pleas of Self-Defense that puts all the hot air of the Zimmerman defense and the statements of Juror B37 in context:
http://www.theroot.com/print/73703
We can also recall the outrage over NFL star Michael Vick who was arrested, convicted, and jailed for his role in a dog-fighting ring:
As we have seen in the case of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, one of the few advocates on behalf of Yemenite Jews in Israel who had their children stolen from them and told by the government that the babies had died in the hospital, there are different standards for different ethno-cultural groups in purportedly “democratic” societies.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/7XWsFNEejHE
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/7HwZqfoDx7o
Those considered part of the “Black” underclass are not deemed fit to be provided with the cover of the Law. Trayvon Martin was robbed not only of his life, but of his right to walk the streets free from the threats of a rogue vigilante like Zimmerman. It is likely that Zimmerman will become a hero not just to his fans on the jury, but to millions of Right Wing fanatics who see in him their own nihilism and antinomian values.
Ironically, Zimmerman himself is now free to return to his neighborhood “watch” – a euphemism for vigilantism – and take the same gun he used to murder the young Martin to do as he pleases:
An excellent summation of the basics of the case can be found in an Op-Ed written by Gary Younge:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/14/open-season-black-boys-verdict
There is another excellent overview provided in Counterpunch by Professor Robin Kelley:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/15/the-us-v-trayvon-martin/
As those who watched the trial on TV saw clearly, the victim was marked as the aggressor and the aggressive individual solely responsible for creating the confrontation was magically turned into the victim.
The underlying “truth” of the Zimmerman case is deeply rooted in PILPUL: Ignoring our basic civil rights as provided by the Constitution, the fixed idea is that we can do anything to “protect” ourselves and that “danger” is a purely subjective concept unconnected to objective reality. It is what we feel that counts and not what the Law permits us to do as responsible citizens.
An adult with a concealed weapon can get out of his car and shoot an unarmed teenager because he claims to have been threatened. Even though professional law enforcement officials instructed Zimmerman to remain in his car and wait for the real Police to come to the scene in order to legally determine if there is any threat of malfeasance, Zimmerman – the make-believe cop – decided to take the Law into his own hands and has now been acquitted of wrong-doing by a jury of his peers.
The high-priced lawyers defending Zimmerman provided an excellent example of how PILPUL works: Guilt becomes innocence, the Law is sacrificed to subjective values, and the death of an innocent young man becomes “necessary” because a dangerously deranged cowboy decided that his life was in danger. That the confrontation was generated by the actions of the “victim” Zimmerman is not to be discussed as the realm of the objective and the legal principle “Rule of Law” is not to be admitted in the context of PILPUL.
As we have seen in previous our discussions of the subject, PILPUL undermines the very authority of Law.
Critical to the PILPUL process is the centrality of emotional identification. In her interview with Anderson Cooper, Juror B37 made it quite clear that it was her sympathy for Zimmerman that moved her to acquit. The harsh standard of the Law was not the primary concern. PILPUL is about the emotional and the subjective rather than the strict application of Law and the concern for Justice.
I would be remiss at this juncture if I did not cite the contemptible views of PILPUL-master Alan Dershowitz who in classic “Dersh” fashion has not only defended the guilty, but has taken shots at the prosecutors for bringing the case:
http://www.newsmax.com/US/dershowitz-zimmerman-martin-defense/2013/02/26/id/492168
Dershowitz has now doubled-down on his idiotic and malicious attacks on those seeking justice as he demonizes them:
The vile image of Alan Dershowitz defending George Zimmerman is strong evidence that we as a society have lost our sense of morality based on the Law. When such a prominent “jurist” seeks to so blatantly disregard the most basic ethical principles and twist the truth to suit his PILPUL values, we have entered into a very dangerous place in our culture.
Although we have our fair share of crime and violence in America, we are never permitted to circumvent the Law, as Zimmerman did, in order to adjudicate a case in vigilante style that was a mere figment in his mind. It is universally accepted that Zimmerman overstepped his civilian authority by stalking an unarmed young man, and yet in the end he was not held responsible for his actions in defiance of objective legal standards.
The death of Trayvon Martin is part of a larger culture of lawlessness that exists in the world of wealthy Americans who believe that anyone who looks a certain way is out to get them. The rich have raped our economy, and are rightly worried that they will become targets. In this world there is an essential nihilism: It is not the Law that protects us, but the point of a gun.
David Shasha
For those not familiar with the concept of PILPUL see my article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/what-is-pilpul-and-why-on_b_507522.html