With all the madness surrounding the George Zimmerman verdict Americans are having to deal with a whole series of tragedies. First and foremost is the death of Trayvon Martin. The second tragedy is that the Sanford Police department, inexperienced at handling complex crime scenes, just did a poor job of thoroughly processing the area of the murder. They should have canvassed the entire neighborhood looking for every possible witness. They simply didn’t have all the evidence that could have been gathered and presented to prosecutors.
But there were more tragedies: The political involvement of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who was pressured to appoint a special prosecutor, Angela Corey.
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, in an interview with CNN, said Angela Corey has a horrible reputation in Florida for overcharging suspects. And there’s now plenty of evidence that Corey intentionally hid important evidence from the defense, a massive violation of legal ethics. It took a whistle blower to come forward and produce the evidence that Corey was illegally holding back. And she has now fired that whistle blower. In fact, Professor Dershowitz says Corey’s misbehavior borders on “criminal conduct.” Dershowitz is certainly no fan of George Zimmerman or of racial profiling. But he notes that all the racial profiling in this case was done by the news media.
And that’s the greatest tragedy of all. In a country where racial sensitivities are raw, a huge opportunity is being lost. The search for mutual understanding is being drowned out by the activists and the noisemakers and by those who have no understanding of how our legal system works. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial was not the place to have those conversations. The ‘show trial’ just ginned up more disrespect for the law on both sides of the fence.
