No Justice for Trayvon

In Georgia, an intellectually disabled black man named Warren Hill is scheduled to be executed this week, despite the Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia that executing intellectually disabled people is unconstitutional.

Just south of Georgia, in Florida, a twenty-nine-year-old hispanic man named George Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old black teenager who was walking home in a hoodie after buying iced tea and skittles.

Does anybody notice a pattern here?

Whether they are the criminal or the victim, the black guy gets handled the worst by our criminal justice system-nearly every time.

There are other examples, too.  The ACLU released a series of reports on the racial gap on marijuana arrests.  The results are shocking:

I think George Zimmerman is guilty.  I think he shot Trayvon Martin for no good reason at all.

But I don’t think Zimmerman was thinking, “he’s black.  He must be up to no good,” at the top of his head.  That was instinct.  George Zimmerman had been taught by society his entire life to be suspicious of Trayvon Martin.

As a city dweller, I often find myself walking passed somebody-it can be anybody, reakky- on the street and thinking in my head, “that person must be up to no good.”  At the same time, I recognize that that is a totally illogical thought.  I wouldn’t pull out a gun, even if I had (and could use) one because that first instinct has never been right.

Racial profiling is a part of our society.  Everybody has, at one point or another, been guilty of it.

Which is not to say that racial profiling is a good thing.  It killed Trayvon Martin and it has killed many others and will probably kill many more.  It has had young men “stopped and frisked” by the NYPD for no reason other than their color.   It has had innocent people executed in states like Texas and Florida.

Racial profiling is why blacks nearly universally end up on the wrong end of our criminal justice.

But along with Voter ID laws, it is the new racism in this country.  You can be racially profiling somebody and not be knowing you are doing it, like George Zimmerman was.  Calling Zimmerman “innocent”  only opens the door for more profiling in the future.

It is time our society taught its citizens to “think before you shoot.”     If you look at the facts of the case you can see that Zimmerman was acting almost like a vigilante who took matters into his own hands (in this case, for the worse).  The 9/11 dispatcher told him to stop following Martin; he kept following him and shot him.

There is a really good movie entitled Adam’s Rib, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as two lawyers on opposite sides of the trial of a woman accused of shooting her husband for having an affair.  Hepburn’s character wins the case for the defendant when she tells the jury to judge her client as if she were a man.

That’s what the jury here failed to do.  Because if they had judged George Zimmerman as if he had killed a white boy, he would be sitting in a jail cell.

This isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.  How many times, in places like Texas and Florida, have we seen poor minority defendants given bad lawyers from the state and receive the death penalty in a trial with an all-white jury?  Here it is only the opposite, Zimmerman hired a good, private lawyer who was able to win his case for a wealthy client.  And he got away with murder.

In America, justice isn’t blindfolded.  She’s usually a racist supporter of big corporations over ordinary citizens.  She has every prejudice in the world, and it’s usually about making the wrong guy win (see Bush v. Gore, 2000).

There has not be any justice for Trayvon Martin.  And unless we work to change our prejudices, I don’t think there will be.

“Be Careful”

A few days ago, the Illinois senate overturned Gov. Quinn’s amendatory veto of a concealed carry law.

Okay; let me explain.  On December 11 of last year, the US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals declared Illinois’s ban on carrying a concealed weapon unconstitutional.     They gave the Illinois legislature a little time to change the law.

In other words, although I’m sure he wanted to veto that whole bad boy altogether, Gov. Quinn couldn’t because the court ruled banning carrying concealed weapons is unconstitutional.  He had pushed for measures such as an assault weapons ban to be added to the bill; they failed.

Instead, Quinn employed an amendatory veto.   The veto would have prohibited concealed weapons from being brought into any establishment that serves alcohol.  It would have required the law to assume that the owner of an establishment disallowed concealed weapons unless they explicitly gave written permission, under the new law the opposite is true.   It would have  protected our police officers so that when an officer asks if a person has a concealed weapon, the person must promptly answer.   It would have capped the number of weapons people are permitted to carry at any one time at one.  It would have more narrowly defined “concealed” to exclude  what are basically half-concealed weapons.  It would have covered the meetings and records of the Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board under the Open Meetings and Freedom of Information Acts.  Most importantly, it would have allowed employers to impose limits on employees carrying concealed weapons; and allowed for local governments to enact assault weapons bans.

None of this was included in the original bill and all of it was overturned when the legislature overturned the veto.

You’ve heard me.  It is now illegal for Chicago, Cook County, and any other local or county government in the state of Illinois to ban assault weapons.

Gun control opponents argue that because of Chicago’s high murder rate, the state’s tough gun control laws should be overturned completely.  That argument fails to take into account the high rate of gun trafficking into the city, all of which is legal, from Indiana and the suburbs.   Less gun control is not the answer; federal gun control is.  If concealed carry laws did anything to reduce the murder rate in Chicago, I would be shocked.

On a more random note, voting records for this issue can be found here for the House and here for the Senate.

And I’ll leave you with the words of comedian Stephen Colbert after the court originally declared a concealed weapons ban unconstitutional:

It is now legal to carry a concealed weapon in all fifty states.  So if you’re in one of them, be careful.