My verdict: Zimmerman’s no hero, but he’s also not guilty of murder

By David McElroy · July 12, 2013

Since George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin last year, two dominant narratives have emerged about the case.

Many of Zimmerman’s supporters think he’s a hero. They see him as someone standing up to punks and criminals who terrorize peaceful neighborhoods. They see Martin as a young thug who was no good, even if he didn’t have any evil intent on the night of the shooting. They think it’s perfectly reasonable that Zimmerman followed Martin and reported his mere presence in the neighborhood as suspicious. These people assume that the thuggish Martin attacked Zimmerman and then Zimmerman killed Martin in self-defense.

Zimmerman’s opponents have an entirely different picture. They see Zimmerman as a racist white thug who went after a peaceful black kid who was minding his own business. (We’ll ignore the fact that he’s half Hispanic.) They see it as a clear-cut case of murder, because they say Zimmerman had no reason or right to report Martin to police, much less confront him in some way. Even if Martin threw the first blow, they think Zimmerman is a murderer because he’s the one who initiated the confrontation simply because he was suspicious of a black teen.

If you believe the first narrative, Zimmerman is a role model for standing up for civilized society. If you believe the second narrative, Zimmerman is a racist killer who deserves to be found guilty of murder.

I see both of those narratives as simplistic. As the trial wraps up — and the case could go to the jury today — I want to give a third narrative. It’s not one that’s neat and clean. It won’t win approval from either side of the racially driven stories. I think it’s reasonable, though.

First, remember that I’m not giving you a legal verdict. Not only does my opinion not matter in that regard, but I don’t know enough about the details of Florida’s murder laws to offer an informed judgment. (Here’s a legal analyst’s opinion about why Zimmerman will be found not guilty, if you’re interested in that.) My opinion has more to do with what’s right, not what’s legal.

In a case where most people have worked hard to turn it into a tale of good vs. bad — with opinions differing about which side was good — I don’t see any good guys. I see two people who were most likely equally responsible for Martin’s death. If the tables had been turned and Zimmerman had died in the fight instead, I’m pretty sure I’d say the same thing.

It seems to me that Zimmerman was out of line in some of his actions. As a neighborhood watch volunteer, he wasn’t supposed to be armed, but he was. I don’t see that he had any reason to be suspicious of Martin other than the fact that he was a young thuggish-looking black teen. (And, yes, I think it’s fair to say he was thuggish-looking, based on the pictures we’ve seen, including the one below.) We all judge people’s character and intent from the way they present themselves. Martin apparently went out of his way to cultivate that look at times — based on pictures and tweets we’ve seen — so I don’t have any problem characterizing him that way. However, that look isn’t enough to raise reasonable suspicion if the teen was simply walking down a street.

Even if Zimmerman wanted to report it to police, he had no business getting out of his car and risking a confrontation. That’s not what he was there for. If he had wanted to get a street address for police, he could have done that from his car.

We don’t know much about what Martin did. All we have is what Zimmerman said and the testimony of the young woman who was on the phone with him at the start of the incident. (As a side note, some people have maintained that it’s racist to point out how unimpressive and non-credible the woman appeared in her testimony. That’s crazy. When a woman has been caught in lies about her actions concerning the case and when she says she can’t read something that she wrote because it’s in cursive, yes, those are reasonable grounds to question her credibility and intelligence, regardless of her skin color.) Zimmerman claims that Martin attacked him. The witness testified that Martin was agitated enough to call Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker,” with “cracker” being a racial epithet for a redneck white.

I’d say that Zimmerman and Martin definitely looked at each other through racial lenses, but whether they were or not, each one of them had a chance to escape the confrontation. I’m inclined to believe Zimmerman’s story that Martin picked the physical confrontation, because if Zimmerman had simply decided he wanted to kill Martin, there would have been no physical confrontation. Since he had a gun, he could have simply shot Martin without letting himself be hurt.

Both of them had the chance to walk away from a confrontation, but both kept pushing at a certain point. Once the confrontation started, though, Zimmerman had the legal right to defend himself if he thought he was in danger. And since there’s no reasonable evidence to dispute Zimmerman’s account of what happened, there’s no way to prove that he had any intent to murder Martin. I don’t see how a reasonable jury can convict Zimmerman, based on what I know.

I think both of these guys were responsible for the confrontation. Either one of them had the power to walk away before it escalated, but neither did. They’re both responsible in the moral sense.

Martin wasn’t the baby-faced innocent victim that some people want to see. Zimmerman isn’t the racist murderer that some want to see. They’re just two people who made some bad decisions that added up to someone getting killed.

And neither one of them deserves to be turned into a hero.

Update: Here’s my post-verdict follow-up to this article.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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