The case against George Zimmerman

Initially the media framed Trayvon Martin's death as a race issue. A white-looking man shot a black kid and got away with it. The police didn't take the crime very seriously, the thinking was, because it was a black kid who was dead.
And Zimmerman's family encouraged this kind of thinking, by playing to it with arguments that Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, and that he's not a racist, as evidenced by his friendship with some people who are black. But something sounds patently false about that, and I think I've figured out why.

Yes, there was most likely racist motivation behind the initial call to 911. But it was a larger paranoia that had Zimmerman calling in supposed threats all those years, and acting as a self-appointed neighborhood watch man. And there is a major difference between being paranoid about black people and actually killing a black person. I don't believe that the shooting itself was racially motivated, although the circumstances arose because of a racially-based suspicion.

This week it came to light that Zimmerman's father is a retired judge along with news of Zimmerman's previous arrest records, and it started to make sense.

The prosecutor who had declined to bring a case against Zimmerman for lack of evidence recused himself from the case on March 22 so there wouldn't be an appearance of conflict. If race was the motivation behind the shooting, what conflict could there be? I suspect that he or someone in his office had a relationship with Zimmerman's father, and possibly even his mother, who also worked in the courts. I suspect that when the call came in and the police found Robert J. Zimmerman's son at the scene, they treated him differently than they would have treated another person in the same situation. I don't think it was about race at all, but about nepotism. It may not even have been conscious for the cops. I'm sure everyone thought they were doing their job the right way. But they weren't. They didn't test Zimmerman for drugs or alcohol. They didn't hold on to the weapon.When they arrived on the scene and saw a dead body, they didn't even wait for a homicide detective to interrogate Zimmerman. They didn't contact Trayvon's parents even though paperwork shows they had an ID for him at about 3 am. And I'd think that if someone pleads self-defense and has injuries to show as evidence, those injuries would be documented with more than words on a paper. Records of specific medical treatment and photographs would suffice.

The lead homicide investigator wanted to go after Zimmerman for manslaughter. The prosecutor didn't feel there was evidence to get a conviction. But they didn't follow all the leads that they should have. Reports have come in from eyewitnesses that the police didn't follow up with them, and last I checked, Trayvon's girlf friend, who claims to have been on the phone with him through the initial verbal confrontation with Zimmerman, hasn't given her testimony to the police either.

The idea that this was not a cover-up is rather scary. If I'm right (and I'd like to be wrong, by the way!), then the issue we have is not that the PD in Sanford was being racist. Zimmerman was treated like a harmless wacko, whose testimony was considered, by the prosecutor at the very least, to be enough to drop the case. It's incredible to think that one person can go shoot another person and then say it was self-defense and get it dropped without a full investigation. I'm not saying that Zimmerman Sr. made some phone calls to help. I really don't believe it was blatant favoritism. But I think that Zimmerman (or his testimony) was considered to be more credible than other people would be in similar circumstances because of existing relationships between his family and people involved in law enforcement.

I would love to see that I'm wrong. I'll be waiting to see the information released byspecial prosecutor Corey.