George Zimmerman’s lawyer says race is “not the elephant in the room” in the Trayvon Martin case.
Mark O’Mara made the statement in a blog post on the GZLegalCase website, on which his team is chronicling their defense of the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who shot Martin, 17, to death on February 26th.
He was responding to an interview Martin family attorney Ben Crump gave to the Orlando Sentinel, in which Crump said in response to a question about whether the case is about race:
“It shouldn’t be about race. But race is the elephant in the room. Nobody believes that if you make Trayvon Martin white [and the Neighborhood Watch volunteer black], there’s no way he would not be arrested, and that’s the unfortunate and tragic truth of the matter. There is a double standard. That’s why race is involved in this case.”
To that, O’Mara writes:
Let’s forget for a moment that George Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white. What Mr. Crump is saying is that race is an issue in the George Zimmerman case because, he insists, that if a black man shot a white person in a similar situation, the black man would have been immediately arrested. This is not an indictment of George Zimmerman; this is fundamentally an accusation that the Sanford Police Department acted in a racist way, and that perhaps the criminal justice system at large is biased against black men.
The truth is that there is credible evidence that black men are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and that is evidence of an underlying problem. Mark O’Mara and Don West have each spent a career in criminal defense fighting against racial bias in the justice system that affected many of their clients. This is something that needs to be discussed as a nation, and if this case has brought that conversation to the forefront, then now is the time to have that conversation.
Mr. Crump is right in talking about the George Zimmerman case when he says: “It shouldn’t be about race.” But by projecting race onto the George Zimmerman case, Mr. Crump is pinning a supposed civil rights victory on a Zimmerman conviction. The problem is that by associating a Zimmerman conviction with a civil rights victory, Mr. Crump has framed a scenario where a Zimmerman victory in a Self-Defense Immunity Hearing or a Zimmerman acquittal will represent a civil rights defeat. That is inappropriate and dangerous to us as a nation.
The Zimmerman defense team is not arguing against civil rights. We are defending a man who claims he shot and killed an attacker in necessary self-defense. If Mr. Crump believes that the Sanford Police Department acted with bias during their investigation, then he should demand a comprehensive conclusion from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), which conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter of whether SPD conducted a proper investigation. If Mr. Crump believes that George Zimmerman’s actions were racially motivated, he should demand a comprehensive conclusion from the FBI, which conducted an exhaustive investigation on whether there is evidence that George acted with a racial bias. In that request, we join him.
Indeed, in many ways the Martin case has become a referendum on the disparate treatment of white and non-white defendants under various versions of the “Stand Your Ground” law around the country. The fact that black defendants appear so unsuccessful in availing themselves of self-defense arguments when compared to white defendants, at least anecdotally (since most states attorneys offices have been reticent about releasing statistics regarding the race of defendants using Stand Your Ground defenses) along with the experiential evidence of most black Americans, has led to the conclusion that the failure to arrest Zimmerman had at lest something to do with his and Martin’s race.
But O’Mara is arguing something more than that. He is saying that race is excluded from the case because Zimmerman is partly Hispanic, as if that inoculates him from even the discussion of racial bias. The fact that Hispanic people can harbor racial bias too, seems to have been lost in his argument about to whom Crump should direct his accusations.
The fact is, it is the prosecutors, not just Crump and the Martin family, who have alleged that George Zimmerman profiled Trayvon Martin based on Martin’s appearance, which includes his dress (a hoodie), his behavior (which Zimmerman decided looked “suspicious” to him) and yes, his race.
O’Mara himself furthered this perception when during Zimmerman’s second bond hearing in June, the attorney introduced grainy images from the surveillance camera inside the convenience store where Martin purchased Skittles candy and a can of Arizona Iced Tea just before his fatal confrontation with O’Mara’s client inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Assistant Sate Attorney Bernie De La Rionda erupted after O’Mara’s presentation that the images were meant to make Martin look like a criminal.
“Is it that because he was wearing a hoodie, this victim can be seen as a criminal,” De La Rionda asked? “That clerk treated him as a customer.”
Further, it is the O’Mara team that has sought to procure Martin’s school records (he was in Sanford because he had been suspended from his high school in Miami) and even his social media accounts, both of which have been leaked to the media, in some cases combined with fake photos purported to be Martin (which, by the way, were circulated by the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, and were later picked up by right wing websites like Breitbart.com and MichelleMalkin.com, among others), and unsubstantiated claims in right wing media and blogs that Martin was high on marijuana on the night of the killing, in a clear attempt to portray the teen as a thug. In fact, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera said Martin was killed because he was wearing a hoodie.
That, O’Mara wants the public to believe, has nothing to do with Martin’s race, but perceptions of a young black man, quoting violent hip-hop lyrics and rocking gold grilles (which Martin didn’t even have, but the young man in the fake Trayvon Martin pics circulated by Zimmerman supporters did), are well known in contemporary America. And O’Mara himself hasn’t shied away from portraying Martin as a dangerous thug — with all that implies when you’re talking about a black teenage boy — in the defense of his client.
After O’Mara’s motion to obtain the school records and social media counts was released, Crump issued the following statement:
“Trayvon’s parents maintain that his school records and Facebook page are completely irrelevant to George Zimmerman’s decision to get out of his car to profile, pursue, and shoot their son in the heart on February 26, 2012. How does George Zimmerman’s review of Trayvon Martin’s high school and middle school records and Facebook page bear any relevance to Zimmerman’s decision to pull the trigger and kill a seventeen year old child? Is this going to be a new legal standard we are setting- for a murderer to review the school records and Facebook page of his teenage victim to determine whether or not he should have killed him?”
Meanwhile, there is testimony in the case, from a cousin of George Zimmerman’s, that he and his family harbored negative views of black people. Whether or not those allegations prove relevant to the case, prosecutors have included that testimony in their basket of evidence.
Lastly, the Martin shooting and subsequent investigation took place in the context of an embittered racial climate in Sanford, where distrust of the police by African-Americans has run high for generations, and where the perception gap between white and black residents on the subject of race was and likely remains wide.
Race clearly intersects with the Trayvon Martin case, both with respect to the killing itself, and the investigation into it. O’Mara seems to blame Martin’s family and their supporters for injecting it, but any objective observer can see that it was there all along.
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