Zimmerman Jury Had No Choice

Like most everyone else I know, I was shocked and disheartened when the Zimmerman jury returned its not-guilty verdict.  

I felt certain that Zimmerman would be -- and should be -- convicted of manslaughter, at the very least. 

But the more I read about the trial, the more I realize the jury really had no other choice.  The prosecution didn’t prove its case.  

Under our constitution,  a person is innocent until proven guilty.   Many of us who followed the trial on television saw what we thought was proof.

But therein lies the problem.  Actual jurors see trials differently than armchair jurors do.  A judge can order actual jurors to ignore a witness’s testimony,  but that doesn’t stop us armchair types from giving the testimony full weight.  

Add that to the fact that the jurors had to deal with some very specific and complicated law, they did all they could. 

CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed one of the jurors, known only as juror B37, and her explanation of what went on in the jury room rings true.

She said that, based on an early survey, three of the jurors wanted acquittal, two wanted manslaughter, and one supported second-degree murder. 

But the more they sifted the evidence and considered the judge’s instructions, the more they realized that, legally, there was no proof, so they had no choice but to find him not guilty.  Some of the jurors wanted to convict him of something, she said, but legally there was nothing.

And so a 16-year-old boy who was doing nothing wrong is shot to death and no one is held responsible.

The NAACP is pushing the Justice Department to file wrongful death charges against Zimmerman.  I was among the first to sign its petition.

-Skip