Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker has been doing some ruminating upon the George Zimmerman murder trial, and I have to say his speculation does mirror my own.
I am not an attorney, and I don’t play one on TV, but I have always had a great deal of interest in legal theory and the jurisprudential procedure and practice. I have always enjoyed reading about various different cases, and often like to read SCOTUS or appellate court opinions, especially how they relate to constitutional interpretation or legal theory. The Zimmerman case interested me from the beginning because I was very surprised not only by what the State Attorney’s office decided to charge him with, but also what they didn’t.
While I was not expecting a charge of 2nd degree murder, (based on the evidence known in the public sphere, it didn’t seem there was any possible way to arrive at murder 2) I was even more surprised it was not accompanied by lesser charges, like reckless homicide, which would have been much easier to prove, if still arguable.
There has been a lot of discussion and analysis of the part race is playing in the Zimmerman trial, but all this talk has lead me to a theory of my own, which I have not seen or heard anyone else advance as of yet: Suppose the State Attorney filed the case to deliberately lose? Consider: we have what seems to be a text-book case of self-defense, based on the evidence at hand, so much so that the local police declined to even arrest Zimmerman at the scene. We also had a great public outcry, stirred-up entirely by outsiders insisting that racism was in play, and demanding an arrest (or worse!).  Is it possible that the State Attorney filed this case against Zimmerman in an effort to appease the Black community, who was demanding Zimmerman’s head, but having no actual belief in his guilt, filed charges they knew they could never prove?
Read more: westernfreepress.com
