The latest news in the Trayvon Martin case is all about the New Black Panthers. They went down to Sanford to protest the whole mess (again) this weekend, and yesterday they announced that they were offering a $10,000 reward for the capture of George Zimmerman. They said they were going to be looking for him themselves, too.
As far as I can tell, this kind of pot-stirring is what the New Black Panther Party is all about. They only seem to turn up around national-attention-drawing cases, and they seem to do their very best to get their own names into the papers. The founders of the original Black Panthers don’t like them. I don’t think I like them much either.
That being said, it’s hard to believe that George Zimmerman is out there right now, living free and easy. I definitely don’t know all of the facts about the Martin case, but nobody seems to be able to argue that Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin. To my mind, regardless of what sort of screwed-up self-defense laws Florida has, the man should have been arrested at the scene of the shooting.
It’s entirely possible that he really did have to shoot in self-defense. It’s possible that his reasons for following Martin that day weren’t racially motivated. (It feels untruthful to type that, though.) Whatever the facts of the matter are, they need to be decided in court, with careful deliberation and investigation. I don’t think any circumstances justify the police allowing a man to walk away after shooting a boy.
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