A Lesson From L.A. in the Zimmerman Case (+video)
Photo Credit: RCPBy Lou Cannon. Whatever one thinks of the jury verdict in the George Zimmerman case, history suggests that retrying him on federal charges would not produce a fairer outcome.
The last time a president of the United States and a U.S. attorney general disapproved of a jury verdict in a race-heightened case, they set in motion a series of events that produced a second verdict as suspect as the first.
It happened in 1992 when a suburban Simi Valley jury acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers of excessive force and other charges in the beating of Rodney King, an African-American. The verdict, coupled with a woeful lack of preparation by the LAPD, touched off the deadliest American civil disturbance since the Draft Riot of 1863 in New York City.
By the time the Los Angeles rioting ended on May 4, 1992, 54 people had died with another 2,328 treated for injuries in emergency rooms by doctors practicing what one of them called “battlefield medicine.” The rioting was the costliest in U.S. history, with property losses exceeding $900 million — $1.45 billion in today’s dollars. Thousands of businesses were burned or looted and 862 structures burned to the ground.
President George H.W. Bush was, as he put it, “sickened” by a televised clip of the King beating he had seen soon after the incident occurred a year earlier. In the midst of the rioting the president met with civil rights leaders and made a televised appeal for calm, promising that the Simi Valley verdicts were “not the end of the process.” Read more from this story HERE.
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Jesse Jackson Says Florida is an Apartheid State because of its Zimmerman Verdict
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Photo Credit: AP‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Are Winning
By Matt Berman. On Tuesday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder said that “Stand Your Ground” laws “sow dangerous conflict,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called her state’s version of the law “important” and a “constitutional right.” And Wednesday, Florida state Sen. David Simmons called Holder’s comments “inappropriate” and “inaccurate.” Stand Your Ground may be getting more attention now after the Zimmerman verdict, but the laws themselves don’t look like they’re going anywhere.
And that’s not for a lack of effort from critics of the self-defense policy. While the exact laws differ somewhat from state to state, Stand Your Ground laws justify the use of force in self-defense when there’s a reasonably perceived threat. It’s on the books in some form or another in more than 21 states. Florida was the first to adopt the law, and the state is the focus of the law’s critics now. Those critics range from Stevie Wonder (who has decided to boycott any state with a Stand Your Ground law) to the dozens of student activists who crowded Gov. Rick Scott’s office on Tuesday.
But the critics aren’t limited to Florida. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general on Wednesday called for “another look” at the state’s Stand Your Ground law. “I think what it can do is cause a situation to escalate that doesn’t need to,” he said. Read more from this story HERE.