(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)
The media has generated a good deal of outrage at the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, and many have been calling for his immediate prosecution and conviction. But as so often happens when these emotional stories hit the media, most people are ignoring the criminal justice process and jumping straight to conclusions.
No one, except Zimmerman himself, knows whether he was acting in legitimate self-defense. There's some evidence that he was, but he could very well not have been. What's clear is that Florida's idiotic "Stand Your Ground" law, which makes self-defense an immunity from arrest rather than merely a defense at trial, prevented a complete investigation of the incident. But that's exactly the thing: without an investigation and a trial, no one of us has a reasonable claim to knowing what happened. And given that, we have a civic duty to respect the presumption of innocence.
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