Wednesday, July 10, 2013

"TRAYVON MARTIN:ONE TRIAL AND TWO DIFFERENT JUDGEMENTS"

The ongoing jury trial of George Zimmerman over the shooting dead of the 17 years old African American teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in which George Zimmerman claimed to have acted in self-defense and in line with the state of Florida's law of "Stand Your Ground" has heavily divided the public opinions across America, polarized the news media, reopened the old wounds of the decades of legal and racial injustices and have further divided the nation along the racial lines since this case first gained the national attention. Americans are also heavily divided today about the final outcome of this murder trial by the jury through the America's criminal justice system that has documented history of questionable judgements against the minority Americans to date.

No single human institution that is run by human beings is perfect, totally objective, infallible,  completely autonomous, fully independent, unbiased and not subjective in the way it addresses the various human issues, disputes, problems and challenges. The all-powerful America's justice system including its criminal arm are not excluded from the above categorization that I have given to all the human institutions. The America's justice system was established primarily to administer justice fairly in all the cases before it. This justice system is 100% evidence-based in the way it operates, functions and passes its judgements. This justice system is not all-knowing and all-seeing and it does not have the complete legal responses to all the cases before it.

No matter the final outcome of this trial, it will never go well with all Americans from walks of life in the same way. There are some Americans today that have full trust and confidence in the America's criminal justice system, there are other Americans that do not trust or have any single confidence in the outcome of this trial and from this selected jury. The last set of Americans are indifferent, but are fully prepared for any outcome whether it is a conviction of murder charge against George Zimmerman or a complete jury exoneration that is based on George Zimmerman's claim of self-defense according to the state of Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

There are basically three different sides or accounts to every human event that involves two persons directly and if that event was watched by other human witnesses. The account of the first person that was directly involved, the account of the second person that was also directly involved and lastly the eye witnesses' account of the observers that same that event. These three different human accounts may be objective, truthful, distorted, manipulated, twisted, biased and subjective at the end of the day. These human accounts may eventually reveal the whole truth, the half-truth or no truth at all on what actually took place or happened between those two persons. The jury at the end of the day will have to rely on these three varied human accounts to arrive at its final legal decision in which the case of Trayvon Martin versus George Zimmerman is not going to be an exception to this historical precedence in the America's criminal justice system. Americans at the end of this trial will remained divided forever over the two different, distinct and competing judgements, which are, the legal judgement of this jury versus the judgement from the court of public opinion.


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