Not Guilty

It seems that those two little words are only the beginning of the conversation.

It's a conversation our country needs to have. There are a lot of people saying that the jury has spoken and we should move on; however, I seem to recall many of these same people just being unable to get over the Casey Anthony verdict for a long time. Whether you agree or disagree with either verdict, there does seem to be a bit of hypocrisy here.

Why do we want to move on from this case so fact, but still dwell on Casey Anthony? I think that's a question people need to ask themselves. Some people seem to be obsessing over how the media, or the prosecution, or whatever didn't portray Martin "as the thug he was".

My question is, why does it matter? Youth of many races make many bad decisions involving crime, drugs, and fighting. But they don't get the death penalty for that.

Without getting into the verdict, what do we know 100% for sure about that night? That George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. I think that's pretty much all we know for sure.

I ask you this: if you had a troubled teen who got killed (rightly or wrongly), would you feel better about it because he had problems? Would you say "well my kid smoked pot, so I'm okay with it"? Would you say "well he got in a lot of fights, so I expected him to get shot eventually"?

Again, I repeat that this particular post neither supports nor disagrees with the verdict. I'm just trying to understand why people are so obsessed with trying to say that "he's a thug so it's okay". I've heard bad things about both Zimmerman's and Martin's pasts on the same news networks, so I don't know that they've made some sort of attempt to show bias. However, I think it's a general thing to be respectful to the dead where possible. I'm sure if Martin killed Zimmerman that night, the media would dig less into his past than Martin's.

As much as some people wish to deny it, race is still very much a big deal in our country. Not everything is about race, but so much about this case certainly is. We as a country need to figure out how we can do better. This is one of many senseless killings in this country, and we need to look for ways to do stop them. It took a long series of events to lead up to the confrontation that ended with Trayvon Martin's life being taken; was every step in that process necessary? Maybe this is the question we should be considering most of all.