Jury decides Zimmerman is not guilty

After 16 hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty in the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin.

From the testimony I heard, I would have been unable to call him guilty of 2nd degree murder, because of the way the law is written and the proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that is required for that verdict.

But I would have voted for Guilty on the lesser charge of manslaughter.   It does not seem right that this killing goes totally without consequences.

I do have some thoughts about why the jurors probably made the decision that they did.

At the bottom, we have two incontrovertible facts:   (1) an unarmed teenage boy was followed by a suspicious, stereotyping, gun-carrying, wannabe cop -- and the unarmed boy wound up dead;  (2)  only two people knew what really happened:   one was dead and one was alive to tell his story -- which became the only story the jury heard.  

Beyond that, I think the defense lawyers did a better job of making that self-serving story (complete with inconsistencies and evidence of lying) seem believable and compatible with the evidence than the prosecuting attorneys did of presenting a plausible alternate story that was also consistent with the evidence -- i.e. what might very well have been Trayvon Martin's story, if he were alive to tell it.    Why didn't they present Trayvon Martin as the one defending himself against a man with a gun who was stalking him?

And beyond that, we have the story of a fight between the two with no real evidence to prove who started the actual physical fight.  And we have the survivor of that fight claim that he was fighting for his life at the moment he pulled the trigger and shot Trayvon. 

In the end, given the trial that the jury heard, it was a tough call to make -- to say, without a reasonable doubt -- that it was not self-defense, that he was guilty of manslaughter.   But that would have been my verdict.

Now we have the heavy burden of how we as a country -- and the African-American community, in particular -- are going to feel about this verdict.   About guns and about "stand your ground" laws.  Early tv commentary was quoting people as saying this just confirms that a young black man's life is not worth much, that it just doesn't matter in this country.   Even as an old white man, I feel very bad about this outcome.

Let's hope that despair and anger can be channeled into political action rather than retaliatory rage and violence.

Ralph