When a trial reaches the national prominence that Florida v. Zimmerman has attained, it loses any sense of fairness or justice. It becomes something other than a search for truth in a contest between prosecution and defense. At the national level, trials like this become entirely politicized.
What I mean by politicized is that in this case the trial ceased to be about whether George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin. It became America on trial for all its racial prejudices, with George Zimmerman, representing the remnant of American racism, against the unfairly-profiled, misunderstood black teenager. Conversely, Zimmerman became a symbol for political opponents of gun control and proponents of Florida’s “Stand your Ground” law, many of whom hardly bothered to ask whether Zimmerman’s actions qualified as self-defense.
In trials like Florida v. Zimmerman, each side becomes a vehicle for political agendas that often have nothing to do with bringing about justice.
Zimmerman, an average-Joe, Hispanic neighborhood watchman underwent a media transformation into a hero for the cherished American right to self-defense. Trayvon Martin was put through a similar metamorphosis: he lived a suburban lifestyle that anyone would consider middle-class, yet by the time of the trial’s verdict his banner was flown in all of America’s inner cities, as if his situation mirrored the prejudice that those inhabitants face on a daily basis. These valorized characterizations are the result of pressure groups — the NAACP, the NRA, and others — warping the complex facts of the case to fit their narrow agendas.
The media ate all of this up, of course. It made a great story, palatable to a national audience because of its supposed simplicity. People love to pick sides in a black-white binary, and the Zimmerman case gave them an opportunity to do this.
Meanwhile, any notions of fairness in the judicial proceedings went up in smoke. How could the facts come to light amid all the screaming about “institutionalized prejudice,” “racism in America,” “police profiling,” etc.? Dirty politics hijacked the judicial process, and the most immediate victim was justice, and the resolving certainty that goes with it. Thanks to opportunistic groups like the NAACP and the NRA, and a news media hungry for an inflammatory story, jurors in Zimmerman’s case faced a choice between black and white, a horrible oversimplification.
If we acknowledge, then, that politicizing a trial destroys its aspirations to justice, what else can we learn from Florida v. Zimmerman? How can we ensure that another trial does not reach the same caricatured proportions? How do we ensure a reasonable environment that best allows the legal system to arrive at just conclusions? The answer is simple — refuse to give such a trial our attention.
I carefully avoided making a stance on the trial’s verdict with this article because I know that whatever information reached me from the sensational media outlets and the trial that embodied that chaos cannot be relied upon. We should recognize that by the time a trial is featured 20 out of 24 hours on CNN HLN, the facts are not an object of concern. Unless, of course, a political circus is what we want out of our journalism.