I had planned to write a celebratory post this evening but, alack, I did not pass all my comps. One of the 4 did not pass. I worked pretty hard an all of them and thought they were all pretty good. It just seems this one missed the mark.

So I have to re-write it. I've been in contact with the professor and I'm pretty sure what I need to do to fix it.  I knew I had taken a risk by veering off-point on a tangential, though important, topic and I recognize that it isn't as tight as it should be.

I guess I'll be spending spring break re-working that instead of working on the term paper for my other class.

Do you think for 1 minute that I (or you) could go and shoot someone and not get arrested?

The facts are clear:  Zimmerman pursued the boy, caught him, started shit with him, then shot him dead.  That is second-degree murder, plain and simple (look it up).  There was no self-defense, no standing of ground, no reckless endangerment, no mitigating circumstances whatsoever.  He pursued him, attacked him, and killed him.  He should have been immediately arrested and charged with second-degree murder.  He should still now be arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

911 tapes of his own conversation have Zimmerman following the boy, getting out of his car, and accosting him - in direct contradiction of police instructions.  Witnesses have him fighting with Trayvon while the boy yelled for help, moments before the shot.  Eye-witnesses report him standing up right after shooting him and saying “I shot him.”  In his phone conversation at the time, Trayvon says he is being followed and was scared and tried to evade Zimmerman, eventually running.  The phone call records Zimmerman accosting him.  In all this time, Zimmerman has never denied killing Trayvon.

Zimmerman claims self defense, yet every bit of evidence, even Zimmerman's own conversation, show Zimmerman to be the aggressor.  As a point of law, the aggressor cannot claim self defense.  The self defense claim is spurious.  Period.

So why is he not in jail?  Hmmm.  Funny also that the police dispatched a narcotics detective to the scene instead of a homicide detective:  Apparently a dead young black guy automatically means there are illegal drugs.

There is no reason, except for the refusal of local authorities to prosecute the case (seemingly due to obvious bias of the local police and/or prosecutor), to involve the FBI or investigate this case as a federal hate crime.  It is a simple open-and-shut murder case.  As I understand it, there are more hurdles to be overcome to show it is a federal hate crime and it may be a more difficult case to prosecute, as the mentioned in this piece in the Washington Post.  Of course Zimmerman has given the prosecutor plenty of ammo for the hate crime charge:  the immediate assumption that a young black guy in the neighborhood is automatically “suspicious,” his determination to get him since “those assholes always get away,” and his muttering of “fucking coons” just before attacking him.  But it would be much preferable if the local authorities would just bring him up on murder charges as the law, and justice, demands.  But they won't.  In my opinion, the police/prosecutor should also be charged as conspirators in the federal hate crime due to their refusal to arrest and their (intentionally?) botched  investigation of the scene (no toxicology on Zimmerman, no investigation of his vehicle, dispatching narcotics instead of homicide detective, etc.).  They are accessories after the fact and should be charged accordingly.