The near-lynching of George Zimmerman

It was one of the most extraordinary trials in American history – not so much for what happened in the courtroom (though there were more than a few unusual developments there, too), but for what happened outside the courtroom that enabled the near racial lynching of a Hispanic victim of a crime who merely defended himself.

Let’s recount the political and media circus that led to the trial and, ultimately, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin:

• Barack Obama’s administration actually spent taxpayer dollars to help professional race-baiter Al Sharpton pressure the state of Florida to try Zimmerman for a case where charges should probably never have been filed. Remember, it was Obama himself who famously and ignominiously said, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” But that wasn’t enough for Obama in his effort to turn the Zimmerman case into a racial show trial. His U.S. Justice Department then met with Martin’s parents and Sharpton to help them organize rallies against the defendant in an obvious effort to inject official bias the case. Eric Holder spent thousands of federal dollars to send officials to Florida “to work marches, demonstrations and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen,” according to government documents. Six times the Justice Department sent teams to Sanford between March 25, 2012, and April 12, 2012, until they were able to persuade local officials to arrest Zimmerman for murder. Holder told Sharpton he would take “swift action” in the case to ensure local police had not committed a “civil rights crime” in releasing Zimmerman. He also deployed FBI agents to Sanford. Shortly afterward, Sanford’s police chief was fired. Then the chief investigator was fired. This was an effort, directed from Washington, to frame Zimmerman as some kind of homicidal racist maniac, when he was actually a Democrat, an Obama supporter.

• Then there was the media circus. I like what defense attorney Mark O’Mara had to say about this: “Two systems went against George Zimmerman that he can’t understand: you guys, the media. He was like a patient in an operating table where mad scientists were committing experiments on him and he had no anesthesia. He didn’t know why he was turned into this monster, but quite honestly you guys had a lot to do with it. You just did. Because you took a story that was fed to you and you ran with it, and you ran right over him. And that was horrid to him. Then he comes into a system that he trusts – let’s not forget, six voluntary statements, voluntary surrender – and he believes in a system that he really wanted to be a part of, right? And then he gets prosecutors that charge him with a crime that they could never, ever, prove. … So those two systems failed him.”

• Then there was the role of State Attorney Angela Corey. She was the prosecutor who issued an arrest warrant and criminal complaint that resulted in criminal charges against Zimmerman. She did so while apparently omitting exculpatory evidence, such as photographs of the wounds on Zimmerman’s head. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz called Corey’s omissions unethical and criminal in their own right.

Back to the media frenzy to railroad Zimmerman:

• There was the hopelessly and knowingly out-of-date photo published and republished showing Martin as an innocent young kid.

• There were the relentless “news stories” portraying the death of Martin as a racial killing, with a “white man” killing a black child.

• There was the NBC-edited 9-1-1 audio between Zimmerman and a police dispatcher making it seem as if Zimmerman was voluntarily profiling Martin as black, when this was not the case. (Heads actually rolled at NBC when this scandal came to light.)

• CNN attributed a racial epithet to Zimmerman before correcting its error.

• ABC claimed there was no visible evidence of Zimmerman’s head wounds. Later the network was forced to air the video in which his wounds were quite obvious.

Despite all this collusion to heighten racial tensions and frame an innocent man, Zimmerman was still acquitted.

But the racial hucksters had a backup plan for that eventuality, too.

There would need to be the credible threat of racial riots if Zimmerman got off. As of this writing, there are numerous news stories about communities bracing for the violence.

Is this what the criminal justice system in America has become? Is it just another stage for political agitation? And how does one get his life back from an ordeal like this?