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Pastimes : The "Zimmerman" File -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (359)	7/15/2013 1:24:46 PM
From: Shoot1st	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 671

I think arno should condo his farm....... Zim could move in and play with the deer and antelope..... and from what I can recall....it's an easily defended position. I'd have to consider an efficiency loft in the barn...... Shootie

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (359)

7/15/2013 1:53:38 PM

From: Sdgla

Respond to of 671

The “what if Trayvon were white” logical fallacy

Posted by William A. Jacobson Monday, July 15, 2013 at 10:03am

One of the most popular liberal reactions to the finding that George Zimmerman was not guilty is to posit the question of how the case would have been treated differently if Trayvon Martin were white.

The question always is answered by the author that the shooting of a white person by a non-white person is treated more seriously by the police and the criminal justice system. This, the argument goes, makes the Zimmerman case all about race.

Law professor and blogger Paul Campos makes this argument at Salon.com, Zimmerman saga was all about race:

Because it happened in America, the trial of George Zimmerman for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin was all about race. And because it happened in America, the people who benefit politically from the same invidious forces that led both to Trayvon Martin’s killing, and the acquittal of his killer, will deny that race had anything to do with either the killing or the verdict.

Suppose Trayvon Martin had been a 230-pound 30-year-old black man, with a loaded gun in his jacket. Suppose Zimmerman had been a 150-pound 17-year-old white kid, who was doing nothing more threatening than walking back from a convenience store to his father’s condo….

How do you suppose the big scary black man’s claim of “self-defense” would have gone over with a jury made up almost entirely of white women? …

Trayvon Martin was stalked by George Zimmerman because he was black. Trayvon Martin is dead because he was black. George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin because the boy Zimmerman killed was black.

If you deny these things, you are either a liar or an idiot, or possibly both.

Variations of this argument are commonplace.

Putting aside the factual incorrectness of the argument that Zimmerman was motivated by race, the argument is fallacious for several reasons:

First, the argument is not an argument that the jury was wrong under the law. Indeed, later in his post Campos admits the jury was correct under Florida law:

Nothing above requires the conclusion that the jury’s verdict was wrong as a matter of law. Florida’s laws, in their majestic equality, extend to people of all races the right to engage in vigilante killing that eliminates the sole witness to that killing. To point this out is neither a defense of those laws, nor a claim that they will in fact be applied equally. In other words, to blame this jury in this situation is to miss the point.

But...