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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Jelani Cobb and Jeffrey Toobin on the George Zimmerman verdict.
00:17:52
Jelani Cobb and Jeffrey Toobin on the George Zimmerman verdict.
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, July 18th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker.
- [01:25]
C
Hey, we've had some break ins in my neighborhood and there's a real suspicious guy.
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B
A year and a half ago, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old African American student. Zimmerman's acquittal this week has sparked protests and a national discussion about guns, race and racial profiling.
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C
He's a black male. Okay. How old would you say he looks? He's got a button on his shirt. Late teens. Late teens. Okay. Mm. Something's wrong with him.
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B
That's from the call Zimmerman made to the non emergency police response line in Sanford, Florida. Jeffrey Toobin and Jelani Cobb are here today to discuss the case and its aftermath. Jeff, tell us first, what were the facts before the jury?
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D
They were a lot more complicated than it seems. Now. I think George Zimmerman was patrolling that night and he saw the person who turned out to be Trayvon Martin. He called in that he saw a suspicious character. The dispatcher asked him certain questions, also said, don't follow him. After that phone call, there was a confrontation between the two of them. And of course, Trayvon Martin was killed.
- [02:34]
B
Was Martin not running away from him at one point during the.
- [02:38]
D
This remains in hot dispute. At one point shortly before the shooting, Trayvon Martin was on the phone with his friend Rachel Jeantel, who testified at the trial. And she said Martin said this creepy guy was following him and he was trying to get away. Zimmerman, in his phone call also says that Trayvon Martin is running at some point. But why Martin was running, Was he running away? Was he running just because he felt like running? Again, that's something, I think that is a mystery today.
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B
Okay, and just to get down to the basic facts, why did they end up with a jury of six women, five white and one Hispanic?
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D
Well, Florida is one of several states that has six person juries for many criminal cases. Not for death penalty cases, but for a lot of criminal cases. The Supreme Court has said that's okay, the U.S. supreme Court. And it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot faster. It's a lot easier to pick a six person jury. The jury selection takes less time and you have to pay fewer jurors.
- [03:38]
B
And what about the racial composition?
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D
Well, that to a certain extent was random chance, as most people probably know. There were six women on the jury, no men, four, five white women, one person whose ethnicity is somewhat of a mystery. Hispanic, African American, not entirely clear, but not white. And the community from which the jury was drawn is substantially white, although not as overwhelmingly white as the jury. So it was some combination of demographics and random chance that led to the all women, almost all white jury.
- [04:14]
B
Jelani, you've been closely following the case. Do you agree with Jimmy Carter that based on the evidence presented, the jury got it right?
- [04:22]
C
It's difficult to say that the jury got it right in terms of being in accordance with the law. I think it seems as if they were of getting it right. It raises, I think, other thornier questions about what exactly are the parameters of self defense and whether or not the law is constructed in such a way as to produce verdicts that might be legal, but not necessarily just both Trayvon.
- [04:44]
B
Martin and George Zimmerman instantly became symbolic figures, obviously in different ways to different people. Talk about that a little. This is something you've been writing about.
- [04:52]
C
On its face, it appeared that this young man had been shot and there had been no official inquiry. The person had just been allowed to go on scot Free. And so there began to be agitation around this issue of whether or not this person should be investigated. George Zimmerman became a symbol, I think, for much different reasons. For one, you know, people very quickly began to see him as besieged. Especially after President Obama made the statement that if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. People began to attach a kind of symbolic relationship to George Zimbin in that he represented the kind of abiding fear of gun owners that their, you know, gun rights would be restricted. Kind of everything that's been bubbling around under the surface of domestic politics in the last year or so, especially after the Newtown shootings. People attached to George Zimmerman and saw him as symbolic in that way. The fact that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for an incident which didn't seem on its face to be something that people would say, oh, okay, I need to go out and help this person get a defense, I think symbolizes just how important he'd become.
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D
This is the first really big story I've covered while I've been active on Twitter. And I have been just shocked by the polarized, angry reaction that I have seen on social media about this case. Just bitter and frankly, very racially divided. Black people totally aggrieved by the injustice. White conservatives indignant at any criticism of Zimmerman's behavior. Both of them angry at me for stuff that I said. But I just think the polarizing and angry reaction has been really, frankly, kind of disturbing to me.
- [06:38]
B
Zimmerman was armed. Martin was not. Zimmerman had a member of the police department on the line. In a state that doesn't have a stand your ground law, would the jury have been given substantively different set of instructions? Could we have avoided this tragic misunderstanding?
- [06:54]
D
Well, there would have been different jury instructions because I think there's been a lot of confusion about this. The stand your ground law has two implications. One is a defendant can invoke it before trial, and the judge can say, that's a good defense. This case is dismissed, case over. That didn't happen in this case. The defense didn't ask for that kind of hearing. But it also substantively changes the definition of self defense. That is given to the jury as a jury instruction, and that was given to the jury here, that Zimmerman had the right literally to stand his ground rather than the old law, which was someone has a duty to retreat. Florida and many states have replaced duty to retreat with stand your ground. I don't know what the jury would have done if this definition of self defense was the old one. It would have been a tougher case for the defense, a slightly easier case for the prosecution. But I don't think we can say with certainty that he would have been convicted under the old definition. He still would have raised self defense.
- [07:58]
B
Jelani, you're writing for the magazine this week a comment about guns and how they figure into the case. The nra, as we all know, has lobbied very hard for stand your ground laws around the country. Where do you think this trial and verdict leaves the national debate over guns?
- [08:15]
C
The NAACP's convention was this week in Orlando. And considering this is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, you might have expected them to be in Washington D.C. but I think it was a very strategic political decision for them to hold the convention in Orlando. Eric Holder addressed the convention and the line that got the most response was when he said that there needed to be tougher questions asked about the laws that purport to be about self defense but really promote more violence. I thought it was an extraordinary thing that that line received so much attention and so much applause because we're talking about an organization whose history is that of their members being assaulted and in some instances killed for no crime more than attempting to participate in the democratic process. And so what I think has become clear in ways that were not perhaps before this verdict is that there's another front in what we consider traditional civil rights struggles. And that's going to be around issues of guns, gun control, and specifically the self defense laws that all came together as kind of a toxic cocktail in this trial.
- [09:22]
D
I see this case through the prism that I see everything through, which is the evolution of the Republican Party. The contemporary Republican Party has made a commitment to gun rights, which is frankly beyond even their commitment to low taxes. It is that much of a bedrock principle. We saw it in the quick failure of gun control in the Congress this year. And the fact that Eric Holder endorsed a change to stand you'd ground probably solidifies stand you'd ground forever in states controlled by Republicans because they revile Holder and they revile anything which they think will impede the right to bear arms.
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B
So tell us, Jeff, what Holder is up to. With the Justice Department's federal investigation into.
- [10:08]
D
The death of Martin, there is the possibility under federal law of a criminal case against Zimmerman for violating Trayvon Martin's rights. There is some history of defendants acquitted in state court, subsequently prosecuted in federal court for civil rights violations, the most famous being the cops who beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles in the early 90s. It would be a Tough case, because the evidence, as far as I'm aware, there's no secret evidence out there that they could introduce that wasn't introduced in the Florida case. And the legal issue would be much the same. Yes, it's true that the self defense would be defined somewhat differently, somewhat more narrowly. Yes, it's true that the level of intent would be somewhat more difficult to prove because a federal case has to establish that the crime was committed because the victim was black. These cases are rare. They're difficult to pursue. They're not impossible. But I am somewhat skeptical that the Justice Department will or should bring another.
- [11:15]
B
Case and talk a little bit more specifically about hate crimes and how those are defined, because that's at the core of what the Justice Department's doing, right?
- [11:23]
D
I mean, the irony of the legal issues here is that they are all versions of the same question, which is, what was George Zimmerman's intent? This was not a factual dispute. Everybody knows that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. Everybody knows what gun he used, where it happened, when it happened. The only issue was intent. Was it self defense or was it reckless, which would have been manslaughter? The issue with a federal prosecution is can the federal government prove that George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin because of his race? And that's the burden that is imposed on the government in those sorts of prosecutions. It's a difficult burden, and I think, frankly, it'd be a difficult burden in this case.
- [12:09]
B
Jelani, I want to get back to what Jeff was talking about a little bit earlier about the aftermath of the case and these extremely polarized reactions. You also wrote about all of the predictions of lynch mobs and violence. Talk a little bit about that and how that is a kind of twisted version of what has happened historically in America in cases that deeply involve race.
- [12:31]
C
One of the things that became almost an article of faith among some conservative commentators, notably Bill O'Reilly, was that there were going to be riots after this race verdict came down. Should Joyce Lemon be acquitted? And I think the reference point there was perhaps the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after those four officers were acquitted. But there were, I think, lots of other dynamics mitigating that and lots of other dynamics that would kind of lend to a selective amnesia about how race and riots have interacted in American history. So for one, the overwhelming mood, I think, from the beginning of this affair has been lamentation and sadness, especially given the prominence of Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, who, you know, repeatedly appealed for legal redress of, you know, their son's death. They were not wild eyed people demanding fire and chaos in response to what had happened to their son. And I think in addition to that, there's a long history that we seem to forget about of rioting that does not involve black people. I think it was kind of the alarmist view of it that black people are going to burn everything down. But we don't really think about the riots in Boston to prevent school integration.
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D
Well, and the subtext of all of that is, in a way, the subtext of the case, which is among significant corners of American life. Black people are seen as scary and dangerous. Whether it's a kid who walking on a rainy night, whether it's political activists after a major national event, they are scary and dangerous in a way that white people are not.
- [14:12]
C
I think one of the most terrible ironies of this situation, and a situation that is replete with terrible ironies, is that, you know, the family that moved there, the family of Tracy Martin's fiance, likely moved into a gated community to be safe from crime themselves. And then the fear of crime is somehow or another related to the death of Trayvon Martin. And so there's a terrible paradox for some African Americans of being both afraid of crime and afraid of people who see you as nothing but the embodiment of it.
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B
Jeff, just to get back to the trial for a second, the judge would not even allow the discussion of the term racial profiling. What was that all about?
- [14:53]
D
The judge made a ruling that the prosecution could say that George Zimmerman was profiling Trayvon Martin, but they couldn't say racial profiling, leading to a situation that I found kind of incomprehensible.
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B
What does that even mean?
- [15:09]
D
Good question. I don't know. But this came up repeatedly in the summations that the prosecutor said he was clearly profiling Trayvon Martin as a criminal. I mean, just don't understand what those words mean. But again, I think it was symptomatic of how the subject of race was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the courtroom.
- [15:32]
C
But it was also kind of the way that we talk about race in general, that we talk around it, and we have to understand what's in between the lines. And so in some ways, the case was a metaphor for not only in terms of what actually happened, but the way that we proceeded with it. And the way that the case was handled was a metaphor for the way that we handle race and the society in general.
- [15:52]
B
Getting back for both of you to President Obama last year saying that if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. But when the verdict came down, the President focused only on gun violence. Jelani, why do you think that?
- [16:05]
C
It's not the first time that the President has made a statement like that. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the verdict was reached in the Sean Bell shooting in New York. The young man who was shot by NYPD on the eve of his wedding, he was unarmed. And when the officers were acquitted of all wrongdoing in that case, Barack Obama released a statement which was, you know, very tepid, you know, calling for people to respect the verdict and saying that we are, you know, a country of laws and so on. And this statement really mimicked that. And I think that it was tone deaf in some ways. It was tailored to be completely non offensive. But in reading it, you could almost forget that there had been a really grievous incident at the heart of this.
- [16:50]
D
I couldn't help but thinking in reading Obama's statement to his off the cuff reaction to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in the first year, where for really one of the very, very rare times in Barack Obama's public life, he flashed some of the anger that a lot of black people feel against the cops. And he said, basically, well, you know, this is what happens to black people. I'm just paraphrasing what he said. That, of course, led him to retreat very quickly and led to the famous beer summit with Skip Gates and the cop at the White House. But I think the bad reaction to his statement about the Gates incident led him to go back to the very cautious approach that he followed in the Bell case. And again, he.
- [17:35]
B
But did it reflect any response to his comment about his son would have looked like Trayvon Martin?
- [17:41]
C
When the President first made the statement that if he had his son, he looked like Trayvon, I thought it was ingenious politically because he was expressing sympathy without overtly politicizing it, or so I thought. But if we remember immediately after that, Newt Gingrich, who was, you know, in the midst of the, if I remember correctly, the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich, said that the President was essentially saying that the tragedy was that Trayvon Martin was black and dead, not simply that he was dead. And then it became a kind of echo that galvanized support around George Zimmerman. So I think that in some ways the President was looking at not making this about him, and that perhaps if he had released a statement that was any stronger, this conversation would have become about him and about what he said and it would have taken attention away from the grieving of the family.
- [18:27]
B
Okay, thank you both. Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer. Jelani Cobb is director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and a frequent blogger on new yorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [18:43]
C
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- [18:45]
D
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- [18:47]
C
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- [18:52]
D
The magazine online@newyorker.com and also in the tablet edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts from PRX.