Honestly, I was all set to write a post about Sharknado, when the not-guilty verdict in he George Zimmerman trial came out and that all seemed quite meaningless.
I posted a link on Twitter explaining the verdict. That page was actually written before the verdict, but predicted that Zimmerman would walk. Basically, the argument is this: the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and it's hard to prove guilt when there are no witnesses.
In general, I can buy that concept. I'd rather know that some guilty people go free, than know that some innocent people are going to jail. Really, the problem I have is in the thought experiment in which a black vigilante confronts and shots an unarmed white teenager. There's no way the black Zimmerman goes free, and I doubt he'd even avoid the death penalty.
One comment I saw on Twitter was that regardless of anything shown in the trial, the fact is that had Zimmerman just stayed in his car instead of confronting Trayvon Martin, none of this would have happened and Martin would still be alive. That's the particularly sad part of this case. Even if we don't know the details, we do know that the incident was produced out of nothing: Zimmerman approached Martin thinking him to be a criminal; whatever Martin did to Zimmerman was in response to that, and possibly shaped by his anticipation of what Zimmerman's intentions were. So essentially it was a crime produced by the expectation of crime.
That produces quite a danger going forward: regardless of whether Zimmerman was a perpetrator, a victim, or a bit of both, the fact is he made a very bad decision, and that decision has been exonerated by the courts. We can only hope that this verdict is not taken as an endorsement of aggressive, proactive self-defence. Innocent or guilty, that strategy didn't work for Zimmerman; hopefully others will realize that.
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