Tell me if you’ve heard anything like this:
An adult male confronts an unarmed 17-year-old male who he believes is committing a crime. The adult claims that the teenager turned upon him violently, so he shot the teen and killed him. The teens family claims that the teen was a good kid, and that the adult was a murderer who acted as judge, jury and executioner. The state arrested the adult, put him on trial and the jury found him not guilty. As a bonus, one of the participants here was black, one was white.
Sound familiar? Here’s where the story goes off the rails: the President had nothing to say about it. CNN didn’t devote a large block of its time to covering this story, calling up talking heads who claim that this was a miscarriage of justice. The Department of Justice didn’t yammer on about civil rights violation charges.
The case in question: one Roderick Scott, a 42-year-old black male, shot dead one 17-year-old Christopher Cervini, who was white. This occurred in New York State, which blighted region does *not* have Stand Your Ground laws. Even though the parallels to the Martin/Zimmerman case are blatantly obvious, the national response could not have been more different. Why could that be?
The lesson in *both* cases here is, honestly, “don’t assault people or otherwise act the thug, or you might get shot.” But there is money and politics involved in the more recent trial that was not involved in the earlier case.
It would be interesting if those in the media yammering about the “tragedy” or “miscarriage of justice” of the Zimmerman verdict would be confronted with the Scott verdict at every turn, and be made to explain why America is horribly racist when two remarkably similar cases produce remarkably similar verdicts even though the races are swapped around.