Verdict recalls Trayvon Martin travesty

It was a foolish, foolish decision by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse to carry his AR-15-style rifle into riotous Kenosha that night — a deadly provocation, whether he intended so or not.

But as Floridians learned after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin by another gunman with vigilante fantasies, foolish provocations don’t nullify an ever-moreelastic right to self-defense. Not in Florida. Not in Wisconsin. Not in 23 other states that have expanded the right to use deadly force in defense of home to almost anywhere someone happens to feel threatened.

Legal niceties don’t much matter in a time of raging culture wars, especially if inconvenient details clash with popular narratives circulating on social media.

Five weeks after 17-year-old Martin was slain in Sanford, I watched hundreds of protesters march through the Central Florida city, waving signs and chanting, “Justice for Trayvon.” Demonstrators were outraged that police had not yet arrested George Zimmerman because of concerns that Florida’s permissive self-defense law shielded the shooter from prosecution.

It turned out the Sanford cops were right to worry. Zimmerman was eventually charged with second-degree murder, but as the trial unfolded the following summer, it was clear that the particulars of the case didn’t jibe with expectations, especially on the left, of a slam-dunk murder conviction.

The Trayvon Martin killing had been rightly seen as another tragic repercussion of racial profiling, after Zimmerman had wrongly supposed a Black teenager walking through his gated neighborhood was up to no good. His unwarranted stalking led to the fatal confrontation.

But Zimmerman wasn’t tried for his boorish prejudices, just as the case against young Rittenhouse didn’t turn on his reckless imprudence.

A dozen days before the jury returned its verdict in the 2013 trial, I warned readers, “The prosecution overreached … a second-degree murder conviction for George Zimmerman looks ever more doubtful.”

In the days before the Rittenhouse acquittal, a growing number of legal analysts offered a variation on the same theme: The prosecutors had overreached. A second-degree murder conviction was doubtful.

In both cases, the narrow parameters of self-defense law required the prosecutors to disprove the respective shooters’ contentions that they believed, at the moments when they fired their weapons, that they were acting to save themselves from imminent danger. To convince a jury that a second-degree murder conviction was warranted, prosecutors needed to prove that the killers acted out of depravity or evil intentions, rather than fear or self-preservation.

After Zimmerman, a pistol-packing, over-exuberant Neighborhood Watch volunteer, saw Martin walking through his gated subdivision (where Trayvon was visiting his father), he called Sanford police to report a suspicious person. With his gun tucked into his waistband and nothing more to go on than his racist assumptions, he followed Martin.

Then came the fatal confrontation — the murky few moments that ultimately mattered in Zimmerman’s self-defense claim. There was no evidence indicating who instigated their fight on that rainy night, but a witness saw someone who vaguely looked like Martin atop someone who might have been Zimmerman, pummeling him in the face. Didn’t matter if the wanna-be cop was a bigoted dunderhead. Under Florida law, the jury had no real choice.

For those who paid more attention to the trial than the stuff on social media, the Rittenhouse acquittal was less shocking — even if you assume that a 17-year-old with an AR-15 who ventured into a riot zone to play cop was looking for an excuse to shoot someone. Which he did. Three times. Killing two. (Notably, the actual police officers managed to get through the evening without killing anyone.)

But Rittenhouse wasn’t charged with unsavory motives or inane reasoning. Sure, the rifle-toting teenager thrust himself stupidly, maybe even maliciously, into a volatile situation, but the actual shooting incidents fit the definition of legally permissible self-defense. His first victim saw a kid with a gun, chased him, threw a bag at him and made a grab for his weapon. The next, thinking Rittenhouse was a killer fleeing a murder scene, struck him with a skateboard. The third, the only survivor among Rittenhouse’s gunshot victims, had unholstered his handgun, worried about his own self-defense.

Once again, after the jurors were required to disregard the incriminating circumstances that led to the killings and examine each of the deadly incidents in isolation, acquittal was inevitable.

It was no surprise. In Wisconsin, like Florida, like much of gun-mad America, self-defense laws protect even the most ignoble shooters. The victims, not so much.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.