Staff opinion: Justice for Trayvon Martin

Moments before George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a police dispatcher told him to stand his ground, but he said it in a different way.

“Are you following him?” the Sanford dispatcher asked. “OK we don’t need you to do that.”

Zimmerman later admitted to police that he shot the teen in self-defense. Citing Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law, police didn’t arrest him, ostensibly accepting his claim and setting a potentially catastrophic precedent in the process.

In this case, based on witness accounts and recorded calls to police, Zimmerman did everything but stand his ground until the very last moment.

Zimmerman’s breathing already sounds labored during the phone call to police, placed during halftime of the NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 26. Then he seems to become exasperated based upon what he thinks will happen: that Martin, who Zimmerman is following in his SUV, is about to commit a crime, any crime.

Martin, who had his sweatshirt hood pulled over his head as he walked home from a Sanford convenience store during a rainstorm, looked suspicious, Zimmerman said. He told the dispatcher that there had been a recent string of break-ins in his neighborhood, a claim he made in many of the about 45 calls to police he’d made in the past year, according to a report by the Orlando Sentinel. He seemed to already have convicted Martin of a crime while he walked down the sidewalk.

“These aholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman said during the call. Then at 2 minutes, 21 seconds into the call, he seems to say a racial slur, though the unfiltered audio of the call contains some distortion.

Based upon Zimmerman’s words and demeanor during the call, he had no intention of standing his ground. He continued to follow Martin in his SUV, eventually becoming involved in a fight and a death that he would claim was in self-defense.

A 16-year-old friend spoke with Martin on the phone seconds before Martin was shot to death. During that call, Martin tells his friend that he’s being followed, and she tells him that he should run away, the friend told ABC News.

Of course with the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to believe Zimmerman’s “I feared for my life” story, much less that police accepted it and let him go. Zimmerman was in an SUV for much of his pursuit; Martin was on foot. Zimmerman outweighed Martin by 100 pounds. Zimmerman was armed with a semiautomatic handgun; Martin had candy and iced tea. Yet according to Zimmerman’s statement, he believed Martin might have killed him if he didn’t shoot him.

The law he’s standing behind, passed in 2005, allows Floridians to kill someone in self-defense, even outside of their own home, if they feel threatened with “death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

It also says that the law is only applicable if the person who kills in self-defense was not committing a crime at the time.

If Zimmerman brandished a gun or threatened Martin in any way before a fight began, he already committed assault. An assault, by Florida law, is “an intentional, unlawful threat by word or act to do violence to the person of another, coupled with an apparent ability to do so, and doing some act that creates a well-founded fear in such other person that such violence is imminent.”

Seminole County’s state attorney, Norm Wolfinger, announced Tuesday that a grand jury will investigate the case and decide whether Martin’s civil rights were violated. The U.S. Department of Justice will also review the case. In the mean time, investigators are poring over evidence to determine whether all of it was taken into account and whether Sanford police tampered with witness statements that would have contradicted Zimmerman’s account of the shooting.

Absent enough evidence to contradict his statements, Zimmerman could walk away unscathed. The Sanford police appear to have already made that judgment call, just as Zimmerman had. Given the magnitude of the potential crime involved, that level of callousness is terrifying. Thanks to a more thorough investigation, we’re about to discover what “standing your ground” really means in Florida. And if Zimmerman walks away free, the precedent will be crystal clear. We’ll have the perfect blueprint for blaming the dead.