Editor’s Note – Civil rights violations on Trayvon Martin by Zimmerman? How about Zimmerman’s civil rights to a fair trial and ‘double jeopardy’? Will there be “triple jeopardy” a civil suit as well?
As each day goes by since the Zimmerman case ended in a ‘not guilty’ verdict, the rhetoric just rises and rises. Now its a civil rights case to so many who did not like the verdict. Therefore, they want another crack at Zimmerman – there must be a way to get that “white Hispanic” to pay for his sins – a theme based in emotion and zealotry. A theme many in the media continue to whip up as they employ words and phrases that are just not true yet raise the blood pressure of those who are ignorant of the law and act out of emotion.
As we pointed out yesterday, and as clear thinking jurists who know and understand the law point out, there never should have been a criminal case. The ‘Special Prosecutor’ appointed by Governor Rick Scott of Florida, Angela Corey, should have never been appointed in the first place because the legal system there was doing its job as well as any jurisdiction in the United States. Alan Dershowitz is openly calling for her disbarment.
Famed defense lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz is calling for a federal investigation into civil rights violations stemming from the George Zimmerman case — but he says the probe should focus on prosecutorial misconduct rather than on allegations of racial profiling and bias. (Newsmax)
Angela Corey and Eric Holder
We agree, Corey should be sanctioned and disbarred for her actions. She filed charges even though a Gran Jury was already scheduled that she cancelled and then she hid exculpatory information and other evidence from the defense. But that is not all. Now her ilk and the race-baiters of this age want Eric Holder to investigate and bring Federal Civil Rights charges against Zimmerman.
What about Zimmerman’s civil rights? There is no Federal interest in this criminal case, but there is a political interest. So now George Zimmerman faces ‘double jeopardy’!
He was tarred and feathered in the media, the DoJ actively helped organize protests against him, ‘community organizers’ descended upon him, politicians ratcheted up the heat, the President weighed in, the NAACP and the Black Panthers foamed at the mouth, and the man was declared guilty before he even went on trial.
Talk about civil rights violations. We also wonder why Rick Scott has been so quiet. Please read the words of a true legal expert, Andy C. McCarthy on the subject:
For Politicized Justice Department, Zimmerman ‘Civil Rights’ Case Is CIA Interrogators Case All Over Again
For those of us who are very proud of our service in the Justice Department – I was a federal prosecutor for nearly 20 years – there is nothing more appalling than seeing the attorney general of the United States heaping praise on, and joining in the machinations of, a race-mongering political demagogue such as Al Sharpton. As I’ve summarized before, Sharpton not only has a history of obstructing the administration of justice but was actively threatening, at the very time Eric Holder colluded with him, to “occupy” Sanford, Fla., if the state declined to file charges against George Zimmerman.
Alan Dershowitz – Noted Harvard Law Professor calls for Corey to be disbarred
In my two decades at the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, most of my best friends and many of the best prosecutors I knew were liberal Democrats. This made for lively debates when we’d go out for beers on a Friday night. But it had nothing to do with our performance of the job.
We all understood that our duty was to keep the politics out of the courtroom and out of law enforcement. And it wasn’t hard to do: It was what the judges expected of us, it was what we expected of the judges, and it was what ordinary citizens who serve on juries were told in every single trial — decide the case based on evidence, not passion, prejudice, fear or favor.
This ethos is being destroyed by Holder and the other movement progressives he has strategically installed in various DOJ policy-making posts (see, e.g., here). Indeed, it is being destroyed by the Obama administration more broadly, which is how you get an IRS bureaucracy – traditionally apolitical and independent – that now harasses and discriminates against conservative groups. That happens only one of two ways: Either the IRS bureaucrats were directed to politicize their mission or they felt encouraged to do so by the “community organizer” approach to governance quite consciously instilled by President Obama.
As I recounted over the weekend, after a Florida state jury acquitted Zimmerman on all counts in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Holder’s Department announced the resuscitation of its preposterous civil-rights investigation of Zimmerman. The main Obama/Holder precedent on which I’d rely to evaluate what’s going on – which is politics, not law – is Holder’s reopening, and later quiet dropping of, the investigation of CIA agents involved in the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation program.
Observe that what the Justice Department has announced is an investigation, not a prosecution. This is the same pedantic distinction Holder drew when he was caught misleading Congress in connection with the surveillance of Fox News correspondent James Rosen. Investigation is cost-free for Holder. The only one who gets harmed is Zimmerman, because he has to live in fear of prosecution, and the continued investigation means a continued spotlight which implies continued harassment by the hard Left. Holder only gets hurt if he actually tries to file charges – he will be humiliated if the grand jury refuses to indict or a jury (or the trial judge) laughs the case out of court.
As I argued last year when Holder did his Sharpton collaboration,
(a) the civil-rights statutes are of dubious constitutionality in terms of federal jurisdiction over intrastate activity by private citizens that involves no federal interest; and
(b) even if that were not so, a federal civil-rights case against Zimmerman would be weaker than the state murder case – if it is possible, there is even less evidence that Zimmerman intended to interfere with Martin’s enjoyment of a recognized federal civil right than that Zimmerman possessed the criminal intent required to sustain a murder conviction.
So when all is said and done, I believe the Justice Department will not indict Zimmerman, the trial would be too embarrassing for DOJ.
Nevertheless, it could be a long time before “all is said and done,” and in the meantime mere investigation is tactically shrewd for a political operator such as Holder. Recall that Holder, as an Obama campaign operative in 2008, stoked Obama’s Bush-deranged political base by promising a “reckoning” against Bush officials for purported war crimes.
Al Aharpton – remember Tawana Brawley?
Of course, there were no prosecutable crimes by the CIA and other officials – career prosecutors had scrutinized the allegations arising out of interrogations and determined that no colorable charges could be brought. Holder reopened the case anyway, continued the investigation for a couple of years, and then quietly dropped it.
The advantage for our Janus-faced attorney general was that he could promise Obama’s angry base that he was actively looking into matter while simultaneously telling Congress and the media that it was absurd to accuse him of harassing the CIA (and thus endangering our security) since he hadn’t actually brought any charges. This kept the issue alive, which was politically useful for the hard-left groups continuing to campaign against Bush, but spared DOJ the humiliation of a trial on a shoddy indictment.
Expect a reprise on Zimmerman. Holder tells the Left he is aggressively investigating; but tells Congress he is just poking around in a responsible way, hasn’t really done anything in the way of filing charges, and respects the verdict in Florida. No charges get filed, but the racial-grievance industry has a green-light to continue agitating, Zimmerman endures the anxiety and expense of a continuing threat of prosecution, and we all watch the spectacle of our justice system used as a tool of racial politics and political fundraising.
As some of us warned five years ago, to confirm Holder as attorney general was to guarantee politicized justice – that, after all, is what “social justice” is.
