Juries – The Last Line of Defense for the Rule of Law

by: tim dunkin | published: 07 21, 2013

As surely most readers know by now, the jury in the George Zimmerman murder trial has returned their verdict – “not guilty” on all counts. Predictably, the very same left-wing media that sought to whip up a racial firestorm for their own petty, partisan purposes is outraged. The racial hatemongers like Al Sharpton are protesting, saying they want the protests to remain peaceful, yet this after having in many cases previously threatened violence and rioting. Pres__ent Obama, whose Department of Justice played a behind-the-scenes role in perpetuating the persecution of Zimmerman, is now demagoguing the verdict, seeking to use it as an excuse to push for laws to “stem the tide of gun violence” supposedly represented by law-abiding citizens using deadly force to defend themselves from thugs and gangsters, even as his administration lays its plans to subject Zimmerman to further harassment via a federal “civil rights” lawsuit. The Left is angry - their designated fall guy did not fall, their agenda of racial intimidation failed, and they're left scrambling to pick up the pieces. 

Indeed, what we saw in the Zimmerman verdict was a victory, and not just for common sense or for conservatives and liberty lovers who knew all along that Zimmerman was being railroaded for political reasons. Ultimately, this was a victory for the rule of law, and it was a victory delivered by the time-honored principle of a trial by a jury of one's peers, one of the bedrock foundations of our commonwealthian heritage of liberty. 

The right to be judged by one's fellow citizens is an important factor in our republican tradition of liberty. Undergirding it is the understanding that, just as the people are the ultimate earthly authority in our lawmaking as they elect legislators of their choosing, so also are the people the foundational authority in our judicial system, able to make judgments on their fellow citizens, even contrary to those desired by prosecutors, judges, and other agents of the state. The Founders thought that trial by jury was such an important principle for liberty that they included some aspect of it into three of the original ten amendments to our Constitution that form the Bill of Rights. Juries do not exist to rubber stamp the decisions of government judiciary. Instead, they exist, in many cases, to stand as a palladium of liberty against that very judiciary, even going so far as to be able to invoke a de facto nullification of unjust or unconstitutional laws by refusing to convict. When their members understand their rights and their duties, a jury can be a very powerful force for liberty. Even in more conventional situations, such as the Zimmerman case, they can hinder and block efforts by politicos to misuse the law for political purposes, by simply sticking to the evidences, facts, and the principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty and that the state has to prove this guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. 

What we saw with this trial was grossly, blatantly contrary to the rule of law. Zimmerman should never have even been on trial. The fact that he was had more to do with political pressure put on prosecutors in Florida by race-baiting bullies and left-wing demagogues than anything else. The police had originally refused to charge him with a crime at the time of the shooting simply because no crime had been committed. It was a clear-cut case of self-defense, perfectly legitimate under Florida law. Essentially, Zimmerman was on trial not because he had allegedly committed a crime, but because certain elements of the Democrat and left-wing alliance wanted to make an example out of him for their own political purposes. The fact that Obama's Department of Justice was helping to engineer this trial behind the scenes only adds to the unfairness of it all. The decision to charge and try him was made not on a rule of law basis, but on one of a rule of fear and political expediency.

The conduct of the trial was disgustingly biased, with the court in many instances completely disregarding basic rules of evidence and fair procedure. The judge, Debra Nelson, demonstrated a systematic bias against Zimmerman; at one point she refused to allow Zimmerman's family to be in the courtroom while the trial was taking place, yet Trayvon Martin's family was allowed in, a move that seems calculated to tug at the emotional heartstrings of the jury so as to incline them towards a conviction. Evidence that would have helped to establish the character of Trayvon Martin – such as text messages indicating his desire to start fights with other people and generally act with violence – were debarred from presentation by Zimmerman's defense counsel, even though these would help to establish the circumstantial context for the events of that night. And of course, who can forget the prosecution team's closing arguments to the jury, in which they essentially asked the jury to ignore all that inconvenient evidence that favored Zimmerman, and to instead “act from the heart” - something that is the exact antithesis of how our evidentialist legal system is supposed to operate. 

Throughout this entire ordeal, the arguments from the Left have largely avoided having anything to do with evidence, proof, facts, or sound reason. Instead, the emphasis from the Left has been to appeal to emotion and to racial sensitivities by trying to portray this as a case of a mean, scary white man shooting an innocent little black kid who merely wanted to eat his Skittles in peace. This was, of course, a completely false portrayal of events, but one that the Left hoped to use to sway any potential jury, as well as building up a case for racial grievance that could be used to pressure a jury to avoid potential riots and violence by “doing the right thing” and convicting Zimmerman, regardless of what the evidences in the case actually showed. In essence, the Left would have been perfectly happy for the rule of law to go out the window, to be replaced by the rule of racial grievance-mongering and mob violence.  

Fortunately, the jury did do the right thing. The jury acted on the evidence and the testimonies in the case, not allowing themselves to be swayed either by threats or by emotional appeal. The rule of law – the principle that each citizen is to be judged before the law by the facts and words of the law rather than by partiality, bias, fear of violence, threats, political pressure, or manufactured social disapproval – was affirmed. The verdict in the Zimmerman trial is a perfect example of what juries are supposed to do, of how ordered liberty and the rule of law are to be upheld despite pressure from those who would subvert the law and use it as a tool to strike at individuals and groups that they do not like. 

What the brave jurors in this trial did (and I call them “brave” because they will almost surely be subjected to harassment and threats of violence themselves once their identities are inevitably discovered) was essentially to nullify an action of overreaching, biased, vindictive government. Essentially, the motivation that led to this prosecution and the further conduct of the trial, the desire to “get” Zimmerman and make an example of him pour encourager les autres, is the same that drove the IRS to single out conservative groups for “special” treatment and is that which leads to the persecution of conservative academics on college campuses all across America. Examples must be made of those who represent wrong ideas and beliefs. In this case, Zimmerman was a stand-in for the typically bourgeois values of property and self-defense, so he must be made to pay the penalty. Under pressure, as we have now seen, from elements going as high as the Obama administration, the court was tasked with executing a political show trial against a member of an undesirable class. Unfortunately for the Left, the jury was having none of it. As representatives of the people, the jury prevented this kangaroo case from succeeding. The jury, in fact, acted perfectly rightly in their capacity of defending the constitutional rights of the people when they acquitted Zimmerman, since had the prosecution been successful, it would have been a major strike against the right of self-defense in this country, for it would have been used as a precedent to persecute others who defended themselves with deadly force. Whether they realize it or not, the Zimmerman jury performed a constitutional service to us all.

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