A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

One of the tragedies of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case – and there are many of them, believe me – is that it has revealed, once again, the seamier side of the American mindset, particularly when it comes to the concepts of justice and “mob rule.” To be sure, there are certain points about the case that everyone seems to agree on.  Trayvon Martin, a 16-year-old adolescent was shot and killed by 26-year-old volunteer community crime watchman George Zimmerman on the early evening of February 26, 2012 in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.  There was a confrontation of some sort, there was a scuffle, and Zimmerman did fire a single shot from a pistol he was licensed to carry, a shot which killed the teenager. Unfortunately for those of us who have been following the case from a long distance, the whole sad incident is still shrouded in a fog of uncertainty.  Very few people in the gated community actually saw what happened, and like many similar occurrence...

Ever since a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain (and law enforcement wannabe) named George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012 during a brief but fatal confrontation in a Sanford gated community, the state of Florida's seven-year-old Stand Your Ground law has found itself in the cross-hairs of much-needed scrutiny by its supporters and critics alike. Passed in 2005 by a Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Florida Statute 776.013 expanded the traditional "Castle Doctrine" law which, among other things, allows a law-abiding citizen to use lethal force - if necessary - to defend his or her home by extending the rights to self-defense to any location where the person who claims self-defense has a "legal right to be." To quote from the Stand Your Ground statute:   (1)  A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to him...

If you, like me, watch news broadcasts, read newsmagazines and/or newspapers or surf the Web for up-to-date reporting and different viewpoints on the issues of the day, you probably have noticed that everyone has an opinion on those issues, especially "hot button" stories such as the Trayvon  Martin tragedy which took place in February of 2012. Trayvon Martin, as you may well be aware (unless you have been stranded on a desert island with no links to the outside world), was a 17-year-old Miami-Dade County resident who, while on a 10-day suspension from his high school, was spending some "away from all the bad influences" time with his father in Sanford (a small town near Orlando), where the elder Martin's girlfriend owns a house in a gated community. Though the details are still murky and under investigation by several law enforcement agencies, Trayvon Martin left that house during a basketball game and walked several blocks to a nearby convenience store to ...