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JusticeForThePoor 8 - 03 Apr 2012 - Main.KensingNg
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| | Hearing about the Trayvon Martin case, I can't help but think about a past Moglen discussion. His observation that the criminal justice system
is just to the poor and kind to the rich can also be applied to how races are viewed in the court system and in public opinion. I was baffled in a recent Matt Lauer interview of Trayvon's parents. At one point he urged the family to not "jump to conclusions" and pass judgment on Zimmerman. Ummm...what?? Some cases are murky. Some have grey areas and nuance. What is so striking about Trayvon's case is the lack of nuance. I don't think there's been a case so public in recent years that has in fact be so void of complexity. | | | I think I'm starting to realize that it's not enough to be an uncreative lawyer that merely "does law" because the the law doesn't do any of the heavy-lifting at all. The uncreative lawyer merely facilitates the only power the law really has, that is, to impart a veneer of legitimacy to what much of the populace already deems legitimate. Perhaps being a creative lawyer, then, requires doing more than just law, finding out what other disciplines can teach us about the society we live in, and seeing the law as merely one more tool to be used in conjunction with others.
-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 01 Apr 2012 | |
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> | RumbidzaiMaweni? , I love your last point about what it means to be a creative/uncreative lawyer: the idea that an uncreative lawyer merely does law, which is inherently weak. I want to compare it to the "bad man" idea that we heard a while back. I may be using it wrong, but as I understand it the idea is that bad men / bad lawyers / uncreative lawyers focus very narrowly on their work.
They merely do law, and they do it for the paycheck (like Wylie and Cerriere and the narrator in Bartleby, assuming I understand those readings correctly). This renders their work unimportant and weak. Unimportant because they're not using the law to it's fullest extent (like, say, Tharaud) and weak because their work relies solely on the malleable law and not on stronger social grounds.
Anyhow, to bring us back to the Trayvon Martin case, I actually disagree with MalaikaJabali? (sorry Malika). I think that this case is murky because we don't know what happened. Who struck first? Did Zimmerman actually have injuries? Who was the person screaming on the phone? Unless I'm oblivious to some recent developments in the case, these things are all unknown. Of course, this isn't to say that the actual result (no investigation) is okay. An investigation would help clear these questions up and bring clarity to what is a murky situation. Maybe it'd turn out that Trayvon was beating Zimmerman up before he was shot. Maybe it'd turn out that Zimmerman shot Trayvon from a distance without any provocation. At this point, I can't say for certain. I probably would like to see some sort of investigation, though.
On the other hand, the police department has said that there is no probable cause to arrest Zimmerman, and without probable cause they can't do anything. As a law student, probable cause sounds like sexy legal term that carries a lot of weight and meaning. And maybe it does. Maybe there's some five part test which I should know but I don't because I've rotted my memory with facebook and twitter. In any case, the police department claims that it's investigation has shown that there's no reason to arrest Zimmerman. Now, as someone whose investigation of the case extends to quickly skimming the wikipedia article and various NY Times articles, I can voice my opinion that I think Zimmerman sounds guilty as sin... but I'm not sure that I'm qualified to set myself of the arbiter of what should and shouldn't be done by the police in Florida.
To sum up, I think that at best we can say that I have a hunch that Zimmerman ought to be arrested, but I also don't know for certain and I do acknowledge the greater expertise of the Sanford police in this case, as they've actually done the investigation. At the end of the day, I feel uncomfortable asserting that a man should be arrested just because a lot of people who have only vaguely researched the facts think he should be. To use a racial analogy, it sounds kind of like a lynch mob.
-- KensingNg - 02 Apr 2012 |
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