I think everyone recognizes the value of an investigation given the facts of this case. My problem, and what I think Malaika points out in the initial post, is that the police did not conduct the investigation in a timely manner and uphold their duty to apply the law equally. They seemed to take Zimmerman at his word about what had happened in his run-in with Trayvon and made no apparent effort to identify the validity of his version of events until people organized themselves over social media to express outrage, the mainstream media picked up on the story, and the DOJ then forced the issue. At that point, the evidence was stale and any investigation was going to be less useful: Zimmerman had time to solidify his story, whereas in the aftermath the police may have been able to identify inconsistencies; the physical evidence at the scene deteriorated by the time they started looking into the events; and the memories of any potential witnesses and those who were around Zimmerman in the following days would be less fresh. I agree with Malaika that it is much less likely that they would have conducted the investigation in such a manner had the races of the individuals been reversed.

In my view, this case is an example of real people knowing what the real truth is, as Judge Day suggested in today's reading. Probable cause to arrest is a legal fiction and it is not what people are demanding. The wrong they have identified is that this investigation (or lack thereof) was conducted in a blatantly sub-par way. Perhaps the police were being prejudicial or racist, as many seem to think, or perhaps they were just lazy. Either way, because of this inexcusable error it may be too late to gather the kind of evidence our justice system (the lawyers) require to prove what happened beyond a reasonable doubt. People are right to be angry that the system may have missed its window to do justice and to care that a legal fiction is intervening when what is right is what matters.

-- JessicaWirth- 03 Apr 2012

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

I think AJ's post is largely correct. In my first paper, I wrote about how despite all the evidence Professor Moglen has tried to present to us to the contrary, I still adamantly believed that the law is a powerful form of social control. But the Trayvon Martin case, as well as the cases we've been reading recently in Criminal Law that AJ succinctly summarized, has forced me to consider otherwise.

My question now is just how effective public interest lawyering can really be on its own- and how much I can do for the Trayvon Martins of the world by merely going to work for an NGO upon graduation. As a former humanities student, I used to feel ambivalently towards peers who would- with no self-consciousness, whatsoever- say things like "art is not a luxury." Adrienne Rich, one of the thinkers who has inspired me most, likened society's need for socially conscious and transformative art as being on a par with the need to provide its citizens with affordable food and shelter. But as much as I believed in the arts, I simply could not believe that a novel, a poem, or any other socio-cultural artifact could be a more practical way of effecting social change than "the law."

I think I'm starting to realize that it's not enough to simply be a 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, understanding 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