Going through the motions, Gary?

Once I saw that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder or manslaughter of Trayvon Martin I knew it was only a matter of time before Gary Younge weighed in. The speed with which he did so took me by surprise nevertheless. Perhaps he wrote "guilty" and "not guilty" versions of the article in advance:

There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. The only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone.

Well, Gary my old chum, it seems that there was considerable doubt about who was the aggressor. "Reasonable doubt" at the very least, given a unanimous "not guilty" verdict by the jury. And let us remember that Gary's hints at skin colour as a reason for prejudice don't really fly, given the range of skin hues of defence witnesses and media interviewees who testified to Zimmerman's character and concern for his neighbours.

My hat off to the jury, who discharged a very difficult duty and are no doubt relieved to be past this case:

A court public information officer said that members of the jury had no desire to speak to the media Saturday night. Identities of jury members are currently protected by a court anonymity order.

I'll bet they don't want to speak to the media. Not when media pundits like Gary write bilge like this:

Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.

We must also ask ourselves how the violent social order arose in the first place. Here's a hint, Gary: broken families and dysfunctional education systems that produced people like the far-from-angelic Trayvon and the illiterate prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel are not unrelated. If Gary really is concerned about the lot of poor black families in the USA, and I see no reason to doubt his sincerity on this point, perhaps he should turn his writing and analytical talents to analysing why a nineteen year old woman cannot even read cursive writing, why black protests have a strong tendency to turn extremely violent and what considerable harm Al Sharpton is actually doing to the black community in his self-aggrandisements.

While we're here, let's note the firing late on Friday of an IT specialist in the state attorney's office who extracted all the photos and text messages from Martin's phone, and approached his attorney a couple months ago in concern that this information had not been turned over to Zimmerman's defence team in apparent violation of rules of evidence disclosure:

Kruidbos asked [lawyer] White in April for legal advice and described some contents of his report such as a photo of an African-American hand holding a gun, a photo of a plant resembling marijuana and a text message referring to a gun transaction.

It's possible that the timing of Kruidbos's dismissal, immediately after closing arguments in the trial, was coincidental. I hope it was, because the implications of deliberate timing in this action are rather disturbing.