Today the Justice Department announced that they are closing their investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin, the black teen in Florida who was gunned down by George Zimmerman three years ago in an incident that at its absolute most generous can be described as "tragic," or "wrong place, wrong time."
Federal prosecutors concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to prove that Zimmerman had intentionally violated Martin's civil rights, and as such they will not be charging Zimmerman. While apparently a miscarriage of justice, the unfortunate reality seems to be that Zimmerman committed no crime, at least not with the way Florida's laws are written. According to one of the jurors from the initial trial:
[A]s the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can't say he's guilty. You can't put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty. But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence.
A bizarre interpretation of manslaughter - one of the charges Zimmerman was brought up on – as several variants of the charge point out that the killer does not have to have had the intent to kill to still be convicted.
It really seems to be a matter of time before Zimmerman's luck runs out, however. While Martin at worst had some behavioral problems towards the end of his high school career, Zimmerman has had a string of encounters with the police, both before and after the shooting, and virtually all of them involve Zimmerman being violent.
ABC News has a video of the story, which disturbingly reveals that not only has Zimmerman gone into hiding but has been given back the right to carry a firearm, AFTER THE JUMP…
