Protecting minorities by empowering prosecutors?

In my new CNN.com piece I argue that we shouldn’t let anger over the Zimmerman acquittal shred the rights of criminal defendants: “awarding new powers to prosecutors will likely mean that more black people will end up behind bars.” [CNN](& Steele; thanks for Instalanche to Glenn Reynolds)

P.S. Some may wonder whether a toughening of hate crime laws might be an exception to the general rule that minorities have much to fear from a broadening of grounds for prosecution. Leaving aside whether the hate crime issue has any relation to the Martin/Zimmerman case (few lawyers believe Zimmerman could be found guilty of a hate crime, and when the FBI investigated him last summer it found no evidence of racial motivation; more on this from Michelle Meyer), per FBI statistics for 2011, blacks are actually overrepresented among persons charged with hate crimes, at 21 percent compared with 14 percent of general U.S. population.

3 Comments

  • The Golden Rule of do unto others as you would want others to do unto you is an ESS – evolutionary stable system. – and is built into humans. It has a second part of retaliation for wrong done unto you. Three of the jurors in the Zimmerman trial paid attention to the lawyers and even took notes, but they discarded the concept of civilized law for the concept of retaliation for the death of a young person.

    And we have our president, a former law teacher, do the same thing. Martin’s brutal beating of Zimmerman was OK to our president because our president felt that he and other black men are unfairly treated with suspicion. Isn’t that what the Boston bomber did. He avenged the unfair deaths of Muslims by destroying the lower leg of a beautiful dancer and killing and hurting others.

    My goodness, we have a problem. Chief among them is the inability to bring rational argument to bear. If ever there was an open and shut case of self defense, it was the Zimmerman case. Much is made of Zimmerman’s wounds being minor, but the Central Park Jogger was in a coma for quite a while after her beating and rape.
    Eric Holder seems to be unaware that the FBI was all over the Sanford police department looking for racism. What a schmuck!

    And we had claims that Martin was screaming for help when he was on top of Zimmerman raining blows.

  • […] his acquittal on state-court charges [Jonathan Adler, Jacob Sullum, Steve Chapman; see also the update to my Friday post regarding the possibility of "hate crime" charges] In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the […]

  • Interesting Reads…

    The Editorial Staff will be busy today, so we’re posting a list of interesting reads in lieu of our usual inane commentary. A young college student’s thoughts on the inherent conflict between manhood and modern morality. We found this link……