The other day I said that the George Zimmerman trial had become a yawn fest. That was an error in judgement on my part. Maybe I had forgotten for an instant that we are in the age of Obama when crises must not be let go to waste. Whether a particular "crisis" has been manufactured, as this one has, is beside the point.
Now I am following the Zimmerman verdict's aftermath much more attentively. There is a lot of interesting material being churned out and it's almost all supportive of the verdict and the right way of seeing the events. Trying to turn Rachel Jeantel into Anita Hill would be downright funny if she were attractive or intelligent — or even if she possessed the proverbial nice personality — just one of the above would make Rachel Jeantel jokes at least mildly acceptable. But I'll stop there.
Far more interesting is the fact that black people benefit disproportionately from stand your ground laws, the new "boogieman" of Eric Holder & Co.
African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing “Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.
Black Floridians have made about a third of the state’s total “Stand Your Ground” claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida’s population. The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites.
Nonetheless, prominent African Americans including Holder and “Ebony and Ivory” singer Stevie Wonder, who has vowed not to perform in the Sunshine State until the law is revoked, have made “Stand Your Ground” a central part of the Trayvon Martin controversy.
So we get to sit back and watch the left demonize yet another thing like they do with school choice, gun rights and pro-growth business policies which help law-abiding blacks. Of course Ann Coulter wrote a book about this so
she contributed an article about a parallel story about an undercover cop named Lee Van Houten who was forced to shoot a black mugger back in 1985. This was in the "dark days" before the internet when false media narratives and hype could not be as easily exposed as such.
The case most like George Zimmerman’s is the Edmund Perry case. In 1985, Perry, a black teenager from Harlem who had just graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. He got shot and a few hours later was dead.
Instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop. When that turned out to be false, the New York Times looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true. It should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!
The initial news accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. (In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect any weapons on the perp as well as his resume.)
The real must read so-far is yesterday's
NR piece called Angela Corey's Checkered Past. The title might be a little inaccurate, unless it's a checkerboard with all dark squares.
Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty. When Ron Littlepage, a journalist for the Florida Times-Union, wrote a column criticizing her handling of the Christian Fernandez case — in which Corey chose to prosecute a twelve-year-old boy for first-degree murder, who wound up locked in solitary confinement in an adult jail prior to his court date — she “fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state-attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.”
Ooooh! Libel suits for criticism! Always so charming.
And that was moderate. When Corey was appointed to handle the Zimmerman case, Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, a former president of both the American Bar Association and Florida State University, criticized the decision: “I cannot imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to serve in the Sanford case. There is nothing in Angela Corey’s background that suits her for the task, and she cannot command the respect of people who care about justice.” Corey responded by making a public-records request of the university for all e-mails, text messages, and phone messages in which D’Alemberte had mentioned Fernandez. Like Littlepage, D’Alemberte had earlier criticized Corey’s handling of the Fernandez case.
More of the same. But there's more than bullying that she's guilty of.
But what these instances point to is something much more alarming than Corey’s less-than-warm relations with her peers.
In June 2012, Alan Dershowitz, a well-known defense attorney who has been a professor at Harvard Law School for nearly half a century, criticized Corey for her affidavit in the Zimmerman case. Making use of a quirk of Florida law that gives prosecutors, for any case except first-degree murder, the option of filing an affidavit with the judge instead of going to a grand jury, Corey filed an affidavit that, according to Dershowitz, “willfully and deliberately omitted” crucial exculpatory evidence: namely, that Trayvon Martin was beating George Zimmerman bloody at the time of the fatal gunshot. So Corey avoided a grand jury, where her case likely would not have held water, and then withheld evidence in her affidavit to the judge. “It was a perjurious affidavit,” Dershowitz tells me, and that comes with serious consequences: “Submitting a false affidavit is grounds for disbarment.”
Shortly after Dershowitz’s criticisms, Harvard Law School’s dean’s office received a phone call. When the dean refused to pick up, Angela Corey spent a half hour demanding of an office-of-communications employee that Dershowitz be fired. According to Dershowitz, Corey threatened to sue Harvard, to try to get him disbarred, and also to sue him for slander and libel. Corey also told the communications employee that she had assigned a state investigator — an employee of the State of Florida, that is — to investigate Dershowitz. “That’s an abuse of office right there,” Dershowitz says.
This is corruption mixed with pure Alinsky tactics. And here's the really bad news, although I hope National Review is wrong about this.
But will Corey ever be disciplined for prosecutorial abuses? It’s unlikely. State attorneys cannot be brought before the bar while they remain in office. Complaints can be filed against Corey, but they will be deferred until she is no longer state attorney. The governor can remove her from office, but otherwise her position — and her license — are safe.
She is a thug worthy of the Age of Obama. We can only hope that the continued overreaching continues to backfire and at least some bad people end up going down for it. And that not too many innocent people get hurt along the way.
