Bill Saletan writing in Slate...
Did George Zimmerman get away with murder? That’s what
one of his jurors says, according to headlines in the New York Times,
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other
newspapers.
The reports are based on an ABC News interview with Juror
B29, the sole non-white juror. She has identified herself only by her first
name, Maddy. She’s been framed as the woman who was bullied out of voting to
convict Zimmerman.
(*PAUSE*)
But that’s not true.
* WHAT'S THAT, WILLIS...?!?!
But that's not true.
* HUH...???
She stands by the verdict.
* WHAT'S THAT...?!?!
She yielded to the evidence and the law, not to bullying.
* THE LAW...? THE EVIDENCE...? WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO
WITH ANYTHING...???
She thinks Zimmerman was morally culpable but not legally
guilty. And she wants us to distinguish between this trial and larger questions
of race and justice.
ABC News hasn’t posted a full unedited video or
transcript of the interview.
* WHY... AM... I... NOT... SURPRISED...?
The video that has been broadcast — on World News
Tonight, Nightline, and Good Morning America — has been cut and spliced in
different ways, often so artfully that the transitions appear continuous.
* THANK YOU SLATE...!!!
So beware what you’re seeing.
* I ALWAYS DO; BUT THANKS AGAIN FOR THE HEAD'S UP!
But the video that’s available already shows, on closer
inspection, that Maddy has been manipulated and misrepresented.
* YOU "F'N C---------S!"
Here are the key points:
1. The phrase “got away with murder” was put in her
mouth.
Nightline shows ABC interviewer Robin Roberts asking
Maddy: “Some people have said, ‘George Zimmerman got away with murder. How do
you respond to those people who say that?’ ” Maddy appears to reply promptly
and confidently: “George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can’t get away
from God.” But that’s not quite how the exchange happened. In the unedited
video, Roberts’ question is longer, with words that have been trimmed from the
Nightline version, and Maddy pauses twice, for several seconds, as she
struggles to answer it. “… George Zimmerman … That’s — George Zimmerman got
away with murder. But you can’t get away from God.”
You have to watch her, not just read her words, to pick
up her meaning.
As she struggles to answer, she looks as though she’s
trying to reconcile the sentiment that’s been quoted to her — that Zimmerman
“got away with murder” — with her own perspective. So she repeats the quote and
adds words of her own, to convey what she thinks: that there’s a justice higher
than the law, which Zimmerman will have to face. She thinks he’s morally
culpable, not legally guilty.
2. She stands by the verdict.
ABC’s online story about the interview ends with Maddy
asking, “Did I go the right way? Did I go the wrong way?”
But that’s not the whole quote.
In the unedited video, she continues: “I know I went the
right way, because by the law and the way it was followed is the way I went.
But if I would have used my heart, I probably would have [gone for] a hung
jury.”
In another clip, she draws the same distinction: “I stand
by the decision because of the law. If I stand by the decision because of my
heart, he would have been guilty.”
At one point, she says that “the evidence shows he’s
guilty.” Roberts presses her: “He’s guilty of?” Maddy answers: “Killing Trayvon
Martin. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him
intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty.” That’s the distinction she’s trying
to draw here: Killing is one thing. Murder or manslaughter is another.
* BINGO!
3. She thinks the case should never have gone to trial.
According to ABC News, when Roberts asked “whether the
case should have gone to trial,” Maddy answered, "I don't think so. … I
felt like this was a publicity stunt.”
4. The jury was not ethnically divided on Zimmerman’s
culpability. Unlike Juror B37, who spoke to CNN, Maddy doesn’t say — at least
not in the edited clips — that Zimmerman was a good man or that Martin shares
the blame. But some white jurors seem to have shared Maddy’s feelings. “A lot
of us had wanted to find something bad, something that we could connect to the
law,” she says. “We felt he was guilty,” she adds in other comments quoted by
ABC News. “But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the
evidence."
* I'M FORWARDING THIS PARTICULAR NEWSBITE TO MY DEAR
FRIEND "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED." WHY? WELL... CERTAINLY
NOT TO TRY AND CONVINCE HIM HE'S WRONG. NOPE. JUST TO MAKE SURE HE SEES THIS.
(AGAIN... THANKS SLATE!)
5. Race wasn’t discussed, and she didn’t focus on it.
Unlike Juror B37, Maddy knows what it’s like to be
profiled. She says it has happened to her while shopping. But she withholds
judgment as to the role of race in this case.
Roberts asks: “How do you respond when you see people who
are making this about race, who are saying, had Trayvon not been a young black
man, that the conversation would be different?” Maddy tilts her head noncommittally
and responds: “Is it true? That’s the question to be asked.” In another clip,
Roberts says, “That was something that a lot of people from the outside thought
must have been the discussion in the deliberations, about race, about color.
But that wasn’t the case?” Maddy affirms, “It was not the case.”
When the verdict was announced and she was released from
sequestration, she was dismayed to discover the national outrage. “I didn’t
know how much importance” was attached to the trial, she says, “because I never
looked at color. And I still don’t look at color.”
* FUNNY THING... (*PAUSE*)... I LOOK AT COLOR. "HE
WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED" LOOKS AT COLOR TOO... BUT DOESN'T SEE
HIMSELF AS DOING SO. HE LOOKS AT ETHNICITY... HE LOOKS AT REGIONALITY...
(*CHUCKLE*)... "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED" IS INDEED A
FASCINATING GUY IN TERMS OF HIS WORLDVIEW... AS AM I!
The value of colorblindness is controversial. Some people
believe that when you don’t talk about race in a case such as this one, you’re
excluding racial bias. Others believe that you’re simply overlooking that bias.
But Maddy’s comments indicate that sequestration worked. The jurors focused not
on the meaning of the case to outsiders, but on the evidence and the law.
(*THUMBS UP*)
6. She was no pushover in the jury room. “I was the juror
that was gonna give them the hung jury,” she says. “I fought to the end.”
Roberts asks: “Did you feel a little, for lack of a better word, bullied in the
deliberations?” ABC News seems to have cut the video here, so we don’t know
what was taken out. But in the edited video, Maddy’s next words are, “I don’t
know if I was bullied. I trust God that I wasn’t bullied.” Roberts asks, “Do
you feel that your voice was heard?” Maddy assures her, “My voice was heard. I
was the loudest.”
* ABC News seems to have cut the video here, so we don’t
know what was taken out...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
7. To the extent she feels racial or ethnic pressure,
it’s against Zimmerman. In the Nightline video, Roberts notes that Maddy could
have hung the jury. Roberts asks: “Do you have regrets that you didn’t?” Maddy
pauses, tilts her head, and thinks about it. “Kind of. I mean I’m the only
minority. And I feel like I let a lot of people down.”
In the GMA version, Maddy’s reference to being the only
minority has been seamlessly edited out.
* WHAT'S THAT...?!?!
In the GMA version, Maddy’s reference to being the only
minority has been seamlessly edited out.
(*SNORT*)
But this theme returns in other clips. “I couldn’t do
anything about it. And I feel like I let a lot of people down,” she says. And
again: “I feel like I let ’em down. We just couldn’t prove anything.” She feels
the anger and the cosmic injustice. But they don’t change her legal judgment.
8. Acquittal is not personal - or national - exoneration.
This is what she’s really trying to convey.
“Maybe if they would put [out] the law, and a lot of
people would read it, they would understand the choices that they gave us,” she
says. The tragedy of the case, and the long-standing sense of racial injustice
that surrounds it, shouldn’t and didn’t dictate the verdict.
* UNFORTUNATELY... A GREAT MANY PEOPLE DON'T BELIEVE
THIS. SAD. AND ANOTHER NAIL IN THE NATIONAL COFFIN.
But by the same token, the verdict doesn’t absolve the
tragedy or the injustice. “I want Trayvon’s mom to know that I’m hurting,” says
Maddy. “And if she thought that nobody cared about her son, I can speak for
myself. I do care.” And it’s not just about the Martins. “There’s no way that
any mother should feel that pain,” says Maddy. In another clip she adds, “My
hope is that we stop walking around looking at color.”
* ME TOO!
Martin’s mother, in a statement responding to Maddy’s
interview, says the case “challenges our nation once again to do everything we
can to make sure that this never happens to another child.” Amen.
