Jul 15, 2013 4 min read

The Saturday night acquittal of George Zimmerman by a Florida jury in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin has provoked a fair share of understandable outrage – Martin’s only offense, at least at the outset of the much-publicized incident on Feb. 26, 2012, appears to have been “walking while black” through a gated community in which Zimmerman was serving as a neighborhood watch coordinator.

And there can be no doubt that black males, particularly young black males, are still unfairly assumed by law enforcement and their fellow citizens to be up to criminal activity in certain situations when they are just going about their business like everyone else. You can’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes, and you can’t judge a human being by the hoodie they are wearing, or the shade of their epidermis.

However, this is one of those public spectacles that produces cognitive dissonance. Martin should have never been killed, and Zimmerman should not be viewed as innocent. But when looked at through the narrow, exacting prism of whether Zimmerman was guilty of committing second-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors didn’t prove their case. There were no witnesses, details were murky and Zimmerman opted not to take the stand, which was his right as a defendant. This is was not an O.J. Simpson-style case where there was an array of forensic evidence and a history of abuse that made Simpson an all-but-certain culprit. As one defense lawyer told The New York Times in an analysis published Monday, “trials, for better or worse, are not morality plays.”

If Zimmerman had been found guilty, it would not have brought Trayvon Martin back, and it would not have healed the racial divisions still all too evident in American society, despite all the progress we have made over the last 50 years. The case’s outcome should spark a serious reconsideration, though, of laws that make incidents like these more likely to happen: the notorious lax regulations we have on guns of all types, which has bestowed a legacy of murder and accidental death in America that amazes and appalls our democratic counterparts in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world where sensible gun laws have been enacted; and “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow individuals to fire upon someone they believe is about to harm them or their property, even if that person is running away. Florida’s law went on the books in 2005, and Pennsylvania lawmakers approved a similar measure in 2011, and they have been joined by 19 other states. Stand Your Ground laws make it too easy for violence to be a first resort rather than a last resort and for shooters to claim they were acting in self-defense when their intentions were actually more malign.

Some also have suggested that the trial’s outcome would have been different had the roles been reversed, and Zimmerman had been the one left dead on the sidewalk and Martin had been the one with the smoking pistol in his hand. They have a valid point. Many young, poor black males who are accused of crimes end up receiving an inadequate defense from overworked public defenders, or never see their cases aired before a jury thanks to pressure to accept plea deals. We still have our work cut out for us when it comes to making our justice system serve everyone, regardless of their income or station in life.

Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Ezra Klein summed up the denouement of the Trayvon Martin saga well: “It’s not an outrageous verdict. The outrageous parts came long before the verdict, and could never be fixed by a trial.”