Zimmerman Screwed

The defense in the George Zimmerman case isn't quite as hapless as I thought it was going to be. I say this because it did two things in the closing arguments that I had been urging the defense lawyers to do. They produced cardboard cutouts of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman showing that Trayvon was actually taller than Zimmerman, not the 135 pound junior high school student the media liked to portray him as.

And they found themselves a piece of concrete sidewalk somewhere and held it up for the jury to see to show them that Trayvon was not as weaponless as the prosecution maintained.

Despite this, the prosecution (and the judge) will be everywhere celebrating after the jury returns its verdict. I read one story about the closing arguments saying that the prosecution was thundering that Zimmerman hadn't "proven he was innocent" of killing this poor child who only wanted to buy a bag of Skittles and return home. A female juror (all the six jurors are female) was seen wiping a tear as the prosecutor spoke. I hope the defense pointed out to the jury that it was not Zimmerman's responsibility to prove he was innocent. It was the prosecution's burden to prove he was not.

It rankles me how corrupt and vicious the prosecutors are in this case. They invariable talk of "this child," as if someone who called him self  a "No_Limit_Nigga" on  his website, was selling guns with his cellphone and had been caught with a bag of stolen property and "burglary tools" (in this case a screwdriver) was somehow a mere child. A child is someone who no adult would worry about if he encountered him on the street. Trayvon was over 6 feet and intimidating in manner. He boasted of the fights he'd won. Is there any grown man who would regard someone who is taller than him as a "child?"

In my opinion the prosecution isn't making a good faith argument for Zimmerman's guilt at all. They are deeply invested in this case. They hate Zimmerman so much they can't speak his name without their lips twisting into an involuntary sneer. Angela Cory, the special prosecutor, who was assigned to investigate this case held a press conference (with the Martin family) at the beginning of the process to announce that her goal was to obtain "justice for Trayvon Martin." Well shoot. Didn't she go to law school? Doesn't she know her goal is to find justice for both Martin and Zimmerman. Justice doesn't only apply to one side.

I don't have a good feeling about this case. The defense was never allowed to present evidence showing Martin was actually a young thug.  The prosecution handled this case with deep malice towards Zimmerman. If the prosecution already has the jury shedding tears it is entirely possible they will find Zimmerman guilty at the last minute of manslaughter, which in the hands of this judge will result in Zimmerman serving just as long a sentence as he would have received had he been convicted of second-degree murder.

I think the judge in this case and the prosecution were both under enormous pressure from the Atty. Gen., Eric holder, and Barack Obama himself, to find Zimmerman guilty. This is one of the reasons the judge harangued Zimmerman over whether or not he would testify. She kept asking him if it was his own decision. Since when is a defendant supposed to make a major decision like this by himself? That's why he has an attorney. To help him make such decisions.

Even if the jury acquits Zimmerman of both second-degree murder and manslaughter his life is still over. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder will immediately file a civil rights lawsuit against him. This will have lower standards of proof. The second time around the witnesses for the prosecution won't be so laughable.

But even if he escapes conviction his ordeal still won't be over. The family will sue him for $100 million on the theory that any case that galvanized a nation like this one did deserves nothing less.

For the time being all this is in the future. What he really needs to worry about is what seems like a very likely manslaughter conviction. And we know what will happen when Zimmerman goes to jail. He won't last two weeks. All the people who promised to kill him if he was acquitted will now send their incarcerated relatives and friends to kill him in prison.

I Didn't Know They Could Do That

The Zimmerman trial throws me another zinger. Just before closing arguments the prosecution says it wants to add a new charge--aggravated assault. It's obvious why. The prosecution knows it hasn't  proven second degree murder and it is desperate to get him on something. If the judge allows this--and she probably will--Zimmerman's goose is cooked. The jury won't want to convict him of something for which there is no proof but the jurors will also want to throw the state a bone, after all the trouble it went to prosecuting Zimmerman and all.

One thing about the trial. The judge absolutely badgered Zimmerman to testify. The judge kept asking if he knew that it was his right to testify. Of course he knew that. Asking that in a criminal trial is like asking if water is wet. And if he didn't know his attorneys certainly told him. The judge was adamant however. When his attorney tried to speak the judge angrily brushed him aside. Twice. Then she asked Zimmerman if it was his own decision not to testify. Why should it be his decision? That's why he is paying the attorney--to advise him on such matters.

The judge wants a conviction. And if she thinks the jury won't go for 2nd degree murder she will allow them to compromise at this late date by adding the new charge of aggravated assault.

Riots in LA Over Zimmerman Verdict

I might as well put my prediction on paper so I can't pretend I expected something else.

Will there be riots in LA if George Zimmerman is acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin?

No, there will not be. And the reason is, Zimmerman will instead be convicted of manslaughter. An appeal will follow. Zimmerman might very well win that one. But it will be 18 months down the road. No one will closely follow the appeals process. There won't be breathless dispatches from the courtroom and bloggers (and the mainstream media in general) won't be demanding Zimmerman's head. Any outrage at that point will be too attenuated to cause a riot.

Now in the off-chance that Zimmerman is acquitted both of murder and manslaughter, Attorney General Holder will try to head off riots by immediately announcing a civil rights prosecution of Zimmerman and the family of Trayvon Martin, including mother, step-mother, father, brother and numerous relatives will sue Zimmerman,, just as O.J. Simpson was sued by the families of the two he murdered.

Will that calm the waters?

Probably not. Obama could help by announcing in advance that this country won't work if people don't respect the rule of law. But frankly Obama doesn't respect the rule of law either. Otherwise he wouldn't continue to give aid to Egypt in spite of the coup and in the face of an express law prohibiting this. He also wouldn't delay implementation of certain provisions of Obamacare despite his having no authority to do so. He wouldn't try to use executive orders to implement new rules in place of getting bills through congress.

In short, if we have riots after a Zimmerman acquittal, they will look a lot like the ones Obama didn't lift a hand to try to prevent.

Don't Mess With Thorton Wilder

I don't understand why the people who put on this production of Our Town felt they had to mess with Thorton Wilder's original dialogue. There is a point early on in the play where the stage manager (Paul Newman) is talking about the Grovers Corners paper boy who grew up, went to college to study engineering, graduated first in his class and then got killed in the First World War in France. The stage manager notes, as per Wilder's script, it was a "waste" of a good education and then goes on to make the following observation (not in Wilder's script): "What business we had picking a quarrel with the Germans we can't make out to this day. But it did seem clear at the time."

Not only is this totally gratuitous, and a desecration of a wonderful play, the new dialogue doesn't even make much sense. I presume the producers added this to further some personal ideological agenda (because it certainly wasn't needed on artistic grounds). But I can't even figure out what they were getting at--we shouldn't have fought Germany in the First World War? Okay, fine, if that's their point of view. But if so should have written a book about it or endowed a history chair at some university to teach that line of thought. What they shouldn't have done however was mess with Wilder's sacred text.

Janet Malcolm Protests Too Much

I just finished rereading Janet Malcolm's disturbing 1990 book (The Journalist and the Murder) about the fraud lawsuit filed by Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who was convicted in 1979 of murdering his family, against  Joe McGinnis, the wonderfully talented but ethically challenged journalist who wrote a book (Fatal Vision) about the case.

McGinnis spent four years researching and writing Fatal Vision, all the while assuring MacDonald, who was in prison, how much he believed his innocence, how painful it was to see him convicted and how in his heart he yearned for MacDonald's eventual exoneration.

In spite of all this, the book, when it came out, could hardly have showed MacDonald in a  worse light. Despite all the time McGinnis had spent living with MacDonald during his trial, working out with him, drinking beer with him and sitting in on all the trial planning sessions (McGinnis was an official member of  the MacDonald defense team), Fatal Vision portrayed MacDonald as a soulless psychopath who killed his family without remorse.

Stunned that such a close friend could turn on him like that, MacDonald sued McGinnis for fraud. After a trial in which conservative intellectual William F. Buckley and former cop-turned-crime-writer Joseph Wambaugh both testified how it was both normal and ethical for writers to lie to their sources to keep them talking, McGinnis ended up paying $325,000 to MacDonald to settle the case.

This seemed to most people fair enough. Even though MacDonald had killed both  his wife and two young daughters, most people still don't like it when a reporter egregiously lies to someone for four years, pretending to be  his friend, only in the end to stab him in the back. But then Janet Malcolm, a publicity shy writer for The New Yorker,  decided to write a book about the lawsuit against McGinnis and that's where Malcom's legal problems and professional ethics turned into a big tarball.

Malcom herself was no stranger to lawsuits, having been famously sued for libel by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, former director of the Freud Archives.  In her defense, Malcolm wrote a postscript to the book about McGinnis arguing that doctoring quotes to make them better is actually a service to both the reader and the person quoted. "The literally true," she argues, "may actually be a falsification of a reality." People who quote what a person actually said, instead of what they meant, she believes, are guilty of the sin of "tape-recorderese." A transcript is not the finished version of what someone said but "a kind of rough draft of expression" filled with "bizarre syntax," not to mention hesitations, circumlocutions,  repetitions, and contractions.

It is strange that Malcolm doesn't know that most readers know that already. As Malcolm sees it, it is the reporter's job to figure out what the subject actually meant and then to say it better and with more precision than he ever could himself. "Only the most uncharitable (or inept) journalist will hold a subject to his literal utterances and fail to perform the sort of editing and rewriting  that, in life, our ear automatically and instantaneously performs."

When a writer doesn't do that, she claims, lawsuits in which literal transcripts are used to determine what a subject actually said can "degenerate . . . into farcical squabbles about the degree to which a journalist may function as a writer rather than a stenographer."

Well forgive me, Ms. Malcolm, but this sounds as if you've been hauled into court too often by people who are able to prove from the transcript of the tape recording that you've altered their words.

As for your assertion that you have a higher calling (a  writer as opposed to a mere stenographer), okay fine, why not do your writing, your understanding  of what a person really meant as opposed to what they actually said, in full and glorious paraphrase and reserve quotation marks for the times you reproduce his actual words?

I think they answer is obvious. You feel that paraphrase, even inspired paraphrase of the sort you undoubtedly do, is inferior to the quoted word. The quoted word has much more impact because the average reader, as opposed to elite writers like you, think that quotes mean "this is exactly what the guy said."

A postscript here: When Malcolm suggests that in real life our ears listen to a quote and then edit and rewrite it "automatically and instantaneously" is true enough for some people. I once was at a trial in Texas as a reporter sitting next to an attorney who was monitoring the trial (though not officially a member of the defense team). While I was scrambling to get exact quotes (as all good reporters do) the lawyer, who had an entirely different objective, sat beside me writing leisurely without stress. I later found out why. She was doing the same thing Malcolm says all of us do--summarizing the gist of the argument, not frantically trying to capture the actual words.

I don't want to demean this. It is certainly a gift but one more appropriate to a lawyer, who is properly concerned about legal arguments, than it is to a journalist, who believes that a few direct quotations showing the hesitations and contradictions in a person's speech say as much about a subject--and give a far more accurate image of him to the reader--than manufactured quotes that only the writer ever heard.

Why We Can't Understand The Universe

We are like ants floating down a river on a log. Because we were born long after the log began its journey we don't know when the log fell in the river, and we will die long before it ever reaches the river's end.

What's the upside?

There is no upside. Life is a bitch, then you die.

Good Will Hunting House

This is the house on Hill Drive six blocks east of my own home where Matt Damon and Ben Affleck lived while writing "Good Will Hunting." When it was done they sold the screenplay for $400,000, starred in the movie and became famous.

What did I do that year? Oh yeah, I grew some great tomatoes, though my bell peppers failed.