Wow. A "necro" thread reanimated.
The Trayvon killing became a reason for me to jettison a friend I had kept going back to college in 1972. It revealed -- to me -- that a friend, also a Democrat, harbored racism that he refused to admit.
The case of Zimmerman also suggests my argument about the Trump presidency and the impeachment imperative.
Zimmerman was acquitted as "not guilty", and there arose in the post-trial discussion the very salient distinction that "not guilty" does not mean "innocent". Reasonable doubt is in the eye of twelve beholders. Crime Scene Investigation follows a method of hypothesis-making and evidence gathering, often toward the goal of merely identifying the perpetrator of a crime. In those cases, the crime is known; the perpetrator may be one of several suspects; the evidence-gathering proceeds to eliminate suspects one by one; and it continues to the point where the investigators, based on a scientific application of facts and inferential logic, can provide an argument strong enough to convene a grand jury, and thence thereafter prove the case in court. The prosecution may then ask the investigators to search for and find additional evidence, even as the defense arguments proceed, to minimize the chances that the notion of reasonable doubt among twelve jurors will decide for the defense.
More facts and more logical scrutiny are always superior to less of either. Prosecutors can cherry-pick evidence, excluding facts which might point elsewhere or be exculpatory, when they think they can make a slam-dunk case and perhaps convict an otherwise innocent person. The notion of reasonable doubt is a built-in bias solely based on the principle that letting the guilty go free is preferable to convicting a single innocent. So it is at this juncture that a scientific understanding of the Truth and a judiciary understanding of guilt may diverge. And all citizens, supposedly and given the Bill of Rights, the Rules of Evidence and other aspects, enjoy a certain security that they are protected from unjust or unwarranted conviction by this bias.
From the view of science, the Truth always contains an element of uncertainty. We accept the theory of Boyle's Law, the theory of adiabatic expansion of gas, the Laws (theories) of Thermodynamics because they "work" and allow us to travel using internal combustion engines. But there is always an element of statistical variation, thus uncertainty. In the courtroom, jurors are asked to apply "reasonable doubt" as a subjective assessment of even the least probable but merely possible explanations of a crime.
Certain persons in our nation-state may have less rights than guaranteed by the Constitution. CIA authors cannot freely publish their books unless they are reviewed by a panel of colleagues to assure national security and avoid publication of classified facts and operations. And so our president, who has enormous powers and freedoms not bestowed on average citizens, is not just a person but a thing. Further, I might prove that miscarriages of justice in the past have occurred because revelation of certain facts would put lives at risk and pose a threat to national security. For instance, in the case of one young man who was shot by a nightclub owner on or about November 24, 1963. revealing that 2,000 US Marines had been trained for infiltration projects "off the books" or that one of them in fact had been successfully infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain may have put at risk sources, methods and lives of other successful infiltrations around the world, so no investigation was mounted, no revelations were made, the person of interest was dead and perpetration of the myth considered essential.
Is the President also a thing? What are the standards of reasonable doubt, if there are grave suspicions and elements of proof that he himself has compromised national security? What is the Truth? And to what extent does reasonable doubt exonerate him in impeachment inquiries, investigations and proceedings?
The president's own party continues to mount argument after argument to thwart the impeachment process. At the point where their arguments seem absurd, in a backdrop of so many dots of fact and inference that connect such that the pattern of evidence and crime looks like air-traffic-control symbols on a US map, what is reasonable, and what is merely obstructive?