Trayvon Martin case: use of Stand Your Ground law or pursuit of a black teen?

A grand jury in Florida and the US Justice Department will both probe the Feb. 26 shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin. Key questions: Did the alleged gunman racially profile Trayvon? And did he use the Stand Your Ground law appropriately?

The shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin is no longer in the sole hands of local law-enforcement officials, meaning the wheels of justice appear to be moving, after a three-week delay, toward a fuller investigation of whether the shooter killed the 17-year-old in self-defense.

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On Tuesday came the announcement that Florida's Seminole County will convene a grand jury on April 10 to look into the case, even as a team from the US Justice Department's civil rights division arrived in Sanford, Fla., the community where Trayvon died Feb. 26 after he was shot by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman.

The Justice Department would not ordinarily investigate such an incident, but the fact that Trayvon was black and the alleged shooter, George Zimmerman, is part white, part Hispanic ? and that local authorities declined to press charges against Mr. Zimmerman, even though Trayvon was unarmed ? opens the door to a civil rights investigation on grounds the teenager came under suspicion primarily because he is African-American.?

Protests, rallies, and official pressure have been building ever since the police in Sanford declined to arrest Mr. Zimmerman. Before the shooting, Trayvon had been walking from a convenience store back to his father's fianc?e's house in a gated neighborhood, with nothing more than a bag of Skittles in his pocket.

The 911 tapes, plus a report Tuesday from a girl who says she was talking with Trayvon on the phone just before the shooting, suggest that Zimmerman may have run after the teen. If true, that could allow the Justice Department to help draw the line on so-called ?Stand Your Ground? laws and reaffirm civil rights protections for young men who draw suspicion by virtue of their skin color.

?The Stand Your Ground law was not intended to authorize vigilante action on the part of neighborhood watch guys when they have suspicions about the motivation of some kid walking through the neighborhood,? says James Wright, a sociologist who studies gun violence at University of Central Florida in Orlando. ?To simply say this case is ambiguous and therefore can't be prosecuted opens the door for a lot of nefarious? actions to take place. In that way, he says, ?this case could help draw the line between what's right and legally justifiable and what goes beyond that.?

?With all federal civil rights crimes, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person acted intentionally and with the specific intent to do something which the law forbids ? the highest level of intent in criminal law,? the Justice Department said in a statement, upon announcing it would investigate Trayvon's death. ?Negligence, recklessness, mistakes and accidents are not prosecutable under the federal criminal civil rights laws.?

The case has sparked outrage across the US, as well as rallies and protests on college campuses and in the Orlando, Fla., area.

While the exact circumstances of the shooting are not clear, the preponderance of evidence seems to point toward Zimmerman overstepping the bounds of the state's Stand Your Ground law, say?some legal and criminal justice experts. The law obviates an individual's?"duty to retreat" from threatening situations. Zimmerman had made several previous 911 calls [that day???] about suspicious people in the Retreat at Twin Lakes community.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/dDWnOs3lHh4/Trayvon-Martin-case-use-of-Stand-Your-Ground-law-or-pursuit-of-a-black-teen

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