(ThyBlackMan.com) The trial of Michael Dunn was considered to be the second-coming of the George Zimmerman trial. In both cases, a young black male was shot by an overzealous man who somehow felt that he could get away with murder. Also, in both cases, there is more than enough evidence to show that the shooter had a history of violence toward others, which was effectively overlooked in the courtroom.
As we discussed the trial repeatedly on CNN over the past two weeks, I found myself having an out-of-body experience, asking myself, “Why do people think black men are animals, and why am I even having to explain that this kid didn’t deserve to die?” Both Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis were unarmed, yet the public was quick to eat up dark twisted fantasies that portrayed the young men as angry gorillas who needed to be put down. Perhaps these trials tell us a great deal about the inherent fear that America has of young black men and what we are truly up against.
Here are a few questions that have crossed my mind since the outcome of the trial of Michael Dunn:
1) (This question was asked by Darryl Forbes, one of our facebook fans) If you’ve been found guilty of attempted murder and the victim dies, then how can you not be found guilty of murder? We’d love to hear the answer to this question. Of course, there is some complex legal reason that this can be the case, but the reality is that it fails the test of common sense. So, if a law is fancy and supposedly created by seemingly intelligent people, one would hope that it’s logical. In this case, it doesn’t make sense.
2) Why did people have to work so hard to get a guilty verdict when a case is so clear cut? It’s emotionally draining to have to work this hard to get even a fraction of the justice that we deserve in cases like this: The victim was unarmed, there’s no evidence that he showed physical aggression toward the perpetrator, the shooter left the scene of the crime and drove 200 miles away and then wrote a bunch of letters to his grandmother about how much he wants to shoot black people.
Oddly enough, the standard for reasonable doubt is so low that it’s difficult to fight through all of the legal hoops necessary to get the courts to do the right thing. Our justice system isn’t built on doing the right thing: It’s built on doing the procedural thing or the legal thing. That’s why you have men like Darryl Kelly, who remains in prison years after his daughter
confessed to having lied as a child to get him locked up for touching her inappropriately. Unfortunately, many legal professionals are brainwashed early in their careers to override their desire to seek truth and taught to replace true equity with a lifelong commitment to a slew of arbitrary procedures that are sometimes antiquated, biased and unethical. But who cares if human lives are destroyed, as long as you protect your career, right?
3) Where is the evidence that Jordan Davis and his friends were “thugs,” as these attorneys made them out to be? I remain astounded by the number of misleading statements that were made during this trial about the character of Jordan Davis and his friends. They were accused of being “thugs,” accused of trying to open the car door to attack Dunn, painted as vicious, trigger-happy hoodlums who wanted nothing more than to take the life of another human being. But what’s so interesting is that these statements can be made with virtually no risk of being penalized if they are found to be untrue. Perhaps Dunn’s sentence should be lengthened for bullying Davis in both life and after his death by presuming that he deserved to die and then assassinating his character afterward.
4) Why wasn’t Michael Dunn’s past behavior considered relevant to the trial? Let’s think about this: People were invited to come to the witness stand to say that Dunn was a great guy. People could come up on the stand to say that Jordan Davis was a terrible person. But the man who told police that Dunn was an arrogant a**hole who tried to have someone killed in the past wasn’t mentioned at all. In fact, when I sought to bring up the police recordings during an appearance on CNN, I was shut down faster than you could say, “black people don’t really matter.” Fortunately, after CNN confirmed that I hadn’t made up my assertion about the existence of the police interview, they ran the story the following day. I honestly wonder if the public would have ever heard this information otherwise.
5) If defense attorneys are found to be fabricating a preconception that Jordan and his friends were thugs and this assertion is refuted, why can’t they be sued for defamation? A lot of people have mistakenly referred to the Michael Dunn trial as the Jordan Davis trial. But when you think about it, this terminology is actually somewhat accurate. Throughout the proceedings, all I saw was one allegation after another that Jordan and his friends were angry, ruthless gangsters who were thirsty for a white man’s blood. This illusion, concocted out of some odd white American fascination with Boyz in the Hood-style movies and music is the burden of nearly every black man in America. I even remember, during the BP oil spill, hearing liberal commentator Bill Maher accuse President Obama of not being a “real black president” because he didn’t bring the BP executives into a room and shoot one of them in the foot. I say that if it is determined that Michael Dunn’s lawyers said anything about this deceased young man that turns out not to be true, they should be sued for defaming his character. The same way there are r@pe shield laws to keep the courts from defaming the character of the victim, there should be murder shield laws keeping us from making up false stories about the deceased.
6) If Jordan Davis were a white woman, and Michael Dunn were a black man, how would this case have looked in the public eye? Most of us know the answer to this question, so I won’t even answer it. If Jordan Davis were either white or female, most of the conspiracy theories about “Thug man Davis” jumping out of the car to confront a crazy old man with a gun wouldn’t even exist.
One final thought that I hope we’ll consider is this one: For every Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, there are thousands of other young black men who are killed, many at the hands of another black man. For various reasons I won’t go into, much black-on-black violence is an artifact of systemic racism. Nonetheless, we must realize that our goal is not just to protect black children from racist white people, it is to protect our good children from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So, this means that the same vigor with which we deal with Michael Dunn must also be applied to record labels that glorify black-on-black violence, or against black individuals and institutions that benefit from promoting black genocide.
Our enemies are coming from all directions, and if we don’t stand up for our children, then nobody will. RIP to Jordan Davis, as well as all of the nameless, faceless, young men and women who’ve died for no good reason. It’s time for the madness to stop.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.
