Guy also failed to eviscerate the crazed psychopathic black male child image. He actually fueled it by asking the jury to imagine Trayvon Martin stalking Z. What he needed to do (probably from the beginning) was implant the image of a white boy trying to get home and drive home that Trayvon Martin wanted to watch the basketball game and give skittles to his future step-brother. His killer wanted to hunt fugitives.
And finally, Guy needed to address fear of black males as not reasonable. A tall order, but one that needed to be attempted as it goes to the heart of this psychological projection. Truth of the matter is Z did fear for his life. He thought he was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987) when in fact he was the alien hunting Trayvon Martin. He feared on some basic level that is at the heart of racism, not the black law professor or whatever black associate Z made, but the strange unknown young black male in the dark that is a projection of his own delusion. That irrational fear is what killed the child and is not codified in law as rational. That's the difference between a female being stalked at night and a young black male. A female can scare away an attacker by standing up to him. (Men who attack women are not looking for aggressive women. So no one thinks a female will go attack a strange man in the dark. But Trayvon Martin didn't have the benefit of that assumption.) And there was nothing Trayvon Martin could have done to defend himself against someone with a gun who wouldn't let him get away. So the question should have been drilled home over and over and over: What was this kid supposed to do? And how was he supposed to know to do it? What was this kid supposed to do? And how was he supposed to know to do it? Does he fight? Does he bring a strange man home? Does he speak to a stranger pursuing him? What is he supposed to do? I figured out long ago that someone looking to rationalize killing an unarmed black male will have an answer that usually amounts to reading minds or not existing.
That said, I have learned a lot through all of this. And not just that racism has no reason and therefore needs no reasonable doubt. But from the beginning, I was under the mistaken impression that President Barack Obama was saying in his statement in March of last year that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, that he empathized with the Fulton/Martin family rather than his killer's family, translating to the country that Obama empathized with black people, but not others, particularly his half white self. That was a problem. But in actuality he was saying Trayvon Martin could have been him. But that potential was lost. And were the world actively trying to make another Barack Obama, it might be noble to say.
It is clear, however, kids are in trouble. And while the discussion is spotlighting black teenage children, there is something really sinister the way society is treating children in general, criminalizing or blowing them off entirely. There's a sort of collective child abuse taking place. So that the third degree felony murder child abuse that the prosecutors attempted to lesser include, kind of got to the heart of it all. Z in a way is a scapegoat, singled out because he's not a cop. But the message being sent is child abuse is acceptable so long as some sort of licensed authority inflicts it. This abuse starting out as neglect in the seventies when parents were allowed to discipline children began to really emerge as institutionalized when children were collectively drugged by the authority of psychiatric doctors and now has evolved to children made to be thugs and terrorists through social media. Somehow a kid can post a wrong picture or wrong comment and be carted off to jail...their life over. And one has to ask, what is childhood anymore?
I've really grown weary of this. The pundits, the politics, I've had enough. The rest has already been said.