Obama Speaks Out
on Trayvon Martin Killing
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
1:20 p.m. | Updated President Obama spoke in highly personal terms on Friday about how the shooting in Florida of a 17-year-old black youth named Trayvon Martin had affected him, saying that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”The comments by Mr. Obama were his first on the explosive case in which a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, has claimed self-defense after shooting Mr. Martin several weeks ago. The case has generated outrage about the state’s so-called Stand Your Ground law.
Mr. Obama was asked about his feelings regarding the case during the announcement of his nominee for president of the World Bank in the Rose Garden on Friday morning.
The president often appears perturbed when he is asked off-topic questions at ceremonial events, but on Friday, he seemed eager to address the case, which has quickly developed into a cause célèbre around the country. He cautioned that his comments would be limited because the Justice Department was investigating. But he talked at length about his personal feelings about the case.
“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” Mr. Obama said. “All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen.”
The brief remarks were nonetheless a rare example of Mr. Obama speaking to the nation as an African-American parent and the father of two children.
“Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Mr. Obama said, his face grim. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”
Jonathan Ernst/ReutersPresident Obama spoke in the Rose Garden at the White House on Friday.
The most powerful line came at the end of his brief remarks, as he said that his “main message” was directed at the parents of Mr. Martin, who have expressed their deep grief during interviews on television over the last several days.
“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Mr. Obama said, pausing for a moment. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
Mr. Obama sidestepped some of the most sensitive and politically charged specifics about the case — whether Mr. Zimmerman should be arrested; whether the Stand Your Ground law goes too far in protecting people who shoot others; whether the police chief in Sanford, where the shooting took place, should be fired. (The chief, Bill Lee, stepped down temporarily on Thursday, saying he had become a distraction to the investigation.)
“I’m the head of the executive branch, and the attorney general reports to me,” Mr. Obama said. “So I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now.”
Thousands of supporters of Mr. Martin’s parents expressed their outrage about the killing at a rally in Florida on Thursday night, adding to the growing political dimensions of the case.
Courtesy of Sybrina FultonTrayvon Martin.
The shooting took place Feb. 26, when Mr. Zimmerman, 28, pursued, confronted and fatally shot Mr. Martin, an unarmed high school student carrying only an iced tea and a bag of Skittles.
In a statement on Friday, Mitt Romney, the presumed front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said: “What happened to Trayvon Martin is a tragedy. There needs to be a thorough investigation that reassures the public that justice is carried out with impartiality and integrity.”
Rick Santorum made some pointed comments about the killing while campaigning at a shooting range in West Monroe, La., before the Louisiana primary on Saturday.
“Well, stand your ground is not doing what this man did,” he said. “There’s a difference between stand your ground and doing what he did. It’s a horrible case. I mean it’s chilling to hear what happened, and of course the fact that law enforcement didn’t immediately go after and prosecute this case is another chilling example of horrible decisions made by people in this process.”
Newt Gingrich, campaigning Friday in Port Fourchon, La., said the district attorney had done “the right thing” in empaneling a grand jury. But, speaking of Mr. Zimmerman, he said it was “pretty clear that this is a guy who found a hobby that’s very dangerous.”
“Having some kind of neighborhood watch is reasonable, but you had somebody who was clearly overreaching,” Mr. Gingrich said. “As I understand Florida law, what he was doing had nothing to do with the law that people are talking about.”
A History of Caution on Race
The last time the president waded into a racially charged incident, it became a political problem for him.
Asked at a news conference about the arrest of a black Harvard professor in the summer of 2009, Mr. Obama offered his opinion, saying that the white officer from Cambridge, Mass., had acted “stupidly” and starting a weeklong controversy about what he said.
“I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3 , what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,’’ Mr. Obama said at the time. “That’s just a fact.’’
Mr. Obama eventually invited the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the police officer, James Crowley, to the White House to discuss the situation over some beers.
But despite that incident, the president has been careful not to wade into racial politics. As the nation’s first African-American president, he is sometimes criticized by black leaders who say he is not doing enough to deal with problems in that community.
Asked about the issue in a news conference in his first few months in office, Mr. Obama defended his approach as one that “will lift all boats” by working to “level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.”
“I’m confident that that will help the African-American community live out the American dream at the same time that it’s helping communities all across the country,” Mr. Obama said in April of 2009.
Richard A. Oppel contributed reporting from West Monroe, La., and Trip Gabriel from Port Fourchon, La.
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- James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
Trayvon Martin's Face
MAR 20 2012, 9:05 AM ET
Looking at your note on this online and seeing Trayvon Martin's picture juxtaposed by Obama's picture on the Atlantic cover made me think - this kid could have grown up to be President.
I don't know anything about Trayvon Martin's real character or potential, and I am not meaning to romanticize him. On the other hand, he was only 17 -- who knows what he might have become? The truth is that virtually no one in the United States actually does "grow up to be president." But a similarly important truth in America is the ideal that almost anyone could realize that dream. (And boy have we seen the "anyone" category broaden out in this latest primary season -- just a little joke.) As a conceptual and symbolic matter, Obama's election has forever opened a realm of possibilities for people who could "grow up to be president" -- and whose potential for such a future you can see in a photo like this. In the same vein:
The effect of Trayvon Martin's photo at the top of your blog post was quite stunning, on me anyway. More powerfully than any of the very well written commentary I've read so far, it said to me simply: Who would find this person so threatening as to shoot him - apparently while *walking away*? And who could find that shooting not to be worth a homicide investigation?Let us stipulate that Trayvon Martin might have looked different that night than he did in this angelic photo. Still, the person in this picture is the same one who was shot -- and who, according the 911 tapes, was begging for mercy before the killer fired the fatal shots. If humanizing this tragic slaughter, by literally putting a smiling face on the victim, attracts attention to the racial and broader civic and legal issues it raises, then let it do so. From a reader with a military background, on one of those broader issues:
I am following this story with interest, but less from a black vs. white story perspective than one of gun ownership out of control... I've done a lot of weapons firing and have a sizeable collection of military firearms as well as a number of acquaintances who share my enthusiasm for firearms. I get tired of hearing periodically from one of my well-meaning but not well-informed shooting buddies about how the Obama administration is going to end gun ownership as we know it. I get more tired of hearing about the incidents where gun owners just plain act irresponsibly in exercising their so-called rights. This story from Florida makes me sick. No one has the right to go around armed and taking the law into his own hands. I personally hope that the Department of Justice gets involved in this case since the accounts I've read so far seem to pretty clearly suggest that Trayvon Martin was deprived of his civil rights, and the authorities in Florida so far have made no effort to bring this matter to justice. sincerely hope Mr. Martin's parents can find a competent attorney to bring a civil wrongful death suit against Mr. Zimmerman and the local police department. Clowns like Zimmerman end up branding all firearm owners as out-of-control bullies who can shoot unarmed people with impunity.
For the record: in the page the first reader originally saw, the pictures of Obama and Trayvon Martin were farther apart on the screen, though both visible in the same glance. For clarity I've moved the Obama image down parallel to Martin's.
Will Trayvon Martin case
spur rethinking of
Stand Your Ground laws?
(+video)
Calls are mounting to reassess, and perhaps refine, the Stand Your Ground law in Florida, after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by a man who apparently pursued the teen and then claimed self-defense.
Demonstrators chant Trayvon Martin's name during the Million Hoodie March in Union Square Wednesday, March 21, 2012 in New York.
Mary Altaffer/AP
Seven years after Florida enacted a landmark gun rights law that became a model for other states, calls are mounting from the public and some state officials, including Gov. Rick Scott (R), to reassess it in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch captain who apparently confronted Trayvon after deeming that he looked suspicious.
A coalition of black Florida lawmakers has askedHouse Speaker Dean Cannon, a Republican, to open hearings on the Stand Your Ground law, which removes any duty by an armed citizen to retreat from danger and allows the use of deadly force if there's a reasonable fear of death or grave harm. Mr Cannon says he wants to wait until more facts are known about the incident, and until state and federal investigations are wrapped up, before he decides whether to do that.
Meanwhile, state Sen. Chris Smith, a Broward CountyDemocrat, has said he's writing a bill that would bar a shooter from claiming self-defense if he or she is at any point the aggressor or provocateur.
Governor Scott has told the news media he's open to changing the law, enacted in 2005. "If there's something wrong with the law that's in place, I think it's important we address it," he said. "If what's happening is it's being abused, that's not right."
Since the Stand Your Ground law took effect in Florida, the number of killings found to be justifiable homicide has jumped there. The annual number of such cases has gone from 13 a year on average before 2005 to an average of 36 a year after the law took effect.
Nationally, a jump in the number of justifiable homicides coincides with the adoption of Florida-like laws, which are backed by the NRA, in about half of the states. There were 238 justifiable homicides in the US in 2006, compared with 278 in 2010.
The law's defenders say Stand Your Ground is intended, after all, to make people freer to defend themselves in public, so the increased claims of self-defense are an understandable, even desirable, outcome. What's more, Florida's violent crime rate dropped by nearly 7 percent both in 2009 and 2010, year over year.
Critics of these laws, however, say the leap in justifiable homicides proves that Stand Your Ground is a flawed strategy that has led to unintended consequences, including needless deaths.
No controversy surrounding these laws has been bigger than the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26. Concern about the handling of his case has gradually evolved into widespread outrage, resulting in a massive Internet petition for the arrest of the shooter as well as major protests, including in Miami and New York, over perceived racial injustice. When he was shot, Trayvon, a high school basketball player and aspiring aviation mechanic, was on his way back to his father's fianceé's house in the gated Retreat at Twin Lakes community, after buying Skittles and an iced tea at a convenience store.
Even as the law comes under scrutiny, Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee on Thursday stepped aside temporarily under mounting pressure over his department's handling of Trayvon's death. He had defended his department's decision to not arrest the shooter, a part-Hispanic man named George Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense. Police cited the Stand Your Ground law in declining to charge Mr. Zimmerman, who has an arrest record and who had lately made dozens of 911 calls to police to complain about suspicious individuals in the neighborhood. Police also did not test Zimmerman for alcohol or drug use before releasing him on the night of the shooting.
Chief Lee received a vote of no-confidence from the Sanford City Council on Wednesday. Some suggest the problem in the Martin case may not be with the law itself, but rather with the Sanford P.D.'s interpretation of it. The Stand Your Ground law, they say, does not guarantee a right to confront somebody and then claim self-defense if a shooting ensues.
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In Pictures: Trayvon Martin
“It's interesting to speculate about how the police culture was incorporating [information about the law] into their activities, and maybe that is the point of friction and difficulty,” says Nicholas Johnson, a law professor at Fordham University. “I'm sure that the people reevaluating the law will be wondering and thinking about whether it's a question of communication about what the law says versus a need for shift in the law [itself].”
The case shot into the national spotlight last week after Trayvon's parents and their lawyers blasted the police department for not arresting George Zimmerman. On tapes of Zimmerman's 911 calls to the police before the shooting, Zimmerman reported that a black male wearing a hoodie was acting suspicious. He then ignored a dispatcher's suggestion to stay put and pursued the teen on foot. A struggle ensued in which Trayvon was killed and Zimmerman received cuts on his nose and on the back of his head. Zimmerman told police he was retreating to his truck when he was attacked.
Heeding a growing uproar on the perception of racial injustice – what if the shooter had been black and the victim white? – the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the FBI, and the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division are all investigating the case. Zimmerman, meanwhile, is in hiding, though his father, Robert Zimmerman, has defended his son, saying he wasn't acting on prejudice and did not initiate the attack.
“It seems to me there's something of a failure of a local prosecutor and law enforcement, including the fact that Zimmerman wasn't tested for drugs or intoxicants,” says Bob Cottrol, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University. “It seems a fair stretch in terms of using the no-duty-to-retreat law as a defense.”
The Stand Your Ground law in Florida has been invoked in a number of questionable cases, critics say. It has been used in the case of a gang member who shot and killed a 15-year-old and successfully argued self-defense, and in a case last year in which a repo man wasn't charged after shooting and killing a man trying to stop him from repossessing a car. But in 2007, the courts did question self-defense claims in the case of a homeowner who shot, but did not kill, a man from behind as the man walked away from the house.
“There are lots of instances where people end up making successful self-defense claims where there's preliminary back and forth – a fight starts, there's retreat and pursuit – and that are typical of the set of problems that one has to unwind in self-defense cases,” says Fordham's Professor Johnson. “But pursuit is two steps away from retreat, and that complicates Zimmerman's claim of self-defense.”
Research is inconclusive concerning the safety effects of laws that allow wider latitude for citizens to carry and use guns. But the Trayvon Martin case is highlighting for some legislators the possibility that the self-defense doctrine, intermingled with thorny issues of American life such as race and vigilantism, can lead to unnecessary bloodshed.
"Nothing's ever finished in the legislature, I learned that. Everything can always be readdressed," state Rep. Dennis Baxley, a co-author of the 2005 law, told CBS News. “We need to look at the circumstances that occurred and see if some kind of legislation is in order."
>via: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0322/Will-Trayvon-Martin-case-spur-...
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Candidates Follow Obama on Trayvon
Earlier this week, Mitt Romney ignored a question from a reporter about the Trayvon Martin case. Now that President Obama has related Martin to his own children and called for the case to be investigated from every angle, Romney suddenly has something to say. There should be a "thorough investigation," Romney said of the "tragedy" in a statement that followed shortly after Obama's speech Friday. "Justice is carried out with impartiality and integrity," he said. Rick Santorum, who had also been silent on the issue, decided to weigh in Friday, telling a reporter that it's a "horrible case, chilling."
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The Right Goes Nuts
Over Obama's
Trayvon Comments
| Fri Mar. 23, 2012 12:45 PM PDT
Protesters at the million hoodie march protest in New York City earlier this week.
President Barack Obama spoke to the press about slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin on Friday morning, saying, "When I think about that boy, I think about my own kids.... If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness this deserves and get to the bottom of what happened."
That was enough to cause some corners of the conservative media to go nuts.
Following along with theme of racial paranoia set by Glenn Beck's website The Blaze, conservative media icon Matt Drudge's page stoked fears of "retaliation," citing Louis Farrakhan. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin accused Obama of "political opportunism" and trying to "pour gas on the fire" for empathizing with Martin's parents. The Daily Caller appears to have discovered the Trayvon Martin case on Thursday of this week, but it had already decided that the most important angle was what the New Black Panther Party thought. Perhaps that was to lay the groundwork for Friday's piece by Matthew Boyle, which implies a causal link between the Panthers' outrage and Obama's remarks on the subject. Going to the New Black Panthers to find out what black people think is like going to the Ku Klux Klan to find out what white people think, except if the KKK were a bunch of clowns who no one cares about instead of a group with a history of racist terrorism.
Obama isn't the first national political figure to weigh in on the Martin case, but he's the first to generate a spasm of outrage from the conservative media, which up till now had remained mostly silent. Somehow, both Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice managed to weigh in on the Martin story, both in support of a federal investigation of the incident, without provoking right-wing speculation that they were in league with black separatists.
Sadly, prior to Obama's remarks the Martin case had avoided being sucked into a partisan vortex. Fox News virtually ignored the issue, and National Review has published several well-considered pieces on the subject. On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called Martin's death "an incredible tragedy" and said "I'm glad it's being investigated and we'll take a look at it as the investigation moves along."
I would have preferred the president not weigh in on the Martin case, lest he taint a potential jury trial for George Zimmerman, who maintains he shot Martin in self-defense. But I also suspected that his silence prevented the whole incident from turning into a partisan food fight, with conservatives having to choose between common decency and agreeing with their hated enemy. Because it was obvious, when it came to that, what some of them would choose. Hopefully actual elected officials won't follow their lead.