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Injustice? I hope it visits with him often.

Wow: Big city editor wishes ‘no peace,’ lifetime of hell on George Zimmerman



It's a measure of just how out-of-control the media has gotten on the Zimmerman story that anyone would even think about writing what Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, wrote yesterday.
And it's all the more so because it was Stephen Henderson, who in my experience is a thoughtful liberal with a penchant for intellectual honesty. He is not, generally speaking, the kind of guy from whom you would expect this (emphasis mine):
George Zimmerman deserves no respite. No peace. Doesn't matter that his prosecution for killing Trayvon Martin left so much to be desired. Doesn't matter that his attorneys worked wonders in raising doubts about the case against him, or that they were successful in convincing a jury to declare him not guilty of second-degree murder or even manslaughter. Zimmerman killed a kid. An unarmed kid who had been doing nothing wrong. A kid he stalked and confronted without cause and against the admonishment of law enforcement, and whom he shot to death after the altercation he provoked spun out of his control.

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My job is typically to make policy sense of news events. But here, I'm at a loss. As a parent, as an African American, I can't get much past thinking Zimmerman has earned every day of the hell his life should be from here on out. Injustice? I hope it visits with him often. Yeah. He really wrote that. And the Free Press really published it. (Disclosure: I write for the rival Detroit News.) Now I get that Steve is venting some personal anger. Everyone who does opinion writing occasionally goes into a rant in which emotion is fused with expression of strongly held beliefs. Sometimes this makes for compelling writing. But in this case, a high-ranking editor of a major American newspaper has openly wished personal harm on an individual who - according to the justice system in this country - is not guilty of any crime. He has wished frequent injustice on George Zimmerman. He has encouraged anyone inclined to make Zimmerman's life a living hell to go ahead and do so. I could have sworn liberals had a problem with vigilantes. In fact, that was one of the things they kept saying about George Zimmerman - that he was a vigilante and he should have backed off and let the cops take care of things. I guess they are willing to put their faith in law enforcement only up to the point where the justice system acquits someone they really hate, and at that point an open call for never-ending mayhem to be inflicted upon that individual is fair game. I wonder if Steve stopped and thought as he wrote this: "Someone could read this and take it as license to physically assault or kill this man." I bet he didn't. Or if the thought occurred to him, he quickly banished it from his mind because he was clearly expressing anger and nothing was going to stop him from doing so. That someone like Steve Henderson would write this is really an indication of just how far off the rails the media has gone in covering this story. Normally an open call to wreak havoc on the life of an individual would never even be pondered, let alone written, let alone published. But media groupthink is a powerful thing, and right now an atmosphere exists that makes such a column acceptable. The media largely manufactured the racial angle to this case, as Breitbart demonstrated so thoroughly here, then took it up as a cause. A commentator's obligation to exercise responsible judgment in what he writes went completely out the window because Zimmerman was turned into some sort of hood-and-sheet-wearing racist monster. And when the jury didn't conclude that the prosecution had met the heavy burden required to prove second-degree murder, the media went nuts - so much so that a normally rational man like Steve Henderson had no compunction about encouraging freelance revenge against the man by anyone who might feel inclined to inflict it. My God. This has to stop. I'm sorry they're so heartbroken about the outcome of the trial, but experienced journalists should know the system is not designed to guarantee particular outcomes in criminal trials just because the media want them so badly. It's designed to weigh evidence against the constitutional rights of the accused. Sometimes that results in verdicts people don't like. That doesn't give members of the media license to openly advocate for hell to rain down on those they have set up as the villians. I hope no one attacks or kills George Zimmerman in part because of the rage that crap like this encourages. And I have to believe, when he calms down and gets back to his own heart, Steve Henderson hopes the same. That's why he should never have written what he did.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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