At Long Last, the Most Perfect Crime

By Rude One

Mystery novels are filled with criminals who attempt to commit the perfect crime. That is, a murder, usually, that they get away with. Most of the time, there is some cat-and-mouse game between the detective trying to solve the case and the killer. The perfect crime is the one that the killer never even gets arrested for, the one where, perhaps, as in the case of Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter," the cops unwittingly eat the murder weapon.

But the verdict in the case of George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, proves that everyone from Agatha Christie to James Patterson has been thinking small. The perfect crime is not just the one you get away with. The perfect crime is the one for which you are acquitted in a court of law. In fact, the most perfect crime of all is the one where, no matter what your true intent, the law supports and sanctions your right to murder in cold blood.

The shooting of Trayvon Martin, it turns out, was that most perfect of crimes.

This blog has previously discussed the complicity of the Florida legislature in making laws that are so ludicrously pro-murder that a Trayvon Martin-type killing was inevitable. It has also argued that the police and conservative media figures successfully turned Martin into a nigger thug who was looking for trouble. It has shown, quite clearly, that Stand Your Ground and other so-called "self-defense" laws do not apply to African Americans who choose to defend themselves. Any anger the Rude Pundit feels, at Zimmerman, at the verdict, at the prosecutors, at the defense attorneys, he expressed last night on Twitter; it has been expressed by others and is being expressed in the streets of America tonight. He agrees with Ta-Nehesi Coates that the law in the state of Florida, a law passed by politicians who can be voted out of office if the people of the state really want it changed, demanded that George Zimmerman be let free and given back his gun.

So he'll just say this: On that night last February, when he got out of his car, George Zimmerman became the judge and jury of Trayvon Martin, accused of the crime of being a black male teenager walking in a neighborhood. Zimmerman then became Martin's executioner because, like so many oppressed people before him, Martin resisted Zimmerman's judgment. So Zimmerman did what scared people in power do all the time. He used overwhelming force to stop Martin's resistance. It is the same kind of force that has killed people and movements in America and all over the world.

George Zimmerman wanted Trayvon Martin to submit to his power, to be what Zimmerman had adjudicated him to be. Trayvon Martin refused. Trayvon Martin resisted. And that's why Trayvon Martin, like so many resisters before him, had to be killed.

There was no way George Zimmerman was going to be found guilty because his guilt would have made Trayvon Martin innocent and said that the law was wrong. Even worse, it would have made Trayvon Martin, the black male teenager, right in his resistance, and the state of Florida, if not the entire nation, would not allow that to happen.