3 Well-Known Cases That Defy Zimmerman's Defense

Or "Why The National Review is Always Wrong About Everything"...

The National Review, a popular conservative magazine, has been getting a lot of traction with its recent spate of attacks against Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman trial.  Their articles feature unflattering photos of Corey that portray her as an angry black woman with gritted teeth and flaring nostrils. Their foundation for these attacks, however, appeals to our liberal side...

The NR brings up cases that tug at our heart-strings like the one about the young boy who was tried as an adult.  They also talk about how supposedly nobody likes Corey or gets along with her.  They recruit statements from lawyers like Alan Dershowitz who can't wait to speak ill of her... with such vociferousness that we are left to once again wonder who is the "aggressor" in this sequel to the Zimmerman trial.

But the crux of the National Review's argument against Corey is that she is incompetent and doesn't even know what 2nd Degree Murder is or how to define it.  Ian Tuttle writes: "[2nd Degree Murder] almost never applies to one-on-one encounters. Second-degree murder is the madman who fires indiscriminately into a crowd or unlocks the lions’ cage at the zoo."


That quoted statement is patently false.  The reality is the opposite.  Angela Corey knows this.  The web that NR is weaving is a tangled one but the idea is that whether you think Zimmerman is guilty or innocent, you should blame Angela Corey. Blame her, they say, because she doesn't know how to do her job... supposedly even rising to the level of prosecutorial misconduct.

But the National Review is not the only publication joining in on the Angela Corey hatefest... Certain popular Tea Party bloggers have even taken it upon themselves to doctor up FAKE court documents as some kind of evidence of Corey's supposed wrongdoings.  It's absurd.  It's a racist attempt to blame a black woman for the murder that Zimmerman is so clearly guilty of.

Here are three relatively well known cases of 2nd Degree Murder that are not at all what Ian Tuttle asserts in the National Review with the utmost authority.




1.  Robert Hall is a white man who tried to claim self-defense when he murdered the other white man who was sleeping with his wife.  Like Zimmerman, Hall pursued the person he killed but claimed that he wasn't looking for a fight when his victim doubled back on him.  Here's a photo of him being found guilty of 2nd Degree Murder:

2. Phil Spector's attorneys maneuvered in much the same way Zimmerman's attorneys did.  They tried to refocus the jury on the state of mind of the victim instead of that belonging to the shooter.  Victim blaming is all too common of a practice among defense attorneys and it reached a fever pitch when Spector claimed that the woman he murdered had just inexplicably gone crazy and shot herself with his gun when she arrived at his house.  He was also found guilty of 2nd Degree Murder.

3. Chrishaun "CeCe" McDonald is a black transgender woman who was attacked by a group of straight, white people. They cut deeply across her face with a broken bottle and the lacerations (mainly to the left cheek of her face) were permanently debilitating and severed her salivary gland... When McDonald finally fought back in an effort to save her own life, one man in the group was stabbed to death as a result of that. This is a clear case of self-defense in a hate crime situation but because McDonald did not back down, that is to say, because she "stood her ground" in the situation, she was charged with 2nd Degree Murder as well and currently sits in prison.