An absolute truism, and I believe, one of the reasons for the right to a jury of our peers, not a enlightened, elite, judge or progressive, egalitarian prosecutor.
This part about juries indicated peer wisdom to me:
A jury deliberated three hours before acquitting Gonzales. He spoke in Spanish to reporters after the trial, saying that at the end of the day it was his life or the boy's.
The verdict shocked Druker. He needed to know why the jury agreed to acquit. He spoke to the jurors officially, and then again afterward when he saw them around town. He said he always heard the same answer: They feared losing the right to protect their own homes.
"They said, at the end of the day we can't let these kids think they can come into our house and do that," he recalled. "It was sending out a statement."
You know, there was a case like this on Long Island, where the shooter was black and the victim was white.
Some teenagers got into some kind of “facebook fight” and somehow some of the white kids ended up at the black kid’s house. The father of the black kid confronted them outside the house, but on his property. Ultimately he shot and killed one of the kids.
I’m sorry I don’t remember the details well, and I can’t think of any of the names. It did get a lot of press in NYC and LI and it might even have been written up at length in the New Yorker or New York Magazine.
I think the shooter got off with what many saw as a slap on the wrist, but I think he did do some jail time.
I do have it good authority (from someone whose father knew the shooter) that the father was an OK guy.
I’m being a bad reporter here, I know. But I just remembered this story, it’s kind of interesting nobody around NY has recollected it and compared it to the Trayvon Martin incident.