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<p>Lawyers for State Attorney Angela Corey say she has “sovereign immunity” and are asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit filed against her in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.</p> <p>Ben Kruidbos, her former information technology director, was fired in June after he testified that prosecutors did not turn over all information to Zimmerman’s defense team in the shooting death of the 17-year-old. Kruidbos said he was a whistleblower and under the law cannot be fired.</p>

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Stop and Frisk and Assistant DA Raul Esparza? Dick Wolf was not kidding with this whole Law & Order/ripped from the headlines thing. Of course, if he wanted to be more accurate, the slogan would go "ripped from one headline, ripped from another headline, ripped from a third headline and then put in a blender with an added sprinkle of crazy," but maybe that's too clunky. Last night's episode of SVU managed to combine so many hot-button current events (current=three months old) that it could make a gal's head spin. It began like all SVUs —...

The parents of Trayvon Martin will be guests Tuesday on Katie Couric's nationally syndicated talk show. "Katie" airs at 2 p.m. weekdays on WESH-Channel 2. Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, the parents of Trayvon, are in-studio guests for what the "Katie" show bills as "an honest and compelling discussion about the reality of race in America." Couric asks how the parents are holding up. "It’s difficult when you’ve gone through a tragedy that we’ve gone through... so many people supporting us and lifting us up," Fulton says. The program provided an excerpt of Fulton talking about her activism after her...

ADA - "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later: Self-Defense, Stand Your Ground, and the Trayvon Martin Tragedy," will be the title of the discussion during the Ohio Northern University Cultural Conversation hour in the Celebrezze Court Room on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 11 a.m. The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Black Student Union, the Black Law Student Association and the Office of Multicultural Development. Dr. C. Antoinette Clarke, ONU professor of law, will discuss the law of self-defense and the changes to settled doctrine that "Stand Your Ground" laws represent, and she will examine both...

Slowly, I'm beginning to understand the freight of meaning in President Barack Obama's comment that Trayvon Martin could have been him. George Yancy's "Walking While Black in the 'White Gaze' " in The New York Times sent shivers down my spine. Fifty years ago, he was a kid in north Philadelphia carrying a telescope, and a white police officer said to him, "Man, I almost blew you away. I thought you had a weapon." Yancy says he's waiting for the day a white president says, "There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other...

An NRA commentator is claiming gun rights are like gay rights. Put simply, they’re not. Here’s what led to this ridiculous comparison and why these two topics are so very different. Starbucks recently had to make a little request to customers: that they do not bring firearms into the coffee chain’s stores because, they feel, having to have one eye on the man with the gun while drinking your latte should not be part of the “Starbucks experience.” Prior to this, the gun lobby had used Starbucks’ uneasy silence regarding gun carrying in store to peddle so-called Starbucks Appreciation Days,...

The Dream Defenders are taking their message to the floor of the United Nations. The group, which is against Florida’s “stand your ground” law and formed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, submitted an eight-page shadow report Friday to the U.N. Human Rights Committee answering questions the committee raised as to whether stand your ground violates the United States’ civil rights obligations. The group has gained momentum since the July acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. They initiated a 31-day occupation of the Capitol building in Tallahassee to pressure members of the Florida House of Representatives...

An email sent to students by a University of Maryland official that cites the Trayvon Martin shooting as evidence "it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida" is being blasted as the latest evidence of a left-wing bias on campus. The email, from William Dorland, director of the school's Honors College, starts by welcoming students back to campus, but then quickly veers into politics. "This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida," it reads, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of...

The minds behind the CBS comedy 2 Broke Girls thought it might be clever to catch viewers up on what they missed during the summer hiatus. They also figured they could hammer home a pair of false liberal memes at the same time. The show's season premiere Monday night featured Max the waitress (Kat Dennings) attending to a young male diner. "I've been out of town all summer. Anything new?" the customer asked her. Max proceeded to rattle off a series of pop culture anecdotes, name checking Chris Brown, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber and Oprah Winfrey before turning political....

Since April North Carolina has made national and international news with a remarkable social movement that has gathered thousands to protest, with nearly 1,000 arrests for civil disobedience. The Forward Together Movement, led by the North Carolina NAACP, showed up at the General Assembly in Raleigh for 13 consecutive Mondays while the Republican/Tea Party-controlled legislature was in session. Although 17 clergy members made up the first wave of arrestees, the activists who formed the backbone of the actions were part of the six-year-old, NAACP-led HKonJ Coalition (Historic Thousands on Jones St.—site of the legislature), which had mobilized thousands to the...

If numbers make an event a success, then day two of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual convention was just that. The halls and conference rooms of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Northwest Washington, D.C. were filled with attendees who sat in on policy sessions, made plans to attend a bevy of social functions, and networked with other convention-goers. The CBCF’s Annual Legislative Conference is a gathering of African-American industry leaders, policy makers, elected officials and citizens. More than 70 policy sessions were planned for the four-day event, which began Sept. 18. As the convention unfolded, events took...

Monday morning, the United States saw yet another mass shooting. The Navy Yard shooting occurred only 2.5 miles away from the White House, shocking the nation and reminding citizens that nowhere in America is safe from gun violence. Since President Obama took office in 2008, Americans have witnessed at least 19 mass shootings. All received exclusive media coverage, a type of coverage that has yet to occur when violence takes the lives of youth in minority communities across the nation. It is clear that in America you are in danger simply by living out your daily life. But it seems...

LAKE MARY — Lake Mary police Chief Steve Bracknell hinted in a recent email exchange that he thinks George Zimmerman may be a threat to public safety. That came in an exchange last week with a West Coast man who complained about how Bracknell's department had handled a domestic-violence dispute between Zimmerman and his estranged wife, Shellie, and her father. Zimmerman was handcuffed Sept. 9 but later unshackled and never arrested after his father-in-law was punched in the nose and Shellie complained that her estranged husband was reaching inside his shirt for a gun. Police found no gun, but a...

It was nice to be some thousands of miles away when the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial came down. I confess to being about as skeptical of a guilty verdict as I was of the predictions of mass violence in response. But being back and having thought about this a bit, I think something needs to be pointed out. There is this horrible idea out there that we should bracket off murder; that Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism but Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton were not. The thinking holds that black people are concerned about the violence...

FORT LAUDERDALE (CBSMiami) – A group of Broward County students attended a special town hall meeting Wednesday that focused on the death of Trayvon Martin and the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. The panel included Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton and students were allowed to ask questions and try to find answers to help improve race relations in South Florida. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Akailah Smotherman, 17, was one of the students in attendance. She said when she learned that Zimmerman was found not guilty for the death of Martin, she had a strong response. “It hurt. I cried; my mama cried; it...

The best way to honor Trayvon Martin is to work to elevate the social status of Black men and boys everywhere. It's up to us to close the opportunity gap and stop the school-to-prison pipeline, so we can, at long last, eliminate society’s negative stereotypes and — most importantly — end the crisis of negative self-perception. Forty-two percent of Black students attend schools that are under-resourced. Young Black Americans are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than young whites — in spite of evidence showing that white kids are more likely to abuse drugs. Taken...

The Senate Judiciary postponed their hearing on "Stand Your Ground" laws on Tuesday morning, after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard one day earlier. "Stand Your Ground" came into national prominence last year after George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, where the law allows people to use deadly force to defend themselves. Martin's mother was expected to testify, along with the parents of Jordan Davis, another unarmed, black teenager killed in Florida. RT's Meghan Lopez talks to Jordan's father Ron Davis and his lawyer, John Phillips, about the controversial legislation.

The State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman was no different. But there was one key player who was both highly visible and oddly inscrutable. Wearing an inevitable muted pantsuit, she sat at the defense table scribbling notes and occasionally whispering to the stoic Zimmerman and lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara. Newspaper cutlines identified the woman with shoulder-length blonde hair as Lorna Truett, co-counsel. Although she never questioned a witness, spoke to a reporter or addressed the jury, she played an integral, behind-the-scenes role in this high-profile, once-in-a-career case. Truett, whose name hangs on the shingle outside the tiny converted house...

It’s an obvious question. After George Zimmerman was acquitted Obama got on TV and gave a very racially divisive speech condemning the law, the legal system and America’s treatment of blacks. He made it clear he believes that blacks are treated almost as bad as they were in the 1950s, in spite of his four years in charge making progress. And Dividing America into opposition groups against one another is how Obama won two elections. And now this Navy Yard mass shooting After all as liberals endlessly lecture us : ‘words mean things’ and 'they have consequences'. After all they...

LAKE MARY, Fla., Sept. 14 (UPI) -- A Florida police chief agreed with assertions by an emailer that George Zimmerman is potentially dangerous. In the email exchange, which was originally revealed by the website ThinkProgress, Steve Bracknell, who heads the police department in Lake Mary where Zimmerman lives, endorsed his correspondent's statements that Zimmerman is a "ticking time bomb" and "a Sandy Hook, Aurora waiting to happen." Since he was acquitted this summer of killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, Zimmerman has been in the news several times. These include two stops for speeding, a visit to the Florida...