Justice for Some

Which I think is an improvement. In case you haven't been keeping up with the Jacksonville shooting case that gained national attention, I'll give you the short version. A fifty-ish man and his fiancee were returning to their hotel after a wedding reception and pulled into a convenience store. The woman went in while the man waited in the car. Meanwhile, in the car next to the man, four young men (three 17-year-olds and one 19-year-old) on their way home from the mall were playing music too loudly. One of the young men, the driver, had gone into the store. The man asked the young guys to turn down the music. At first they complied, but then a backseat passenger reached forward and turned it back up. There was some back and forth between the two cars, and the pulled a gun from his glove compartment and started shooting at the other car. He shot ten times, killing the backseat passenger. The man left, went back to his hotel, had a drink and ordered pizza, and drove back to his home in Satellite Beach the next morning -- even after he had heard that the young man had died. Fortunately, someone at the scene had gotten his license plate number.

The man had already been convicted of attempted murder of the three surviving teens in a trial earlier this year, but the jury hung on the murder charge. Yesterday the trial ended and today the jury went out to deliberate. Around 3:30 this afternoon, the verdict came in: guilty of first-degree murder. The man will spend the rest of his life in prison (the mandatory minimum on the three attemped murder charges of which he had already been convicted is sixty years), and that's sad for his family. The young man is dead, which is more sad for his family. By all accounts, he was a good kid, but even if he hadn't been, no one deserves to die in a parking lot over a fight about music.

Now, it might not surprise you to find out that the fifty-ish man is white and the young men are black. The man had said as soon as he pulled into the parking space, to his now-former fiancee, that he "hate[s] that thug music". He claimed to be afraid that more "thugs" would come after him; however, he had gotten out of the car to fire the last three shots. When he got to the hotel, he went outside in the dark to walk his (very small) dog. So he didn't really seem to be all that afraid. The bigger surprise, at least if you follow issues of race in Florida, is that the man was convicted of first-degree murder. The defense attorney said the case wasn't about race, but I can assure you of three things: If the young guys had been white, the man never would have shot; if the man had been black, justice would have been much swifter; and if the man hadn't had a gun in his car, he wouldn't have engaged the teenagers in the first place.

My belief is that the statewide (and even national) outrage about the acquittal of a man in a somewhat similar (although certainly less clear-cut) case two years ago may have had some influence on the jury's decision. Whether it did or not, this verdict is a move in the right direction; no parent should have to worry when his or her son goes to the mall (or a gas station, or wherever, that he'll be shot and never come home.