The jury more or less nailed it, for what it’s worth. Under Florida law, if a defendant kills someone and claims self-defense, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to demonstrate the killing wasn’t self-defense. Which basically means you can start a fight with no witnesses, kill the other party, claim self-defense, and be assured of getting off scot-free because there’s no one to gainsay you.
It’s a hell of a way to run a state, but then, America’s flaccid wang is a hell of a state to begin with. But it’s of a piece with other things, like North Carolina sneaking its abortion restrictions through on a bill to prohibit sharia law (proving that North Carolina Republicans are immune to death by irony poisoning). Or Texas calling one special session after another until they can hammer through a law that makes it illegal for a woman to use RU-486 – a far safer method of pregnancy termination than surgical intervention, and one that requires a doctor’s involvement in any event – in the privacy of her own home. Or half a dozen states leaping at the opportunity to impose restrictions on voting in the absence of any preclearance mechanism for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Civil Cold War is heating up. The general result of the last two or three years of state-level activity and Supreme Court decisions has been to return to a pre-Civil Rights’ interpretation of “states rights”, apparently leaning heavily on the idea that it’s better to get forgiveness than permission and that the best way to bring about their own promised land is to implement it red state by red state while merely tying up the federal government otherwise. No need to win even a single house of Congress, or the White House – six years of record-breaking filibuster numbers are all that’s required to grind government to a halt.
So where do we go from here? It’s unlikely that the Supreme Court will step into the fray on the side of the federal government; quite the contrary, based on what we’ve seen thus far. (The Court didn’t affirm gay marriage; they punted on an open-and-shut case of standing, and one where the decision has been specifically handcrafted to pass muster with the swing vote.) It won’t take long before there’s an entire block of states, all under neo-Confederate governance, with strikingly similar laws across the board requiring voter ID and tightening up non-traditional voting, regulating abortion almost out of existence, and putting a gun on every hip with a green light to use it. Basically, we’re headed toward secession on the cheap. Once they create their old white man’s paradise, they may be reluctant to give it up. And that’s when the trouble really starts.
I called it. I called it twenty years ago. But hey, there was no difference between Gore and Bush, right?