Nothing to Say About the Zimmerman Trial

I’ve written very little about George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, and I have nothing to say about the trial. It’s a lethal-force incident, with a claim of self-defense, and in years of reading about such incidents, I’ve learned a few important lessons:

(1) These cases are very fact-specific: Guilt or innocence can turn on just a few details, and it will be hard to arrive at a sound conclusion about Zimmerman’s guilt unless you know all the relevant details.

(2) The media usually does not report all the relevant details.

(3) Some of the relevant details are unknowable, except to the participants.

So unless I listen to the entire trial — and maybe not even then because of (3) — I don’t have any opinion about the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman that I can be confident about. For the most part, neither does anyone else, but that doesn’t seem to stop many of them from talking about it.