with like force. so if i scream and curse at you, you can scream back and yell back. you can t punch me and you can t shoot me and can t take a knife to me. if we were to presume to george zimmerman s aggressiveness and following him and say george confronted him, even if that were absolutely true, trayvon martin did not have a legal right to attack george zimmerman physically and when he upped the ante by doing that, he caused a cascading round of events that ended up leading to his own death. what i was struck by in the trial was the cascading series of events from a legal perspecti perspective, really only start when the physical confrontation begins, whereas logic to me indicates it should have started earlier when george zimmerman is driving along and sees trayvon martin and gets out of his vehicle and calls the authorities, et cetera, et cetera, but none of that seemed to be relevant in terms of the law.
previously broken into a white woman s home and that was entered into evidence. so race did come in, but in a very negative way. angela corey, you said this case was not about race, but you said trayvon martin was profiled to be a criminal. how do you reconcile those two things? many factors go into one human being profiling another human being. doesn t race factor into that? well, race could factor into it. it would be one of many factors, but it was not the sole factor, nor were we able to file the race enhancement, the hate crime enhancement under florida law. we believe that the criminal profiling, the wannabe fact, the fact that he was armed and should have never gotten out of his car would be enough to prove second degree murder. did you believe race was one of those reasons george zimmerman paid attention to trayvon martin?
justice system. i mean, i believe that s where the tension originally came from when we were all introduced to the trayvon martin case and where it ended. we still don t have faith in the justice system. do you think that zimmerman racially profiled trayvon martin? i do. i believe so, because we all have issues with prejudice, and i think as a nation we re afraid to own up to it. when you think about what prejudice means, it means to prejudge. we know he prejudged him. he didn t know that young man from a can of payment. so to prejudge him, to be prejudiced against him, that was clearly wrong. and we all do. but he, in the end, precipitated it, george zimmerman, is my whole problem with the case. if he hadn t ignored the advice not to follow after trayvon, then there would have been no
crime. and i relied upon the justice system to see what i saw, which was a second degree murder case. as a mother of a brown boy, i struggled with that. what do i tell him now, when this case first broke, his question to me, and in retrospect was so poignant, he said why was he so afraid of trayvon martin? having these conversations is so important. you know, what occurs to me is when mr. canada and mr. blow speak so eloquently as other journalists have about the question of what shall i tell my black son? i would be very interested to know how many parents are saying what shall i say to my white son or white daughter about this world, and the fact that all of us have a role in it.
writing the entire system failed trayvon martin long before his confrontation with george zimmerman, sunny hostin, jeffrey toobin and newt gingrich, the former house speaker. appreciate all of you being with us. i want to introduce everybody to a very special guest we have, raymond santana, one of the so-called central park five whose convictions were vacated. he was vindicated after serving so long. i m so glad you re here. [ applause ] what s so extraordinary to me about your case, i grew up in new york city and i remember your picture being splashed in the papers. i remember the media who at that time i wasn t working for, talking about packs of wild kids, wilding through the park.