Students, Faculty Discuss Trayvon Martin Case

According to a panel of Harvard faculty members and students, the “inanity” in the killing of Trayvon Martin was not the outcome of the trial, but the laws that promote situations like it.

The discussion, held Wednesday evening, was organized by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and Cabot House. It was the first in a series of panels on race and justice created to analyze the implications of the Martin case on race relations in the U.S. and within the Harvard community specifically.

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed February 2012 in Sanford, Fla. by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. After facing charges of second-degree manslaughter and murder, Zimmerman was acquitted in July.

The five-person panel consisted of Ronald S. Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and Winthrop Housemaster; Timothy G. Benson, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School; and three undergraduates. They analyzed the social and psychological ramifications of Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law,  which gives individuals the right to defend themselves with deadly force without any requirement to evade or retreat from the dangerous situation. The law was influential in the defense of George Zimmerman.

“The stand-your-ground law was written in a way that demanded the verdict,” Sullivan said.

The other panelists agreed that the law did not uphold justice in Martin’s case, and outlined other aspects of the trial that they believed were troubling.

“The case seemed to be thrown in a way by the prosecution,” Rodriguez S. Roberts ’15, one of the panelists and president of the Harvard College Black Men’s Forum, said, which led to witnesses being “unprepared for the onslaught of the defense’s cross-examination.”

Sullivan added that the law has significant psychological impacts that promote tragic outcomes, stating that “it provokes a frontiersman-like mentality in people.”

Benson concurred with Sullivan, noting the “dynamic between power and privilege.” He said that Zimmerman felt empowered by his position as a neighborhood watch volunteer and thus thought he had the right to act in a certain way.

Attitudes towards African Americans also played an important role in the Martin case, according to Sullivan, who cited figures that showed there is a statistically higher likelihood of white attackers being acquitted when the victim is African-American than when the victim is white.

“Blackness often serves as a crude proxy for criminality,” Sullivan said.

Differential attitudes toward minorities persist here at Harvard too, according to S. Allen Counter, a professor of neurology and director of the Harvard Foundation.

“What eludes our white friends is the concept of racial humiliation,” Counter said in an interview with The Crimson following the event. “They say things that they wouldn’t say to white colleagues.”

For Counter, the aim of these discussions and of the Harvard Foundation in general is to approach the issue of racial bias in the Harvard community in a “civil manner.” This series of panels on race and justice is just one example of the approach, he added.

“The Foundation wants to see a Harvard where students don’t have to be distracted by race,” Counter said.