That last point relates to a finding that could be seen as evidence of racial bias: While black and white defendants fared equally well, people who killed blacks were more likely to make successful self-defense claims than people who killed whites. “People who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time,” the Times reported, “while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time.” The Times conceded that its analysis “does not prove that race caused the disparity between cases with black and white victims,” since “other factors may be at play.” For example, “black victims were more likely to be carrying a weapon when they were killed” and “more likely than whites to be committing a crime, such as burglary, at the time.”
Critics of Florida’s law may seize upon the numbers regarding victims and cite Zimmerman’s acquittal as another example of how the criminal justice system values black people’s lives less than white people’s. But they will find no support in the numbers regarding defendants for the often heard claim that Trayvon Martin would have been arrested immediately and ultimately convicted if he had shot Zimmerman instead of the other way around. And as Reason Contributing Editor Walter Olson notes in a recent CNN.com essay, anyone who is concerned about racial disparities in the justice system should think twice before responding to Zimmerman’s acquittal by supporting legal changes that would make it easier to convict people and send them to prison.
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