A Republican congressman said the case of George Zimmerman won’t go away anytime soon because “there are moral dimensions beyond the case that obviously we have to come to grips with.”
On ABC’s This Week, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said it’s “very hard” to keep the legal and moral debates over Trayvon Martin’s death separated.
“I mean, this is a tragedy that should have never happened. I mean, clearly Zimmerman should never have gotten in that car, shouldn’t have had a gun, shouldn’t have been out. The police advised him to stay home,” Cole said.
“But what we don’t know is what happened in the actual encounter. And I think that’s what the jury struggled with. I think they were trying to determine what happened. There’s a reasonable doubt here, which is a pretty high standard,” he added, noting “we’ll be talking about this case for a long time to come.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said he saw “plenty of reasonable doubts” in the second-degree murder case and “at least from all that I watched, it seemed to me it was an accurate verdict.”
“It’s still a very serious set of problems that exist, and I agree with some of the commentators before, that we need to look at these matters a lot more carefully,” Hatch said.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said on CNN’s State of the Union that “a very thoughtful case was made by each side, the jurors made the decision, and we will live with that.”
“And although, you know, there maybe people on either side of this that don’t agree with how it came out, the fact is that we have the best judicial system in the world and we respect it,” Perry said.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said on Fox News Sunday that Zimmerman shouldn’t have been prosecuted.
“And my sympathy goes out also to the Martin family and the Zimmerman family for this ordeal that they’ve been through,” he said. “The evidence didn’t support prosecution, and the Justice Department engaged in this, the president engaged in this and turned it into a political issue that should have been handled exclusively with law and order.”
“So, I regret that this all happened. I’m sorry that it was turned into a race issue by the media. And otherwise, it would have been tried or not tried, depending on the laws and the language that was there. This is unfortunate.”
Defense Atty:”if George Zimmerman were black, he never would have been charged with a crime” Is he high?
— Michael Steele (@Steele_Michael) July 14, 2013
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