Former president Jimmy Carter, who for years has been an outspoken voice for progressive causes, waded into the George Zimmerman controversy yesterday, telling a local Atlanta television station that the jury “made the right decision.”
The nation’s 39th president, who made his comments in an interview Tuesday with WXIA in Atlanta, said he agreed with President Obama—though he mischaracterized Obama’s reaction to Zimmerman’s acquittal.
“So President Obama said he thought—it was—he regretted the decision, but he had to accept the results of the jury decision,” Carter said.
In a statement released after the verdict, Obama called Trayvon Martin’s death a tragedy “for America” and said, “we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.” But Obama didn’t say he regretted the jury decision.
“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented because the prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman and that he was not at all defending himself,” Carter said.
“It’s not a moral question,” he continued, “it was a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”
As the nation is still embroiled in angry protests and passionate opinion pieces, Carter, when asked if race was a factor in the jury’s decision, didn’t want to presume to know what the jury was thinking.
“I can’t allege the six jurors … are not just as sensitive about the race issue as I am or you are,” he said. “I would presume they listened to the evidence.”
“I’ve seen outbreaks of this before, in California when a man was beaten up by police and when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; there were terrible race riots. And I think eventually no matter how deep the emotional feelings and moral feelings might be, with time passing, we start seeing what we can do about the present and the future and put aside the feelings about the past,” Carter said.
