Zimmerman to be Indicted

What bothers me about the George Zimmerman indictment is that the special prosecutor refused to turn it over to a grand jury.  This looked like an obvious instance in which the grand jury option would make sense.  My guess is that the prosecutor knew a jury would no-bill Zimmerman.  The politicians want a trial.  They would like to see Zimmerman railroaded into a conviction.

Let me make my position clear.  I do not know if George Zimmerman was justified in killing Trayvon Martin.  In fact, the only living person who knows that is Zimmerman himself.  The external information in the form of the sole eyewitness account suggests that it was a self-defense shooting, but I do not know.  I find it hard to believe a grand jury could reasonably return an indictment given the scant data available.

The prosecution is going to be based on the fact that Zimmerman should have stayed in his vehicle and not attempted to pursue or confront Martin.  Zimmerman may have been imprudent in taking that course, but that has little or nothing to do with what transpired in the encounter that took place between the two men.  If Zimmerman's story is true, Martin came looking for trouble, initiated an assault, and was attempting to severely injure the older man when Zimmerman responded by shooting him.

While we can question Zimmerman's wisdom, he did not at any point engage in an illegal action.  He was on a public street in his own neighborhood.  I no longer live in any kind of suburban or urban environment, but, if I did, I would want to be able to walk around the block and see what was going on if the notion struck me.  Why should Zimmerman have been forced to leave the area and hide in his house?  This is doubly true if Martin posed no threat of any kind. 

Again, this is assuming Zimmerman's story is correct, and his story is really the only one there is so far.  This looks like a political prosecution.  The end result is hard to predict, but I can safely forecast that the law of unintended consequences is already working like gravity in a ten-story fall.