Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the annual convention of the NAACP on Tuesday, and in the wake of the George Zimmerman trial in Florida, he addressed the legitimate concerns of African-Americans that simply being a black male in America renders them a "criminal suspect." Attorney General Eric Holder denounces ‘stand your ground’ laws:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. strongly condemned “stand your ground” laws Tuesday, saying the measures “senselessly expand the concept of self-defense” and may encourage “violent situations to escalate.”
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“These laws try to fix something that was never broken,” Holder told cheering delegates of the annual convention of the NAACP, which is pressing him to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman. “The list of resulting tragedies is long and, unfortunately, has victimized too many who are innocent.”
The attorney general, who is the first African American ever to hold that position, drew parallels between his own life and the claims of many here that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin after spotting the teenager walking through his father’s neighborhood in a hooded sweatshirt. Martin was African American. Zimmerman’s father is white, his mother Peruvian.
Holder recalled being pulled over twice by police on the New Jersey Turnpike as a young man and having his car searched, “when I’m sure I wasn’t speeding.” Another time, he said, he was stopped by law enforcement in Georgetown while simply running to catch a movie after dark.
“I was, at the time of that last incident, a federal prosecutor,” Holder said dryly, prompting some in the audience at the Orlando Convention Center to gasp in disgust and others to shake their heads. “We must confront the underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs and unfortunate stereotypes that serve too often as the basis for police action and private judgments.”
His personal stories and his denunciation of “stand your ground” laws brought the audience to its feet. But administration officials say that there is little the Justice Department can do to actually change the laws, because they are state, rather than federal, statutes.
When he was a youth growing up in New York, Holder said, his father — an immigrant from Barbados — warned him to act carefully if he was stopped by police. Decades later, after Martin was killed, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer decided he had to have a similar conversation with his own 15-year-old son. “This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down,” he told the delegates.
Transcript of Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks on Trayvon Martin at NAACP convention.
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