The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Dogs Consider SCOTUS’s Reliability–Now That Would Be News
“SCOTUS Will Consider Dogs’ Reliability as Probable Cause Generators”–headline, Reason.com, March 30

Work Makes Going to the Dogs More Fun–Now That Would Be News
“Dogs Make Going to Work More Fun”–headline, Discovery.com, March 31

Out on a Limb

  • “Who Will Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential Pick Be? A Conservative.”–headline, Washington Post, April 2
  • “Markets Predict Supreme Court Will Overturn Health Care Law, but Uncertainty Is High”–headline, Yahoo! News, March 30

Do the Right Thing
Like everyone else who has commented about the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman, we don’t know if this was a case of justifiable homicide, murder or something in between. It would be helpful if everyone else would follow our lead and admit as much upfront.

In a piece for The American Spectator last week, William Tucker made this point with respect to conservatives who’ve reflexively defended Zimmerman:

I spent five years writing a book about crime in the 1980s. Much of my research consisted of listening to liberals blather about how “Criminals are impulsive,” “They can’t be deterred,” “Punishment doesn’t work,” “They don’t think about what they do,” plus “Better a hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted.” And on and on. Liberals were wrong then, just as conservatives are wrong now for trying to keep Zimmerman from being charged with anything.

The justice system is a pageant. Each criminal trial is public theater from which people gather moral lessons. It matters whether people who commit offensive acts are arrested, tried, convicted or acquitted. Each case sets a standard for public behavior. When the public sees justice done, it reinforces everyone’s sense of morality. When people see others getting away with things, they become uneasy, demoralized and finally angry.

Tucker portrays the shooter as an overzealous rent-a-cop who was looking for trouble, and he agrees with those who say “Zimmerman should be charged with something. Second-degree manslaughter certainly sounds pretty good to me.”

That is a highly plausible theory of the case based on what is publicly known, but there may be mitigating factors that are not publicly known or whose credibility an outsider is unable to judge based on news reports. It’s possible that, once all the facts have been gathered, prosecutors will conclude they are unlikely to convict Zimmerman, or that they will bring him to trial and he will be acquitted.

We agree wholeheartedly with Tucker that it’s foolish for conservatives to defend Zimmerman. His guilt or innocence turns on the facts of the case, not any ideological belief. If he is charged, he will be entitled to–and, given the high-profile nature of the case, he will almost certainly receive–a vigorous defense from lawyers who are paid to represent his interests.

What everyone, regardless of ideology, should be defending is the rule of law and the right of due process. Liberals used to champion these principles but in recent decades have been all too willing to jettison them when a crime arises that implicates identity politics, as this case does because Trayvon Martin was black (although Zimmerman, whose matrilineage is Hispanic, does not perfectly fit the left-liberal stereotype).

On the left, a lynch-mob mentality has developed around this case. The New York Times’s Bill Keller is one of the few liberals to acknowledge its depravity:

Fashioning a narrative from the hate-crimes textbook–bellowing analogies to the racist nightmares of Birmingham and Selma, as the reliably rabble-rousing Reverend [Al] Sharpton has done–is just political opportunism. This is the kind of demagoguery that could prejudice a prosecution, or mobilize a mob. Is it not creepy, by the way, that Spike Lee was tweeting the suspected home address of George Zimmerman? As if to say, “Go get him!” (Lee sent apologies and a check to the elderly couple who were scared from their home because, oops, the tweet gave the wrong address. But apparently it’s O.K. to terrorize Zimmerman.)

The event that made a national figure out of Sharpton a quarter-century ago was the Tawana Brawley hoax, a racially charged accusation of rape that turned out to be fabricated. Sharpton is now an on-air personality for NBC News.

NewsBusters.org argues that Sharpton’s network “has been ginning up another Tawana Brawley-like atmosphere where passions are whipped into a frenzy before all the facts are laid out on the table.” The Washington Post has the specifics. A “Today” show report included a clip from a Zimmerman call to 911 in which he said these words: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

Zimmerman did say those words, but there were other words between the two sentences:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy–is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

In the real clip, you could argue that Zimmerman comes across as paranoid or overzealous. But to dowdify the quote to make him seem racist, as NBC did, is both inflammatory and dishonest. (The Post quotes an NBC statement that the network has “launched an internal investigation into the editorial process surrounding this particular story.”)

Again, none of this is to argue that George Zimmerman is innocent. Lynch-mob justice and smear-job journalism are just as wrong if the target is guilty.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”