The parents of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teen who was shot and killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman a month ago, are calling for the immediate arrest of the accused killer. 

Trayvon Martin (graphic by bMethe, via Creative Commons)

"I strongly feel he needs to be arrested, because a crime was committed," the father Tracy Martin told Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show (hat tip: New York Daily News).

Martin was unarmed when he was killed. 911 tapes and a documented report from a girl who was on the phone with Martin before he was killed suggest the attacker chased Martin through a gated neighborhood. 

The accused attacker, George Zimmerman, argued that he was acting under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. Local authorities did not press charges. 

After a botched investigation of the killing by the Sanford police in which no arrests were made, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Justice Department have taken over. 

“Until they do, I cannot eat, I cannot sleep and I cannot relax. Not until he’s arrested,” Martin's mother, Sabrina Fulton, told the Huffington Post. 

The killing has sparked off intense debate over said "Stand Your Ground" laws, which give striking leeway to people claiming to be acting in self-defense, and race dynamics, Zimmerman being part-white and part-Hispanic. 

The New Yorker's Matthew McKnight argues the argument over race avoids some of the harder questions:

Other cases that have turned on the “Stand Your Ground” law involved two people of the same race, with similar results: someone dead, and no one to prosecute. Florida’s law nearly enabled another tragedy to be swept away. To deal with this case fully and appropriately, it’s important not to pigeonhole the discussion about it.

“The Stand Your Ground law was not intended to authorize vigilante action on the part of neighborhood watch guys when they have suspicions about the motivation of some kid walking through the neighborhood,” sociologist James Wright told the Christian Science Monitor.

The Atlantic's Andrew Cohen identifies Martin's reported last phone conversation as the detail on which the case against Zimmerman will hang.

From the Atlantic: 

You can't "reasonably" be trying to avoid serious injury or death, you can't be doing something absolutely necessary to spare your own life, if you are at the same time chasing down the very person you claim to be deathly fearful of. Even under Florida's addled self-defense law, even under its most strident interpretation from its worst judge, such an explanation makes no sense.

We know from the 911 tapes what Zimmerman's motive might have been in going after Martin the way he did. But what would Martin's motive have been to attack Zimmerman, who was 11 years older and 100 pounds heavier than him? That's a question grand jurors will have to answer if and when they are confronted by the evident conflict between Zimmerman's story and the version offered by Martin's girlfriend. And it is here where the failings of the police investigation will likely deprive grand jurors of all the pertinent evidence and information they might have had, and should have had, in looking into this tragedy.

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