Matthew Rothchild, Cambridge, Minn.

It’s all over but the shouting in the George Zimmerman trial. And amid the shouting there has been suggestions that Zimmerman’s acquittal was “a grave miscarriage of justice” and that this affair has “called the entire criminal justice system into question.”

Actually, the criminal justice system performed exactly as it should have. The facts of the case simply were not enough to deliver a conviction. No matter how badly one might have wanted a conviction as payback for a perceived slight that’s part of a larger perceived pattern of slights, things like fact must always be the number one consideration if someone is to be locked up for a crime. Period.

It would have, in fact, been a grave miscarriage of justice had Zimmerman been convicted on the basis of recent emotional outpouring over this case rather than the facts of this case, which were clearly insufficient for a conviction.