Just when we thought the police and prosecutors in Trayvon Martin’s killing couldn’t have bungled the case any worse than they did, it turns out they have. As we learned several days ago, although police spokesmen assured reporters that the police had not arrested the gunman because they had no “probable cause,” the Sanford police had, in fact, formally requested an arrest warrant weeks before from the local district attorney on the basis of — what else? — probable cause. The district attorney’s office, as we’ve also learned, denied the request. In the latest twist, however, we find that George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot Martin, was, in fact, taken into police custody, in handcuffs, on the night of the killing. As any first-year law student knows, being taken into official custody in connection with a possible crime constitutes, whether or not the police announce it to the detainee, an arrest under the U.S. Supreme Court case of Dunaway v. New York. So the arrest that the Sanford police said they lacked probable cause to effect — but for which they’d requested a warrant on the basis of probable cause — had actually been made. Truth, at least in Central Florida, is stranger than fiction. The apparent failure of the police and the district attorney to understand the law of arrest is more than just unfathomable. It threatens the ability of the state to bring Zimmerman to justice should the police or the new prosecutor ever acknowledge the probable cause that is evident to rest of the world. With respect to a suspect’s right to a speedy trial, which must be observed if a case is ultimately to be prosecuted, the clock starts ticking the day of the initial arrest, whether or not the police felt they had probable cause when they made it. Fortunately, the countdown to preserve that right, which takes 180 days in Florida, won’t end for another five months. The failure to find probable cause is even scarier. When probable cause determinations are delayed, crime scenes turn cold. Wait a day, much less a month, and witnesses are no longer present at the scene, memories fade, spontaneous responses can no longer be elicited from the suspect, and physical evidence vanishes. Yet the probable cause necessary to develop and preserve evidence doesn’t require that the police be able to prove anything. There need only be, as the Supreme Court put it, a “fair probability” or “substantial chance” that a crime has been committed, and that the suspect committed it. Common sense here is the key. And common sense tells us, Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law notwithstanding, that the scene that night was rife with probable cause. Zimmerman, smoking gun in hand as he stood over Trayvon’s body, admitted to the killing. He’d followed the victim after being told by the police dispatcher not to follow him. Without knowing anything more, the police needed only to conclude that the claim of self-defense by a 28-year-old man armed with a loaded gun who trailed and killed a 17-year-old armed only with a pack of Skittles is inherently suspect. Police know better than anyone else that suspects routinely lie to save their own hides. Indeed, we’ll never know just how much evidence was lost because the police in that Southern town, either not understanding probable cause or unable to see it when a black teenager is killed, decided to table the issue — that is, until the media got wind of it. After law-and-order cheerleaders like Bill O’Reilly and the Orlando Sentinel cast the victim in this travesty as either the aggressor or a drug-addled teen who got what was coming to him, they compound their insensitivity and hypocrisy by admonishing the critics of the police and the “left-wing” media for their “rush to judgment” on probable cause. It would, however, be impossible to slow the wheels of justice in this case; they’ve already ground to a halt. Jay Sterling Silver is a professor of law who teaches and writes on criminal law at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens, Florida, the town where Trayvon Martin lived.