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MIAMI The Justice Department's decision to not prosecute a civilian neighborhood watch volunteer for a hate crime in the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager is not necessarily a harbinger of how it will rule in two other high-profile deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, legal experts say.

That is because the standards used to gauge the existence of a hate crime committed by civilians are different from those used to measure the behavior of police officers, who can be charged with depriving someone of their civil rights by using excessive force in the course of duty.

Because George Zimmerman was not a police officer, the U.S. Justice Department could only prosecute him for fatally shooting teenager Trayvon Martin nearly three years ago if it had sufficient evidence the killing was motivated by racial bias or hatred, the experts say.

Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, without any legal authority associated with law enforcement officers. Zimmerman claimed he shot the 17-year-old Martin in self-defense, and he was acquitted by a jury in July 2013 of second-degree murder.

If he had been a sworn officer, federal prosecutors would have the option of pursuing "color of law" charges against Zimmerman. It is this kind of federal case that could be brought against officers in recent contentious killings by white police officers of black suspects Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

Those cases are also hard to prove; police officers are given latitude to use deadly force if they feel their lives are endangered.

"In the case of a police officer, what you're looking at is, did the police officer use excessive force that resulted in a death or injury or something else? It's not what a reasonable person would do. It's what a reasonable police officer would do under the circumstances," said David S. Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who handled civil right cases.

"For a private citizen, it is a hate crime, which has to be motivated by race," he added. "Zimmerman may have wanted to be a police officer at some point in time, but he wasn't then and he isn't now."

St. Louis community activist John Gaskins, a member of the NAACP's national board of directors, said he wasn't surprised by the decision to not charge Zimmerman federally in Martin's death. But he said "this doesn't give me much hope" that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will be indicted.

"It's not encouraging to see that George Zimmerman was not indicted," Gaskins said.

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Without hate crime, US limited in prosecuting George Zimmerman