Six women jurors, five white and one Hispanic, now hold in their hands the fate of George Zimmerman and, to a considerable degree, that of equal justice in America. “I think the state’s case is kaput,” forensics expert Larry Kobilinsky said last week on the Jane Velez-Mitchell Show, whose eponymous host is pro-prosecution. [Transcript, July 10, 2013]But will these women have the courage to agree.
Remember, this is an anarcho-tyranny show trial. The lack of any credible prosecution case is not a bug but a feature. The Obama-Holder Justice Department organized black mobs to demand and get a show trial, despite there being no grounds even for an arrest. [Documents Obtained by Judicial Watch Detail Role of Justice Department in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests, Judicial Watch, July 10, 2013.] Florida officials cooperated, turning our legal system upside down and presuming the guilt of a white-enough defendant.
And remember, George Zimmerman is a liberal who fought, when no blacks cared, to avenge the maltreatment of a black homeless man, Sherman Ware, by a white policeman’s son.[In 2010 race-related beating case, George Zimmerman pushed to discipline same officers who investigated Trayvon Martin shooting, By Matthew Boyle, Daily Caller, April 4, 2012] As my mom always says, no good deed goes unpunished. And that goes in spades for Zimmerman’s yeoman efforts to protect his community.
Since my last column, this surreal trial has continued in the same direction. The prosecution called more witnesses that either helped the defense, or were laughably incompetent (Medical Examiner Dr. Shiping Bao). By Day 12 (Wednesday), the prosecution had come full circle: after starting out claiming that Zimmerman was on top of Martin, the prosecution now argued that Martin was on top, and even brought in a dummy to demonstrate, which elicited a lot of merciless puns about “dummies” from cable network lawyer-commentators otherwise supportive of railroading Zimmerman.
This case should never have been brought; once brought, the judge should have summarily dismissed it. But instead, anything could happen.
Some thoughts:
There’s a saying that the ultimate insult is that one was too dumb to get out of jury duty. The prosecution team, including Judge Debra Nelson, has compounded that by withholding all sorts of information critical for the Zimmerman defense.
Judge Nelson refused to permit the defense to exhibit Trayvon Martin’s text messages, in which he bragged of bloody fights and swinging at bus drivers, of wanting to buy a gun, and a picture of a gun, giving the baseless assertion that it wasn’t clear that Martin was sending the messages from his own cell phone. Thus, the jury has no proper context in which to put Martin’s brutal beating of Zimmerman.
On top of that, the prosecution team has presented Martin as “a child”—“That child had every right to be in that 7-11…. Didn’t that child have the right to defend himself against that strange man?” (Prosecutor John Guy, in his emotional, baby-talk rebuttal to the defense’s closing argument, on Friday, July 12.) In effect, the prosecution has instructed the jury that it is a crime equal to assault and battery for a non-black man to merely follow a black, to which the black may respond with deadly force.
It is not a crime to follow someone, but try telling that to CNN division HLN, which summarized: “Scathing closing argument. Zimmerman started fight by following Martin.”
Contrast this to what jurors typically hear in cases with black defendants: Not only are defense attorneys routinely permitted to give details that cast the victim in a negative light, they are permitted to fabricate racial fairy tales to defame the victim.
In an Alabama case several years ago, Dedrick Griham carjacked, kidnapped, raped and sodomized a female Birmingham attorney. Graham’s attorney argued that the victim had staged the entire incident, via an imaginary black prostitute. And in the Knoxville Horror atrocity, Lemaricus Davidson’s defense team asserted that carjacking-kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murder victims Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom had gone to the murder house voluntarily, and Christian had had consensual sex with Davidson.
In a similar example of double standards, a talking point in this case has been that Zimmerman should simply have called the police. But recall that in Gatesgate (2009), the white woman who saw Henry Louis “Skip” Gates and another black man breaking into a home and called 911 was vilified as a “racist.”
In Sanford, it is Trayvon Martin whom we must presume innocent, and George Zimmerman whom we must presume guilty. The jury has been led by the prosecution to believe that if the latter pokes holes in the defense’s case, it will arrive at reasonable doubt… regarding Zimmerman’s claims!
The defense team has been a model of courtesy towards friendly and hostile witnesses alike.
Too courteous, in my opinion, especially with hostile black witnesses. Chief defense counsel Mark O’Mara let Martin’s parents get away with murder on the stand, and let Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte get away with not answering key questions. Thus did the jury not learn that it was Bonaparte who was behind the opportunistic, racial psychodrama that permitted Martin’s parents, half-brother, and lawyers to listen to the tape of Jenna Lauer’s 911 call tape in the Mayor’s office as a group—while, in an act of racial humiliation, keeping Sanford’s white then-police chief Bill Lee out. [Trayvon Martin shooting transforms part-time mayor by Barbara Liston, Reuters, March 29, 2012.]
When prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda relentlessly badgered defense witnesses such as Zimmerman neighbor and friend Sandra Osterman, and animation expert Daniel Schumacher, the defense should have vigorously objected. But it was silent.
In his closing on Friday, O’Mara even diminished the significance of Martin’s racist statements: “They [17-year-olds] can say whatever” they want to. He should have been jumping on those statements!
O’Mara went so far in playing by the prosecution’s rules that in his closing argument he said, “I am going to prove my client’s innocence.”
I realize that O’Mara is desperately seeking to save his client’s life, and is worried that the jury was hopelessly tainted by the Judge’s misconduct, but this case is setting a terrible precedent.
In trying to coerce defense witness Sandra Osterman into saying that Zimmerman was showing rage and spite in his non-emergency call to the police, Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda kept replaying the tape, and getting angrier at Mrs. Osterman, when she wouldn’t submit. He wanted to play the tape a fourth time, but the sweetly unflappable woman tilted her head and stopped him with: “I've heard it three times,.”
Judge Debra Nelson has been every bit as hostile towards the defense in terms of her rulings, in permitting prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel’s outrageous behavior towards defense counsel Don West, and in herself seeking to publicly humiliate West when she directly addressed Zimmerman and sought, by hook or by crook, to make him testify.
De la Rionda and Judge Nelson were so petty that when defense counsel Mark O’Mara opened his brief cross-examination of Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton by sympathizing with her loss, de la Rionda immediately objected that that was “improper”—and the Judge sustained!
Andrew Branca, an expert on the law of self-defense, has commented:
In my opinion the level of prosecutorial misconduct in this case is of Mt. Everest proportions….
The State has stuck their thumb into the defense’s eye at every opportunity, making the defense’s job even more brutally difficult. The trial judge, after being told that the defense simply wasn’t ready to try a murder 2 case, in large part due to the State’s slow-roll of discovery, simply told them to go pound sand–a classical abuse of a trial judge’s discretion….
[Zimmerman Trial Day 2 – Analysis of State’s Witnesses by Andrew Branca, Legal Insurrection, June 25, 2013.]
Any jail time for America’s most prominent political prisoner would amount to a death sentence, with Zimmerman enduring gang-rape and torture before being murdered
Since the jury has had so much essential information withheld from it, has heard the prosecution lie about the law, and were chosen based on their low-information, presumably emotional character, we cannot conclude from the incompetent prosecution case that the jurors will vote as one to acquit.
But if Zimmerman is acquitted of all charges, look for the Obama/Holder Justice Department to indict him federally for violating Trayvon Martin’s civil rights, subjecting him to an unconstitutional, double-jeopardy trial.
The point of this persecution is to make an example of George Zimmerman, and to teach whites, and the “white-enough,” that
This is what America has come to under Obama—a banana republic, replete with government-orchestrated mobs, political prisoners, and show trials.
The campaign against George Zimmerman is entirely political. In the end, it must be fought politically, via demonstrations, petitions, and by elected and non-elected political leaders.
George Zimmerman must be kept out of jail. But even then he will need to get a new name, a new face, and … a new country.
In fact, we all need a new country.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
