George Zimmerman: Liberals Need to Dig Deeper

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

16 July 13

ost every liberalish person I know or read feels shattered but unsurprised by the Florida jury finding George Zimmerman, a gun-toting "white hispanic," not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old black schoolboy wearing a black hoodie. Most of us are certain in our hearts that the verdict had to be racist. But we need to do more than make moving arguments against racism and armed self-defense to keep similar tragedies from happening again and again.

Without question, we need to fight racism and the brutal idiocy of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which eliminates any "duty to retreat" before using lethal force in the face of a deadly threat. We need to fight what Rich Benjamin called this "implicit green light for every paranoid, sub-intelligent, vigilante racist to go on victimizing black youth." But, somewhere in the mix, we need to get our law schools, criminal justice courses, law enforcement foundations, and the U.S. Department of Justice to teach police and prosecutors how to win racially-charged cases. This will become all the more important as immigration continues to create a more colorful new America.

Thirty years ago, my wife Anna and I spent over a year investigating a racial murder in my hometown of Tampa, which is not a world away from Sanford, where Zimmerman killed Martin. I summed up the killing (and some 55 hours of interviews with the killer) in "Run, Johnny, Run: Exploring the Mind of a Racist Killer."

Anna and I also explored the minds of our Florida jurors, interviewing almost all of the 24 in two separate trials (the first trial had a hung jury). Many of the jurors admitted racist feelings that led them to a lesser verdict of manslaughter. But the deeper problem was the ease with which a skilled defense lawyer misused "the burden of proof" and "reasonable doubt," those venerable principles of Anglo-Saxon law, to help the jurors whitewash their racism. Our well-meaning prosecutor, who truly believed the law should be color-blind, never understood how to counter this "legal trickonometry." In the Zimmerman trial, two completely inadequate prosecutors - Bernardo de la Rionda and John Guy - made it even easier for the defense.

If you follow the Zimmerman trial in both the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald, as I did, you will quickly see that the prosecutors gave the game away by trying to prove too much - that Zimmerman was a "wanna-be cop" who had profiled Trayvon Martin as a criminal because of the color of his skin, and that he knew from his criminal justice classes how make it look like self-defense. These assertions may be true. They may be false. But they were far more than the prosecution could prove or needed to prove, while prosecutor de la Rionda hurt his case even more by his mocking and often shrill tone.

Worse, as the Miami Herald concluded from legal analysts at the trial, every time the prosecutors played police videos, called unnecessary witnesses, or had the jurors listen to old 911 recordings to establish their overly elaborate narrative, they gave the jury a chance to hear or get a feel for Zimmerman without his having to take the stand and face cross examination. In effect, as one legal analyst put it, the prosecutor enabled Zimmerman to testify without running the risk of having to answer any questions. That, said one analyst, was "a strategic error."

To be sure, Zimmerman has a Fifth Amendment right not to testify. But if he pleads that he killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense, he would usually have to give the jurors some sense of that. In fact, the prosecution told his story for him, which helped defense attorney Mark O'Mara argue "methodically and dispassionately" that Zimmerman did no more than exercise a legitimate right to self-defense, a "right" that is widely supported in that part of Florida and beyond.

A more modest, more minimalist case might well have worked better, leaving it to the defense to establish its own narrative without so much help. This would have made it easier for the jurors to see the defense attorneys doing exactly what they were doing - trying to use every bit and piece they could find to get their client off. By making their arguments for them, often with witnesses who proved sympathetic to Zimmerman, the prosecutors allowed defense attorney O'Mara to claim that he would take on the burden to prove Zimmerman's "absolute innocence."

Some prosecution testimony was necessary, of course. To prove second-degree murder, the state had to establish that Zimmerman acted with a depraved mind, hatred, evil intent or ill-will. They tried to show this with his call to 911, in which he said, "these assholes always get away" and, according to prosecutors, muttering "fucking punks" under his breath. But, once they have established the essential element of their case, the prosecution has no obligation to make the defense's case for it.

Adding to their problems, the prosecutors allowed a jury of 6 women, with only one of them black. The legal analysts cited by The Miami Herald think the prosecution failed so badly that even a more diverse panel would have found Zimmerman not guilty. But, in the killing we studied, a lone black juror found the courage to hang the jury in the first trial only because she found support from a surprisingly liberal white woman who had slipped by defense efforts to weed out anyone like her. In the Zimmerman case, a lone black juror would have had great difficulty standing up against the others.

Second-guessing is easy, of course, and it's entirely possible that no one could have proved what happened between two people when one of them was conveniently dead, especially after the police, who appeared sympathetic to Zimmerman, had failed to secure convincing evidence.

But having undertaken to pursue the case, which was a moral and political necessity, the prosecution failed miserably, as de la Rionda threw in the jury's face in his closing argument. He had no idea, he told them, what really happened in the seconds just before the shooting. That is no way to uphold the prosecution's burden of proof or to overcome the reasonable doubt of even a fair-minded jury.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.