THE TRAYVON MARTIN VERDICT

MARK GERAGOS DAILY BEAST

Mark John Geragos is an Armenian-American criminal defense lawyer. Clients that he represented include Michael Jackson, actress Winona Ryder, politician Gary Condit, Susan McDougal and Scott Peterson. Wikipedia He has served as a regular legal analyst on CNN, Fox, and is the author of Mistrial: An Inside Look at How the Criminal Justice System Works … and Sometimes Doesn’t (2103) with Pat Harris.


Did the George Zimmerman trial involve racist attitudes? Of course it did. Did the predominantly white jury reach the right verdict? Of course it did. Is the criminal justice system a racist institution? Of course it is. Do young black males disproportionately suffer the brunt of this criminal justice system? Of course they do. Did the media and politicians inflame the situation for their own purposes? Of course they did. Is this a conundrum easily resolved or reconciled? Of course it’s not.

Let’s start with whether this trial involved racist attitudes. That’s easy. There has already been a judicial determination that the prosecution was racist. Judge Nelson made a finding that the prosecution was exercising peremptory challenges in a race-based fashion. The race and cognizable class they were targeting? White women. After finding that the Florida prosecutors were targeting white women, her Honor used her discretion, based on a U.S Supreme Court precedent called Batson, to reseat two of the white women that the prosecutors kicked off the panel. Those two women later became jurors who voted to find George Zimmerman not guilty.

Faced with the prospect of trying this case to the only demographic that mattered—six women, five of whom were white—the prosecutors instead decided to play for the cameras. True homicide prosecutors will admit in private (and some brave souls will admit to the public) that the prosecutors in the Zimmerman case were appalling. Their histrionics were more appropriate for a bad episode of Law & Order.  Even though the Zimmerman prosecutors had the advantage of pretrial depositions of witnesses, something absent in criminal cases in most jurisdictions other than Florida, they acted unaware of what witnesses were going to testify to on the stand. They put on witnesses who destroyed any chance of a conviction and sat idly by without obvious objection as the defense co-opted witness after witness.

The defense flawlessly made the prosecution witnesses their very own character witnesses for Zimmerman. The media, instead of wondering what case the prosecution was trying, fixated on complete nonsense like the defense lawyer’s lame knock-knock joke in his opening statement. Most breathlessly speculated that the defense would never recover. Supposed legal pundits, who themselves have never prosecuted or defended a homicide case in their career, daily gave high marks to the prosecution for their made-for-TV theatrics. As long as there is an Esquire after the name, they could opine in front of a camera about how great the prosecution was doing. 

It's like going to a dermatologist for a second opinion when you are told you have a brain tumor. And what does the public know? Then, lo and behold, the jury comes back with a not-guilty verdict, which was the only correct verdict based on the evidence that was presented.

These prosecutors were scared from the beginning. They were scared to put the case in front of a grand jury. They were scared to turn over evidence to the defense. Zimmerman’s lawyer filed not one but six separate motions seeking sanctions against the prosecution for playing hide the ball. The judge even set a hearing post-trial on sanctions against the prosecution, which the media treated as just a normal part of the process. Instead of questioning why the prosecutors were repeatedly hiding evidence, the media just continued their cheerleading for the prosecution. The prosecutors were even afraid to put Trayvon Martin’s father on the witness stand. They left that chore for the defense.

The collective response from the hallelujah chorus of legal dermatologists? The defense had made a huge mistake calling Tracy Martin to the stand, instead of chastising the prosecution for playing hide the ball once again. In their penultimate act of fear, prosecutors sought a lesser charge than murder, basically running away from their case in its entirety and abandoning George Zimmerman as harboring ill will and malice. Instead, they jettisoned their malicious racist theory in favor of one that argued Zimmerman was grossly negligent. And in their final act of cowardice, the state attorney, Angela Corey, waited until the jury was out deliberating to fire her IT employee whistleblower who revealed her office’s prosecutorial shenanigans.

So why this inversion of the normal criminal roles of the prosecution and defense? It lies in one simple word. Race....Go into any criminal courtroom in America in any metropolitan city and see the customers the prosecution is serving up. They are predominately “children” of color. Politicians and prosecutors use race as a strategy as part of their everyday currency. Is it any surprise that the public follows along? ....Think George Zimmerman seeing a young black male with a hoodie who must be a punk who gets away with it.

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BUSINESS WEEK Paul M. Barrett

George Zimmerman was at fault for killing Trayvon Martin.
Ignore the pious post-verdict declarations by Zimmerman’s (skilled) defense lawyers. The police dispatcher told Zimmerman to stay in his car. If the wannabe cop had followed reasonable instructions and/or had decent training as a neighborhood watchman, he would have remained in his vehicle. Zimmerman deserves heavy blame.

The “system” sometimes works in mysterious ways.
The American justice system bends to public opinion, politics, institutional bias, and sometimes even flat-out corruption. In this case, prosecutors came under understandable public pressure to punish Zimmerman for his foolhardy behavior. ...Still, the ambiguity surrounding the last minutes of Martin’s life left plenty of room for reasonable doubt. The jury could have convicted on manslaughter but made a plausible choice not to. The defense lawyers brayed afterward about Zimmerman suffering grave injustice. Baloney. He endured 16 months of intense suspicion and court supervision. He’ll never escape the moral legacy of a needless killing. Sounds like rough justice to me.

The next step should be a private wrongful-death suit, not a federal civil rights prosecution.
Civil rights activists are calling for the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute Zimmerman for violating Martin’s civil rights. While one can sympathize with the demand, especially in the emotional aftermath of the state-court acquittal, federal civil rights charges would require the government to prove that Zimmerman is an old-fashioned racist. That would not be easy to do. NAACP President Ben Jealous has compared Zimmerman’s acquittal to one six decades ago of two white men accused of kidnapping and murdering black Mississippi teenager Emmett Till. But that kind of hyperbole won’t hold up in court. Zimmerman’s defense would again be able to engender reasonable doubt, leading to more heartache. Much better to give Martin’s parents an opportunity to prove by the much lower civil legal standard (“preponderance of the evidence”) that Zimmerman acted irresponsibly. A wrongful-death action might lead to the best possible outcome: a swift settlement, including some kind of money payment to compensate the victim’s family and a public apology from Zimmerman.

Liberal gun-control advocates are already overplaying their hand.
“Murder has now been legalized in half the states,” proclaimed Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington (D.C.)-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. This loopy statement echoes many less-extreme attempts to associate Zimmerman’s defense with Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law....Such statutes may be problematic (personally, I think they are), but the Zimmerman case isn’t a good example to make the argument against stand your ground. In fact, the defense team waived the opportunity to invoke the statute to preempt the prosecution. Instead, Zimmerman’s lawyers made a more conventional self-defense argument. Their contention was that Zimmerman never had an opportunity to retreat because Martin had him pinned to the ground. Stand your ground just wasn’t relevant to this defense. In the end, what got Zimmerman off was the most basic of all criminal-law concepts: reasonable doubt.