This time, Jackson and Sharpton stayed home, but Crump and Parks were there to keep Martin’s parents on message. In Birmingham, for instance, Sybrina wanted to talk about “conflict resolution,” but that humble theme did not exactly resonate on the world stage. “The issue is profiling,” Daryl Parks told the Society of Black Lawyers in London. “Profiling of any type of person is wrong, wrong, wrong.”6

  The British media embraced the road show uncritically. Like most of its counterparts, the mainstream Independent sifted all nuance out of its coverage. “Trayvon was shot in the chest by armed neighbourhood volunteer George Zimmerman as he walked through a leafy gated community in Stanford, Florida,” the paper reported on the occasion of the Team Trayvon visit, “because his killer assumed he was ‘up to no good.’”7 This was standard fare in the UK and in Europe. The case was that simple.

  As they did at just about every stop, team members found common cause with other seeming victims of white injustice. The Martin family reportedly went to Britain at the request of an activist named Doreen Lawrence. Originally from Jamaica, Lawrence lost her teenage son Stephen in 1993 when a member or members of a thuggish white juvenile gang stabbed him to death. In a long and complicated case, the gang members, none older than the “child” Martin, were initially acquitted due to lack of evidence. Inspired by Doreen Lawrence, the British civil rights community and the media rallied to the cause. The Daily Mail led the crusade with headlines like “MURDERS: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong let them sue us.” A public inquiry followed five years after the killing and recommended that Britain’s historic double jeopardy protection be suspended so the boys, now young men, could be tried anew for the same crime.

  This Britain did with the passage of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003. The media, with the impressively self-satisfied Daily Mail in the lead, cheered its enactment and the hounding of the presumed killers, two of whom were later convicted.8

  From the British perspective, Trayvon Martin suffered much the same fate as Stephen Lawrence: murder at the hand of a white racist who was also being coddled by racist police. Often manic in their political correctness, the British media made their American counterparts seem a model of prudence and restraint. What all the hype disguised in Britain, however, was what it disguised in America: the Lawrence stabbing, like the Martin shooting, was a statistical anomaly. In both countries, whites suffered much more from black violence than blacks did from whites, and young black men suffered even more from black violence than did young whites.

  A June 2010 Daily Mail article by Rebecca Camber conceded as much. “The majority of violent inner-city crime is committed by black men, police figures suggest,” wrote Camber in her opening. “But the statistics also show that black men are twice as likely to be victims of such crimes.” According to figures released by Scotland Yard under Freedom of Information Act laws, black men committed more than two-thirds of shootings and more than half of robberies and street crimes in 2009–2010. What made these figures even more troubling was that only 12 percent of London’s 7.5 million people were black. To counter these statistics, Camber cited a predictable liberal alibi, “Critics say the figures merely show the continuing prevalence of racism in the Metropolitan Police.”9

  Indeed, if there were a real commonality between crime and Britain and the United States, it was the cultural dominance in both counties of the aforementioned “critics.” These were the people, black and white, who preached the gospel of black victimization. They welcomed the Trayvon road show to Britain because the traveling players sang from the same hymn book and made the grudge seem universal.

  Later that May, the road show headed to Chicago, then in the throes of extraordinary street violence and desperately in need of some explanation beyond the obvious, namely, the welfare-fueled collapse of the black family. Chicago was Jesse Jackson territory, and Sharpton kept his distance. The take-away message at the road show’s Chicago news conference was not racial profiling, conflict resolution, nor what Sharpton memorably called “the disproportionate distribution of justice.” The focus was on “senseless gun violence.” It’s time to “stop the killing,” said Jackson, and in his own backyard there was plenty of it.10 In 2012 Chicago recorded 20 percent more murders than New York City despite having only one-third of the population. Rather than face up to the causes of the violence, let alone the fact that blacks were proportionately eight times more likely to commit murder than whites, Jackson zeroed in on the extraordinary death of Trayvon Martin. He linked the Martin case to two even more unusual killings in the Chicago area, those of Rekia Boyd and Stephon Watts, both of whose families were represented onstage with Jackson, Crump, and the Martins.

  In March 2012, a few weeks after Martin’s death, a white off-duty Chicago detective named Dante Servin shot and killed Rekia. Her only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Servin was shooting at a man named Antonio Cross, and a stray bullet caught Rekia in the head. She was one of eight Chicagoans killed by police in 2012 and the only innocent bystander among the eight. More than five hundred Chicagoans were murdered that year by people other than police. A year after the shooting, Boyd’s family would receive a $4.5 million settlement. The other five hundred were not so fortunate.11

  A few weeks before Martin was killed, Calumet City police drove to the Watts home for at least the eleventh time in two years to help his parents subdue Stephon, a fifteen-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome. The two officers found him in the basement, wielding a kitchen knife. After Stephon backed the officers into a corner, he “lashed out” and struck one in the arm. The officers each fired once, killing Stephon.12 Although the Cook County state’s attorney cleared the officers of wrongdoing, Stephon’s mother filed a lawsuit against them and Calumet City.

  The death of all these people—Trayvon, Rekia, Kendrec, Stephon, and Stephen—had only one thing in common: white people killed them. This made the cases newsworthy and thus exploitable. A lawsuit followed every death. No change in law or philosophy or community sentiment could have saved all of these five dead young people or even any two of them.

  The ambiguity of it all left the well-intended Sybrina Fulton flailing to find some meaningful way to pull a message out of her grief. “He’s not here to speak for himself,” she said of Trayvon in Chicago, “so we as his parents have decided instead of sitting back and not doing anything, this is what we have decided to do, to help our community and to help other parents.” Unfortunately, the advice she offered was counterproductive. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported, she spoke of the Justice for Trayvon Foundation, “which helps teens identify signs of racial profiling.”13 Of all the threats facing young black men today, profiling is the least of them. To present profiling as an evil, as Sybrina and others routinely do, puts black men at more risk, not less. It inspires some of these young men to project that evil onto those responsible for keeping watch. And attacking the watchman, as Martin learned the hard way, could be fatal.

  Not surprisingly, Bob Zimmerman, George’s father, looked at crime stories from an altogether different perspective than Trayvon’s parents. He wondered, for instance, how a year after Martin’s death, three young black Floridians, one of them a female, could lethally bludgeon a white woman with a hammer forty times and then set the woman’s bed afire with her in it and get no media attention beyond the Pensacola area.14 Even closer to home, Bob wondered how the national media could ignore another hammer attack just a month after the Martin shooting and just six miles away. The two perpetrators were black teens. The victim was a fifty-year-old white male. The two attacked the man in his car, then dragged him into the woods, bludgeoned him, and left him near death. Finally, they stole his car.

  The Orlando Sentinel had to cover the case, of course, and even asked the public to help police catch the suspects. More than a little unhelpfully, the editors chose to leave the race of the attackers out of their description. There were no cries of racism, no marches, and, of course, no calls to restrict hammers.15

  28

  STRAIGHTENING THE STORY

  WITNESS 8, Trayvon Martin’s mystery girlfriend, had to have cost Bernie de la Rionda more than a few night’s sleep. Despite her importance to his case, he had no sure way of knowing whether she was the same girl that Crump introduced to the world as “Dee Dee” or, for that matter, whether she was the witness she claimed to be. So he summoned her to Jacksonville for a come-to-Jesus meeting in August 2012, four months after his initial interview with her in April. The same FDLE agent who escorted de la Rionda to the April interview in Miami escorted Witness 8 to the Fort Lauderdale airport for her August trip to Jacksonville. In that the subsequent get-together went unrecorded, it was not until March 13, 2013, when he deposed this witness, that Mark O’Mara learned the details of what was said in the Jacksonville meeting. The very threat of a deposition, however, inspired the prosecution to prepare O’Mara for what he was about to learn.

  Two weeks later, on March 25, O’Mara shared some of that newfound knowledge with the court. In this motion, he asked the court to sanction the prosecution for discovery violations regarding the elusive witness. As State attested, and O’Mara affirmed, Witness 8 was the same Dee Dee that Crump had interviewed in March, the one who was allegedly too ill to attend Martin’s wake. O’Mara quoted Crump’s March 2012 interview with Dee Dee on this subject. “And that’s when you realized that the day of his wake that you were the last person talking to him and it just made you physically sick?” Crump had asked her, and the witness had responded yes. She said much the same to de la Rionda in their April meeting.

  As early as August 23, 2012, O’Mara asked the prosecution about the witness’s hospital records via e-mail, but he got no response. He sent a letter on September 19 inquiring again, but he got no response to that correspondence either. O’Mara also spoke to the prosecutors about these records repeatedly but without results. On February 21, 2013, he filed a motion to subpoena the medical records. Finally, two weeks later, assistant state attorney John Guy explained that there would be no need to move forward with a subpoena, as “no hospitalization records existed for Witness 8.”1 There were no records for the simple reason that Witness 8 had not gone to the hospital.

  In deposing Witness 8 in March 2013, O’Mara confirmed that she confessed the hospital scam to de la Rionda during her August 2012 Jacksonville rendezvous. O’Mara accused the state attorney’s office of being “fully aware” of her lie since that meeting. The reason she gave for lying made some sense. Sybrina Fulton was sitting next to her during her interview with the State in April, and she “felt the need to deceive as to the reason for not going to the wake or funeral.” O’Mara also chastised the State for its decision to conduct the April 2012 interview in the living room of the Fulton home in Sybrina’s presence. “Mr. de la Rionda had to know the potential influence that could occur,” said O’Mara, adding that this arrangement put “the legitimacy and veracity of the entire statement at issue.”

  The State had some practice in keeping critical information about this witness away from the defense. As O’Mara noted in his motion, on several occasions Crump presented the witness to the public as a minor. On March 21, 2012, for instance, he told Matt Lauer on the Today Show, “She is a 16-year-old teenager who just lost a friend very special to her.”2 His colleagues on Team Trayvon repeated the same canard. When HLN’s Nancy Grace asked Daryl Parks why this witness had still not talked to the police five weeks after Martin’s death, he answered, “She’s a minor. So it’s a very delicate situation.”3 ABC’s Matt Gutman, who might as well have been part of the team, was echoing the “minor” line as well. More curious still, he told Lawrence O’Donnell on his MSNBC show, “We`ve been talking to [Witness 8] for days now. This is not the first time that I`ve heard her speak.”4 He said this on March 28, 2012, four days before the State was able to locate her. By this time, Gutman had abandoned all journalistic distance: Team Trayvon was no longer a “they,” but a “we.”

  For his part, de la Rionda played along with the charade, or at least he seemed to. If he truly believed her to be a minor, he would have made sure a parent or guardian accompanied her to the April deposition, but he did not. In any case, it was only in November 2012 that the defense learned, through the witness’s affidavit, that she was eighteen when Crump interviewed her in March 2012.

  “It became apparent that Mr. de la Rionda knew that Witness 8 was an 18 year old adult in April of 2012 when he interviewed Witness 8,” O’Mara wrote in a footnote. “However, the State redacted that information from the Defense until months later.” As to why this lie was permitted to fester so long, O’Mara did not speculate, but the Treepers did. One Treeper believed the age was concocted by Crump to limit the media’s access to Dee Dee. For his part, Sundance was not at all convinced that the girl Crump interviewed on the phone was the same young woman that de la Rionda interviewed in Sybrina Fulton’s living room a few weeks later.

  Slowly, the media were beginning to face facts. “Chief witness in Trayvon Martin case lied under oath,” read the CNN headline after O’Mara went public with his concerns.5 If a few journalists were beginning to sense just how badly they had been played, the true believers in the Martin camp refused to hear a contrary word. “One service most ERs and many pharmacies offer is free [blood pressure] screening,” wrote a commenter deeply in denial. “You simply go in, they take your pressure and unless it is dangerously high, you go home. No record is kept. This would undoubtedly be the kind of treatment DeeDee received the day of Trayvon’s funeral.”6 After a year of relentless propaganda, some minds were beyond changing.

  Not surprisingly, the state attorney’s office rejected O’Mara’s motion. What was a surprise, though, was the mocking tone of its response. Yes, Witness 8 lied, but the lie was immaterial. George Zimmerman also lied. Wittingly or not, O’Mara enabled his lies. Zimmerman’s brother Robert also made inflammatory statements. “Targeting the prosecutors” was inevitable given O’Mara’s incompetence. “No misconduct has occurred,” wrote de la Rionda in conclusion, “nor should sanctions be awarded to compensate counsel. Indeed, the instant Motion appeared to be the product of

  [A] walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale . . . Full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”7

  Lest the court not get the reference, de la Rionda added, “William Shakespeare (1564–1616), ‘Macbeth,’ Act 5 scene 5.” In his reply to the State, O’Mara questioned the “scurrilous and unfounded personal attacks” by the prosecutors and asked that the State’s pleading be stricken.8 If he had wanted to show off, O’Mara might have added his own line from Macbeth:

  Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.9

  29

  REMEMBERING LEO FRANK

  ON APRIL 30, 2013, Zimmerman and his attorneys faced off against prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda in a preliminary hearing that addressed, among other issues, whether there would be a pretrial Stand Your Ground immunity hearing. One of the revelations that came out of this hearing was that the Treehouse, a blogging outpost thoroughly ignored by the major media and not even ranked among the top two hundred conservative blogs, had cast its shadow on the prosecution’s case.

  Pleased by the grudging recognition, the Treepers and their friends commented in real time as they watched the hearings. Chip Bennett was first to notice: “BDLR [Bernie de la Rionda] mentions The Conservative Treehouse—Drink!” HughStone followed: “Bernie is about to cry. THE TREEHOUSE mentioned again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “He is behaving like a child that isn’t getting his way,” commented Rebelious [sic] Angel after de la Rionda’s third reference to the Treehouse. “Obviously the Conservative Treehouse has done a better job at shining the light on the truth and it’s got BDLR upset.”1

  The prosecutors’ many references to the Treehouse did not make the news. What did was Zimmerman’s unexpected decision to waive his right to a Stand Your Ground hearing. The experts consulted by the New York Times listed a series of “strategic and practical” reasons as to why Zimmerman would have made this unanticipated move. In such a hearing, said the experts, the burden to prove innocence is on the defendant. Then, too, the hearing would provide prosecutors a preview of his defense, and state attorney Angela Corey had shown her willingness to challenge vigorously the Stand Your Ground defense. The Times only hinted at another motive in suggesting that a ruling of immunity by a judge, not a jury, “would most likely provoke a strong public reaction in the highly charged case.”2

  Strong public reaction? Yes, and Zimmerman knew that better than anyone. He showed up at the late April hearing as much as one hundred pounds heavier than he was a year earlier. The media had rendered the mid-Florida ether so poisonous that Zimmerman felt compelled to spend that year in hiding, in legitimate fear for his life. He could not just pop down to the gym or go for a run around the neighborhood. On one rare excursion he made to a store, it was to buy a bulletproof vest.3 As he fully understood, only a very public exoneration by a jury of his peers could begin to give him his life back. There would be no shortcuts, even if the law provided one.

  There was no guarantee either that Zimmerman would get justice from a jury. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes anticipated the anxiety that a Florida jury might face in his sad commentary on the Leo Frank case. A century earlier, Frank, a Jewish entrepreneur from New York, was tried in an Atlanta court for killing a young woman in his employ. The case outraged the citizens of Georgia, and that outrage no doubt intimidated the members of the jury.4 According to Holmes, they “responded to the passions of the mob” and found Frank guilty. “Mob law,” said Holmes for the ages, “does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrified jury.” The jury had cause to be terrified. After the Georgia governor commuted the death penalty for Frank, a well-organized, high-profile group of citizens kidnapped Frank from prison and brutally lynched him. “Lynch law is a good sign,” said former Georgia congressman Thomas Watson at the time. “It shows that a sense of justice lives among the people.”5