Defense attorney Mark O’Mara was better known for his commentary on HLN during the Casey Anthony trial than for any case he had tried on his own. A native New Yorker in his late fifties, O’Mara seemed younger than his age and as far removed from his roots in Queens as de la Rionda was from his in Cuba. Unlike many defense attorneys who have handled high-profile cases, O’Mara was still doing divorce work at the time he took on Zimmerman as a client. In selecting Don West as cocounsel, O’Mara rescued the folksy, quietly humorous death penalty specialist from the federal public defender’s office in Orlando. The two were friends before the trial. They meshed well.2 In the movie version, casting widely over time, Jimmy Stewart plays O’Mara. Robert Duvall plays West. A young Kevin Costner plays Guy. The short bald character actor with the glasses and mustache whose name you can never quite remember plays de la Rionda, although Paul Giamatti might do in a pinch. And Kathy Bates plays the dual role of the flashy Angela Corey and the frumpy Judge Nelson.

  At the outset of the trial, most media commentators presented the case to their audiences as though it were a perfectly legitimate exercise of state power, one whose outcome was too close to call. Florida’s generous sunshine laws should have armed them all with enough information to be skeptical of the State’s case, but either out of some unspoken journalistic ethic or their own biases, most chose not to know any more than they wanted to. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart fell comfortably into this category.

  Capehart predicted two “pivotal moments” in the trial to come. One would be the testimony of Witness 8, the State’s star witness. The other would be the defense’s resolve to keep Zimmerman off the stand. Said Capehart in conclusion, still stuck on the imagery first introduced by Martin family publicists, “From the precious little DNA evidence to back up his story to Trayvon’s hands [sic], Zimmerman could be his own worst enemy in explaining how he killed a teenager armed with only a bag of Skittles and iced tea.”3

  Meanwhile, on the eve of the trial itself, the Treepers were doing the work that the Washington Post used to do, and still occasionally does when an issue fits its agenda. “The hourglass sand has been disappearing rapidly as of late—[a]ll building toward this date,” wrote Sundance. “After spending thousands of hours, and thousands of miles, on this journey I can say with relative confidence the ‘TRUTH’ about Trayvon in Miami-Dade is far worse than even the most die-hard insider would grasp.”4 As Sundance related, the Treehouse had begun emergency legal motions to shed light on the issues at hand, particularly the efforts of the Miami-Dade School District and its allies in state government to bury what should have been Martin’s criminal record.

  “For the past several months,” Sundance reported, “we have been engaged in a Truth Search against multiple self-interested parties all with a vested interest in keeping the Truth hidden.” Sundance believed the state of Florida was fully aware of what secrets the vault files from the M-DSPD internal affairs investigation held. Sundance knew that at least one member of the FDLE Miami-Dade field office was given this information as a result of a phone call from Angela Corey’s office, and that person in turn sent it to the prosecutors in Jacksonville. Sundance knew, too, that the parties at risk made a coordinated decision to stonewall the release of all relevant information. Was Sundance confident that the Treehouse could secure the needed information in time or that Judge Nelson would even allow it? No, he was not, but, as he admitted, “We are at that point where, for the first time, I’m willing to engage the Defense Team directly.”5 The clock was ticking.

  “Good morning,” said John Guy to the six-woman jury on day one, minute one, of the trial.6 From that benign moment on, Guy’s opening statement was pure shock and awe, what the French might call épater la bourgeoisie or “shocking the middle class.”

  “F**king punks. These a**holes always get away,” said Guy, dramatically repeating what George Zimmerman was alleged to have said that fateful night in February 2012. “Those were the words in that grown man’s mouth as he followed a seventeen-year-old boy.” Although Zimmerman most likely said, “It’s fu**ing cold,” the defense attorneys had to be a little relieved that Guy did not lead with “fu**ing coons,” the words CNN once insisted Zimmerman had said. The defense did not bother to challenge the State’s interpretation in any case—Zimmerman had confirmed the “punks” line to the Sanford police and on the Hannity Show—and the media did not comment on the word switch. The State so liked the “f**king punks” phrase that Guy repeated it several times and, in the process, assured that going forward the cable networks would broadcast the trial with a time delay.

  Beyond the shock and awe, Guy had little else to say. To prove second-degree murder, prosecutors had to convince the jury that Zimmerman killed Martin with a “depraved mind,” one moved by ill will, hatred, or spite. Despite that burden, Guy took only thirty minutes, an unusually brief exposition for a trial of this visibility. Guy compensated for a lack of tangible evidence with dramatic incantations of words like “profiled” and “chased” and “semi-automatic” as though these very words proved a hateful intent on Zimmerman’s part. In his most dishonest moment, Guy addressed the repeated cries for help heard on the 9-1-1 tape. “You will hear screaming in the background,” said Guy disingenuously. “Trayvon Martin was silenced immediately when the bullet fired passed through his heart.”

  Although he dared not say that Martin was doing the screaming—he would leave that job to Martin’s mother—Guy implied as much and, so saying, further inflamed the low-information portion of a preheated national viewing audience. Even more inflammatory, Guy claimed Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to. “He shot him for the worst of all reasons,” said Guy, “because he wanted to.” To make this case, the prosecution interpreted every slight variation in Zimmerman’s various retellings of the incident as one more thread in his “tangled web of lies.”

  “[Zimmerman] told the police that it was just after he hung up with Sean Noffke, the nonemergency dispatcher, that Trayvon Martin approached him, confronted him, said a couple of words to him, and then punched him and knocked him to the ground just moments after that,” said Guy to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, that did not happen.” As to what did happen, the prosecution left that to the defense to describe. This soon became a pattern.

  “There are no winners here,” said Don West once he got beyond the knock-knock joke. “George Zimmerman is not guilty of murder. He shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense after being viciously attacked.” In the three hours that followed, the low-key West detailed with maps and photographs just how the attack took place. For the first time, millions of people across the nation heard that Martin, the cute little boy in the red Hollister shirt, may have assaulted George Zimmerman, the brooding thug of their imaginations. It was the day’s real shocker. To the end, many would refuse to accept this scenario even as a possibility.

  34

  FERRETING OUT THE FALSEHOODS

  AT THE TREEHOUSE, the Treepers and their allies were, in real time, or something very close to it, reviewing the testimony of various witnesses for accuracy and honesty and noting any discrepancies they discovered. They called it “crowdsourcing.”1

  “So here’s where EVERYONE comes in,” posted Sundance on the opening day of the trial. Given their exhaustive research to date, the Treepers were aware of “hundreds of lies told by potential witnesses for the prosecution,” some of them in legal affidavits and sworn statements. Those who made false statements in the past, Sundance continued, would either have to lie under oath or give a conflicting account. With all their other burdens, the defense attorneys might miss the lie the moment it occurred. To compensate, the Treepers would “crowd source the witnesses as they take the stand.”2

  For the eight administrators of the site, this meant spending every spare moment monitoring the many information streams that the Treepers sprung. To make this strategy pay off, the “admins” had to keep contributors focused and to discreetly triage their comments. If a certain insight might help the prosecutors—they were visiting the site too—the admins would quietly divert it into a private thread.

  By trial time, this obscure little blog had become information central in Florida v. Zimmerman. Florida had on its side the state bureaucracies, the US Justice Department, the president of the United States, the BGI, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media. Zimmerman had on his side two folksy local lawyers and their aides, an army of bloggers, and, most important, the truth. Despite the pressures, the Treepers had retained their integrity. Truth was still the coin of their realm. They cozied up to no one, not even defense attorneys Mark O’Mara and Don West, whom they criticized as warranted. If the attorneys wanted information, they came to the Treehouse. The Treepers did not go to them. This was an unprecedented battle formation in the history of American jurisprudence, and the major media did not even notice. Their talking heads prattled on about trivia utterly irrelevant to the jurors in Sanford—Don West’s knock-knock joke consumed them for a day—while the bloggers unearthed new information and processed it swiftly.

  By trial time the Treepers had plenty of help. Diwataman had his own obsessive-compulsive site. The Smoking Gun kept digging up provocative dirt. TalkLeft’s Jeralyn Merritt, the Colorado attorney who made her bones in the Duke lacrosse case, offered much useful analysis as well as a reminder that some liberals still cared about justice. Cornell law professor William Jacobson of the smart and popular Legal Insurrection blog featured Andrew Branca throughout the trial. An attorney and author of the blog The Law of Self Defense, Branca knew the subject as well as anyone anywhere, and the Treehouse linked to his material regularly. Zimmerman’s attorneys helped the information flow as well. On their George Zimmerman Legal Case site, they promptly posted all legal documents and provided much of the raw material for the bloggers. Mining the legal data, the social media sites, and the local reporting for evidence, several of the more sophisticated bloggers found evidence threads that eluded the attorneys. Some, like Sundance, went the extra mile, pounding the pavement like reporters of old and filing FOIA requests when the pavement wouldn’t yield.

  The strategy showed its value on the second day of the trial. The witness in question, Selene Bahadoor, lived in a townhome that overlooked the site of the shooting. A young, black professional with an attractive presence, Bahadoor told de la Rionda how the sound of a “no” or an “uhh” first alerted her to the drama about to follow. She then heard urgent footsteps moving from her left to her right, meaning away from the Green town house and toward the intersection of the dog walk and the cut-through, the T, as it came to be known. Her testimony suggested the possibility of one person pursuing another.3 If credible, it would have given the State the opportunity to create a scenario plausible enough to support a second-degree murder verdict.

  The State’s story line might have played out as follows: In his unaccounted-for minutes, Martin made it back to Green’s townhome. Both Green and Tracy Martin had said as much. “He was sitting on the porch and this man killed him,” Green told a reporter the day after the shooting. In his unaccounted-for minutes, according to this scenario, Zimmerman tracked Martin to that porch, prompting Martin to flee back toward the T with Zimmerman in pursuit, thus the left-to-right footsteps that Bahadoor heard. At the T, Zimmerman challenged Martin, and Martin responded as a scared child might. Embarrassed at his thrashing, Zimmerman murdered Martin with ill will, spite, and/or malice. The State hinted at these details but never quite told this story. They did not do so because of what happened in the cross-examination.

  O’Mara sensed something amiss with Bahadoor’s testimony and zoomed in. In her sworn deposition and other previous statements to the authorities, O’Mara did not remember any mention of a pursuit of any kind. He handed her one prior statement of hers after another and asked her to point out any reference to a left-to-right motion. She could find none. “When was the first time that you told anyone about this ‘left-to-right’ motion you’ve described to us today?” O’Mara asked her. “Is it in fact today, here in court, the first time you’ve ever told anyone about it?” Said Bahadoor, “It could be.” What O’Mara implied but did not say is that the prosecution had coached her to say this in her pretrial preparation just a few days prior, a judicial no-no.

  This much O’Mara discerned on his own. What followed had the scent of blogosphere about it, much as did the outing of Jerry Counelis. After establishing that Bahadoor’s credibility was suspect, O’Mara probed as to why that might be so, asking Bahadoor if she had any particular sympathy for the Martin family. “I have sympathy for both families,” she answered dismissively. This proved to be a perfect setup line for O’Mara: “But you ‘liked’ the Facebook page for the Martin family, but not the Facebook page for the Zimmerman family.” Bahadoor claimed disingenuously that the opportunity never presented itself to like the latter.

  In his re-direct, de la Rionda tried to rehabilitate Bahadoor. In a strategy born of desperation, he led her to say that she had not mentioned the left-to-right movement previously because no one had asked her about it. He reminded the jury, too, that she had been a reluctant witness all along. He suggested that she was not eager to be famous or to go on television. In fact, she had not even volunteered information to the police in the hours after the shooting. Bahadoor followed de la Rionda’s lead without resistance. On recross, O’Mara quickly dispelled the illusion of a reticent, impartial witness, “Isn’t it true that you’ve actually been on national TV about this case?” he asked.

  “No,” said Bahadoor, “I did a video, but they never aired it.” O’Mara pressed on: “But you wanted to be on TV. A television journalist interviewed you on camera for half an hour; you talked all about the case with them.” Bahadoor claimed that she chose not to let the video air, that she had only considered appearing on video to bring attention to the shooting. “Because you thought that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin improperly and should be prosecuted,” said O’Mara.

  “I never said that,” Bahadoor shot back. “But you signed this petition, did you not?” said O’Mara as he held up the super Irish Kevin Cunningham’s petition “Prosecute the killer of our son, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.” Bahadoor was one of the two million to sign it, and she could not deny that she had. This was not quite a Perry Mason moment, but it was close. O’Mara had just stripped Bahadoor of whatever value she might have had as a prosecution witness.

  O’Mara did not discuss the source of his information, but he had two comely young women working with him, one black and one white, affectionately nicknamed Cobra and Viper by the Treehouse. “I’m always watching them research and relay info to O’Mara & West. Today the blonde said something to George at the end of the day during all the sidebar impeaching stuff & it looked for the first time like he was genuinely relieved and had to hide a smile,” commented one Treeper. Added another, “I want to know what they’re so busy reading back there on their puters . . . . Every time I catch a glimpse of a computer screen in the courtroom, I’m looking for the signature brick edging, lol.”4 That brick edging was the Treehouse’s distinctive background graphic, and it had indeed been spotted on a relevant “puter” more than once.

  The Bahadoor smackdown was a decisive early turning point in the trial. “Her testimony and credibility,” said Legal Insurrection’s Andrew Branca, were “utterly, indeed humiliatingly, crushed before the jury.”5 What Branca missed, however, what almost everyone missed, was a statement that de la Rionda could have used to humiliate O’Mara in his re-direct—if, that is, he had known it existed. On March 26, 2012, Bahadoor gave a brief statement to the State investigators. According to that statement filed by T.C. O’Steen, “She heard running outside and looked out her bedroom window. She looked out and saw shadows running from left to right. She heard someone say ‘yo’ or ‘no.’”6 This was early, un-coached, unprompted testimony. De la Rionda could be forgiven for overlooking this statement. He wasn’t there to interview Bahadoor, but John Guy was. Although cynics in the Martin camp might suspect Guy of ulterior motives, he, too, likely forgot. If those cynics had spent their energy “crowdsourcing,” instead of griping on cable talk shows, they might have been able to compensate.

  35

  ECHOING THE AGITPROP

  BAHADOOR WAS NOT THE ONLY WITNESS to yield to the siren song of the media. She had enough neighborhood company to launch a Twin Lakes association for the easily spun. Two of her compatriots followed her to the stand on day three of the trial. Their testimony provided direct proof, if any were needed, of the corrupting influence of months and months of media disinformation. Although neither saw much of anything that rainy night in February 2012, the media managed to convince both of them, in defiance of the evidence, that George Zimmerman was the aggressor and Trayvon Martin the boy calling for help.

  The media’s effect on Jeannee Manalo would have been comical were there not so much at stake. The foreign-born Manalo lived with her husband on the west side of the dog walk, very near the site of the encounter. She gave her first interview to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) on March 20, 2012, three weeks after the shooting. She admittedly did not see much. She looked out from her town house window and “saw two shadow” [sic]. She added. “One was on top of the other. I don’t know which one.”1 Nor at the time could she distinguish which of the two was bigger.

  By the time of the trial, however, Manalo had concluded that the one on top, “just hitting down,” had to be Zimmerman, as “the top was bigger than the bottom.” The photos of Martin in the media convinced her he was the smaller of the two. O’Mara produced some of the photos she might have seen: the iconic photo of a youthful Martin in his red Hollister shirt, two photos of a preteen football player, and the photo of Martin in his hoodie. Manalo innocently confirmed these images as the source of her perception. In reality, of course, Martin was at least four inches taller than Zimmerman and, at 158 pounds, all but fully developed. Skimming the media as she did, Manalo had no idea Martin was that big.