Given the centrality of the “fu**ing punks” phrase to the State’s case, the knowing observer would have liked O’Mara to remind the Court just how the word “punks” evolved from indecipherable garble to “coons” to “cold” to “punks.” But O’Mara avoided digressions. He did not address the unaccounted-for twenty-five minutes in Martin’s journey from the 7-Eleven, or his likely exchange outside the 7-Eleven with “Curly.” He stayed true to his assignment, which was subverting the State’s case on the encounter itself.

  O’Mara also gave a pass to the racist and/or homophobic “creepy ass cracka” slur uttered by Martin and repeated by Rachel Jeantel. For strategic reasons, he handled Jeantel very gently. In this regard, he read the jury correctly. “She just didn’t want to be there, and she was embarrassed by being there because of her education and her communication skills,” said B37 of Jeantel. “I just felt sadness for her.”

  On the subject of the hatred, ill will, and spite required to show a “depraved mind,” O’Mara returned to Zimmerman’s nonemergency call. If the State dwelled on the dispatcher’s suggestion, “We don’t need you to do that,” O’Mara focused the jurors on that same dispatcher’s request to Zimmerman: “Just let me know if this guy does anything else.” Once Martin began running, the dispatcher asked, “Which way is he running?” Zimmerman’s calm response to these questions showed not only an absence of hatred or anger but also a willingness to honor the dispatcher’s request for information. He could not tell him where Martin had gone from his truck. It may have been imprudent for Zimmerman to follow Martin, even at a distance, but it was not at all illegal. As to the most critical of the dispatcher’s requests, the request not to follow Martin, Zimmerman responded passively. “Is that when George Zimmerman snaps?” asked O’Mara. “No. He simply says, ‘Okay.’”

  Zimmerman agreed not to follow Martin, said O’Mara. He then asked what evidence the State presented to prove Zimmerman continued to pursue Martin. “Let [the prosecutors] show you in the record of this case that they had evidence that he ran after Trayvon, walked after him, after he said, ‘Okay,’ because if it’s there, I missed it,” said O’Mara. All evidence, physical and eyewitness, put the point of the initial encounter at the T juncture where the east-west cut-through met the north-south dog walk. “We know the altercation started exactly where George Zimmerman said it started,” observed O’Mara emphatically. He proceeded to show an animation as to what did happen and where it happened. The prosecution offered no counter animation. To do so would have highlighted the holes in its imagined scenario.

  As O’Mara noted, the State had made a fuss about the allegedly mysterious two-minute gap between the end of Zimmerman’s phone call with the dispatcher and the beginning of the confrontation with Martin. In fact, these two minutes presented a mystery only to those who chose not to believe Zimmerman when he said that he walked across the east-west cutthrough to get an address reference on Retreat View Circle. De la Rionda thought he had demolished this account by showing a photo of the Lauer residence on Twin Trees Lane with a clearly lit address. According to de la Rionda, Zimmerman would have seen the address on Twin Trees even before he reached the cut-through. He might have, said O’Mara, if the light were on, but the prosecution had offered no evidence of any kind that the Lauers had their outside light on at 7:15 on the night of February 26, 2012. The photos shown in court were taken later. One suspects that the residents were more inclined to keep their lights on after the shooting.

  The real mystery, said O’Mara, was where Martin had gone in the four minutes from when he started running to when he confronted Zimmerman. In the day’s best bit of theater, O’Mara set a clock on the podium and sat in silence while four minutes counted down. Those minutes passed slowly. In four minutes, said O’Mara, some men could run a mile, but the athletic Martin was apparently unable or unwilling to run a couple hundred feet to the house where he was staying. More problematic, O’Mara added, was the State’s failure to explain where Martin might have gone during that time.

  After a lunch break, O’Mara continued to pound away at the State’s evidence or lack thereof. He walked the jurors through a photographic tour of all the witnesses, both the State’s and the defense’s, and recalled what they had to contribute. Where, he asked, was the evidence that Zimmerman attacked Martin or did anything to justify Martin’s attack? There was none. As to the notion that Martin was unarmed, O’Mara lugged a large chunk of concrete over to the jury box to show its lethal potential. He called the State’s contention that concrete could not be a weapon “disgusting,” a rare and oddly placed display of anger on O’Mara’s part.

  As he wound down, O’Mara predicted that in his rebuttal John Guy would call Zimmerman a liar and a murderer, but unless the State disproved self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt, there could be no conviction. He asked the jurors to examine the definition of reasonable doubt. “You look at that definition,” concluded O’Mara. “You go back to that room and say let’s talk first about self-defense. If I think George may have acted in self-defense, we are done.” That simple.

  John Guy lived down to O’Mara’s expectations. Unchastened by O’Mara’s warning, he referred to Zimmerman as a liar even more often than he referred to Martin as a child. Were one to title his rebuttal, “The Liar and the Child” would work just fine. “That child had every right to be where he was,” said Guy. “That child had every right to be afraid of a strange man following him.” Conceding now that Martin beat the snot out of Zimmerman, he added, “Did that child not have the right to defend himself from that strange man?”

  On style points, there was no faulting Guy. He looked good, spoke well, and showed a theatrical knack for calling attention to key words. “The last thing [Martin] did on this earth was to try to get home,” said Guy. No, that was false, one of many falsehoods Guy told in the close. As Guy and his colleagues knew, Martin had no home. His mother had kicked him out. His father was in no position to take him in. Still, he could have easily gotten to the house where he was staying if he had chosen to, but he chose otherwise. The last thing Martin did was brutally attack a man he did not know for reasons that will remain forever unknown.

  Guy did not see it that way. He repeated his libelous canard from the opening that Zimmerman stalked Martin and “shot him because he wanted to.” He continued, “What is that when a grown man, frustrated, angry, with hate in his heart, gets out of his car with a loaded gun, follows a child, a stranger, with a gun and shoots him through his heart? What is that?” What that was, the savvy observer understood, was fiction. Said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz later that same day, “To ask the jury to believe that is to ask the jury to convict based on complete and utter speculation and that’s not the way the law operates.” Dershowitz recommended, in fact, that the prosecutors be charged with “prosecutorial misconduct” for even suggesting Zimmerman somehow planned the shooting of Martin.2 ABC News was less judgmental. The headline for Matt Gutman’s online piece that day read simply, “George Zimmerman ‘Had Hate in His Heart’ Prosecutor Tells Jury.”3 ABC, though, was hardly through with its mischief. In fact, the diehards in its newsroom were just warming up.

  45

  SAVING THE SYSTEM

  “MEMBERS OF THE JURY, I thank you for your attention during this trial,” said Judge Nelson to the six female jurors chosen to decide George Zimmerman’s fate on Friday afternoon, day fourteen of the trial. “Please pay attention to the instructions I am about to give you.”1

  The instructions were complicated. As the jurors had heard during the trial, and as Nelson repeated, they could find Zimmerman guilty of second-degree murder if the evidence demonstrated a “depraved mind without regard for human life.” As testament to that depravity, Zimmerman would have had to act “from ill will, hatred, spite or an evil intent.” The homicide would be justifiable, however, “if necessarily done while resisting an attempt to murder or commit a felony upon George Zimmerman.” The homicide, if deemed justifiable, would also rule out the lesser charge of manslaughter.

  For the jurors the instruction that would concern them most was the definition of the justifiable use of deadly force. “A person is justified in using deadly force,” they were told, “if he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.” Judge Nelson continued:

  In deciding whether George Zimmerman was justified in the use of deadly force, you must judge him by the circumstances by which he was surrounded at the time the force was used. The danger facing George Zimmerman need not have been actual; however, to justify the use of deadly force, the appearance of danger must have been so real that a reasonably cautious and prudent person under the same circumstances would have believed that the danger could be avoided only through the use of that force. Based upon appearances, George Zimmerman must have actually believed that the danger was real.

  If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

  In considering the issue of self-defense, you may take into account the relative physical abilities and capacities of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.

  If in your consideration of the issue of self-defense you have a reasonable doubt on the question of whether George Zimmerman was justified in the use of deadly force, you should find George Zimmerman not guilty.

  However, if from the evidence you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not justified in the use of deadly force, you should find him guilty if all the elements of the charge have been proved.2

  Restricted from talking about the case, the jurors to that point talked among themselves about everyday things, their children, their spouses, their pets, their favorite reality TV shows. In addition to her two grown daughters, B37 was the one with all the pets. No fan of the media, she found the best use of the newspaper was to line the parrot cage. Of note, too, she was the only juror to have once had a concealed carry permit.

  Retired and unmarried, B51 was one of the few admitted newspaper readers among the forty would-be juror finalists. As such she had a better understanding of the facts of the case than her fellow jurors. She also seemed to have a better grasp on the law and its application. She even thanked Mark O’Mara for explaining the legal concepts involved and the roles of the jurors.

  B76 was one of the two jurors that the State tried to strike. A middle-aged mother of two grown children, she had formerly helped her husband run his construction business but now spent much of her time rescuing pets. B76 did not trust the media and knew little about the case save for the basics. Still, she wondered what a “kid” was doing out at night buying candy. This had to have alarmed the prosecutors.

  “I don’t put much stock to what’s in the news,” said E6, a ponytailed blonde. “It’s so speculative.”3 That comment may have been enough to provoke the State to try to strike her too. The fact that her thirteen-year-old son, one of her two children, had a hunting rifle and that her husband owned several pistols could not have reassured the prosecutors.

  The sixtyish E40 was living in Iowa at the time of the Martin shooting and paid little attention to the story. The mother of one grown son, she had moved to Seminole County only seven months prior to the trial. She worked as a safety officer and did not own any guns, although she had a brother-in-law who did. Of all the jurors, she endured the shortest voir dire, which may have been due to the lateness of the day she took the stand.

  Juror B29 was the outlier of the group. Although the media routinely reported that the Zimmerman jury was all white or at least devoid of African-Americans, juror B29, a Puerto Rican in her mid-thirties, was clearly of African descent. The mother of eight, she and her family had moved to Florida just months before the trial. Like several of the jurors and eyewitnesses, her cursory attention to the news of the incident led her to believe that Martin was only twelve or thirteen years old at the time of his death. She preferred reality TV to the news. The Real Housewives of New Jersey was her favorite show.

  Once they left the courthouse each day, the six jurors pushed the trial from their minds to the degree they could and made the best use possible of their communal down time. Given that their private hotel rooms were stripped of all electronics, and they could only make one supervised phone call a day, no one begrudged them their diversions, not at least until they returned their verdict. During the twenty-two days of sequestration, they went shopping together, bowled a few games, got manicures, took side trips, even attended a couple preapproved movies—The Lone Ranger and World War Z, to be precise.4

  As soon as the trial was over, the jurors were free to speak about their experiences. The two jurors who went public in the immediate aftermath of the trial—B29 and B37—disagreed somewhat on the evidence but told fairly consistent stories about the process. Once the word got out that B37 had signed on with a literary agent, however, she suffered what the Washington Post called “a social media smackdown.” An anger-fueled petition on Change.org coerced her agent to drop the deal and to apologize publicly for taking it on. “I believe I made a grave error in judgment in wanting to represent this story,” the agent told the Los Angeles Times despite the fact that she typically represents people involved in high-profile criminal cases.5

  The backlash persuaded four other jurors to distance themselves from B37. “The opinions of Juror B37, expressed on the Anderson Cooper show were her own, and not in any way representative of the jurors listed below,” they wrote on court stationery.6 They did not, however, specify in what way they might have disagreed. Juror B37 felt obliged to back away from her own comments in a statement two days after her appearance. “My prayers are with all those who have the influence and power to modify the laws that left me with no verdict option other than ‘not guilty’ in order to remain within the instructions,” she wrote to CNN. “No other family should be forced to endure what the Martin family has endured.”7 For all the backtracking, however, her original comments continued to ring true.

  After the instructions were read, the jurors retired to the jury room with little idea of what to do next. Likely from seeing this done on TV, they chose a foreman, or foreperson, in this case. This they had to figure out on their own. There were no instructions. Then they took an initial vote. Three of the jurors, including B37, voted not guilty. Two voted for manslaughter. B29 alone voted to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder. At this point, the jurors started reviewing the evidence. They listened multiple times to the 9-1-1 calls, the reenactment video, and various other recordings in evidence. “That’s why it took us so long,” said B37. “We’re looking through the evidence, and then at the end we just—we got done, and then we just started looking at the law.” The jurors broke for the evening Friday at six and resumed Saturday morning at nine.8

  The jurors deliberated throughout the day. At about 6:00 p.m. Saturday evening, as protestors gathered anxiously outside the courthouse, the jurors asked for clarification on the manslaughter charge. Legal commentators speculated that this meant the jurors had removed second-degree murder from consideration, and in this, they were correct. “We actually had gotten it down to manslaughter, because the second degree, it wasn’t at second degree anymore,” said B37.9 At that point, the jurors had reduced their options to not guilty or manslaughter, and they received little clarification from the court in moving forward. Aware of their responsibility, they continued deliberating into the night.

  “There was a couple of [jurors] that wanted to find [Zimmerman] guilty of something,” said B37. Most resolved of those jurors was B29. “I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury. I fought to the end,” she said.10 What changed her mind was not bullying by the other jurors, but the law itself. As the jurors came to see, all that really mattered was whether Zimmerman felt that he was at legitimate risk of death or great bodily harm when Martin was slamming his head into the concrete. Everything else that preceded that moment faded into irrelevancy. “That’s how we read the law. That’s how we got to the point of everybody being not guilty,” B37 told Anderson Cooper.

  “So that was the belief of the jury, that you had to zero in on those final minutes/seconds, about the threat that George Zimmerman believed he faced?” asked Cooper. “That’s exactly what had happened,” said B37. “And after hours and hours and hours of deliberating over the law and reading it over and over and over again, we decided there’s just no way—[no] other place to go.”11 Although inclined to find Zimmerman guilty of something, B29 conceded, “As the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty.”12 This was not exactly the way the law was read to her, but it wasn’t too wide of the mark.

  Having reached a consensus, the jurors voted. “After we had put our vote in,” said B37, “and the bailiff had taken our vote, that’s when everybody started to cry.” She continued, “It was just hard, thinking that somebody lost their life, and there’s nothing else that could be done about it. I mean, it’s what happened. It’s sad. It’s a tragedy this happened, but it happened. And I think both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into. I think both of them could have walked away. It just didn’t happen.”13 As B29 and B37 each admitted separately, the issue of race, the issue that made the trial a national sensation, never entered the equation for them. For the jurors, it was not about black and white. It was about life and death.