Don West shows photos of his client to jurors.
One thing that lawyers and reporters soon learn is not to make public predictions or big wagers on the outcome of a trial based on opening statements or the demeanor and apparent slip-ups of witnesses or the facial expressions of the defendant or how awake this or that juror may appear during crucial testimony. Good to remember that during the trial of George Zimmerman, which started out this week with the prosecution's "fucking punks" and the defense's lame "knock-knock" joke. Even with highly paid, supposedly scientific jury-selection consultants on the job, what actually turns a juror toward a particular verdict often just isn't all that clear even to the experts of various disciplines who study the intricacies of such matters.
Witnesses so far have described what they saw or think they saw 16 months ago when, against the admonition of a police dispatcher, Zimmerman followed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin into a gated community of modest townhomes, got into a confrontation with him that nobody directly witnessed the beginning or end of and finished up by shooting him dead less than a minute's walk from the residence where Martin was visiting his father's fiancée together with his father.
Jurors have seen the grim photos of Martin's body, the cheap 9mm pistol Zimmerman was legally carried concealed, and one of Zimmerman's fingerprints lifted from that gun. They've heard a police technician explain how crime scenes are preserved and documented and how Zimmerman's gun, holster and flashlight were processed along with the Skittles and can of iced tea whose purchase was the reason Martin was out walking in the drizzly February evening.
They've heard from the woman who runs the Sanford Police Department's volunteer programs discuss Zimmerman's work with the community's neighborhood watch programs and from residents who said he seemed conscientious in that role.
They've heard contradictory testimony from a few neighbors who heard or saw part of the fight that ended with Martin face down in the grass. They listened to the EMTs and police officers who were first on the scene tell how they tried to revive Martin without success. Of how one officer arrested Zimmerman at gunpoint, handcuffing and taking away his gun after Zimmerman admitted he had shot Martin. They've heard those witnesses, police and civilian alike, describe Zimmerman's appearance, his bloody, swollen nose and head lacerations, and his behavior, one saying he seemed confused, another saying he didn't. They've heard how after he was given first aid, Zimmerman refused to go to the hospital.
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They've heard two witnesses earlier say they saw the person on top in the fight stand up and walk away. And another on Friday who said the person on the bottom was wearing lighter colored clothes and having lighter skin, which matches Zimmerman and what he was wearing the evening of the shooting.
That witness, John Good, a resident of the housing complex, used the term "ground and pound," a phrase from mixed martial arts fighting, to describe what he said he saw the person "straddling" the other doing. He testified that he asked what was happening, got no answer, told them to "cut it out," decided the fight was serious and told the two fighters he was going to phone police. Asked if he now thinks Martin was on top and Zimmerman on the bottom, Good said, "Correct [...] that's what it looked like." He also said he saw the fight move to the sidewalk but couldn't tell if Martin was slamming the older man's head into it as Zimmerman claimed to police.
It is the prosecution's contention that Zimmerman was the person on top.
The two police officers first on scene testified that when they arrived Martin's hands were under his body. That matters. Because Zimmerman told the police during an interview immediately after the shooting that he climbed on top of Martin, spread his arms out and pinned them to the ground.
Of all the testimony so far, it is that of 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel that has caused the greatest stir. She was on the phone with Martin shortly before he was shot. She's widely seen as the prosecution's star witness. But the defense spent several hours on Wednesday and Thursday focusing on inconsistencies in her accounts. She said she had left out details from her initial account to police. Among them was that Martin called Zimmerman a "creepy-ass cracker" during his phone call with her. She said when she originally talked with the police she was sitting with Martin's mother and didn't want to hurt her feelings.
Her demeanor, her use of slang, what some called "mumbling" on the stand and alleged disrespect for the lawyers and proceedings in general, and even her heavyset appearance became targets for all kinds of garbage on social media, some of which was highlighted by Kossack diarist Vyan Thursday.
Eric Deggans, a media critic at the Tampa Bay Times, had perhaps the best analysis of Jeantel's behavior:
[W]hat so much of this really revealed was the gulf between middle-aged, middle class, mainstream codes of behavior and life among youth from poorer, non-white neighborhoods.
A national TV audience saw up close the gulf between a poor black girl and a dense and arcane legal system, where white lawyers speak in ten-dollar words based on the dead language of Latin. They couldn’t seemed further apart if Jeantel was born on the moon.
[...]
Predictably, social media has piled up with smug comments from people on her appearance and demeanor, including one MSN commenter who wrote “If you want to be taken seriously, you have to behave in such a way that people WILL take you seriously.”
But which culture decides what constitutes such behavior? And if you don’t know how to act that way for that culture, is it fair that you’re not taken seriously in a court of law?
Scary to think that, in the end, the verdict on whether Zimmerman murdered Martin may come down to how well the dead teen’s friends and family can speak to mainstream America.
Scary indeed.