The Zimmerman Trial

When I started watching the taping of the George Zimmerman trial, I did not know that that event started the Black Lives Matter movement.

From the trial, it is pretty evident that the prosecution case was thin and politically motivated. Their mostly emotional and scarcely factual narrative of guilt steadily degraded day-by-day and testimony-over-testimony. Starting with their own witnesses, during their own case in chief—at the end of which they had nothing of substance to show the jury. The defense case just crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s.

I find ironic—and to the extent that those who engaged with it were also aware of it, hypocritical—that those seeking justice for the historically persecuted, decided to do so through persecution. But sometimes persecution is spelled advocacy, I guess.

I leave you with a quote from lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara, who—at the end of the post-verdict press-conference, as the last question, almost on his way out, when asked by a reporter if George Zimmerman ever cried to him and showed any emotion—replied with:

Absolutely. Sixteen months of being—some people called him the most hated man in America for having defended his own life only after getting beat for 45 seconds.

And then, a man who believes in the system, whose dad was a judge, who maybe want to be a cop or a prosecutor, then gets a system—two systems went against George Zimmerman, that he can’t understand.

You guys, the media. He was like a patient in an operating table where mad scientists were committing experiments on him, and he had no anesthesia. He didn’t know why he was turned into this monster, but quite honestly, you guys had a lot to do with it. You just did. Because you took a story that was fed to you, and you ran with it, and you ran right over him. And that was horrid to him.

Then he comes into a system that he trusts—let’s not forget, six voluntary statements, voluntary surrender—and he believes in a system that he really want to be part of, right? And then he gets prosecutors that charge him with a crime they could never, ever, prove. It’s not that—they didn’t lose evidence along the way, right? So I don’t think anyone would argue with me in this room that they had evidence of second degree murder. This ‘in your heart’ kind of stuff, that’s not what we are supposed to do and not what they are supposed to do.

So, those two systems failed him.