Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 125

RESPITE

A very few folks complained about me spending all that time and the last twenty blog entries on one topic. I felt those things needed to be addressed. I’ve said my piece on the matter for now. Thanks for your patience.

You get a respite here on that subject. I’m getting a respite this month, too. September 2013 had been shaping up to be a killer on my end, with the 30 days encompassing two classes, a speech at a Friends of NRA meeting in Idaho, teaching at a state bar association CLE course on defending justifiable shooting cases, the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, the IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) national championships, and two shooting trials.

The two classes (great classes, with great students!) are done. None of the NRA supporters threw tomatoes or anything. The murder trial out west was postponed to November a couple of weeks ago. The attempted murder trial back east, which might have seen me on the stand during the pistol match, was scheduled to start Monday the 16th, and on that morning postponed into January.

As my kids used to say, “Woo-hoo!” I missed last year’s IDPA Nationals because it conflicted with a trial. Not this time. The old guy’s gonna be tripping a trigger in Tulsa, and is looking forward to the CLE and the Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC).

Speaking of respites…

The GRPC was created many years ago by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. You don’t need to belong to either to attend (though I recommend that you join both). THERE IS NO CHARGE TO ATTEND – you’re only responsible for getting there and feeding yourself. You’ll hear the finest minds in the gun owners’ civil rights movement giving you the inside story on the fight as it stands now and what to expect next. They’ll give you hundreds of dollars worth of publications for free.

The object is to bring together the people at the point of the spear on the national level, and at the grass roots. You’ll get the inside skinny from the people who’ve been fighting the fight in Colorado, in New York, and in the other most embattled states, and of course, those who’ve been fighting it in Congress and have carried it to the Supreme Court of the United States. Info is here.

Every time I go, it’s a re-charging of the batteries. You’re among hundreds of like-minded advocates of self-protection and civil rights. A respite from the constant assault on your rights? Feels that way to me.

Hope to see you there. In the meantime, I’m getting ready for a shooting match.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 20: …AND INTO THE FUTURE

Today is two months exactly since the day of the Zimmerman verdict, which I started blogging on that same day. Two months, and twenty entries, are nice round numbers to end upon. That’s right at twice as long as the trial took, including the week of jury selection. The strangeness continues, with the prosecution’s medical examiner Dr. Shiping Bao being fired for his egregious performance in this case, and suing for a hundred million dollars over that. The divorce proceeding of Mr. and Mrs. George Zimmerman grows weirder.  A key player in the case has decided that he doesn’t want to play anymore, and has a new gig. The story will continue. It’s been about twenty years since the O.J. Simpson trial, and he’s still in the news. But I won’t discuss that case until I’ve walked a mile in O.J.’s blood-stained, “ugly-ass” Bruno Magli shoes. There will be books. Damn near everyone associated with the Simpson case eventually wrote one. I’ll be interested in hearing from the Zimmerman prosecutors, and from the defense lawyers, and from the judge (from whom I’m still waiting to hear a ruling as to the allegations of the prosecution withholding evidence from the defense).  I’ll be particularly interested to read George Zimmerman’s own account. Earlier in this blog, I mentioned that he had reportedly wanted to testify, that I thought he handled himself well talking to the investigators, and would have done well on the witness stand if he was as articulate as his brother Robert, who tore Piers Morgan a new one on CNN.  Robert Zimmerman later sent the following tweet:

.@MassadAyoob – Thanks 4 your kind words here–> http://t.co/CpjQeTHZ0w Fact: GZ is just as articulate (if not more than) as I appear to be. — Robert Zimmerman JR (@rzimmermanjr) August 24, 2013

There already are books.  “Florida v. Zimmerman: Uncovering the Malicious Prosecution of my Son, George” by the defendant’s father, Robert Zimmerman, Sr., and “Defending Our Friend: the Most Hated Man In America” by Mark Osterman, the close friend who trained him with a gun and testified so well on his behalf, are available. The co-author of the latter was Sondra Osterman, who also helped show Zimmerman’s human face when she testified at trial. I’ve mentioned in this series that when the mainstream media dismally failed to tell the truth, the blogosphere picked up the ball they dropped.  A classic example of that was the work of Conservative Treehouse, the “Treepers” who told the truth about the case in all its dimensions. The best digest I’ve seen of that good work is “If I had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman” by Jack Cashill. There is also good reading on the topic to be found in “The Lynching of George Zimmerman” by Hunter Billings III.  Those are just the ones I’ve read; there are more. The titles of the dad’s book and that of the friends show that they’re obviously advocates for one side. The Cashill and Billings books clearly have advocacy in them, but that doesn’t distract from the truth if the advocates are on the side of that truth, and the evidence showed that these advocates were. I hope another book on the trial will be forthcoming from my friend and former student Andrew Branca. His reporting from right there in the courtroom was, I think, the gold standard for commentary on the trial as it unfolded. It can be found day by day for the trial, which went from June 10 to July 13, 2013, at www.legalinsurrection.com. When you go there, budget yourself some time to read the huge volume of commentary on each day’s blog.  Legal Insurrection draws an audience very heavily populated by lawyers and other criminal justice professionals, and there is gold in their assessment of the strategy and execution of the tactics seen in this trial.  Branca is a lawyer who specializes in self-defense (get his excellent book on that topic at www.lawofselfdefense.com).  His commentary and that of the readers will sound like advocacy for Zimmerman, but if you read it carefully, you’ll see that he and most of the commentators are really advocating for law and reality…which just happened to favor Zimmerman. This nationally divisive case brought out tribalism at a disturbingly high level.  Black versus white. Anti-gun versus pro-gun. I for one didn’t come from that angle.  As an advocate for armed citizens, it’s as important to me to step on the ones who screw up as to celebrate the many more who save innocent lives. The history of it is, any community that does not police itself will be policed for outside.  If I thought Zimmerman had done wrong, I would have said so. Had I been going with tribes, I would have sided with special prosecutor Angela Corey. We have a lot in common.  We’ve both made our careers in the justice system, we’ve both prosecuted, and we both have Arabic-American ancestry.  Sorry, homegirl, I just can’t side with you on this one.  My career has taught me to go with the evidence to find out who’s on the side of the angels, and in this case, Angela, you were on the wrong side.  Simple as that. When John Guy did his dramatic opening statement for the prosecution, he ended with his now-famous line, “We are confident that at the end of this trial you will know in your head, in your heart, in your stomach that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to. He shot him for the worst of all reasons, because he wanted to.” Under the prosecutorial duty to be a minister of justice, this writer believes that Ms. Corey should have simply brought the evidence before a grand jury and given them the option to indict. Instead, she bypassed that key element of the criminal justice system and set the stage for a cruel show trial.  I suspect that historians will write of it more as, “Angela Corey did not put George Zimmerman and his family through this ordeal because she had to. She did it for the worst of all possible reasons…because she wanted to.”

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 19: LESSONS

There was much for us all to learn from this case. For anyone who came in late, let me refer you here http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/ayoob143.html for a summary.  It ends with one such lesson. Let’s pick up from there.

In this society, the person who moves toward danger in any respect is seen as “having gone looking for trouble,” and widely blamed accordingly if it does not end well. I’ve explained earlier why I don’t think anything Zimmerman did within the totality of the circumstances was the proximate cause of the death, but there’s a reason for the saying “It’s not about fault, it’s about blame.”

When you’re on trial, you aren’t the player, you’re the stakes. The players are your lawyers, and you want the best. Zimmerman had that, and it saved him.  The evidence dealt them a powerful hand of cards. I think their two highest cards were Ace of Experts Dr. Vincent DiMaio, Jr. and Ace of Eyewitnesses John Good.  The master forensic pathologist tied it all together and proved from the hard evidence what Good, the closest eyewitness, testified: it was Martin on top brutally beating Zimmerman until the shot. I did a murder case with Dr. DiMaio in Texas years ago, also resulting in an acquittal, and DiMaio was extraordinary there, too.

If anyone still has the fantasy that you’ll always be treated as a hero after a clean shoot, this case teaches us the reality. It’s often an ordeal of lies, misunderstandings, and false accusations…and, as seen here, your family will go through that ordeal with you.

It’s not something you want to face alone. Kudos to those who donated to Zimmerman’s legal defense fund: you helped enormously to do justice.  O’Mara establishing a website to show the actual evidence (www.GZlegalcase.com)  was powerful and effective, and I think we’ll see other defense lawyers modeling on this strategy in the future. One useful ally would be the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network, which I’m involved with and have seen do good work. (http://armedcitizensnetwork.net) . Mark O’Mara consulted with ACLDN head Marty Hayes on the case, and appears to have put some of his advice to good use. Hayes’ excellent analysis is found here: http://www.armedcitizensnetwork.net/images/stories/Network_2013-08.pdf .

Don’t believe everything you see in the papers or on TV when the news in question is a self-defense act. For decades as an expert witness in these cases, I’d get back to the hotel after testifying, watch the news report on the day’s events in court, and wonder what the hell trial the reporter was watching.  We saw that classically here. The honest reporting was more in the blogosphere than in the mainstream media.

The gun prohibition subculture in this country is powerful, abetted heavily by the MSM, and you can expect them to seize on incidents like this and demonize the shooter. Zimmerman has become the poster person for this venomous trend.  Even those who grudgingly accept the verdict still mutter aloud, “If Zimmerman hadn’t had a gun, Trayvon Martin would still be alive.”

That’s probably true, but the final lesson is the flip side, which those commentators sometimes blindly and sometimes studiously ignore: If George Zimmerman hadn’t been carrying a gun routinely on a night he wasn’t expecting trouble, he would probably be dead.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 18: AFTERSHOCKS

There was no winner of the fight that dark, rainy night in Sanford. Only degrees of losing.

When the President and the galaxy of movie stars extended their condolences to the Martin family after the verdict, we heard from them no sympathy for the defendant and his family. George Zimmerman’s life has been horribly and irreparably changed. We learn that a divorce is in progress, something not uncommon after traumas like what he and his family were put through. His loved ones at various times have been in hiding, subjected to the same death threats as George Zimmerman. The guy gets a warning for speeding in Texas and a ticket for 15 MPH over in Florida, and each time it’s national news. When I heard of the latter on CNN radio, they thought it important enough to announce it ahead of the suicide of Ariel Castro, a genuine monster of our time, which occurred in the same news period.

Trayvon Martin’s family has suffered the loss of a seventeen-year-old, his life wasted twice over. He threw it away himself on that February night – dealing drugs, planning beatings, and negotiating to illegally buy guns according to his own digital records, his liver ravaged already at seventeen by his drug abuse according to the autopsy – when he suffered a sudden, acute, and fatal failure of his victim selection process.

His father had supposedly put an association with the Crips street gang behind him and was gainfully employed as a truck driver, and his mother was a government employee with a Masters degree. The dad loved him enough to take him in when the mom had enough tough love for him to kick him out, and the stepmother for most of his life (who was, for the most part, excluded from the media narrative) loved him too. Supervision and intervention did not come in time to save Trayvon Martin from his own violent tendencies.

The second waste of his life is being witnessed now. His mom is on the talk circuit calling for an end to Stand Your Ground laws, which any honest and competent legal analyst could tell her had nothing to do with her son’s death. It would do much more good, and perhaps save the lives of young men across the spectrum of the color lines, to hear this woman speak of the importance of seeing what’s in your son’s cell phone and on his Facebook page before homicide investigators have to do it.

Will there be a civil suit? Very probably. I would expect plaintiff’s counsel to wait to file it until there’s some money there. I predict substantial settlements of George Zimmerman’s lawsuits against the networks whose minions deliberately libeled him, whether or not he ever signs a lucrative book contract, but as soon as deep pockets are there I expect to see vultures circling. Perhaps a Florida Statute 776.032 hearing will ward that off, if it takes place in front of a judge with the courage to do the right thing. Time will tell.

The much bally-hooed Federal investigation under Eric Holder, to see if Zimmerman violated Martin’s civil rights? Inconveniently for both the media and the Administration, that has already been done by a horde of specially-assigned FBI agents, all of whom reported absolutely no indication of racism or malice on Zimmerman’s part. If you’ll forgive vernacular, “they got nothin’.” But of course, that was true of the case Angela Corey brought against him, and it didn’t stop that travesty from taking place.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 17: THE COPS

In the first installment of this series, I mentioned that the cops were among those to thank for justice having been done in this case. Let’s look at that.

Every commentator has noted that it was the police witnesses called by the state – civilian dispatcher and community watch coordinator and evidence technicians, as well as the responding and investigating officers – who cut the legs out from under the prosecution’s weak case before it could ever get to its feet.  Fewer commentators have spoken of the price paid by many of those honest members of the criminal justice system.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee, a highly respected CLEO (chief law enforcement officer) resisted powerful demands from elected officials to file a case even though he knew there was nothing there. He did his duty and did the right thing.  He was fired for that.

Detective Chris Serino was the lead detective in the case. He took a lot of heat for not wanting to file a case because he knew he didn’t have probable cause. He wound up as a patrolman back in uniform.

Doris Singleton was in the role of investigator on the night of the shooting. She handled things competently. She comforted Zimmerman when she saw he was emotionally devastated by having had to end a young man’s life.  And she was at the rank of patrol officer at the time she testified almost a year and a half later.

Ben Kruidbos, IT director in the office of the special prosecutor, realized that the office had failed in its duty to turn over full discovery material to the defense.  He fulfilled the office’s duty and got that information to Zimmerman’s defense team.  As soon as the trial was over, special prosecutor Angela Corey fired him for doing what she should have done.

Norman Wolfinger, the designated State’s Attorney (chief prosecutor) for the district, apparently realized that there was no probable cause to arrest Zimmerman but nonetheless scheduled the case for the next session of the grand jury.  This is a normal procedure. It wasn’t enough to placate the media-fueled lynch mob, and the case was basically taken away from him by the governor and given to special prosecutor Angela Corey.  Wolfinger retired shortly thereafter.  He may have been due for retirement anyway, but it was a lousy note on which to end a long and stellar career as one of Florida’s most respected prosecutors.

The next time some tells says “Never talk to the police, they’re your enemy,” remember each and every one of those honest members of the criminal justice system who stood up, told the truth, and did their duty.  The next time someone tells  you that the police are the mindless minions of the Gestapo/Leviathan/The Zionist Occupation Government/The Man (pick one as suits the given agenda), remember the ones who were severely and unmeritoriously punished for having fulfilled their oath and hewed to the truth.  And remember the role they all played in getting that truth across to the jury, and helping to acquit an innocent man who, by every objective analysis of the evidence, was wrongly accused.

Interviewed later about his firing, Chief Lee wistfully told the reporter that at least, at the end of the day, he had kept his integrity.

That’s more than some involved in the prosecution can say.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 16: THE IMPACT ON THE BLACK COMMUNITY

When propagandizing media made this case out to be something other than what the evidence showed it was, a hoax had been played on the whole country. It was a particularly cruel hoax on the African-American community.

Look at it this way. Suppose the mass media had – whether through gullibility or complicity – had told a false story of a cancer victim being horribly wronged.  Any of us would have been outraged and hurt…but genuine cancer survivors would have been put through more unnecessary pain by the story than anyone else.  Basically, that’s what happened here.

Look back to the days of slavery. Fast forward to the Emancipation Proclamation, and another century forward to the time of Martin Luther King when the desegregation finally became law. Another half century since, and African-Americans are still disproportionately burdened by poverty and crime.

Is it any wonder that this group felt more pain from what their country, from the White House on down, seemed to tell them was a threatening, potentially homicidal slap in their face?

A few days after the Zimmerman acquittal, I attended a meeting at an African-American church in the deep South, sponsored by the local chapter of the NAACP and focusing on Stand Your Ground Laws. The discussion panel included the local police chief, undersheriff, chief prosecutor, and public defender.  It became apparent that many of the mostly black attendees believed what the media had told them: that SYG laws had allowed a racist vigilante to murder a helpless young black man and get away with it. The professionals explained how things worked. The audience understood.  Before long, talk from the almost entirely African-American audience had turned toward black-on-black crime, their real concern.  While in the distant past their community had been preyed upon by the Klan and suffered lynchings, they understood that past was buried, and their real concern was present crime from within their own community.

In the weeks that followed, I was a guest on Tracey and Friends, an African-American-centric radio show headquartered in Ohio.  If you have a couple of hours, listen to it here:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/traceyandfriends/2013/07/31/hump-day-with-tracey-jeff-and-sticks.mp3

You’ll get a better understanding of how bitter people are when they’re singled out as suspects for their color, and followed suspiciously for that reason, and why some are angry enough about it to think that Trayvon Martin was right to physically confront and assault the man he perceived to be following him.  I did another interview with an old friend and stalwart of the gun owners’ civil rights movement, Kenn Blanchard, on his podcast  Black Man With A Gun.

We have recently celebrated the memory of Martin Luther King, the march on Washington, and the “I have a dream” speech. It reminds us all that Dr. King made it clear that the civil rights movement was about healing, not about wounding.

The way the media – and, yes, the criminal justice system – distorted this case did a disservice to all of us.  The facts in evidence clearly showed that it had nothing to do with race, and making it look as if it did plunged a knife into our consciousness as Americans.

But the way they made it look, often comparing it to the lynching of Emmett Till, the media twisted that knife into our African-American citizens with particular cruelty.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 15: TALK AT THE SCENE, TALK ON THE STAND?

Many advise people involved in shootings to say nothing to the police.  I’m not among them. I’ve seen too many cases where declining to speak is heard as “I ain’t sayin’ nuttin’ ‘til my mouthpiece gets here,” and only the bad guy’s side of the story gets told or assumed.  I do recommend that people caught up in these things tell the responding officers the nature of the attack on them which forced them to fire, and indicate that they’ll sign a complaint on the perpetrator. I also recommend pointing out evidence and witnesses, because both tend to disappear otherwise. From there on, I strongly suggest that they advise the police that they’ll fully cooperate after they’ve spoken with counsel.

Zimmerman did otherwise, answering all questions that night and in the time that followed, and he prevailed at trial.  He convinced the investigators that he was telling the truth about being a victim, not a murderer.  He even passed a lie detector test (voice stress analysis) administered by the police shortly after the shooting.  When defense lawyer Mark O’Mara got lead investigator Chris Serino to say that he believed Zimmerman was telling the truth, it was crushingly powerful for his client. Even though the judge ordered the jury to disregard that statement the next morning in court, it was a bell that simply could not be unrung.  It turned out that his having done a videotaped walk-through of the scene was also critical to his acquittal: it allowed the jury to see the complicated layout of the scene, all the more important since Judge Nelson denied the defense’s request to have the jury visit that scene.

I also advise my students to expect to take the stand on their own behalf after a self-defense shooting.  Since both sides are going to stipulate as to who shot who, it’s going to come down to why you shot him…and, in the last analysis, that’s something the defendant can answer better than anyone else.  Sometimes, only the defendant can really answer that question.

Why didn’t Zimmerman take the stand? When I talked to Mark O’Mara a year before the trial, I got the impression he was expecting Zimmerman to testify; that Zimmerman wanted to testify; and that O’Mara thought his client would handle it well.  After the trial was over, O’Mara confirmed that Zimmerman wanted to take the stand.

I personally think he would have done well.  He certainly did when he was talking to the cops.  If he’s as articulate as his brother Robert, he would have done fine.  Shortly after the acquittal, Robert Zimmerman went into the lion’s den in an interview by hostile Piers Morgan on CNN, and the young man absolutely handed Morgan’s pompous, prejudiced ass back to him on a silver platter.

 

 

Only Zimmerman and his defense lawyers can tell you why he didn’t take the stand, but I can give you an educated guess: He didn’t have to.  The state’s case had imploded even before the defense began theirs, with virtually every prosecution witness turning into a defense witness. Zimmerman’s walk-through at the scene, when everything was fresh in his mind, was already in to the jury…and it was the best evidence.  There was simply nothing important enough to add.

I will continue to recommend that people involved in these confusing, high-stress incidents not submit themselves to detailed questioning and re-enactment in the immediate aftermath.  That said, it worked for George Zimmerman.  I will continue to warn my students that they can expect to take the stand to explain why they shot their attacker…but in this case, George Zimmerman had already done that very well during police interrogation, and had nothing to gain by repeating himself.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 14: THE JUDGE

Of all the key figures in the courtroom during the Zimmerman trial, I found Judge Debra Nelson the most enigmatic.

Some of Zimmerman’s advocates called her the fourth prosecutor. It’s true that she granted more approaches to the bench to the prosecution than to the defense, and those who kept count said she sustained far more objections from the prosecution than from the defense. Her insistent questioning of the defendant himself as to whether he chose not to testify is something I haven’t seen before in more than 40 years in the criminal justice system.

 

I would have liked it if she had allowed prior bad acts by the late Trayvon Martin to come in to the jury.  At the same time, as I’ve explained earlier in this blog series , she was well within judicial prerogative to make the decision to keep that material out.

 

The trial lasted a month, and it’s been more than a month since the jury delivered a verdict. I’m still waiting to hear how she will rule on the requests the defense made for sanctions against the prosecution for the prosecution’s failure to provide discovery material – evidence – in a timely manner.

But, hey: did you watch Judge Nelson when the jury verdict was read?  Is it my imagination, or was she wearing a very slight smile, a smile as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa’s?

 

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 13: ANGELA COREY

In the last installment, I said that it was the coach who sent the prosecution team in to try to win a game that never should have been played. The police had determined they didn’t have probable cause. The highly respected state’s attorney who had responsibility for the case, Norman Wolfinger, apparently agreed. When the plaintiff-orchestrated cause celebre created public outcry, Wolfinger scheduled the matter for the grand jury.  But Florida Governor Rick Scott turned it over to Angela Corey, the state’s attorney for the Jacksonville area, to act as special prosecutor.

Some have blamed Scott for this. I can’t, at least not at this time. “The perception is the reality,” it’s said, and when the people who elected them cry out for a deeper investigation, those in charge have a duty to act. This is, in part, what the grand jury is for. While I think it should have been left in Wolfinger’s capable hands, I can understand Scott’s decision. His choice of Ms. Corey, however, is open to question in hindsight.

I gave Ms. Corey the benefit of the doubt as I watched this case unfold. I had hoped she would simply present the evidence to the grand jury. When she didn’t, instead indicting on her own, it was inescapably obvious why: she had to have known that the grand jury would refuse to indict, once they had seen the evidence.

The job of the defense is to be a zealous advocate for the defendant. The prosecutor’s role is different. She is supposed to be the minister of justice, every bit as responsible for exonerating the innocent as for aggressively prosecuting the guilty. It is an egregious breach of prosecutorial ethics to, for example, prosecute for Murder a man who the evidence shows is telling the truth about acting in self-defense. And of course, there is the very serious breach of both rules and ethics encompassed in withholding evidence from the defense, a matter which in this case is still hanging in the air.

The right is unhappy with the special prosecutor. National Review had this to say about Ms. Corey: http://nationalreview.com/article/353633/angela-coreys-checkered-past-ian-tuttle/page/0/1.  The left apparently isn’t too thrilled with her either, as seen in the Daily Beast, here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/19/angela-corey-s-overzealous-prosecution-of-marissa-alexander.html .  Her fellow attorneys seem, for the most part, to be aghast at how she has handled the Zimmerman case, as seen here in law professor Jonathan Turley’s blog: http://jonathanturley.org/2013/07/18/zimmerman-prosecutors-angela-corey-under-fire-for-public-comments-and-allegedly-threatening-action-against-harvard-law-professor/ .

The most damning moment for Ms. Corey in this case was her commentary to the press after the acquittal. A prosecutor should respect the system, and the jury’s verdict.  The man she assigned to spearhead the state’s case, Bernie de la Rionda, obviously understood that.  One journalist asked both of them to describe the defendant and the deceased in a single word.

De la Rionda chose the words “lucky” for defendant George Zimmerman, and “victim” for the deceased Trayvon Martin. He knew how to straddle the line.  Despite Zimmerman’s ordeal, a lot of people think anyone who is facing life in prison and gets set free is “lucky.” And “victim” is the term that is generally and automatically used for someone who is killed.

But Corey described the young man who was shown by the evidence as the one who started the fatal battle as “prey,” and the man the jury had just found Not Guilty of Murder as “murderer.”

The difference is profound. It doesn’t just show her to be a bad loser, it shows her to be utterly contemptuous of the jury, and the system she is sworn to serve.  Her answer was simply egregious.

There are those who believe that Ms. Corey took the case and tried to destroy Zimmerman’s life because, in the cases mentioned in the links above, she had lost voter support in the African-American community and thought that prosecuting Zimmerman would be a good political move. If one accepts that, it begs the question, “How did that work for ya, Ms. Corey?”

What some call “the next Trayvon Martin case” – a white guy who wound up shooting a black teen in Jacksonville after an argument that began with the latter and his friends playing loud music in an adjacent vehicle – falls into Ms. Corey’s jurisdiction.  The Florida Civil Rights Association  has called for the case to be taken out of Angela Corey’s hands, because they think after the Zimmerman case, she doesn’t have enough credibility to prosecute this one.

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ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 12: RATING THE LAWYERS (PROSECUTION)

While there were two lawyers at the defense table, there were three at the State’s: Bernie de la Rionda, John Guy, and Richard Mantei.  With about a hundred lawyers to pick from, knowing her office would be in the spotlight, State’s Attorney Angela Corey wouldn’t have put anyone on the team she thought would make her look bad.

Mantei was third chair, and the lowest guy on the totem pole gets the scut work in any organization. For instance, he was the one they sent in to argue that the state had proven its case when it hadn’t during the argument for judgment of acquittal. Perhaps the two senior guys didn’t want to be on film forever BS-ing the judge. I suspect Mantei is a good prosecutor when he actually has a case.

The lead prosecutor in the courtroom was de la Rionda. He’s the only one of the three I’ve seen live in a courtroom, and I can tell you that he knows the law and presents himself with articulate confidence.  De la Rionda is said to have an extraordinarily high conviction rate. Why he accepted a case like this, as close as he is to retirement age, I cannot understand. His frustration was obvious throughout the Zimmerman trial; I can’t imagine a man with his skill and experience being so abrasive in front of a jury for any other reason.

In second seat was Guy, by far the best orator on that prosecution team. My students have heard me warn them about attorneys who seem to have majored in drama and minored in law, and Guy certainly fit that mold in Zimmerman. Remember his “Fucking punks” opening, and his breathless assertion that the defendant killed the deceased “because he wanted to”? If he is as good a prosecutor as I hope he was when he really had a case, he may be disgusted enough after this trial to quit. If so, he’ll have a future in theater.  I would suggest something Shakespearean, because the Zimmerman case gave him experience in things that were “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I’ve seen other cases, more than one in Florida, where assistant prosecutors flatly refused to argue a case for conviction when the evidence showed the defendant wasn’t guilty. That didn’t happen here. Perhaps they truly believed Zimmerman was guilty, though it’s hard for me to believe that, given the evidence they must have studied at great length. On the other hand, they worked for Angela Corey, who does not have a public history of treating kindly those employees who go against her wishes.

I’ve seen many people on many a forum and blog call these prosecutors incompetent. I don’t think they were.  They simply had no case.  If you hired the greatest chefs in the world to cook for you, and you stocked the larder with feces, the best you could hope for them to put on the table would be a big, steaming pile of shit. And in the end, through no lack of argumentation skills on their end, that’s how these three prosecutors’ case ended up.

Now, forevermore among their peers, they’re stuck with the blemish of this case, and the accusations of withholding evidence which have come along with it, and which don’t seem to have been fully resolved at this writing.  When retirement comes to each, I doubt that any will consider trying this case to have been their best career move.

Before you blame the team, blame the coach who sent them into a game that never should have been played. We’ll discuss their coach later.

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