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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