As the murder trial of George Zimmerman headed for the jury this week, prosecutors portrayed the former neighborhood watch captain as a wannabe cop with a gun who provoked a fight with unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, while defense witnesses backed Zimmerman’s account that he shot Martin while the 17-year-old sat on his chest, punching him. Zimmerman told police that he had stopped following Martin and was headed back to his SUV when the teen attacked him, hitting him repeatedly and slamming his head into the pavement.
Prosecutor Richard Mantei argued that inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s account showed that he acted maliciously from the start, and concocted a self-defense story. “There are two people involved here: One of them is dead and one of them is a liar,” Mantei said. But forensic pathologist Vincent DiMaio, testifying for the defense, said that the wounds revealed that Zimmerman had received blunt force trauma to the head, and that Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he was shot.
The odds of George Zimmerman being convicted of second degree murder “are hurtling toward zero,” said Mark I. Pinsky in HuffingtonPost.com. DiMaio nailed it for the defense when he testified that Martin was “leaning forward” over Zimmerman when he was shot, and that Zimmerman’s wounds were consistent with having his head slammed against concrete. Witnesses also testified that Martin was on top when Zimmerman fired.
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If Zimmerman walks, said Roxanne Jones in CNN.com, it will be deeply troubling to people in the black community. Martin was a black teen who was walking home when Zimmerman targeted him. What did he do to deserve an execution? One witness said it was Martin who was pinned to the ground, at least at first. Either way, “when an unarmed child is confronted and gunned down in the street by a grown man,” that’s murder.
We’ll never know “what happened that night down in Florida,” said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview.com. All we’ll ever have is a “he-said, he-said dispute that we’re supposed to line up and take sides over.” But for Zimmerman to be convicted of second-degree murder, the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted with “hatred” and “an indifference to human life.” That’s a very high bar.
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