Saturday, July 20, 2013
Good evening my friends:
The jury delivered its verdict in the George Zimmerman trial a week ago tonight. I was shocked and dismayed by the verdict. Like most of you I initially focused my wrath on stealth juror B-37 because she basically admitted on national television approximately 12 hours after the verdict was announced to having decided that “George” (referring to him as though he were a personal friend) was not guilty before she heard any evidence in the case. Indeed, her summary of the evidence matched the false narrative that Mark O’Mara had been preaching and the national media had been duly reporting for a year.
She bought O’Mara’s Trayvon-is-a-thug story despite no evidence to support it. Her race-based criticism of Rachel Jenteal’s manner of speaking and her consequent decision to ignore her testimony was a breathtaking admission of racist thinking that she quite obviously regarded as acceptable normative behavior that no one would question.
When I thought she could not possibly do more damage to herself, she added insult to injury with her giddy announcement that she had reached an agreement with a literary agent to sell her story to a publishing house before the story was even written. Never mind that she or her attorney husband must have contacted the literary agent in violation of the sequestration order, unless they contacted her in the middle of the night after the verdict was announced.
I seriously doubt that literary agents accept cold calls on late Saturday nights and early Sunday mornings from unpublished authors pitching ideas for unwritten books. Thankfully, the agent had the good sense to nix the deal once she realized she was dealing with an out of control racist wacko.
I was so disgusted and angered by B-37′s false statements under oath during voir dire, her willful violations of the sequestration order and her oath to follow the jury instructions that I urged the prosecution to prosecute her for perjury. Well, I have not seen any sign that Angela Corey intends to make an example out of her to warn future jurors not to engage in those behaviors. Seems to me that such a prosecution probably is necessary in Florida to convince jurors that an oath truly is a promise to tell the truth under penalty of perjury. In addition, B-37 truly is an unrepentant racist and egregious human being who deserves to spend time in prison for who she is as well as what she did.
While I have no doubt that B-37 contributed significantly to the miscarriage of justice, she was not alone. I also hold Angela Corey and Bernie de la Rionda responsible two disastrous tactical decisions; namely, the decision to remove race from the case and the decision to refrain from aggressively attacking Investigator Chris Serino and Officer Doris Singleton for their testimony supporting Zimmerman and vouching for his credibility. Serino, in particular, deserved to be raked over the coals for tampering with witnesses at the crime scene in an attempt to convince them that the defendant uttered the terrified death shriek.
Witness tampering in a murder case is a felony punishable by up to life in prison.
I first read about Trayvon Martin’s murder while the Sanford Police Department was still investigating the case and it seemed that Zimmerman was not going to be charged.
Their reluctance to charge appeared to me to have been imposed from the top down by State Attorney Norm Wolfinger and Chief Bill Lee due to as yet unknown reasons political reasons rather than the merits of the case.
That is corruption and that is not how our legal system is supposed to work.
As soon as I reviewed the defendant’s statements, including what he said during the NEN call, I realized that this case was all about race and could not be understood without mentioning race. If Trayvon Martin had been white, for example, the defendant would not have called the police.
I wrote an article in which I stated that anyone who believed George Zimmerman’s story was necessarily a racist. That is, one had to assume that Trayvon was a violent and crazy thug who all of a sudden for no apparent reason decided to attack and attempt to kill with his bare hands a menacing stranger who had followed him in a vehicle and then on foot after Trayvon had successfully eluded him by running away and hiding in a dark area behind a building containing townhomes. No person in their right mind would do that.
The defendant described Trayvon as a stereotypical black gangsta popularized in comics and blaxploitation films. In order to believe Zimmerman, people had to believe that the stereotypical black gangsta in films actually exists in real life.
I have represented black gang-bangers from Los Angeles who were members of the notorious Crips and Bloods. They were real flesh and blood people with more than a passing interest in survival. Yes, they had participated in gang violence and killed people but they planned what they did and they acted together. They did not utter dated movie lines or issue warnings to their intended victims before shooting them. They did not wander off unarmed and alone somewhere and suddenly decide to attack and kill a stranger with their bare hands. None of them would have believed Zimmerman’s ridiculous story. Only a white racist fixated on young black males who gets a thrill out of watching movies about mean and vicious black gangstas believing that they represent real people would even be capable of making up such a ridiculous story.
I was and continue to be astonished that anyone believed his story.
I believe that the extent to which it is believed offers a pretty accurate measuring stick indicating the prevalence of racism against blacks in our current society.
George Zimmerman did not profile Trayvon Martin as a thug casing the neighborhood for a house to burglarize in the RTL around 7 pm on a rainy Sunday night in late February because Trayvon was wearing a hoodie and walking around in the rain. He profiled him because he was a young black male and he invented a self-defense claim to justify killing him by describing Trayvon Martin as character in a movie.
Race was the proverbial elephant in the living room and the prosecution should never have agreed not to mention it. Zimmerman selected Trayvon because he was black and he hunted him down and attempted to detain him because he assumed certain things about him because he was black. He was the aggressor because he was determined to prevent him from escaping out the back entrance before the police arrived just like all of the other fucking coons and assholes who got away.
A review of all of the defendants NEN calls establishes that he obsessed about blacks. Black residents of the RTL had negative experiences with him where he accused them of wrongdoing. A visible pattern emerges of Zimmerman repeatedly assuming that blacks engaging in normal activities actually were up to no good and he called the police NEN to report them.
All of this evidence was relevant to why he selected Trayvon and why he killed him
As John Guy said, “George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to. He shot him because he wanted to.”And he did it because Trayvon was black.
In other words, he committed a federal hate crime and I hope the Justice Department prosecutes him.
I do not know why the prosecution decided not to stress the importance of race. I imagine Angela Corey made the decision with Bernie de la Rionda’s consent. I do not believe John Guy or Richard Mantei participated in that decision. I think Corey and de la Rionda owe us an explanation.
They also inexplicably allowed Chris Serino and Doris Singleton to support George Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. I can understand not wanting to attack a law enforcement agency in order to avoid incurring the probable wrath of other law enforcement agencies. However, once Serino and Singleton turned against the prosecution, Bernie de la Rionda should have torn Serino to shreds by bringing out that he tampered with witnesses to get them to identify George Zimmerman as the person who uttered the terrified death shriek and he set up Tracy Martin at his most vulnerable moment to deny in front of other officers, including Singleton, that he could positively identify Trayvon as the person screaming.
Serino was obviously following orders issued before he arrived at the crime scene. The fix was in and the orders were issued from the top down. He ran that investigation to produce the appearance of an investigation and he only varied from that course of action at the last minute when he realized that the department was not going to get away with not charging Zimmerman. I think he made that decision on his own hoping to save his job and hoping people would not look closely at what he did.
I think he was a trusted player in the corruption game or the Chief would not have put him in charge of the investigation.
Bernie de la Rionda also should have confronted Singleton for wearing awards on her uniform that she had not earned.
The verdict in this case might well have been different if Angela Corey and Bernie de la Rionda had not made these decisions.
The bottom line is Chris Serino and Doris Singleton are corrupt cops in a corrupt police department. They still have their jobs and that suggests that the effort to clean-up the department is only for the sake of appearances.
The prosecution’s decision to allow them to lie and gut their case to justify and conceal how they mishandled the investigation bespeaks a form of intolerable corruption in which Angela Corey and Bernie de la Rionda aided and abetted corrupt police work.
And the end result is that a racist lying psychopath is now free to kill again.
That is why I cannot and will not accept this verdict as legitimate, ever.
This is why I join with LLMPapa in urging Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute George Zimmerman for a hate crime.
I regret to say that I do not believe Zimmerman will be charged with a hate crime. I fear the decision will be made for political reasons rather than on the merits of the case itself.
Assuming I am right that will add even more corruption to a corrupt and shameful case.
At the very least, by speaking truth to power, we draw a line in the sand and declare for all who have eyes to see that we are not fooled by the appearance of justice. We saw through to the corrupt core of this case and in this way we honor Trayvon Martin and his memory.
