Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It by Lisa Bloom

Author:Lisa Bloom [Bloom, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics & Social Sciences, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Racism, Social Sciences
ISBN: 161902327X
Amazon: B00H6UOENG
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2014-02-25T06:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

It’s Not Over

WHY DID THE prosecution make so many blunders? Was it negligence or intentional?

I can’t say they meant to throw the case. A few, like defense attorney Mark Geragos, made that allegation based on the prosecution’s poor performance. But I have no real evidence of that. Special prosecutor Angela Corey, who did not personally try the case but who oversaw it, did appear delighted in her press conference right after the verdict, as if she was pleased with the “not guilty” verdict, but perhaps that was just a politician’s “never let ’em see you sweat” smile for the cameras. In contrast, her two courtroom prosecutors, de la Rionda and Guy, seemed genuinely deflated. They appeared to work hard, and they looked like they wanted to win as much as any courtroom lawyer. That the police who initially failed to arrest Zimmerman, believing his self-defense story, were vindicated by the acquittal is insufficient to make such a serious allegation.

Was it inexperience—simple incompetence? More likely, but still, implausible. Lead prosecutor de la Rionda had obtained convictions in eighty prior murder cases, he said after the trial, losing only one other. He knew how to bring cases home to juries. So why did it not happen here?

The most likely explanation is that, like the police who did not want to arrest Zimmerman, they just did not believe in their case. As we’ve seen, they did not choose this case. It landed on their laps, and they could not plea bargain or dismiss it. They were stuck with it. Sure, they tried the case. But they only went through the motions.

Angela Corey made a very telling public statement immediately after the verdict:

What we promised fifteen months ago was to get all the facts before a jury. That’s what we’ve done. The focus needs to be on how the system worked, and how now everyone in this country can say they know the facts and can make up their own minds about the guilt of George Zimmerman.81

What a peculiar view of the role of a criminal trial, coming from the special prosecutor. Her team’s job was simply to put forward all the evidence, so that everyone could make up his own mind about guilt? Prosecutors are not documentary filmmakers or journalists. One does not need lawyers to expose facts. Prosecutors are there to advocate, to make the case against the defendant in the courtroom, not just throw out all the facts and see what sticks. In that role, they failed miserably.

Did the state attorneys truly believe that Trayvon was the innocent victim and Zimmerman the aggressor? Probably not. Certainly they did not behave in the courtroom as though they had the evidence to convict. As a result, they did not appear to have looked hard enough at the evidence. Assigned what Corey believed was a difficult case—she called it “difficult” or “tough” five times in her post-verdict press conference—Corey made it even more challenging for her team by choosing to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder rather than simply manslaughter.

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