{"id":2444,"date":"2013-09-13T09:03:47","date_gmt":"2013-09-13T13:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=2444"},"modified":"2013-09-13T09:03:47","modified_gmt":"2013-09-13T13:03:47","slug":"zimmerman-verdict-part-20-and-into-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/zimmerman-verdict-part-20-and-into-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 20: \u2026AND INTO THE FUTURE"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s right at twice as long as the trial took, including the week of jury selection. The strangeness continues, with the prosecution\u2019s medical examiner Dr. Shiping Bao being fired for his egregious performance in this case, and suing for a hundred million dollars over that.<\/a> The divorce proceeding of Mr. and Mrs. George Zimmerman grows weirder<\/a>.\u00a0 A key player in the case has decided that he doesn\u2019t want to play anymore<\/a>, and has a new gig.<\/a> The story will continue. It\u2019s been about twenty years since the O.J. Simpson trial, and he\u2019s <\/i>still in the news. But I won\u2019t discuss that case until I\u2019ve walked a mile in O.J.\u2019s blood-stained, \u201cugly-ass\u201d Bruno Magli shoes. There will be books. Damn near everyone associated with the Simpson case eventually wrote one. I\u2019ll be interested in hearing from the Zimmerman<\/i> prosecutors, and from the defense lawyers, and from the judge (from whom I\u2019m still waiting to hear a ruling as to the allegations of the prosecution withholding evidence from the defense).\u00a0 I\u2019ll be particularly interested to read George Zimmerman\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Robert Zimmerman later sent the following tweet:<\/p>\n

.@MassadAyoob<\/a> – Thanks 4 your kind words here–> http:\/\/t.co\/CpjQeTHZ0w<\/a> Fact: GZ is just as articulate (if not more than) as I appear to be. \u2014 Robert Zimmerman JR (@rzimmermanjr) August 24, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There already are <\/i>books.\u00a0 \u201cFlorida v. Zimmerman: Uncovering the Malicious Prosecution of my Son, George<\/a>\u201d by the defendant\u2019s father, Robert Zimmerman, Sr., and \u201cDefending Our Friend: the Most Hated Man In America<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s human face when she testified at trial. I\u2019ve mentioned in this series that when the mainstream media dismally failed to tell the truth, the blogosphere picked up the ball they dropped.\u00a0 A classic example of that was the work of Conservative Treehouse<\/a>, the \u201cTreepers\u201d who told the truth about the case in all its dimensions. The best digest I\u2019ve seen of that good work is \u201cIf I had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman<\/a>\u201d by Jack Cashill. There is also good reading on the topic to be found in \u201cThe Lynching of George Zimmerman\u201d<\/a> by Hunter Billings III.\u00a0 Those are just the ones I\u2019ve read; there are more. The titles of the dad\u2019s book and that of the friends show that they\u2019re obviously advocates for one side. The Cashill and Billings books clearly have advocacy in them, but that doesn\u2019t 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<\/a>. When you go there, budget yourself some time to read the huge volume of commentary on each day\u2019s blog.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Branca is a lawyer who specializes in self-defense (get his excellent book on that <\/i>topic at www.lawofselfdefense.com<\/a>).\u00a0 His commentary and that of the readers will sound <\/i>like advocacy for Zimmerman, but if you read it carefully, you\u2019ll see that he and most of the commentators are really advocating for law and reality\u2026which just happened to favor Zimmerman. This nationally divisive case brought out tribalism at a disturbingly high level.\u00a0 Black versus white. Anti-gun versus pro-gun. I for one didn\u2019t come from that angle.\u00a0 As an advocate for armed citizens, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We\u2019ve both made our careers in the justice system, we\u2019ve both prosecuted, and we both have Arabic-American ancestry.\u00a0 Sorry, homegirl, I just can\u2019t side with you on this one.\u00a0 My career has taught me to go with the evidence to find out who\u2019s on the side of the angels, and in this case, Angela, you were on the wrong side.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I suspect that historians will write of it more as, \u201cAngela 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\u2026because she wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s right at twice as long as the trial took, including the week of jury selection. The strangeness continues, with the prosecution\u2019s medical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2444","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-firearm-owners-civil-rights","8":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}