Regardless of any notion about justice as portrayed on television and in the movies, real life criminal convictions are difficult and time consuming to achieve. One must hire a criminal law attorney to win the case.
The state must investigate, make an arrest, convince a grand jury and then bring a defendant to trial, where many of the advantages rest with the defense. The defendant can choose criminal defence lawyers that’ll defend them. All the while, the individual enjoys a presumption of innocence, even to the point that a jury cannot weigh a defendant’s decision not to testify as any sign of guilt.
The prosecution carries a heavy burden. It must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. All the defense has to do in criminal defense cases is demonstrate that the prosecution has not met that responsibility.
These hurdles for the prosecution were created purposefully to prevent the state from abusing its considerable power. Naturally, we have a desire for the guilty to be punished, but not at the risk of condemning the innocent.
As English jurist William Blackstone said, “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than one innocent suffer.”
It’s important to keep this critical principle in mind when considering the verdict in the George Zimmerman case. The prosecution simply did not prove, perhaps could not prove, that Zimmerman was the aggressor in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman’s legal team took a risk by assuming the unnecessary burden of proving that Zimmerman shot in self-defense during the struggle. In his closing argument, defense attorney Mark O’Mara took jurors methodically through a timeline that apparently left little doubt in the minds of the jurors that Zimmerman was not at fault.
Meanwhile, the prosecution relied more on emotion, attempting to establish Zimmerman as a liar, but that fell flat because his story remained generally consistent throughout. Zimmerman also benefited from the jury hearing and seeing his statements to police; it was as though he testified without ever being cross examined.
I thought that the jury may return a compromise verdict of manslaughter. A teenager is dead. Zimmerman followed Martin even after the police told him not to. And there was Zimmerman’s comment, “these a——-, they always get away.”
But the defense was able to focus the jury on the altercation itself. It became evident through testimony that Martin was pummeling Zimmerman and the defense had plenty of witnesses who said they believed it was Zimmerman who was screaming for help.
The case attracted national attention because of race, yet race never became a significant factor in the trial itself. The prosecution was not able to show that Zimmerman had ill-will toward Martin because he was black, but the jury did hear testimony that Martin told a friend on the phone just before the shooting that a “creepy-ass cracker” was watching him.
Still, those upset with the verdict will point to the fact that there were no blacks on the jury. The Miami Herald quoted Larry Handfield, a prominent African American Miami criminal defense attorney, as saying, “After seeing the quality of evidence presented by the state, the diversity of the jury didn’t matter in the end. But it would have helped the community in giving more credibility to the decision to acquit Zimmerman.”
Post trial protestations will be racially-charged and driven by emotion. That’s predictable, but unfortunate. The great irony is that the bedrock judicial principles that allowed George Zimmerman to go free, a presumption of innocence and the burden of proof on the prosecution, are designed to protect every individual, regardless of ethnicity.