As a legal matter, even if jurors find parts of Zimmerman's story fishy, that is not enough to convict. Even if they believe that Zimmerman initiated the altercation, and that his injuries were relatively minor, that too would be insufficient evidence to convict. Prosecutors have to effectively disprove self defense beyond a reasonable doubt.Which is incredibly hard if the only living witness to the events is the accused. Hence all the focus on the foam dummy and such. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz put it even more bluntly as:
Remember, it's monumentally irrelevant who's morally guilty here, Whether or not Zimmerman was a racist and racially profiled and shouldn’t have been doing it and didn’t listen to police, that's all irrelevant in Florida law.Add in the fact that some of the prosecution's witnesses were darn right harmful to the prosecution's own case and I think you can see why I see a likely acquittal.
Not that I necessarily agree with such a verdict, but it's what I see happening. The fact that Zimmerman likely stalked and murdered Trayvon Martin isn't the same as that being proven beyond a reasonable doubt in that Florida courtroom, which after all the the major question before the jurry. Having said that juries are notoriously impossible to predict so anything could happen. I assume this blog post will sink the S.S. Zimmerman just so the universe can prove me wrong.
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Over at The Good Men Project I talked about why a GOP strategy that ignores minority voters is bad for them and the country and talked about the potential comebacks of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. You should go read them and then like them on facebook and such.
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