Zimmerman

Zimmerman is not looking guilty of murder so far. I offer that after frittering away too many hours watching the trial, from the state's opening vulgarity through Barrister Knock-Knock's greeting to the jury to the Hannity interview.

He's being caught in tiny lies of the sort you and I and Mother Theresa would whip out in a flash to lipstick any incident which turned out badly for us, but his core story still  (again, so far) stands. Not even the most rabid anti-Zimmerman, errr, analysts on the teevee can make much of the "inconsistencies."

So the prosecution is left with orts for facts and is hoping, I thiink, to dress the table with two fat capons.

(1) The race bird, of course.  The accused is whitish. The dead person is blackish. Ergo malicious racial prejudice. The judge did well to keep the term "racial profiling" out of the arguments, but just plain "profiling" is kosher. She couldn't possibly have barred it without being laughed off the bench.  And can any jury, even a knock-knock jury, miss the state's intended meaning?

(2) The emo bird. It isn't hard to believe that prosecutors knew they had a rotten evidentiary case and carefully planned days of relative tedium as stage setting for the great close, parental sobs for such a good boy. Anyone -- any parent, anyway -- understands their grief and wishes to his Heaven that it had not occurred. But their anguish and our empathy have nothing to do with the facts of what happened that night in Sanford. I'm looking forward to seeing the legal artistry each side will use to persuade the jury to believe or disbelieve that.


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Couple of sidebar notes:

--In the Hannity interview Zimmerman said he never heard of the Florida stand-your-ground law. Very hard to believe. I assume the state will get a few points from this.  More generally, you and I face some extra work in explaining that the Zimmerman defense has little, if anything, to do with stand-your-ground. It is a traditional self-defense case.

--The medical examiner's testimony that Zimmerman was not hurt all that badly is going to mislead a fair portion of the GED set. They will understand that a victim must reach some sort of injury threshhold before his right to defend himself kicks in.  "Okay. Ya gotta let the guy bang your head on concrete at least seven times and break your nose twice. Then ya gotta ask him nicely to stop before ya can shoot him." 

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EDIT TO ADD: That didn't take long. Out of the gate the state is introducing Zimmerman's criminal justice course records to demonstrate he studied stand-your-ground. Teevee says those transcripts show him with a 1.5 GPA, and suggests defense may have to mount a stupidity response.