The Trial About the Trial

Well, it’s looking like the George Zimmerman verdict probably will come down to how much racism may lurk in the hearts of the jurors. Much snarking has been aimed at Rachel Jeantel, the young woman who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin until minutes before he was killed. Her testimony has been called a “train wreck.” Zimmerman supporters made much of her testimony that Martin called Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.” Like that proves something.

This is the only bit of the testimony that I’ve seen. I say it’s purely in the eye of the beholder to determine who comes off worse, Ms. Jeantel or the creepy-ass cracker defense attorney questioning her.

Hey, the question was retarded. The attorney seemed to be insinuating that Trayvon Martin was attacking George Zimmerman while he was on the phone — good trick, that — and lying to Ms. Jeantel about it. Huh?

What we’re not hearing as much about is that the white and properly articulate neighbors have been giving conflicting testimony.

The boy in the dark-colored hooded sweatshirt straddled the man in red, doing a mixed-martial-arts-style “ground-and-pound.”

Or the boy in the hoodie was on the bottom, crying out for help.

I don’t much care who was on top. The central issues of the trail are summed up pretty well here

The big question hanging over the trial is whether it was an unarmed Martin who claimed his self-defense rights against an armed adult stranger following him in the dark, and whether Zimmerman waived his self-defense rights when he made the decision to pursue Trayvon after noting to a 911 dispatcher that “these [guys] always get away.”

Yes. However,

Yet the potential for Jeantel’s testimony to illuminate that central question appeared to sink beneath a wave of commentary about aesthetics, as Christina Coleman summarizes in a Global Grind article called “Why Black People Understand Rachel Jeantel.”

Fortunately, the jury is sequestered, so they aren’t being influenced by the trial about the trial.