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.

Today attorneys made opening statements in the George Zimmerman trial. CNN says the defense attorney began with a knock knock joke.

Following Guy’s statement, defense attorney Don West came forward to woo the jury. As he began, he told a knock-knock joke. But it failed to win a laugh. “Knock knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? Good, you’re on the jury,” he said.

Yeah, I’m sure that made an impression.

I mostly want to call your attention to “The Quote That Should End the Trayvon Trial.” John Richardson writes,

George Zimmerman is going to be found guilty. All the evidence you need — all the evidence the cops needed — is right there in the interrogation they did with him three days after the shooting. The only thing more shocking than what Zimmerman says in the clip, which was released on the internet one year ago, is how little it has impressed the bloviating jerks who dominate the coverage of this trial.

Richardson provides a partial transcript of the tape with his own comments. What comes across is that (a) Zimmerman wasn’t taking the crime all that seriously; and (b) the cops clearly knew Zimmerman’s account didn’t add up, but they let him go, anyway.

Yesterday some jailhouse audiotapes of conversations between George Zimmerman and his wife were released. I haven’t listened to them, but there’s a description in the Orlando Sentinel.

The recordings show that from his jail cell, Zimmerman gave his wife step-by-step instructions on how to change a password and clear security questions so she could move money, gave her orders to withdraw specific amounts and directed her to pay the bills.

Prosecutors allege the couple was moving money out of an Internet PayPal account that was awash with donations for Zimmerman, who’s charged with second-degree murder in one of the most racially-charged criminal cases in the country. He shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, in Sanford Feb. 26.

The couple spoke in code, according to prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda. In the calls Zimmerman makes repeated reference to “Peter Pan,” an apparent reference to PayPal.

Joe Coscarelli provides a bit of transcript in New York magazine.

SHELLIE: After this, we go over, you’re gonna be able to just, have a great life.
ZIMMERMAN: We will.
SHELLIE: Yeah, we will. You’re
ZIMMERMAN: I’m (inaudible) excited.
SHELLIE: Yeah, you should be. You should be excited.

In other words, these two seem to think they had just hit the mother lode. And you’ll love this bit:

They also discussed Zimmerman getting out on bail, and how to keep him from the press. The Sentinel reports that his choice of words was not ideal:

… “Well, I have my hoodie,” he says, a possible joke, referring to the hooded sweatshirt Trayvon Martin wore the night Zimmerman shot him in Sanford, Feb. 26.

Classy.

Zimmerman’s lawyer Mark O’Mara has filed a motion asking the Court to reconsider an order to release all of the audiotapes. He says the Zimmermans were not talking about the money on those tapes, so the public doesn’t need to hear them. Still …

The really remarkable thing about the audiotape release is that they’ve made very little splash in the blogosphere. Even righties who have blogged exhaustively about every news story about what Zimmerman’s second cousin’s garage mechanic said about the shooting are oddly subdued about the newly released recordings. Poster boy remorse?

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I am still soliciting donations for Lily’s vet bill. I’m so sad she can’t be saved, but I think I would have been a lot sadder if I hadn’t tried because the bill would put me in a hole. But what’s done is done. Please help if you can.

All donations of any amount are deeply appreciated.

Awhile back, y’all might remember a certain Democratic president who testified in a civil trial and before a grand jury that he had not had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, and the House impeached him for it. If we’d all gotten nickles for every time some rightie uttered the phrase “Clinton lied under oath” we’d be able to buy out WalMart.

But today we are told that lying to a judge is no big deal, and charging Shellie Zimmerman with a crime for (obviously, to anyone whose head is screwed on) conspiring with her husband to hide assets from the court during a bail hearing is just the prosecution being mean.

On the other hand, at least one rightie blogger has figured out that their knee-jerk support for George Zimmerman is likely to bite the Right in the ass, because the trial may reveal that ol’ GZ’s defense is a pack of lies. And this will play into the hands of those nefarious liberals.

Never, ever let the exception drive the rule. That’s how liberals gain control over law abiding citizens, by claiming the need to avoid giving criminals opportunities.

If anyone knows what planet these people live on, please speak up.

When George Zimmerman was finally indicted I promised myself to leave the story alone until there was a trial. But this is too juicy to pass up. You probably heard that George Zimmerman’s bail was revoked a few days ago, for trying to hide assets from the court during his bond hearing. Now Mrs. Zimmerman also is arrested because the two of them conspired to hide assets, namely about $135,000 in donations raised on a private website and available to the Zimmermans.

Jeff Weiner writes in the Orlando Sentinel:

In an affidavit, prosecutors revealed new details about Shellie Zimmerman’s alleged efforts to hide money from the court.

Four days before she testified to having no knowledge of the funds, the affidavit says, Shellie Zimmerman began a series of transfers into her account — totaling $74,000 between April 16 and April 19.

The affidavit says about $47,000 more was transferred from George Zimmerman’s account to his sister’s. Shellie Zimmerman withdrew about $18,000 more cash, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors say the Zimmermans used a rudimentary “code” to discuss the money in recorded jailhouse phone calls — referring to $100,000, for example, as “$100.” At least two of the calls, the state alleges, were made while Shellie Zimmerman and her husband’s sister were at a local credit union making the transactions.

“In my account do I have at least $100?” Zimmerman asked. “No… there’s like $8. $8.60,” she replied.

Zimmerman told his wife to “pay off all the bills” with the money, prosecutors said, including an American Express card and a Sam’s Club card. He also instructed her on how to pay for his bail.

According to the affidavit, after her husband was released on bond days after the bond hearing, she transferred more than $85,000 back into his account. A branch manager at their credit union told prosecutors he knew the couple, and saw Shellie Zimmerman talking to her husband on the phone on April 16.

The manager said he’d helped Shellie Zimmerman transfer control of George Zimmerman’s account, at one point speaking directly to George Zimmerman by phone.

Since his defense largely hangs on a jury believing his version of events, in spite of a mess of sloppily collected evidence and contradictory witness statements, a perjury charge probably won’t help Zimmerman’s case, I suspect.

Rightie reactions range from calls for firing Zimmerman’s lawyer to the quaint theory that the prosecution is trying to drive a wedge between the Zimmermans and their version of events. I doubt the wife’s version of events would have been heard at trial, though.

So many high profile trials turn into media events, with grandstanding lawyers and flaky judges, and I’m hoping for something more sane and sober for George Zimmerman’s trial. Well, assuming it goes to trial. There’s still a possibility that a magistrate will toss the case because of the “kill at will” law.

Last night I did a bit of browsing through comments threads on right-wing sites, and the consensus is that as soon as Zimmerman is found innocent the entire state of Florida and probably other places will be consumed by race riots. Some are also certain that Zimmerman’s new attorney, Mark O’Mara, already is getting death threats, although there’s been not a word about that in the news.

Both the prosecution and Zimmerman’s new lawyer have said that further facts about the case will not be made public before the trial, which is as it should be, so I think further arguing with righties about who might possibly have done what is even more pointless now than it was before. So let them believe that all the witnesses swore Zimmerman was getting beat up by Martin and that voice identification technology is worthless. I have some hope that the trial could get the story straight.

I also agree with Joan Walsh:

There’s an element of hysteria that makes me think that right-wing whites are afraid that if black people get any real power in this country, they’ll use it to treat whites as badly as some whites have treated them. Fox’s Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly emerged as shrill Zimmerman defenders, as though he was a white Everyman being menaced by a mob simply for defending himself against a dangerous black man – the facts of the case be damned. “First they came for George Zimmerman…”

I have been impressed by the fact that the movement to defend Martin mostly stayed away from demands for vengeance or punishment. For the most part, people were demanding information about the apparently shoddy police procedures; some, like Sharpton, advocated that Zimmerman be arrested. Sure, people seized on and promoted any evidence that made Zimmerman look guilty. That’s part of making clear that an injustice has occurred. But the loony right focused on four New Black Panther buffoons and their racial threats rather than the reasonable demand for answers by Martin’s parents.

Righties will no doubt swiftly remind us of the New Black Panthers (who are they, four guys in Pittsburgh somewhere?) issuing a bounty for Zimmerman, and Spike Lee’s boneheaded tweeting of George Zimmerman’s address that wasn’t even the right address. But on the whole most people have just been calling for the criminal justice system to take the shooting seriously. Now that it has, I hope everyone can be patient and go back to making fun of Mittens.

See also Jonathan Capehart.

According to the Washington Post, George Zimmerman will be charged with something regarding Trayvon Martin’s death. We should know what in a couple of hours.

Update: They are saying on the teevee that Zimmerman has been taken into custody.

Update: It’s second degree murder. Outstanding!

The Associated Press is reporting that George Zimmerman’s attorneys are withdrawing from his case because they can’t locate George Zimmerman. They haven’t spoken to him since Sunday. They also say that, against their advice, he contacted the special prosecutor who may bring charges against him.

Update: Another little tidbit emerges — Zimmerman spoke directly to Sean Hannity at some point, his former lawyers say.

Update: Here’s a video of the attorney’s press conference from MSNBC.

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