George Zimmerman Trial: How Could the Prosecution Have Made Its Case More Strongly?

by Patrick H. Moore

The prosecution phase of the George Zimmerman trial for the second-degree murder of 17-year-old black youth Trayvon Martin is over and the defense now gets to have its day in Court. Pundits and self-styled experts for the most part seem to feel that the prosecution has failed to make a sufficiently strong case to convict Zimmerman of the second-degree murder charge, particularly in light of Zimmerman’s self-defense claims.

If Zimmerman is ultimately acquitted of the second-degree-murder charge, the prosecution will inevitably be second-guessed. The question is: could the prosecution have done anything differently that would have made their case more strongly? In order to answer that key question, it must be stated that, from the beginning, the prosecution was faced with an uphill battle for the simple reason that they had no witnesses whose testimony could establish that George Zimmerman actually attacked Trayvon Martin rather than the other way around. In a sense, their dilemma reminds me of the old saw: “How do you make an omelette without eggs?”

What then could the prosecution have done — if anything — to build its case more convincingly? My sense is that they may have missed an opportunity by not systematically attempting to discredit Zimmerman more thoroughly, by not effectively “catching him in his lies,” as lead prosecutor John Guy vowed to do in his dramatic opening statement. Sure, they have done it piecemeal. They have pointed out that Zimmerman allegedly “profiled” Martin, that he was an out-of-control wannabe cop, that he followed Trayvon Martin after being specifically told not to by the 911 police dispatcher, and that his story is not consistent.

Where they missed their best opportunity, however, was in failing to systematically point out the glaring discrepancies between Zimmerman’s statements on the 911 dispatch tape and what he told law enforcement at the Re-enactment walk-through. In particular, they could have hammered home the point more strongly that Zimmerman was out of his truck and following Martin well before the 911 call ended and that the reason he was reluctant to provide the dispatch officer with an address where he could meet the officers was because he didn’t know where he would be because he didn’t know where the fleeing Martin would lead him. A careful step-by-step analysis of the contradictions between the 911 tape and the statements Zimmerman made at the Re-enactment walk-through could have aided the prosecution immeasurably in making the case that Zimmerman was not just a wannabe cop that disobeyed orders but rather that he was maniacally obsessed with tracking down Martin at all costs, even if it meant attacking the youth and bringing matters to such a head that in the end he felt justified in shooting him.

I suspect that the prosecution will make these points as strongly as possible in their closing arguments after the defense rests its case. But it will be too little too late because during the prosecution phase of the case they got off-track by calling witnesses such as John Good who — on balance — helped Zimmerman more than he helped Martin, rather than keeping their pitch narrowly focused on the fact that Zimmerman was far more than merely a wannabe cop who overstepped his boundaries on the night of February 26, 2012. The prosecution had to convince the jurors that Zimmerman was completely out of control on that fateful evening and that as a result an innocent 17-year-old boy is dead.

If the prosecution had succeeded in establishing Zimmerman’s obsessive desire to track Martin down at all costs, and had effectively supported that theory by systematically pointing out the myriad contradictions in his constantly shifting story, it still may not have been enough to overcome the claim of self-defense. But it would have undoubtedly helped to overcome the sense on the part of many that all the prosecution has succeeded in doing to this point is build a distinctly lukewarm case.