Zimmerman Prosecutors Go for the Big Lie
Assistant State Attorney John Guy dropped the F-bomb in the very first word of his opening statement in the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman. "F***ing punks," Guy said dramatically, attempting to quote George Zimmerman's garbled comment to the police dispatcher on the night he shot Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
A year or so ago, the reader will recall, CNN and other media worthies attempted to convince America that the indecipherable word in question was "coons" as in "f***ing coons." At the time, not everyone was on board for this nonsense. Liberal media pundit Jon Stewart said on his show what most dispassionate observers were thinking of the utterance in question, "That doesn't sound like a word at all!"
That prosecutor Guy would repeat the "F***ing punks" phrase repeatedly in his opening showed how shaky and insubstantial the case against Zimmerman is. If Guy had a strength, it is that he is young and telegenic. His weakness was everything else.
In his final statement, Guy showed how willing the State is to contort the facts to fit its second degree murder charge. Zimmerman, Guy claimed, "did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to. He shot him for the worst of all reasons -- because he wanted to."
"He wanted to?" Even Guy had to admit that Martin was straddling Zimmerman, that Zimmerman did get his nose bashed and his head cut open, but Guy tried to undo the impact of these concessions by minimizing the severity of Zimmerman's wounds.
The state's most flagrant misrepresentation, one that will likely not survive the day, revolved around the source of the screams for help clearly heard for roughly 40 seconds on one of the 911 calls. "You will hear screaming in the background," said Guy, then slyly adding, "Trayvon Martin was silenced immediately when the bullet fired passed through his heart."
The State knows that it was Zimmerman who was screaming. Guy consciously deceived the jurors in his opening by suggesting otherwise. Defense attorneys do this kind of thing to raise the specter of "reasonable doubt." Prosecutors are not supposed to.
"That's when he began to spin that tangled web of lies," Guy said of the bloodied and rattled Zimmerman when questioned by the police within a minute of the shooting. No, Zimmerman did not have the time or the skill to lie. The State has had sixteen months.