Suspicion Nation Read online

  Finally, while the prosecution quickly shied away from “creepy-ass cracka” and “nigga,” the defense, naturally, seized on them, getting her to repeat the terms again for the jury to hear. West then asked several times whether Jeantel thought the case was “a racial thing,” with a slight emphasis on the word that implied bringing such a topic into the trial was distasteful.

  “Yes, it is racial,” Jeantel said bravely, staring at the white-majority jury. She knew they wouldn’t understand, but she stuck to it. (As soon as she saw the jury composition, Jeantel told me, “I knew it would be a waste of my time.”) Jeantel was the only voice in that courtroom ever to say that Trayvon was racially profiled, something she understood implicitly, but was not ready to defend in depth. “Why is that?” West wanted to know. She murmured that Trayvon described being stalked, that Zimmerman was watching and following him. “Why is that racial?” West pressed. She didn’t have an answer.

  Ah, if only she’d been prepared, what a powerful moment it could have been in that courtroom:

  WEST: Do you think this trial is a racial thing?

  JEANTEL: I think Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon is racial, yes.

  WEST: Why is it racial?

  JEANTEL: Because he targeted and followed Trayvon, who was a young black kid, for no good reason. A teenager. Who was just minding his own business, not bothering him or anybody. Who was unarmed, and who has the same right to walk down the street as you and your kids do, Mr. West. This happens to unarmed black men in America every day.

  WEST: That’s what makes it racial? How do you know what was in Zimmerman’s mind?

  JEANTEL: Aren’t you the ones saying there were black burglars in the neighborhood? They got nothing to do with Trayvon. Why do you keep bringing up the black burglars if it’s not racial?

  WEST: Objection, Your Honor, the witness is argumentative.

  JUDGE: You asked the questions, counsel. She’s just answering them.

  WEST: I’ll move on.

  JEANTEL: And I heard that all his police calls about suspicious people were about black men. Is that true? Come on, Mr. West.

  WEST: Let’s move on.

  She had the moxie and the brains to pull this off, if she’d had a chance to practice it beforehand. But without preparation, she didn’t have the backup to defend her position. And without the prosecution’s advocacy that of course this case was about racial profiling, as outlined in Chapter Four, she was hung out to dry alone on the subject. Lacking that support, the defense painted her as improperly playing the race card (as if anything about this trial was a game) instead of a young woman who perceptively understood the obvious, a view shared by millions.

  After the trial, she stuck to her position. “It was racial. Let’s be honest, racial,” she said in a post-verdict interview.73

  At the end of a case, normally state attorneys explain to the jury all the ways their witnesses got the facts right, why they should be seen as reliable, why they should be believed. Here, incredibly, both prosecutors distanced themselves from their star witness in closing arguments. De la Rionda, clumsily invoking Martin Luther King, Jr., said he had a dream that Jeantel would be judged not on the “color of her personality” (what color would that be, exactly?) but on the “content of her testimony” (which few had been able to follow, and which he did not clarify for them). Translation: nobody, including us, likes her, but please believe her testimony anyway, if you can figure it out. He said that “Rachel Jeantel may not be sophisticated”—how sophisticated are most high school students?—“but she is a human being.” Was that really the best he could say about her? Was there a lack of clarity as to what type of mammal she was? John Guy74 said, “There are no Rachel Jeantels on CSI.” Translation: so disfavored are plump dark-skinned women in our culture that they are rarely seen on TV, but please try to relate to her anyway, somehow.

  That “damning by faint praise” was only the culmination of the state’s ineffective handling of Jeantel from the beginning. Having failed to interview her immediately after the shooting, having failed to prepare her to testify in any meaningful way, having failed to conduct her examination in a manner in which the jury could follow and understand her testimony, having failed to object to the defense’s overlong cross-examination of her, the state effectively washed its hands of Rachel Jeantel in their final summations.

  In the first interview after Zimmerman was found not guilty, juror B37 said she had found Jeantel not credible, largely because of her poor communication skills, and that she “felt sorry for her.” Maddy told me that no one mentioned Jeantel in jury deliberations. Her testimony played no role whatsoever in their decision. The state’s star witness had been entirely neutralized.

  I SPOKE WITH Jeantel three months after the verdict. Bubbly, upbeat, and relaxed, she had found her voice and was easy to understand. She laughed at herself often during the interview, a robust, infectious laugh.

  With the trial behind her, she had much to be happy about. Radio host Tom Joyner, watching Jeantel on a post-trial television interview, sensitively noticed that when she said she and Trayvon had talked about their futures, the interviewer failed to ask her what lay ahead for her. What were her goals, her hopes and dreams? Trayvon would have no future. But Jeantel still could, perhaps with a little help and incentivizing. Shortly thereafter, Joyner publicly offered75 Jeantel a full scholarship to any one of America’s one hundred historically black colleges, if she could graduate high school and get accepted. He even sprung for tutors to help her through her senior year of high school.

  Attorney Vereen stuck with Jeantel months after the trial ended, watching out for her as well. “I’m a whip cracker,” he says. “No Ebonics, no slang, don’t talk to me about the underbite. I don’t want to hear it. No excuses. Don’t be lazy.” She respects him as her mentor, he says. When making life choices she’ll think, “What would Rod say?”

  All that community support was paying off. The teenager who admitted at trial that she couldn’t read cursive was achieving nearly straight A’s in her first semester of senior year in high school, looking forward to graduating in June 2014 and attending college thereafter. While she’d briefly flirted with the idea of studying law, with some distance from the trial she realized it was not for her and had returned to her original goal, a career in fashion design. How’d she feel about the prospect of college? “Excited!”

  If only that help had come just a few months sooner, and she’d had that confidence, pleasant attitude, and those improved communication skills at trial. The support of a few adults had made such a difference in her life.

  I brought the conversation back to her friend Trayvon. What did she want us to know about him? “He could be one of you, your child. Forget his race, color. He’s one of us. He’s not an animal.”

  She’s a human being, de la Rionda had said of Jeantel.

  He’s not an animal, Jeantel says of Trayvon.

  And Jeantel has not forgotten his sense of humor. A year and a half after his death, she still smiled broadly thinking about Trayvon, speaking of him, as always, in the present tense: “He is a funny person.”

  SIX

  Mishandling the 911 Call

  NO VIDEOTAPE OF the shooting of Trayvon exists, but the killing was captured on audiotape. Neighborhood resident Jenna Lauer, hearing the altercation, called 911, and the police recording of that call captured not only Lauer’s and the dispatcher’s conversation but the background sounds of one person yelling “aaah!” intermittently over a period of about forty seconds. The gunshot then unmistakably rings out, and the cries go silent. But was it Trayvon or Zimmerman who was calling out?

  More witnesses were asked about this than anything else, as it became one of the most litigated issues at the trial. If Zimmerman was the screamer, his selfdefense story is plausible and corroborated—He was banging my head on the concrete, trying to suffocate me, threatening to kill me. I called for help, but no one came. So I had to shoot him to save my own life.


  If Trayvon was screaming, another narrative would apply, such as: Zimmerman was pointing a gun at Trayvon, cursing him and threatening to kill him if he tried to escape (“these assholes, they always get away.”) Zimmerman was scary, brandishing the gun, indicating that he meant those threats (months later, that chilling attitude came through in Zimmerman’s interview with Sean Hannity, when he said he had no regrets and the killing was “God’s plan”). Trayvon was terrified and yelled urgently for help. BANG! The fatal shot to Trayvon’s heart silences him.

  The jury heard the Lauer 911 recording many times in the courtroom, as both sides played it with various witnesses who testified as to who they believed was yelling out for help. The prosecution called three witnesses (Jeantel and Trayvon Martin’s brother and mother) to say it was Trayvon’s voice. The defense had nine family members and friends to say it was Zimmerman.

  Once again, the state failed to effectively put together the pieces of evidence it had, all of which pointed to Trayvon Martin as the screamer. The state glossed over the issue with its witnesses, asking the question briefly (whose voice is that?), getting the answer (Trayvon Martin), and then moving on. But of course Trayvon’s friends and family would want to believe it was Trayvon, just as Zimmerman’s would want to believe it was Zimmerman. The state’s attitude appeared to be, We’ll put the witnesses on, but we know we can’t prove this.

  The defense, on the other hand, understood that the issue could make or break the case. And so they hit hard, not only by calling a much larger number of witnesses, all of whom seemed to fervently believe Zimmerman was the one crying out, but by breathing color and credibility into their witnesses’ accounts.

  For example, one of the defense witnesses, retired physician’s assistant John Donnelly, forty years earlier had worked in the battlefields of the Vietnam War. A pleasant, likeable older man who now worked in litigation support, he said that “George Zimmerman is a very good friend of mine.” Zimmerman had hung around his office, wanting to learn about business, and Donnelly had advised him on matters large and small, including how to tie a Windsor knot. The clincher in Donnelly’s testimony was his description of working in combat conditions, where, he said, he would hear hysterical cries of wounded soldiers, identify them, and run out to treat their injuries. In the midst of combat, there are a lot of people yelling and screaming for help. “You can distinguish the screams for a medic, you go where they’re at, but because you know the men you eat and sleep with, you know who it’s going to be before you get there.”76 Donnelly appeared to suppress some emotion recalling the anguish of the Vietnam battlefields. Dabbing at his eyes and nose with tissues, he then said it was his friend Zimmerman on the Lauer 911 call.

  Juror B37 said later that Donnelly was one of the most credible witnesses in the entire trial. She incorrectly thought he was a doctor.

  While a witness like Donnelly should be treated with respect and sensitivity, his Vietnam story is entirely uncorroborated. War stories, by their very nature, can be subject to embellishment. Did Donnelly truly have an uncanny ability to know who was yelling out in wounded distress before he got to them, or was that exaggerated, even fabricated? There’s no way to know. We have to take his word for it. Because when any of the men of his company would call out, injured, for a medic, wouldn’t he have gone? In other words, did it matter which of his men was calling out? Wasn’t it his job to render aid regardless?

  Second, the conditions in Vietnam are entirely different than those found in the Zimmerman case. Even assuming Donnelly’s testimony was true, that he could identify a man crying out in anguish after being injured in combat before seeing him, the army setting was obviously dissimilar to the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Donnelly had said that as a medic, he ate, slept, and spent all his time with the men in his company, with whom he lived daily in perilous conditions. In other words, he was extremely familiar with them. While Donnelly said that he’d been Zimmerman’s friend for some time, their relationship was not analogous to those he’d had with soldiers in Vietnam.

  And most importantly, he’d never heard Trayvon’s voice. How could he be sure without knowing both voices?

  The question was never asked. None of these points were raised.

  Additionally, none of the nine defense witnesses could say they’d ever heard Zimmerman screaming hysterically for his life, so how could they be sure how he would sound when his life was, allegedly, threatened? There would only be one way. They could ask Zimmerman to scream again, in the privacy of their homes, to see if it sounded like the Lauer 911 call. The prosecutors couldn’t make Zimmerman do this in the courtroom, as he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he elected not to testify. But his friends could have asked over the previous year. Of course, no one did this. Why not? Didn’t they want to be sure? Or were they afraid they’d be wrong?

  They were not asked.

  Zimmerman himself said to the detectives who played the tape for him the first time, “That doesn’t even sound like me.”77 The prosecution failed to run with this critical piece of evidence. He didn’t say, “That’s funny, I was definitely screaming, but that doesn’t sound like me.” He didn’t say, “It was me, though it doesn’t sound like it now.” Just, “That doesn’t sound like me.” Isn’t Zimmerman in the best position to know who was screaming? Shouldn’t that be case closed on the subject once he’d said that?

  Most importantly, the state failed to drive home the significance of the fact that the screaming stops instantly with the gunshot. (This was mentioned, but not elaborated upon.) That makes it far more likely that the shooting victim was the screamer. The defense argued that Zimmerman stopped screaming because the threat was then removed—he no longer needed help, as he’d shot Trayvon. But once again, the prosecution failed to argue the evidence—that Zimmerman himself admitted in his police statements just the opposite, that he didn’t think the threat was over once he pulled the trigger. He didn’t think his bullet hit Trayvon, he said. He was still afraid that Trayvon had a weapon or was otherwise going to harm him. Recall his fear minutes earlier, telling the police dispatcher: “He’s got his hand in his waistband [pause] and he’s a black male.” (On that call, he’d already been asked Trayvon’s race, and given it, so why repeat it when mentioning the hand in the waistband, if not for dramatic effect?) Trayvon remained a threat after the shooting, according to Zimmerman, which is why he asked neighbor John Good, the first to come outside after the gunshot, to “help me”; why he says he extended Trayvon’s arms out as he lay dying (because he thought he might be armed). By his own words and actions, Zimmerman was still scared.

  So why would he stop screaming? He wouldn’t.

  The screamer was almost certainly the unarmed kid who was being threatened by the man with the gun, the man who had followed him and was angry at him, and who, more than anything, didn’t want him to get away. Shot directly in the heart, he fell silent instantly. If Dr. Bao had been allowed to testify that the bullet fragments in Trayvon’s right lung would have prevented him from speaking immediately upon impact, due to pneumothorax, the jury would have understood even more clearly why Trayvon’s screams stopped precisely at the moment he was shot.

  The state’s failure to properly argue this evidence meant they lost their best proof that Trayvon was the victim, not the aggressor, in the final seconds before the shooting.

  SEVEN

  Closing Arguments: A Disaster for the Prosecution

  CLOSING ARGUMENTS (ALSO called summations) are most attorneys’ favorite part of the trial. All other stages of the trial are so tightly constrained. In opening statements, attorneys may only lay out what the evidence will show, without arguing what it all means. During the presentation of witnesses, trial lawyers may only ask permissible questions or raise brief objections. Though it would be helpful, we can’t say to the jury, “Hey, before I put this guy on the stand, let me explain to you why he’s important.” Question, answer, question, answer—that’s all that’s a
llowed. After a particularly good bit of testimony, we can’t turn to the jury box and say, “Did you catch that? Remember the witness who testified the day before yesterday? This supports what she said!” Not allowed.

  But once all the evidence is in, attorneys get their one and only chance to pull it all together for the jury in closing arguments. With the rules loosened, trial lawyers can and often do quote the founding fathers, poetry, movie lines—whatever may sway the jury’s hearts and minds. Now inferences may be drawn from the evidence—reasonable interpretations that each side argues supports its position. Attorneys hold up physical evidence, they replay audio and video evidence, they create charts and graphs and timelines to synthesize the facts. At last, most lawyers think, a chance to connect all the evidence with the law and argue in the most forceful possible terms that the jury should vote my way. Finally, I can respond to those ridiculous arguments made by the other side.

  In criminal trials, prosecutors and defense attorneys have very different jobs. Prosecutors in every case must prove all the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense, on the other hand, raises doubt wherever possible. Thus in closing, prosecutors typically explain to the jury what the elements of the crime are, since this is new, foreign legal language to jurors, and then connect the dots to show that their evidence has proved each and every one of those elements. Defense attorneys chip away at that evidence, arguing that the jurors really can’t be sure, and if even one element of the crime is in doubt, the verdict must be “not guilty.” Prosecutors want the jurors to join them in reaching definitive conclusions. Defense attorneys want them to question, to wonder, to be uncertain.