With the George Zimmerman trial drawing near, his attorney is flaunting information about Trayvon Martin as a pothead, a possible thief and a gun lover. It’s questionable whether that information will ever make it into evidence at trial and the assistant state attorney has filed a motion for a gag order to prevent attorneys from discussing the case with reporters. But you’d never know any of that from watching Megyn Kelly’s interview with Zimmerman attorney Mark O’Mara on Thursday (5/23/13). To the contrary, she seemed determined to work in as much dirt on Martin as she could before she was ordered not to.
Kelly, an attorney herself, sounded more like a lawyer questioning her own client on direct examination than an interviewer. In other words, her questions were designed to elicit O’Mara’s talking points and ignore the other side. So she asked questions like, “What is the most significant piece of information” O’Mara wanted to put forth against Martin and commented, “It looks like you’re also going to use some of these text messages from Trayvon’s phone to show that he was a potentially violent guy who had some past violent episodes. What do the texts show in your view?” She also made a point of showing some of the photos O’Mara wanted displayed, such as a photo of a marijuana plant and a gun.
Kelly feigned objectivity by asking, “How is this relevant?” but it was really just an opportunity for O’Mara to answer that Martin was high the night he got shot by Zimmerman and was a “chronic user” of pot. But as Kelly surely knows, the issue is not whether Martin was high or loved guns but whether Zimmerman acted in self defense when he shot and killed the unarmed Martin.
Somehow, she never got around to bringing that up. In fact, it was O’Mara who kept qualifying his “evidence” by saying that it may not be admitted in court. But that was no problem for Kelly! She never even asked why not.
Zimmerman’s attorney knows very well that he won’t be able to present this kind of stuff in court because it isn’t germane to the matter at hand. He’s just floating this material to assassinate Trayvon Martin’s character right before the trial. He’s fully aware that Fox News and AM radio will try to make hay out of this at any point they can.
The facts of the case still stand that George Zimmerman willfully shot an unarmed teenager to death, after stalking the boy when he had been specifically told not to do so. It’s pretty evident that Martin was alarmed at Zimmerman following him, and finaly turned on him to ask why he was doing it. What happened immediately after that may never be clearly known. We know that moments later they wound up on the ground and Zimmerman proceeded to shoot Martin to death. And we know the whole situation could have been avoided had Zimmerman not pushed it and run after Martin. Zimmerman may well try to argue he was defending himself, but he’s forgetting that he lost that as a legal defense when he instigated the confrontation.
And those facts will not be somehow changed by the idea that Trayvon Martin texted about any given subject at any time. But it’s a nice try by Fox News and Zimmerman’s attorney.
Earth to Megyn Kelly, Mark O’Mara, and all the other wingnuts vigorously defending George Zimmerman:
In case you didn’t know it, Minority Report was NOT real, it was a MOVIE.
We are not allowed to go around killing people on the basis of what they potentially might do . . .
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