Pool photo by Joe Burbank
From left, Don West, a lawyer; George Zimmerman, defendant; Robert Hirschhorn, a jury consultant; and Mark O’Mara, lead defense lawyer, on Wednesday.
SANFORD, Fla. — The mother whose 18-year-old “lives in a hoodie” was in. So was the young man who said he paid little attention to the story of the shooting but remembers first hearing about it while doing a one-arm pull-up at the gym.
The woman who believed “the more guns the better” was out. So was the bearded guitarist who claimed to have no opinion on the case — until the judge confronted him for writing a Facebook posting suggesting the local police department was not just corrupt, but in need of an enema.
After eight days in which 40 potential jurors have been culled from a sea of hundreds, a final jury of six people is on the verge of being seated in the second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman, the volunteer community watchman who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, 16 months ago.
Mr. Martin was wearing a hoodie against a steady drizzle and was walking back to the home in the modest gated community where he was staying when he encountered Mr. Zimmerman, who is Hispanic. His death turned him into a national symbol of injustice for some, with civil rights leaders leading marches demanding that Mr. Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense, be arrested, demonstrators wearing hoodies and even President Obama weighing in.
After a public outcry Mr. Zimmerman was eventually arrested, 44 days after the shooting.
That a local jury is poised to be seated is considered a feat in this polarizing case, widely described as the biggest trial in the history of this small city one hour’s drive north of Walt Disney World. There were predictions that the selection process could stretch three or more weeks, with summonses being sent to 500 potential jurors, all from here in Seminole County, where the shooting took place.
The media saturation raised speculation that the trial might have to be moved or its jurors imported from elsewhere, which was done two years ago one county over, in the trial of Casey Anthony, the Orlando woman accused of murdering her toddler. But the national coverage devoted to the Zimmerman case may have made importing a jury moot.
The judge, Debra S. Nelson, seemed intent on keeping the trial and its jurors local, instituting an exacting selection process. Pretrial questionnaires, which have yet to be made public, winnowed the pool. Individual questioning followed in the courtroom to gauge each would-be juror’s exposure to and opinions on the case.
Once past that, a pool of 40 was arrived at, from which 6 jurors and 4 alternates will almost certainly be chosen.
On Wednesday, as both Mr. Zimmerman’s and Mr. Martin’s parents looked on, the lead prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, questioned the potential jurors as a group, asking how long they had lived in Seminole County, whether they had ever been arrested or the victim of a crime and whether they owned guns.
Defense lawyers will question them Thursday, and opening statements are predicted for next week.
Twenty-seven of the 40 are white, making the group more diverse, proportionally, than Seminole County, where four out of five residents are white. In Sanford, 57 percent of residents identify as white.
The degree of vetting is rare, and usually reserved for high-profile cases like this one, legal experts say.
“It’s extremely uncommon, and it’s proving to be very effective,” said Mark E. NeJame, a defense lawyer based in Orlando who has represented Tiger Woods and Ms. Anthony’s parents and is a legal analyst for several television networks. Early on, he said, he was asked to take the Zimmerman case but declined.
Also unusual are the attributes that the prosecution and defense are likely to be seeking in jurors. Conservative-leaning jurors who favor law enforcement are generally what prosecutors seek, while the defense often looks for those who skew liberal. But not in this case, which is testing Mr. Zimmerman’s claims of self-defense and spotlighting Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. That law has not been invoked in this case, but was cited by the Sanford police as the reason officers did not initially arrest Mr. Zimmerman.
“It is a strange, bizarre case in that the prosecution is not looking for a typical prosecution-oriented jury — which is more conservative, more law and order, more gun rights, maybe more Republican,” said Mark O’Mara, Mr. Zimmerman’s lead defense lawyer. “Those are sort of the types of jurors that I’m looking to.”
Visit Source: NYT > Global Home http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/us/jury-selection-reaches-final-stages-in-trayvon-martin-murder-case.html?partner=rss&emc=rss