Zimmerman juror: Let's face it, he got away with murder

Remember when juror B37 told Anderson Cooper that initially there were three votes for acquittal, two for manslaughter, and one for second-degree murder? Meet the juror who voted for murder.

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She wouldn’t/couldn’t convict ultimately but she seems to think the outcome was a moral travesty, yet she also thinks that the trial was a “publicity stunt” by the prosecution and never should have happened. If there’s one thing a raw, divided America needs now to heal after the verdict, it’s … the opposite of this, basically:

“You can’t put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty,” said the woman who was identified only as Juror B29 during the trial. “But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence.”…

“George Zimmerman got away with murder, but you can’t get away from God. And at the end of the day, he’s going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with,” Maddy said. “[But] the law couldn’t prove it.”…

“That’s where I felt confused, where if a person kills someone, then you get charged for it,” Maddy said. “But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty.”…

She said she believes she owes Trayvon Martin’s parents an apology because she feels “like I let them down.”

“It’s hard for me to sleep, it’s hard for me to eat because I feel I was forcefully included in Trayvon Martin’s death. And as I carry him on my back, I’m hurting as much Trayvon’s Martin’s mother because there’s no way that any mother should feel that pain,” she said.

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“In our hearts we felt he was guilty”? Go back and watch B37’s interview, or the local news station’s interview with the alternate juror. They didn’t feel he was guilty. Then again, four of the jurors issued a statement after B37 spoke up to say that she didn’t speak for them, so maybe the “we” here is a reference to those four. I’m curious to hear from them now. How many of the six acquitted him with a clear conscience, a la B37, and how many were convulsed with misgivings like “Maddy”?

Now, explain something to me. If she thought he “got away with murder” but that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove intent, … why didn’t she stand firm on manslaughter? It seems clear to me, even though she’s not quoted by ABC as saying this explicitly, that she thinks this wasn’t legit self-defense. If that’s how she feels, yet she also feels that the prosecution didn’t meet its burden of intent for Murder Two, then Florida’s catch-all homicide category of manslaughter is the obvious fit. She seems to be trying to argue that Zimmerman’s morally culpable even if he’s not legally culpable, but that’s a hard argument to make if you just let a guy go free on the theory that he was protecting himself from death (or great bodily harm) by shooting. If it’s not self-defense, it’s manslaughter. If it’s self-defense, he didn’t “get away with murder” as a moral matter. Which is it?

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