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Zimmerman jury adjourns for night; Deliberations to resume Saturday

SANFORD, Fla. — The jury in George Zimmerman's second-degree murder trial have been released Friday after asking the judge if they could pick deliberations back up Saturday morning at 9 a.m.

Jurors  began deliberating Zimmerman's fate Friday after hearing dueling portraits of the neighborhood watch captain: a wannabe cop who took the law into his own hands or a well-meaning volunteer who shot Trayvon Martin because he feared for his life.

Zimmerman, 29, is charged with second-degree murder, but the jury will also be allowed to consider manslaughter. Under Florida's laws involving gun crimes, manslaughter could end up carrying a penalty as heavy as the one for second-degree murder: life in prison.

Shortly after deliberations began, the jury asked the court for an inventory list of evidence by number and description. The clerk made the list, which was approved by the attorneys and given to the jury.

To win a second-degree murder conviction, prosecutors must prove Zimmerman showed ill will, hatred or spite -- a burden the defense has argued the state failed to meet.

To get a manslaughter conviction, prosecutors must show only that Zimmerman killed without lawful justification.

Allowing the jurors to consider manslaughter could give those who aren't convinced the shooting amounted to murder a way to hold Zimmerman responsible for the death of the unarmed teen.

Before the jury got the case, Zimmerman's lawyers put a concrete slab and two life-size cardboard cutouts in front of the jury box in one last attempt to convince the panel Zimmerman shot the unarmed 17-year-old Martin in self-defense.

Attorney Mark O'Mara used the slab to make the point that it could be used as a weapon. He showed cutouts of Zimmerman and Martin to demonstrate that the teenager was considerably taller and he displayed a computer-animated depiction of the fight based on Zimmerman's account.

He said prosecutors hadn't met their burden of proving Zimmerman's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, he said, the murder case was built on "could've beens" and "maybes."

"If it hasn't been proven, it's just not there," O'Mara said. "You can't fill in the gaps. You can't connect the dots. You're not allowed to."

In a rebuttal, prosecutor John Guy accused Zimmerman of telling "so many lies." He said Martin's last emotion was one of fear as Zimmerman followed him in a neighborhood of townhomes on a rainy night Feb. 26, 2012.

"Isn't that every child's worst nightmare, to be followed on the way home in the dark by a stranger?" Guy said. "Isn't that every child's worst fear?"

One juror, a young woman, appeared to wipe away a tear as Guy said nothing would ever bring back Martin.

The sequestered jury of six women will have to sort through a lot of conflicting testimony from police, neighbors, friends and family members.

Witnesses gave differing accounts of who was on top during the struggle, and Martin's parents and Zimmerman's parents both claimed that the voice heard screaming for help in the background of a 911 call was their son's.

O'Mara dismissed the prosecution's contention that Zimmerman was a "crazy guy" patrolling his townhouse complex and "looking for people to harass" when he saw Martin.  O'Mara also disputed prosecutors' claim that Zimmerman snapped when he saw Martin because there had been a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, mostly by young black men.

O'Mara told jurors to ask themselves what Martin was doing during the four minutes from when he started running at the urging of a friend he was talking to on a cellphone to when he encountered Zimmerman.

Martin was planning his attack instead of going back to the townhome where he was staying, O'Mara said. The defense attorney let four minutes of silence pass to emphasize the amount of time.

"The person who decided ... it was going to be a violent event, it was the guy who decided not to go home when he had a chance to," O'Mara said.

The defense attorney said Zimmerman at no point showed ill will, hate or spite during his confrontation with Martin -- which is what prosecutors must prove for the second-degree murder conviction.

"That presumption isn't based on any fact whatsoever," O'Mara said.

The defense attorney bolstered his arguments with the poster-board timeline of events, a PowerPoint presentation showing witnesses who had testified and the computer-animated depiction of the fight.

To invoke self-defense, Zimmerman only had to believe he was facing great bodily harm, O'Mara said. He asked jurors not to let their sympathies for Martin's parents interfere with their decision.

"It is a tragedy, truly," O'Mara said. "But you can't allow sympathy."

O'Mara's conversational style contrasted with prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda's booming presentation a day earlier.

De la Rionda said in his closing argument that Zimmerman assumed Martin was a criminal who was up to no good when he confronted him in his neighborhood. A scuffle followed, and Zimmerman fired his gun.

"A teenager is dead. He is dead through no fault of his own," de la Rionda said. "He is dead because a man made assumptions. ... Unfortunately because his assumptions were wrong, Trayvon Benjamin Martin no longer walks this Earth."

Prosecutors argued Zimmerman showed ill will when he whispered profanities to a police dispatcher over his cellphone while following Martin through the neighborhood. They said Zimmerman "profiled" the teenager as a criminal.

Guy said Zimmerman violated the cornerstone of neighborhood watch volunteer programs, which is to observe and report, not follow a suspect.

Zimmerman's account of how he grabbed his gun from his holster at his waist as Martin straddled him is physically impossible, Guy said.

"The defendant didn't shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to, he shot him because he wanted to," Guy said. "That's the bottom line."

With the verdict drawing near, police and city leaders in Sanford and other parts of Florida said they have taken precautions for the possibility of mass protests or even civil unrest if Zimmerman, whose father is white and whose mother is Hispanic, is acquitted.

There were big protests in Sanford and other cities across the country last year when authorities waited 44 days before arresting Zimmerman.

Guy told the jury the case wasn't about race.

"It's about right and wrong," he said. "It's that simple."

WFTV

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