A
female juror identified as Juror B37 was interviewed
by Anderson Cooper on CNN (7/16/2013). Excerpts from
the interview appear below.
(Juror B37 was one of the three jurors (out of six) who believed from the start of deliberations that Zimmerman was not guilty.) Juror B37: "I think George Zimmerman is
a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got
displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and
wanting to catch these people so badly that he went
above and beyond what he really should have done. But
I think his heart was in the right place. It just went
terribly wrong." "If anything,
Zimmerman was guilty of not using good
judgment...When he was in the car, and he had
called 911, he shouldn't have gotten out of that
car." "Anybody would think anybody walking down the road, stopping and turning and looking -- if that's exactly what happened -- is suspicious....I think all of us thought race did not play a role. We never had that discussion." "I think George
got in a little bit too deep, which he shouldn't
have been there. But Trayvon decided that he
wasn't going to let him scare him ... and I think
Trayvon got mad and attacked him." "He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him, or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right." "There was a
couple of them in there that wanted to find him
guilty of something and after hours and hours and
hours of deliberating over the law, and reading it
over and over and over again, we decided there's
just no way, other place to go." "It's a tragedy this
happened. But it happened." "And I think both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into. I think both of them could have walked away. It just didn't happen." "Now that I am returned to my family and to society in general, I have realized that the best direction for me to go is away from writing any sort of book and return instead to my life as it was before I was called to sit on this jury." "I realize it was necessary
for our jury to be sequestered in order to (protect)
our verdict from unfair outside influence, but that
isolation shielded me from the depth of pain that
exists among the general public over every aspect of
this case." A
female juror identified as "Maddy" was interviewed
by Lisa Bloom as part of research for her book on
the Zimmerman trial, Maddy: "I felt
naive and dumb from the beginning." "I went in
there wholehearted. I listened to the lawyers
and they said don't use your heart. That to me
meant he was not guilty." "All the
other women were talking a different language...All
their points were so educated. It didn't matter
what I said." "They told
me not to look at the beginning, just the fight...You
are able to use force when force was used...The
evidence is there. He profiled him because he
was black, but the law says at the end of the day all
that mattered is who was on top and who was on the
bottom." "I felt in
my heart he was guilty to the end, but I couldn't
prove it...I feel that I was forcibly included in
Trayvon Martin's death. I carry him on my
back...I'm the only minority, and I felt that I let a
lot of people down." |