Trayvon Martin Did Not Beat Up Homeless Man, Zimmerman Defense Sheepishly Admits

In the Trayvon Martin trial, evidence has taken a strange focus on the victim’s life before he was gunned down a year ago in Sanford, Florida rather than that of his assailant — but a recent push by the defense to include a video of Trayvon Martin allegedly beating a homeless man has receded as the attorney admits the video did not depict what they originally had claimed.

In the past week, much has been made of the decision to limit “evidence” about the life of teen Trayvon Martin at the trial of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in Martin’s shooting death in 2012, but only after several weeks of internet and social media attention culminating in real-life protests due to a failure to arrest Zimmerman.

The Trayvon Martin homeless fight video was only the latest in a series of attempts by the defense to smear the teen ahead of the trial and seemingly try the victim rather than the defendant… at least in the court of public opinion.

But as the Orlando Sentinel reports and The Atlanticparaphrases, the misrepresented “evidence” may have done its job already despite being incorrectly characterized and left to hang for nearly a week:

“As The Orlando Sentinel‘s Rene Stutzman reports, the video was actually ‘two homeless men fighting over a bicycle,’ which Martin did film. How that turned into Martin’s friends beating up a homeless man is a little beyond us, considering there’s a huge difference between two homeless men fighting and two friends beating up a homeless man. But like the fabrications and over-the-top examples before it, the whole point of the defense strategy is to leave you grasping for answers.”

Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family, calls the “evidence” floated by George Zimmerman’s defense a “a despicable campaign to assassinate the character of a dead teenager.”