A George Zimmerman juror has gone public.
Zimmerman juror B-37 told CNN’s Anderson Cooper tonight that she was convinced it was the defendant’s voice on the 911 tape and that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch in the fatal confrontation. This particular juror is also apparently writing a book about the trial according to a literary agent.
The juror, who was concealed during the interview and is still anonymous, exclusively spoke with Cooper for about 20 minutes.
As virtually everyone across the country (and the world perhaps) knows, George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch captain, was put on trial for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, 17, on February 26, 2012, after confronting the teenager as he walked back to the house where he was staying in a gated community outside of Orlando, Florida. Zimmerman,who is Hispanic, entered a plea of not guilty on self-defense grounds and went on trial in a Seminole County courtroom starting on June 24. After about 16 hours of deliberation, the six-person, all-female jury Saturday night found him not guilty of both second degree murder and manslaughter.
As far as the 911 call that became a huge part of the case, juror B-37 said that “I think it was George Zimmerman’s (voice)… because of the evidence that he was the one that had gotten beaten.” She noted that at least five of six jurors on the panel believed that it was the neighborhood watch captain’s voice.
At another point in the interview, she explained that she thought that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch, but also separately admitted that “”nobody knew exactly what happened.”
As far as how the tragic confrontation went down, juror B-37 explained that “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. I think he’s 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.”
She said that Zimmerman had every right to carry a gun like any other citizen. She also offered the opinion that the incident “pretty much it happened the way George Zimmerman said it happened.”
As far as the racism allegation, the juror declared that “I think if there was another person, Spanish, white, Asian, if they came in the same situation where Trayvon was, I think George would have reacted the exact same way.”
At one point in the interview, Cooper and the juror seemed to get confused between the court testimony of the Zimmerman friend who was the Vietnam medic and the medical expert for the defense.
Do you think it is a good idea for a Zimmerman juror to grant an interview so soon after the end of the trial when emotions are both sides are still raw? Watch both parts of the interview embedded here in context and make your assessment of what she had to say about the George Zimmerman trial from the inside.