Zimmerman Prosecutors Bounced Fox News Watching Black Juror From Panel [Video]
Prosecutors reportedly rejected an African-American for the George Zimmerman jury.
The jury pool in the Zimmerman case has been criticized for its lack of diversity, but apparently the prosecutors didn’t want anyone on the jury who admitted to watching the Fox News Channel.
This revelation emerged during a CNN interview today, when anchor Carol Costello asked why there wasn’t an African American on the jury and wondered why it turned out to be six women (one of whom reportedly is Hispanic, a fact that was unknown to Costello).
Legal analyst Mark Nejame, who was a regular talking head during CNN’s Zimmerman trial coverage, responded about how Seminole County is only 11 percent black, while Sanford, Fla., where the Trayvon Martin fatal shooting took place, is 30 percent black. According Nejame, “so when in fact you condense that down to a jury, the odds of getting an African-American on the jury are very slim when you’re in Seminole County.”
At that point Costello chimed in with “if I remember correctly one of the prosecutors struck a black, a potential black juror, from the jury.”
The other panelist, Michael Skolknick, Political Director for Russell Simmons’ website TheGlobalGrind.com, then jumped in to say…
[the juror] was also a Fox News watcher, so that was, you know, problematic for the prosecution.”
As virtually everyone across the country (and the world perhaps) knows, George Zimmerman, 29, 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 in Sanford. 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.
Do you a potential juror should have excluded from the Zimmerman trial because he watched Fox News or any other cable news channel for that matter?
