Tag: Trayvon Martin

George Zimmerman Juror B-37 (B37) Interview With Anderson Cooper on CNN – Part 1 CNN’s Anderson Cooper landed the first “exclusive” interview with one of the six women who sat on the George Zimmerman murder trial jury for the last month. Seated in darkness and identified only as Juror B-37, the woman told Cooper is “seems like it’s been years” since the trial began and shared which moments of the proceedings had the biggest impact on her.

Speaking about the opening statements, the juror called defense attorney Don West’s knock-knock joke “horrible.” She said, “nobody got it. I didn’t get it until later, and then I thought about it, and I’m like, I guess that could have been funny, but not in the context he told it.” She told Cooper that in general she found the witnesses to be “credible” and said when it came to the 911 call audio of the screams, she believed those who said it was Zimmerman’s voice “because of the evidence that he was the one that had gotten beaten.” All but one of the six jurors agreed with that assessment. “I don’t think there was a doubt,” she said, “that everybody else thought it was George’s voice.”

If there was one witness who the juror didn’t find entirely credible it was Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel. “I didn’t think it was credible, but I felt sorry for her. She didn’t ask to be in this place. She wanted to go. She didn’t want to be any part of this case. I think she felt inadequate toward everyone because of her education and her communication skills. I just felt sadness for her.” She added, “she was embarrassed by being there, because of her education and her communication skills, that she just wasn’t a good witness.”

The juror had announced she was writing a book about the case, but after hours of outrage on social media for Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management LLC to drop the juror, it was announced that a book deal was no longer in the works, via a statement published by Buzzfeed:

“I realize it was necessary for our jury to be sequestered in order to protest 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. The potential book was always intended to be a respectful observation of the trial from my and my husband’s perspectives solely and it was to be an observation that our ‘system’ of justice can get so complicated that it creates a conflict with our ‘spirit’ of justice.

“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.”