trying to get zimmerman arrested, blacks and whites wearing hoodies and all kinds of parks, maybe those should have kept on for an entire year, because we can t trust the system. we are still at a kind of a war that degrades and belittles a great part of our population. and sunny, you ve worked in the system. the system is all there is. how does one where do we go from here? i ve been asking myself that question since this verdict that i think most people know i was stunned by. i come from a law enforcement background. i was one of those prosecutors on the front lines and i saw this case as very race neutral. it was not an element of the crime. and i relied upon the justice system to see what i saw, which was a second degree murder case. as a mother of a brown boy, i struggled with that. what do i tell him now, when this case first broke, his question to me, and in retrospect was so poignant, he
zimmerman had shot, that case he would have been filed on and they probably would have sought the death penalty. you have a you can black male, you will find if you go through all the death penalty research, one of the things you don t get in this country is a whole lot of death penalty verdicts against people when the victim is a black male. jeff, what do you make of this? i am less sure than mark is that race dominates everything in the criminal justice system. i think it s my job, in a case like this, to be in the weeds and look at what the government did and didn t prove. i actually think there is a lot to support the jury s verdict in this case, that this was not a strong case.
requested all of the evidence. we cannot fault their verdict. and i don t believe it can be faulted based on race. this was a tough case. we knew it was a tough case. we felt it was compelling that george zimmerman got out of his car after profiling trayvon martin, followed him and attempted to apprehend him. we felt we could prove it was not justifiable use of deadly force. we have to leave it there. i want to broaden out the conversation when we come back and talk about how we got here. there s a history to this, a legacy to this, the long history of race and justice in america and what the future holds as our 360 town hall continues. we ll be right back. we re talking about race and justice in tonight s 360 town
white female jurors. why was there not an african-american person on that jury? can you explain that? i can explain that the jurors got seated in the order in which they were questioned. we were attempting to exercise two pre-emptories. the court had us receipt two of the female jurors, which did not allow us to get to the back row. as you know, there were two african-american females that we kept on the jury that the defense struck, and they stated their cause on the record and the judge allowed those strikes. to it had to do with the seating, and who came in first. i speak as a prosecutor who has been doing this for 32 years, and i can tell you when we analyze a case, it has nothing
the prosecutor has handled several cases and put a white man on death row for killing black men. we ve all been in that situation before. quite frankly, we have seen women treated more differently than men. but that doesn t mean you change your prosecution style. you always base your decision to charge on the evidence and the law. this was a case about the law, and we knew it was a tough case. it hinged on justifiable use of deadly force, and quite frankly, whether a person is white or black, male or female, when there is any arguable claim of justifiable use of deadly force, there is not an immediate arrest because we don t want to start speedy trial. that is a legal concept. it has nothing to do with race. one of the things you said the other day is a lot in the trial depends on the jury s ability to sympathize or understand a defendant or victim. i want to show you something that juror b37 said to me