maddy was pulled out of her life, thrust into the jury against her will as all jurors are and she had a very difficult time and i reveal in the book the kind of different treatment that she got. she was demeaned and belittleded by the five white women. do you think that was part of what it was? we weren t sure whether maddy was black or hispanic. does it really make a difference? some people are very strong and some people are less strong. there is no question when we re talking one person of color and everybody else is white, that person can get worn down. and i think that s what happened in this case. although i want to add that there were three our white jurors who also wanted to convict zichl and they didn t have the facts and the law do it either because the prosecution didn t give to them. so while i start with maddy s story, ultimately this is about the failures of the
maddy said don t decide the case based on emotion and emotion is all you gave me. they wanted the facts and the law. this was a murder trial. it wasn t a memorial service. it s appropriate to have a few comments like that, but ultimately i m sure the jurors were thinking give me the facts. give me the road map to conviction. and it s not just what i would have done in the case. it s what prosecutors do in every case. they know they re hot going to get a conviction just based on emotion. one they think you ve written a lot about is the way race played into the trial or didn t. because race was not explicitly used by the prosecution. but in many ways you ve written that it was by the defense. can you explain? there is a reason why millions of americans took to the streets to get george zimmerman arrested and that s because the case was very obviously about race. and yet in the courtroom, the case was completely bungled by the prosecution on the issue of race. the defense tried to pai
makes me feel worse the more i hear about george zimmerman. now, that s what she told me. but what she told you that was truly stunning of what was going on in the jury room, one juror, quote, knew more than we knew. from pretrial publicity, she knew from pretrial publicity that trayvon martin was a bad kid, was intentionally behind zimmerman, that he knew he was going to hit him, and that he planned his own death. lisa, none of these points were mentioned during the trial. how did this make into it the deliberations? it s really sickening. and it s really disturbing, reverend al. i opened the book with maddy s story. i spent a considerable amount of time with her. she and i are really friends now. she and i have a been texting the last couple of days. she cannot get over this case because she feels that the
weight of trayvon martin s death is on her shoulders. and when she tells the story of what went on not only during deliberations, but during the three weeks of sequestration, i was shocked. i mean, i think it raises serious questions about whether about whether racial profiling was going on in the jury room. how cruel the five white women were on that jury to maddy, how they demeaned her, how they mocked the way she smoke. it was microcosm of how what this case was about. give me an example. what do you mean mocked her and treated her isolated her and treated her differently? did she give you examples? yes, yes. and i have the examples in the book. for example, she referred to ramen noodles as roman noodles. they all laughed at her. oh, maddy, you don t know how to talk. one of them was allowed to bring her dog in for nine hours on a weekend because she was lonely. maddy wanted to bring in her 3-month-old infant, and she was denied that on the ground that
supposedly the child could talk. wow. there was a deputy stationed outside of maddy s hotel door. she thought is that just a coincidence, or is it because i m the only nonwhite juror? the same kinds of questions that people of color have to ask all the time when they re followed and asked by law enforcement. there was a deputy outside her door, but there wasn t outside of the other jurors doors? correct. that s right. wow. i mean, you write a lot about race in this trial, that at the root of this entire case is, quote, unspoken fear that african americans are criminal, that fear is often armed, locked, and loaded. and so the body count continues to rise in an atmosphere of lawlessness. was race a part of this trial whether the prosecution wanted it to be or not, lisa? there is no question about it. the defense is the one that brought race into the case, comparing trayvon martin to a couple of african american burglars that he had absolutely no connection to, except for sha