The disservice is to those that want answers from multiple “expert” sources — like potential lawyers and the general public. That’s one of the reasons I’m so grateful for this blog by Professor Leatherman. He presents the law and allows opinions recognizing we’re part of the mix.

I agree it is a pity.

She seems to be a concealed handgun carrier herself, and while she calls he blog talkLeft, I suspect her version of “left” is less progressive and more libertarian at the core.

What I learned from posting there as the often lone voice who found GZ not credible from almost the very start is that she herself shies away from the closer look at his story, and instead falls back on legalities when push comes to shove. She’s honest enough in pushing the idea that she is presenting “the way” that GZ can defend his case, not “this is what happened,” and that’s what I take away from her posts. I found it useful to be challenged by this thinking, and continued to post there for several months as the discovery documents slowly emerged into the public realm.

And I learned a lot – and I still think the state is going to have its hands full getting a guilty verdict in some regard even though it seems obvious that George pushed a false narrative and lied to investigators. It’s now clear to me that George can be proven to have lied about his movements from clubhouse to cut thru and the prosecution can prove it “six ways ’til Sunday” that he chased Trayvon down Twin Tree Lane with his car and that most of what he says happened in this first portion of the altercation is a pack of poorly told lies. The rest, including the reasons for the shooting, will be much harder to prove for the prosecution IMO. (He has however established a pattern to his lies that can be extended past the part where his own call to police dispatch obviously contradicts his statements to investigators.)

But on Jeralyn’s site, I made the mistake of challenging the status quo of the group over there and was eventually banned from being able to post there, mostly for asking the one question that his supporters cannot answer: where were the two persons when GZ told the dispatcher in this exchange, “is he by the clubhouse now? /Yeah, now he’s coming towards me.”

George himself repeatedly insisted to SPD investigators that he was parked in front of the clubhouse, or at least “at the clubhouse” when he said this. (This is all in his final SPD interview) He’s lying and it’s obvious, because were he there the physical timing of his other claim, that TM emerged from the cut thru to menacingly circle his car elsewhere is not possible. This is the ONE question that will stump any supporter of GZ. Try it yourself. Someone who contradicts themselves so clearly is either lying once, or lying twice and in this case GZ is telling lies both ways that he wants the story to go.

That’s where and how I lost any faith in Jeralyn’s credibility in regards to this case. An honest person admits when they are “licked.” She chose to dodge the issue and ban me as a poster instead.

I never once claimed to know that GZ was guilty or innocent when he pulled the trigger, and I await a jury’s decision on that question but the facts are in regarding George’s account of where he was that night and what he was doing, and he’s lying. I hope he receives a good defense and fair trial, but he’s not going to escape his lies regarding his movements. His “selective memory” does not remove him from the space-time continuum, and the pattern of his lies lends strong support to the prosecution’s case. GZ himself has proven the case against his credibility, and in a self defense claim, credibility is everything.

There is a map, a stopwatch and GZ’s own words to show he’s lied to investigators. And of those three things, the defense would have to impeach their own client, the defendant to move away from this sad fact. That tends to go poorly with juries.

Jeralyn can have whatever motive she carries in her heart for continuing to defend his actions, but she moved outside of the realm of me having much respect for what she says when she crossed the line of refusing to listen to reason and ignoring the facts of the case. I see her merely as someone who is striking a pose for a case she knows she’s lost, and turning the corner into a dark area where she is forced to obfuscate and prevaricate to continue to do so. One can strike poses in a courtroom, and should do so in fact, but in my opinion she’s stepped outside her role as a credible blog moderator when she actively denies the truth and works to squash it citing fuzzy “rules” regarding the discussion on a blog. It’s easy to ban the truth on one’s personal blog. All it takes is a lack of credibility, and this is something she choses to share with George Zimmerman.

Zimmerman Made Race an Issue with his False Description of Trayvon Martin

When I first went to a lawyer to seek representation in a “spin-off” case related to my divorce, I introduced the subject by saying, “in this banker’s box I have the written proof of what I’m telling you, but to save time, I’d like to describe this situation first.” He agreed. I then described the situation and the underlying case and he said he believed me 100%, though obviously he was going to read the file. I asked him WHY he believed me so firmly and this is what he told me:

1. Because you realized, coming in here, that the story sounded crazy and your recognizing that meant that you were looking at it accurately in spite of your obvious personal feelings about it.

2. Because the story is internally consistent and whenever I have interrupted to ask a question you have answered it in a straight-forward manner and the answer has addressed my concerns in asking.

3. Because although you’re smart, nobody is smart enough to make up a story like THAT and defend it with the documents; the only possible conclusion is that it is true AND it is supported by the documents. And you knew before you showed up here that I was also smart so you couldn’t be hoping to fool me with a ridiculous story like that unless it was, as it most probably is, true.

I had heard almost the same three reasons (for why I was being believed) from a forensic psychiatrist, who said:

1. Your affect while you told the story was appropriate to what you were saying;

2. The story was internally consistent;

3. Whenever I challenged you on something, your response satisfied me both as to fact and as to your responses to the situations that arose; and

4. I’ve been doing this work for 35 years and it’s not that easy to fool me; and

5. Who could make up something like that?

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I put all this together whenever I’m trying to figure out if a story being told to ME is true or false or something in between. And obviously an attorney interviewing a client will do some combination of things to determine what his take is on the client and on the case.

Many defense lawyers will not disagree with the statement: “Most of the time the client has actually committed either the crime charged or something like it.” I have heard that on radio programs, in personal conversations, and from many written sources. That does not mean, however, that the defense lawyer cannot give the defendant the best possible defense. In fact, if a defendant is guilty but does not intend to plead out, it is to his (defendant’s) actual advantage that the lawyer DOES KNOW what he did, in great detail, so he can avoid slipping up and exposing part of the defense case that he could not foresee!

This is not the same in a civil suit, of course. If someone represents a parent in a custody case, and that lawyer actually knows that the parent he is representing has lied about the other parent and has abused the children, it is probably NOT acceptable for him to continue to present a false case for custody, because the rights involved are not just the rights of his client and his client’s adversary’s — also involved are the rights of children who, if they already have an abusive parent, surely do not need any more enemies!

Anyway, I’ve said enough for a person who has never been a lawyer but who has had and known (and even worked for) a slew of them.