Legally, it was irrelevant to the case, which hinged on basic self-defense. But listen to one of the jurors explain to Anderson Cooper how she came to her verdict:
COOPER: Because of the two options you had, second degree murder or manslaughter, you felt neither applied?
JUROR: Right. Because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground. He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.
Geraldo got the jury dead to rights:
COOPER: It didn’t come up, the question of, did George Zimmerman profile Trayvon Martin because he was African-American?
JUROR: No, I think he just profiled him because he was the neighborhood watch, and he profiled anyone who came in acting strange. I think it was just circumstances happened that he saw Trayvon at the exact time that he thought he was suspicious.
The key to her was that Trayvon was allegedly just meandering around in the dark in the rain – but she concedes that that entire description was entirely from Zimmerman. It’s a glimpse into how the jurors balanced a black man’s corpse against a neighborhood watch’s testimony. And how racial profiling to some can seem like nothing of the sort to others.
The Dish 