My colleague Dahlia Lithwick has a great piece up on the strange case of juror B37 that you should go check out. But a few updates from last night’s news cycle about the Zimmerman juror who so far remains the only member of the six-women jury to speak publicly (albeit anonymously) about the trial.
Book Plans Off: On the advice of her agent and pretty much the Internet at large, the juror now says she won’t write a book after all. Here’s her full statement, as released by her agent, Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management LLC:
“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.”
CNN Interview: The women also sat down last night for a much-talked about interview with Anderson Cooper. The pull-quote that grabbed most people’s attention: “I think George Zimmerman is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done,” she said. “But I think his heart was in the right place. It just went terribly wrong.”
The juror also offered up details of the preliminary vote from the jury at the very start of their deliberations: three jurors—including B37—were in favor of acquittal, two supported a manslaughter conviction, and the other believed Zimmerman was guilty of second-degree murder. In the end, of course, the six women agreed that he was not guilty.
