George Zimmerman's attorney: We're not trying to 'demonize' Trayvon Martin

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“Will it ever come into a courtroom that Trayvon was suspended from school a couple of months before, and then suspended again, for writing on the wall, or having pot in his backpack or having a handful of jewelry in his backpack, I don’t think that’s gonna get anywhere near a courtroom. It might,” O’Mara said. “As a zealous advocate for my client, I’m going to look into everything I can look into that might lead to helping George defend himself against a second degree murder charge. And we have case law in Florida that says, a victim’s prior history of violence is relevant. I can’t ignore that. It may be seen to be socially unseemly to do that, but I’m a lawyer, and I know the law, and when the law says you’re allowed to get in a victim’s propensity towards violence in a self-defense case, I have to do my homework and go see if it’s out there. Now I didn’t take his school records and put them all over the Internet, cause they’re private, they’re protected. Those don’t go out there. But do I want them? Absolutely.”

Sanford native Natalie Jackson, an attorney for the Martin family, agrees that O’Mara must do everything he can to advocate for his client. But she and the rest of the Martin family legal team take issue with his approach.

“Who Zimmerman saw [on the night of the shooting] was a figment of his imagination,” Jackson says. “And that’s where Mark is being disingenuous, because Zimmerman did not know who Trayvon was. He didn’t know his school record. … All he saw, was a young, black male in a hoodie, walking ‘suspiciously,’ to Zimmerman. So what made him suspicious? If Mark is going to address that problem – and I agree, he should defend his client – and I agree that he should show why Zimmerman thought that Trayvon was suspicious. But the honest thing to do is to say why did Zimmerman think that Trayvon was suspicious? He didn’t know anything about him, so the only reason he thought he was suspicious is because he was a young, black teenage male wearing a hoodie, walking in a neighborhood that he didn’t think he belonged.”

“I think what people are upset about is the way that [O’Mara] is portraying a young, black male, who most people feel did nothing, and was just walking home,” Jackaon said. “And the way he is portraying him, and the way that, in defending his client, he’s had to demonize Trayvon. So that’s what people are taking offense to. I don’t think he understands why people are upset with him.”

O’Mara says the defense has been conscientious about its portrayals of Martin, but that the constant vitriol he says has been directed against his client has often forced the legal team’s hand.

“I think we’ve been quite sensitive about what we’ve said about Trayvon and his family,” O’Mara said. “But I’m not gonna shy away from the fact that my client had his nose broken, it looks like, or smashed, and that we have a witness who says that Trayvon was on top of him, because that’s fact. We have an obligation to zealously represent and defend our client, while still maintaining some sensitivity to the fact that we have a 17-year-old who’s passed away. … I will tell you, I feel like I’ve only responded to attacks against my client. If there wasn’t all of the groundswell of hatred of my client, based on mis-assumptions and misinformation, we wouldn’t have to be evening the playing field quite so much.”

O’Mara’s case will hinge in part on whether he can convince a jury that it was reasonable for Zimmerman, having spotted Martin on a dark, rainy night, to fear him. And he says he hopes that the trial doesn’t cause the public to miss an opportunity to have a real discussion about race, and racial stereotyping.

“My concern is that we’re tying so much to the verdict” in the upcoming trial, O’Mara says, “when it needs to be divorced from the verdict. Because I don’t want the nation to be split along racial lines because of the outcome of a verdict that is supposed to be decided upon the law and the facts by six people, who shouldn’t even hear the word race. … It’s also in a case where there is necessarily no suggestion of racism, but for the subtleties [of] what whites do in America where they just have a predisposition to view young black males a certain way. But there’s nothing to support, with the facts of this case, that George did it. … My contention is we need to have conversations about that, but we’re not having them, and we’re never gonna be having them, and we’re gonna be set back years if he gets acquitted, and the African-American population says, ‘you see? We told you the system doesn’t work, and it’s still not working.’ That’s my fear.”

Jackson insists the case has never been about accusations of racism on the part of George Zimmerman, but rather about what the Martin family believes was the racial profiling of their son, and the failure of Sanford police to make an arrest after the shooting, based on their own assumptions about Zimmerman and Martin that night.

“When I hear Mark O’Mara, it feels to me as though he’s saying that, you know, people still think this is a race issue — that George Zimmerman is a racist,” Jackson says. “What they don’t get is that whether or not he’s a racist, people are still offended by what he did. And what he did was, he saw a young, black male, and he assumed that he was a criminal. And you see it all over the evidence, and that is the problem. So whether or not [Zimmerman] is a racist, [he] ascribed a negative attribute to Trayvon Martin.”

“Being a criminal defense lawyer is a very hard job,” Jackson adds, acknowledging the complexities of the case O’Mara has taken on. “However, being a young black male in America is much harder.”

Editor’s note: George Zimmerman has sued NBCUniversal for defamation and the company has strongly denied his allegations.

 Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport