NBC NEWS – An animation depicting the fatal fight between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and text messages from Martin’s phone cannot be submitted into evidence, a Florida judge ruled Wednesday.
The animation, which was commissioned by the defense, can be used demonstratively in closing arguments, however, Judge Debra Nelson said.
The animation and the texts were the subject of a hearing during a long day in Zimmerman’s second-degree murder trial Tuesday.The animation, which once showed Martin punching Zimmerman but now excludes the punches, would be misleading for jurors to see, prosecutors argued.
The defense pushed for it to be shown, and brought in the crime scene and accident recreation animation graphic artist who was hired to reconstruct his version of the Martin-Zimmerman confrontation on Tuesday to explain to Nelson how he recreates events. Jurors were not in the courtroom during the hearing.
“It’s perfect for court because then you can – it gives you a running log of all the movements. Say, for example, somebody hits something and causes a certain amount of damage. With this suit, I can do that same action and from the accelerometers, you could see how much force it took to cause that amount of damage,” Daniel Schumaker of California-based Contrast Forensics said of his motion-capture suit that he uses for animations.
Schumaker was hired in April 2012 by the defense to do a recreation of the Feb. 26, 2012, confrontation at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community in Sanford, Fla., where Martin, 17, and Zimmerman, 29, encountered each other.
Prosecutors filed a motion last Friday to block the animation, arguing, among other objections, that it “artificially depicts lighting conditions” on the rainy night Zimmerman and Martin tussled and “relies in part upon statements in police reports, some of which were in fact contrary to testimony repeated by the same witness in court.”
They also object to the animation because it wasn’t presented at any pretrial hearings.
Also on Tuesday, Zimmerman defense attorney Don West said he wanted to introduce photographic evidence on Martin’s phone of a hand holding a gun and texts that West says indicated Martin may have wanted to buy a gun shortly before coming to Sanford, where Martin’s dad’s girlfriend lived.
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