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percent of Florida’s population, but 31 percent of the defendants invoking Stand Your Ground were black, and they were acquitted significantly more often than whites who used the very same defense.
    The tumult didn’t matter. O’Mara and West decided against a Stand Your Ground defense simply because they believed Zimmerman had a solid traditional self-defense case: He was on his back and couldn’t retreat from Trayvon Martin’s vicious pummeling. The law was irrelevant.
    Even if Zimmerman had screwed up, they believed he had no evil intent. Would a killer call the police before he murdered someone?
    And it was also possible that both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman feared for their lives, and that both chose to use force to defend themselves. If the jury believed that, under Florida law, Zimmerman was innocent.
    But the prosecution had a different theory. Zimmerman had lied about everything except shooting Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had stalked the unarmed teenager and forced a violent confrontation. He shouldn’t have been armed at all. Zimmerman’s wounds were minor, and he had no reason to think he might die. The cries for help overheard on the 911 tapes came from Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman. The neighborhood watchman shot the kid in cold blood as he lay in the wet grass.
    The scene was set for an epic courtroom battle.
    As each week passed, the protests grew, and a horrible event was simplified for mass consumption: A good-natured black child had simply gone to the store for some candy and a drink, only to be bushwhacked by a racist white man.
    Some were already calling Trayvon Martin a modern-day Emmett Till. Hundreds of death threats drove George Zimmerman into hiding, while reporters described him as a “white Hispanic,” seeming to accentuate the racist subtext in the tragedy. It didn’t take long for the real Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman to be lost in the Category 5 rhetorical storm that raged about race, guns, profiling, civil rights, and vigilantism.
    O’Mara and West focused on the legal questions, but they weren’t cloistered from the commotion on the street. They knew their future jurors were listening.
    Zimmerman’s defense team divvied up the daunting task brilliantly. Battling restive public opinion and prosecutorial sandbagging while trying to stay afloat, the smooth-talking O’Mara handled the intense media attention while West dived into the forensic issues.
    Even if the media, the race-baiters, and the general public had already leapt to their own conclusions, justice moved more deliberately. Legal issues remained unsettled. The whole tragedy—the entire question of George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence—boiled down to a single legal question: Who was the aggressor at the moment the trigger was pulled?
    *   *   *
    This was a real case with real forensic issues, but for O’Mara and West, it was a nightmare. The case was complicated enough without a frustrating discovery process. Prosecutors were slow with or unresponsive to the defense’s requests for evidence. A simple color photo of George Zimmerman’s face after the crime took the prosecution months to deliver. Key exhibits like the complete Florida Department of Law Enforcement case file were withheld. The state claimed no evidence was recovered from Martin’s phone, but a whistleblower claimed otherwise.
    With almost no money for the defense, West began the arduous process of finding legal experts who could interpret the evidence, looking for any clue that could help explain what happened. He needed experts on gunshots, forensic pathology, toxicology, voice analysis, and computer animation.
    A toxicologist friend mentioned my name as the go-to guy on gunshot wounds. West already knew my name and reputation. He even had a copy of my book on gunshot wounds. So he eventually reached out to me in September 2012, ten months before