Direct questioning of Zimmerman was conducted by Prosecutor Frank, taking over from Schleiter, and that raises an interesting and noteworthy point.
Today one of the television commentators chattering away while the court was recessed mentioned that the state had some 15 or so attorneys admitted on the case by Judge Cahill. I’d thought the number was more like 10 or 12, but regardless, the point remains the same.
There is only one defense attorney, Eric Nelson. The woman sitting behind him is technically an attorney, in that she’s passed the bar, but I believe she did so about a week ago, or some similarly short time. She’s not really a lawyer on the legal team in any substantive sense. And that appears to be it for Nelson’s “team.”
Those of you who followed my George Zimmerman coverage (presumably no relation) will recall that George always had two lawyers in court with him, Mark O’Mara and Don West, and those two did a masterful job of switching out so as to achieve a best fit in questioning different witnesses. (The prosecution, in contrast had some four or five or six attorneys actively on the case.). Largely unseen, however, was a substantial support staff backing up O’Mara and West—one of the factors that led to that legal defense billing out at around $1.7 million.
Nelson has himself, a newly barred assistant, and that’s it. The situation is rather like a wrestling match in which one competitor fights alone against 10-15 opponents who can tag each other in and out as they like.
On a more practical level, it means, for example, that each prosecutor need have command of every detail of only the subset of witnesses that they intend to personally question—whereas, in contrast, Eric Nelson must have command of every detail of every single witness.
It also means that if any single prosecutor feels, perhaps, that they might be a bit off that day, they can “tag in” a colleague. Eric Nelson can “tag in” nobody.
This stuff matters, folks, especially in an extraordinarily long trial such as this one. It’s worth noting that most murder trials—by which I mean intentional murder, not the unintentional killing that Minnesota strangely insists on labelling murder—last only a day or two or three. Criminal trials of three and four weeks just don’t happen in the normal course of events, but only in the most exceptional cases—often highly politically charged cases, such as this one.
I wrote in a recent blog post how impressed I’ve been by Nelson’s performance in the trial proper, and that’s true. Whether he can maintain that level of performance for two, three, or four weeks, is another question entirely. I certainly hope he can.
