George Zimmerman judge: I'll decide Monday on gag order By Rene Stutzman and Jeff Weiner, Orlando Sentinel
7:52 p.m. EDT, October 26, 2012
SANFORD – Defense attorney Mark O'Mara on Friday told a judge that George Zimmerman was arrested on a murder charge only after a pair of media-savvy lawyers "traveled the countryside" on a campaign that had a single message: "Mr. Zimmerman is a racist murderer."
He was trying to convince Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson not to impose a gag order, something Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda urged her to do.
She will announce her decision on Monday, she said.
O'Mara pleaded with the judge to ignore the gag order request. His comments and blog posts have ratcheted down the hatred and emotion in the case, he said.
He said he is trying to counter the damage done by Tallahassee attorney Benjamin Crump and Orlando lawyer Natalie Jackson, attorneys for the family of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black 17-year-old Zimmerman shot Feb. 26 in Sanford.
The family's attorneys hired a public relations professional and began holding news conferences and making national television appearances in March, demanding Zimmerman's arrest.
"Crump and Jackson decided they'd make it a national media case," O'Mara charged Friday. And they didn't play fair, he said. They portrayed the Sanford Police Department and the local State Attorney's office as racists and part of a conspiracy, O'Mara said.
Crump and Jackson were not in court Friday. But Jackson told the Orlando Sentinel she had never called Zimmerman a racist.
"I don't know George Zimmerman," she said, adding that she was on a campaign to bring to justice a man who had killed an unarmed teenager who had every right to be in Zimmerman's neighborhood that evening.
During Friday's hearing, O'Mara portrayed his client as a man victimized by hatred and buried by "an overwhelming tidal wave of misinformation."
That is "why today he's wearing a bullet-proof vest and living in hiding," O'Mara said.
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