One of the six women jurors who cleared George Zimmerman of murdering unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin on Tuesday scrapped plans to write a book about the trial.
The woman, identified only as juror B-37, said she had been shielded from the depth of public “pain” about the racially charged case during her isolation on the jury.
After seeing the public mood since Zimmerman’s acquittal — which has triggered angry protests across the United States — she had decided not to go ahead with the memoir, the juror said in a statement.
“I realize it was necessary for our jury to be sequestered in order to protest our verdict from unfair outside influence, but that isolation shielded me from the depth of pain that exists among the general public over every aspect of this case,” the woman said.
“Now that I am returned to my family and to society in general, I have realized that the best direction for me to go is away from writing any sort of book and return instead to my life as it was before I was called to sit on this jury.”
The juror said she had intended the book to be a “respectful observation” of the trial.
“It was to be an observation that our ‘system’ of justice can get so complicated that it creates a conflict with our ‘spirit’ of justice,” the woman said in a statement issued to AFP by her literary editor Sharlene Martin.
Juror B-37 had earlier given an exclusive interview to CNN broadcast on Monday which revealed details from the deliberations before the jury in Florida issued its verdict on Saturday.
She said the jury — comprised of five white women and one Hispanic woman — had been evenly divided when deliberations began.
“We had three not guilties, one second degree murder and two manslaughters,” the juror said, adding she was one of the ones who voted not guilty.
Zimmerman — who has a white father and a Peruvian mother — said he acted in self-defense when he shot Martin during an altercation on February 26, 2012.
But prosecutors said he profiled and stalked Martin, provoking the altercation that led to Martin’s death.
The juror said ultimately it became a question of whether the events leading up the shooting were legally relevant or if, for self-defense, it is the moment before pulling the trigger that counts.
“It was just so confusing with what and what we could apply to what. Because I mean, there was a couple of them in there that wanted to find him guilty of something,” the juror said.
But “after hours and hours and hours of deliberating over the law and reading it over and over and over again, we decided there’s just no way.”
The juror explained her understanding of what happened that night, saying she believed Martin had attacked Zimmerman, who had “feared for his life.”
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