Then, in explaining his aggressor theory, he makes a claim that is wholly unsupported by the state's evidence at trial: "Zimmerman gets out of the car and chases Martin." Not a single witness testified Zimmerman got out of his car and chased Martin. Not a single witness identified anyone chasing Martin, let alone Zimmerman chasing him.

Piers Morgan then brought out a female CNN reporter (I didn't catch her name.) She said she was in the courtroom today. Maybe she's new to covering this case, and I don't expect show anchors like Piers Morgan to know the facts of any one case they report on, but they both seemed to me to be completely off-base in their comments about defense witness Olivia Bertalan. The reporter actually claimed Mark O'Mara may have taken too big a risk by calling the witness because the witness introduced the race issue by volunteering in her answers to his questions that the two suspects who robbed her home on August 3, 2011 were African American males. She thought O'Mara wasn't anticipating her answer, and it was a move that may backfire on O'Mara.

Obviously, neither of them attended or watched the trial on June 25 or June 26. Here is the video of the June 25 trial segment where the state argued it should be allowed to introduce 5 of Zimmerman's prior calls to non-emergency because they were evidence of his state of mind. To make its position clearer to the court, they argued the calls were evidence of Zimmerman playing cop, profiling young males because he found them suspicious and for "other reasons" and reporting them to police, saying they got away.

Two of the calls pertained to the August 3 burglary at Olivia Bertalan's house. The calls were then played for the Judge, outside the presence of the jury. The judge sided with the state. Here is the video of the calls being played for the jury on June 26 during the testimony of Ramona Rumph, the records custodian for the Seminole County Emergency Communications Department.

I wrote earlier today on why the defense called Olivia Bertalan. I'll restate it here so it's all in one place.

Two of the five calls the state played for the jury pertained to the home invasion at Bertalan's residence.

It was Olivia Bertalan, not Zimmerman, who called police to report a home invasion at her home while she and her infant son were home. She saw the perpetrators, hid in a bedroom and called 911 at 11:00 a.m. Bertalan described the perpetrators in her 911 call to police as two young African American males. Shelley Zimmerman also saw the suspects and provided a description to police.

Later that day, at 5:00 p.m., Zimmerman went to her home and brought her a new deadbolt because hers wasn't working. At 6:45 pm Zimmerman called the non-emergency number to report he spotted someone who fit the description Bertalan had given police of one of the suspects. The police did not catch him that night.

On August 6, Zimmerman called non-emergency again to tell police that the male fitting Bertalan's description was back in the neighborhood, and that he and Shelley had just seen him again. He told police they might want to send someone over to Calabria Cove apartments because he thought that's where the male would run to. Again the police didn't catch him. The case was placed on inactive status.

In September, police got a latent print report from the lab which showed that two prints found on the wall between Retreat at Twin Lakes and Calabria Cove apartments matched someone named Emmanuel Burgess. Bertalan identified Burgess from a photo lineup and charges were filed.

Emmanuel Burgess, who lived with his parents in the neighborhood, was on juvenile parole and and in and out of detention facilities. He lived with his parents at Retreat at Twin Lakes, and was finally arrested in February, 2012, after another burglary at the complex on February 6. His juvenile probation was terminated, he was transferred to adult court, where Judge Nelson presided over his multiple cases, consolidating them. He pleaded guilty to both the burglary at Bertalan's home in August, 2011 and the Febrary 6th burglary . Zimmerman had nothing to do with reporting the February 6 burglary. Burgess was sentenced by Judge Nelson to five years in prison. The dockets are here and here.

The full police reports from the Bertalan burglary are here (they will take a while to open.) The report for the Feb. 6 burglary is here

O'Mara didn't call Bertalan to inject race into the case, and I highly doubt her description in court of the males who burglarized her home on August 3 was unexpected by O'Mara. He called her to refute the state's allegation that Zimmerman was a wannabe cop who improperly profiled young African American males by seeking them out, reporting them as suspicious and claiming they always got away. (At another motions argument during the trial, O'Mara mentioned Emmanuel Burgess' name and reminded the Judge that she would be familiar with his record.)

Of the five calls the state introduced as supposed support for its theory that they showed Zimmerman's state of mind as a profiler and wannabe cop, two of the calls pertained to the Bertalan home invasion, in which he didn't profile anyone. He reported seeing someone who matched the description the homeowner (and his wife) had initially given police. The person he reported not only turned out to be the perpetrator, but the perpetrator was only able to be charged after his latent prints were found on the wall he had jumped over from Retreat at Twin Lakes to the neighboring complex. Burgess didn't just commit one burglary, but several, and he was found in possession of some of the stolen property when he was arrested. He had a long record as a juvenile and he lived in the neighborhood.

In the third of the five calls, Zimmerman didn't report anyone. He called to report an open garage door after 10:00 pm.

That leaves a total of 2 calls prior to February 26 in which he reported African American males as suspicious.

In one, on Feb. 2, the male appeared to him to be casing Frank Taafe's house, located at the shortcut from the main road. Zimmerman said the guy kept walking up to Taafe's house and away from it, and he knew the guy didn't live there. By the time police arrived, the male had left. Taaffe was out of town.

In the other of the two calls, during October, 2011, Zimmerman called to report seeing two older (late '20's to '30s) African American males hanging out at the entrance to the gated community at 1:00 in the morning. He reported them for loitering.

After the CNN reporter said O'Mara had taken a risk that may have backfired by Bertalan's reference to the two males who robbed her as African-American, Piers Morgan responded, "The prosecutor should have hammered about this" and launched into some other ways the prosecutors had poorly presented their case. Maybe someone could inform Piers that the prosecutors knew exactly what they were doing by not questioning Bertalan further. Had they done so, Ms. Beltaran would have driven the final nail into their already weak profiling argument.

Further indication O'Mara knew exactly what he was doing by putting Bertalan on the stand, and that his purpose was to contradict the state's implicit racial profiling theory, rather than "inject" race into the case: Right after he told the court he would rest and before he called Bertalan, one of his last two witnesses, O'Mara introduced into evidence the 6th call Zimmerman made to the non-emergency line, which the state had decided not to submit. It's the call made by Zimmerman to report his concern for children who were playing in the middle of the street, darting back and forth. He was afraid a car might hit one of them. The dispatcher asked him what race the children were. His response was "all races."

*****

Now that the evidence has been presented, my previously expressed opinions on this case have only become more solidified. Looking to the future, and the legacy of this case, here is what I see. Keep in mind this is only my opinion.

Whether George Zimmerman is acquitted or convicted, and I am not making any predictions before hearing closing arguments and reading the jury instructions, the legacy of this case will be that the media never gets it right, and worse, that a group of lawyers, with the aid of a public relations team, who had a financial stake in the outcome of pending and anticipated civil litigation, were allowed to commandeer control of Florida's criminal justice system, in pursuit of a divisive, personal agenda.

Their transformation of a tragic but spontaneous shooting into the crime of the century, and their relentless demonization of the person they deemed responsible, not for a tragic killing, but for "cold-blooded murder," has called into question the political motives and ethics of the officials serving in the Executive branch of Florida's government, ruined the career of other public officials, turned the lives of the Zimmerman family, who are as innocent as their grieving clients, into a nightmare, and along the way, set back any chance of a rational discussion of the very cause they were promoting, probably for years.

The problems of racial disparity and arbitrary enforcement of our criminal laws are real, systemic and need to be addressed. Criminal defense lawyers see it and fight to correct it every day. From charging decisions to plea offers to sentences, the system is not fair and everybody knows it.

But this case has never been representative of those problems. And perhaps most unfortunate of all, as a result of the false narrative created by the lawyers for grieving parents who tragically lost their son -- a narrative perpetuated by a complicit and ratings-hungry media -- any attempt at meaningful reform is likely to fall on deaf ears for years to come.

