There's certainly no shortage of legal opinions on this case. USA today has an article, Zimmerman Verdict No Surprise to Lawyers. From Randy Reep, a defense lawyer in Florida:

"In watching the case, it is clear to me the jury got it right," Reep said. "The prosecution team did the very best with what they had, they just did not have the facts on their side. At least enough facts." ....Reep said the nation deserves a conversation about race. "However, our criminal justice system, where one man is taken on by an entire state, is not the forum for that — at least it should not be."

Jules Epstein, a law professor in Delaware, aptly notes:

...the prosecutor may have erred by charging second-degree murder. The charge requires proof of an evil state of mind, but the evidence "seemed to show bad judgment and then an event that spiraled out of control," Epstein said. Epstein echoed Reep's comment that a courtroom is not the place for a forum on race. The jury's job is not to rule on racial profiling, racial animosity or the merits of a stand-your-ground law, he said. "The jurors' function was to answer one question — whether the charges were proven beyond a reasonable doubt," he said.

Alan Dershowitz is harsher. He thinks Angela Corey should be disbarred. Law Professor William Jacobson thinks a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate this "special prosecution."

[Added: More legal views in this New York Times article, "Why Self-Defense Was Hard to Topple."]

The affidavit for the arrest on second degree murder charges was shocking to most criminal lawyers. In re-reading my early posts on the woefully inadequate affidavit, I am struck by how "modulated" I was in tone.

Affidavit = FAIL. That a judge signed off on this as establishing second degree murder which according to Florida jury instructions and case law requires the killing be done with "ill will, hatred, spite, or an evil intent" is perplexing, to say the least.

That's changed over the course of this case, as one injustice after another was revealed. Had this jury not realized the emperor had no clothes, a man would be spending the rest of his life in prison, probably in solitary the first several years, due to the notoriety of the case.

A prosecutor's job is to bring charges when the facts show a conviction can be obtained by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not to kow-tow to public pressure or satisfy the demands of a private party or even the public for bringing criminal charges. Politics has no place in the criminal justice system.

As I've said a hundred times on this site, the criminal justice system was not designed to cure every conceivable social ill. If we're going to address racial injustice in the criminal justice system, the focus should be on actions of police and prosecutors, and laws that unfairly target minorities and are arbitrarily enforced in a discriminatory manner. Last week I wrote:

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.

I do not believe the elephant in the room was race, as asserted by these lawyers. If anything, in my view, it was neighborhood watch groups that encourage citizens to spy and report on their neighbors. From the Government's Operation Tips to "If you see it, report it," the Government and law enforcement encourage the reporting of immensely subjective personal perceptions and suspicions. This country expends an extraordinary amount of resources on law enforcement. They have unlimited surveillance tools at their disposal, from cameras that record us at public events to obtaining the location data on our cell phones. They don't need to involve untrained citizens.The multiple unfortunate events in this case did not begin with George Zimmerman getting out his car. They began with the creation of a Neighborhood Watch which sent out newsletters like this one.

The affidavit was the tipping point for some lawyers. It was a story, not a presentation of facts. For me, as a lawyer, the tipping point was the conduct of the media and the Martin family lawyers. On March 20, 2013, before any charging decision was made, they stepped over any line I could view as reasonable when they held their national press conference to announce they found a witness who would blow the defense out of the water, and played a mostly unintelligible recording of her conversation, misrepresenting her to be a minor who was so desolate at the loss of her boyfriend she missed his wake because she had to go to the hospital.

Instead of encouraging the witness to tell her story to the police, or call law enforcement themselves to alert them to her existence, they called ABC News and invited a reporter to hear her statement. The reporter recorded her statement (without her permission, according to her trial testimony) and then aired segments of it over and over on national news.

As we all now know, the young woman has admitted lying under oath to prosecutors, lying to the lawyers and Martin's parents and she was not a bereaved girlfriend, or even a classmate. She was someone who wasn't involved in his life until two weeks before his death, when they reconnected and engaged in a marathon of phone calls and texts. Did the family lawyers know this? Probably not. Was their failure to verify any information she told them, or even ask her for her last name, before going public with her statements, responsible? You decide.

Those of us who toil in the trenches of the criminal courts every day, fighting to get a fair shake for defendants, many of whom are minorities, know that minorities, more so than others, don't get fair or equal justice, from traffic stops initiated by racial profiling to charging decisions, plea offers and sentencing decisions. Everybody knows it. We move to suppress evidence, we file motions to dismiss, we bring willful discovery violations to the court's attention, we argue for fairness to judges -- we even lobby Congress to change unfair and discriminatory laws. We know the system needs to be fixed and we do our part as advocates for our clients to make it better.

What we don't do is inject ourselves into an ongoing investigation, publicly misrepresent disputed facts as undisputed truths, claim our client's case is one of monumental national and social importance to engage civil rights leaders and foster attendance at rallies across the country, publicly shout over and over that the person we believe to be responsible for our client's misfortune is "a cold blooded murderer" and blast the investigation as a conspiracy of lies before the investigation has even been completed.

It is unfortunate when any 17 year old loses his life, whether to illness, accident, suicide or murder. It is indeed a tragedy for the family he or she leaves behind. But when a 17 year old physically attacks another person, breaking his nose and banging his head against a cement surface, the other person is allowed to defend himself. Once charged, it became the job of the jury to decide whether a reasonable person in his situation would have believed that deadly force was necessary to prevent great bodily harm from that attack.

The jury in this case heard testimony of witnesses and experts. It examined physical evidence, from pictures of the scene to injuries of the defendant to autopsy photos of the deceased. It found no ill-will, hatred or spite. Through its rejection of manslaughter, it found it was reasonable for a person in Zimmerman's circumstances, as he believed them to be, to believe that he was in imminent danger of great bodily harm.

This case has been miscast as a civil rights issue since the day the Martin family's lawyers came on the scene. If the public wants to be believe them, that's their right. If they want to bring civil lawsuits against George Zimmerman or law enforcement or public entities, that's their choice. But when it comes to those lawyers and their public relations team using their bully pulpit to inflame passions and exert undue influence on the actions of law enforcement and public officials, including elected prosecutors, who have a duty not to bring charges without a good faith belief they can prove those charges beyond a reasonable doubt, all the while having a financial stake in the outcome of related civil litigation, I object.

After 16 months of watching this case take on a life of its own, perpetuated by misstatements of the media and the interests of private lawyers pursuing a personal and divisive agenda on behalf of their clients, my tone, like that of other lawyers who objected to this prosecution, rose. Now that the jury has reached a just verdict, I'm going to tone it down again.

I do not intend to further their agenda by reporting on protests or calls for change related to the actions of George Zimmerman. My interest is in protecting the rights of those accused of crime. In this case, that means George Zimmerman, and now that his right to avoid an unjust conviction is secure, my reasons for participating in the discourse are largely over.

To paraphrase Don West, one of Zimmerman's tireless, fearless and dedicated defenders, it may have been tragic that Trayvon Martin lost his life. But it would have been a travesty if George Zimmerman had been convicted and had to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Not just for him, but for the integrity of our criminal justice system.