And after Mr. Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel testified to the only racial epithet uttered in the courtroom — Mr. Martin’s characterization of Mr. Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” — another family attorney stood alongside Mr. Martin’s parents at a news conference and said, “To this family, race is not a part of this process. Anybody who tries to inject race into it is wrong.”

Yet Mr. Martin’s parents had traveled to Washington to attend a Congressional forum on racial profiling and hate crimes, which resulted in the Congressional Black Caucus’s describing the killing as one of “racial bias.” And in March 2012 Tracy Martin had said, “For the Sanford Police Department to feel as though they were going to sweep another young black minority death under the rug, it’s an atrocity.”

Many disturbing factors were present in the Zimmerman trial: his legal right to drive to the grocery store with a loaded concealed weapon, bullet chambered; Florida’s overly permissive self-defense laws; subpar crime-scene evidence-collection techniques; the oddly arrogant medical examiner who had little interest in answering the questions posed to him by counsel; the prosecutors’ apparent failure to adequately prepare their key witness, Ms. Jeantel; prosecutors’ failure to emphasize how Mr. Zimmerman’s gun, holstered behind him and inside his waistband, could not have been seen and reached for by Mr. Martin in the scenario Mr. Zimmerman described, where he was pinned on his back with Mr. Martin assaulting him; prosecutors’ failure to drive home the fact that Mr. Zimmerman’s claim that Mr. Martin pounded his head on concrete in his final moments did not fit the crime scene, since Mr. Martin’s body was found on the grass a substantial distance from any concrete.

The prosecution’s most glaring trial failure was its absence of a theory about what happened on the night of the shooting that would counter the defense’s frightening story about Mr. Martin’s pinning Mr. Zimmerman to the ground, straddling him and banging his head against the concrete and then reaching for Mr. Zimmerman’s gun. The defense seized upon the prosecution’s unusual practice throughout the trial, and especially in closing, of simply raising questions of what might have happened, rather than proving its own case or presenting its own theory about the facts. When both sides seemed to advocate for reasonable doubt, an acquittal was the only possible outcome.

It cannot reasonably be disputed that the incident that left Mr. Martin dead began with ugly racial profiling. But the prosecution seemed afraid to say so at any point in the trial. Instead, the state appeared to want to tread lightly on the jurors’ presumed delicate sensibilities on the dicey subject of race and, leaving the race question aside, simply pointed out that Mr. Zimmerman must have made “assumptions.” The state’s refusal to take an aggressive, clear position on Mr. Zimmerman’s racial profiling was, like many of its strategic decisions, a clear fumble.

One of the final photos the defense showed to the jury was a 7-Eleven surveillance camera image of Trayvon Martin an hour before his death, the kind of blurry photo one sees on the local news when the police are searching for a holdup suspect. This was the person George Zimmerman encountered, counsel insisted.

By the following night, Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted. Afterward, smiling broadly after her team had just lost the case, Angela B. Corey, the special prosecutor, said: “This case has never been about race.”