Criminal Justice Quote: Alan Dershowitz Finds Race, Politics and Prosecutorial Misconduct in the George Zimmerman Case

[In the Zimmerman trial] there was reasonable doubt all over the place. I think there were violations of civil rights and civil liberties--by the prosecutor. The prosecutor sent this case to a judge, and willfully, deliberately, and in my view criminally withheld exculpatory evidence. They denied the judge the right to see pictures that showed Zimmerman with his nose broken and his head bashed in. The prosecution should be investigated for civil rights violations, and civil liberty violations. If the judge had any courage in applying the law, she never would have allowed this case to go to the jury. She should have entered a verdict based on reasonable doubt. The special prosecutor [Angela Corey] had in her possession photographs that would definitely show a judge that this was not an appropriate case for second-degree murder. She deliberately withheld and suppressed those photographs, refused to show them to the judge, got the judge to rule erroneously that this was a second-degree murder case. That violated a whole range of ethical, professional, and legal obligations that prosecutors have. Moreover, they withheld other evidence in the course of the pretrial and trial proceedings, as has been documented by the defense team. Angela Corey is basically a prosecutorial tyrant, and well known for that in Florida.

Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor, author, and famed appellate attorney, July 2013