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Excerpts Of Interview With Juror B-37; Legal Panel

Aired July 16, 2013 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "AC 360": The prosecution tried to paint George Zimmerman as a "wanna-be" cop, overeager. Did you buy that?

JUROR B-37: I think he's over eager to help people. Like the lady who got broken in and robbed while her baby and her were upstairs, he came over and he offered her a lock for her sliding glass door.

He offered her his phone number, his wife's phone number. He told her that he -- that she could come over if she felt stressed or she needed anybody, come over to their house, sit down, have dinner.

Not anybody -- I mean, you have to have a heart to do that and care to help people.

COOPER: So you didn't find it creepy that -- you didn't find it a negative that -- you didn't buy the prosecution when they kind of said he was a "wanna-be" cop?

JUROR B-37: No, I didn't at all.

COOPER: Is George Zimmerman somebody you would like to have on a neighborhood watch in your community?

JUROR B-37: If he didn't go too far. I mean, you can always go too far. He just didn't stop at the limitations that he should have stopped at.

COOPER: So I don't -- is that a yes or -- that you -- if he didn't go too far. Is he somebody prone, you think, to going too far? Is he somebody that you would feel comfortable --

JUROR B-37: I think he was frustrated. I think he was frustrated with the whole situation in the neighborhood, with the break-ins and robberies and they actually arrested somebody not that long ago.

I just -- I mean, I would feel comfortable having George but I think he's learned a good lesson.

COOPER: So you would feel comfortable having him now because you think he's learned a lesson from all of this?

JUROR B-37: Exactly. I think he just didn't know when to stop. He was frustrated and things just got out of hand. COOPER: People have now remarked subsequently that he gets his gun back and there's some people said the idea that he can have a gun worries them.

Does that worry you?

JUROR B-37: That doesn't worry me. I think he'd be more responsible than anybody else on this planet right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Next to the question so many of you want answered. How did the jury, how did these six women ultimately reach its not guilty verdict?

Her answer next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: How exactly did this jury come to a final decision? Anderson Cooper continues his interview with Juror B-37.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: If we can, let's talk about how you reached your verdict. When the closing argument was done, rebuttal was done, you go to that jury room. What happened?

JUROR B-37: Well, the first day we went in we were trying to get ourselves organized because there's no instructions on what you do, how you do it, and when you do it.

So we all decided we'd -- we nominated a foreman so she could have the voice and kind of run the show, if anybody gets -- you know, so everybody's not talking over everybody.

If somebody starts talking, somebody else starts talking, and then she would say, you know, stop -- we've got to -- one person at a time. We've got to do this.

And so the first day we got all of the evidence on the tables and on the walls, then we asked for an inventory because it was just too time consuming looking for evidence when it was in no order whatsoever.

COOPER: Did you take an initial vote to see where everybody was?

JUROR B-37: We did.

COOPER: So where was everybody? How was that first vote?

JUROR B-37: We had three not guilties, one second-degree murder and two manslaughters.

COOPER: So half the jury felt he was not guilty, two manslaughters and one second-degree?

JUROR B-37: Exactly.

COOPER: Do you want to say where you were on that?

JUROR B-37: I was not guilty.

COOPER: So going into it once the evidence -- all the evidence had been presented, you felt he was not guilty?

JUROR B-37: I did. I think the medical examiner could have done a better job by preserving Trayvon's evidence --

COOPER: You mean the state?

JUROR B-37: They should have bagged his hands. They should have dried his clothes. They should have done a lot of things they didn't do.

COOPER: Do you feel you know truly what happened?

JUROR B-37: I have a rendition of what I believe happened and I think it's probably as close as anybody could come to what happened. But nobody's going to know exactly what happened except for George.

COOPER: So you took that first vote. You saw basically jury split.

Half the jurors, including yourself thought not guilty, two people thought manslaughter, one person thought second degree murder had been proven?

How do you then go about deciding things?

JUROR B-37: We started looking at the evidence. We listened to all the tapes, two, three, four, five times.

COOPER: The 911 recordings?

JUROR B-37: The 911 recordings, then there's the reenactment tape. There were some tapes from previous 911 calls that George had made.

COOPER: The reenactment tape, that's the tape of George Zimmerman walking police through what he says happened?

JUROR B-37: Exactly. Exactly. We looked through pretty much everything. That's why it took us so long.

We were looking through the evidence and then at the end we just -- we got done and then we just started looking at the law, what exactly we could find and how we should vote for this case and the law became very confusing.

COOPER: Yes, tell me about that.

JUROR B-37: It became very confusing. We had stuff thrown at us. We had the second-degree murder charge, the manslaughter charge, then we had self-defense, "stand your ground," and I think there was one other one. But the manslaughter case, we actually had gotten it down to manslaughter because the second-degree wasn't at second-degree anymore.

COOPER: So the person who felt it was second-degree going into it, you had convinced them, OK, it's manslaughter?

JUROR B-37: Through going through the law. And then we had sent a question to the judge, and it was not a question that they could answer yes or no.

So they sent it back saying that if we could narrow it down to a question asking us if -- what exactly -- not what about the law and how to handle it, but if they could just have -- I guess -- I don't know.

COOPER: You sent a question out to the judge about manslaughter?

JUROR B-37: Yes.

COOPER: And about --

JUROR B-37: And what could be applied to the manslaughter. We were looking at the self-defense.

One of the girls said -- asked if you can put all the leading things into that one moment where he feels it's a matter of life or death to shoot this boy or if it was just at the heat of passion at that moment.

COOPER: So that juror wanted to know whether the things that had brought George Zimmerman to that place --

JUROR B-37: Exactly.

COOPER: -- not just in the minute or two before the shot actually went off --

JUROR B-37: Exactly.

COOPER: -- but earlier that day, even prior crime?

JUROR B-37: Not prior crime, just the situation leading to it, all the steps. As the ball got rolling, if all of that --

COOPER: From him spotting Trayvon Martin --

JUROR B-37: Exactly.

COOPER: -- following him, whether all of that could play a role in --

JUROR B-37: Determining the self-defense or not.

COOPER: Did you feel like you understood the instructions from the judge? Because they were very complex. I mean, reading them, they were tough to follow.

JUROR B-37: Right. And that's -- that was our problem. I mean, it was just so confusing what went 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, and 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 -- other place to go.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Coming up next, she describes to Anderson the moment all these jurors broke down in tears.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Take you back to the final piece of the interview. The mother of two grown children told Anderson Cooper she had no clue what she was getting into when she became part of this George Zimmerman trial.

I want to take you back to this conversation here with Anderson Cooper.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Whether he was right to get out of the vehicle, whether he was a "wanna-be" cop, whether he was overeager, none of that in the final analysis mattered.

What mattered was those seconds before the shot went off, did George Zimmerman fear for his life?

JUROR B-37: Exactly. That's exactly what happened.

COOPER: And you have no -- do you have any doubt that George Zimmerman feared for his life?

JUROR B-37: I have no doubt George feared for his life in the situation he was in at the time.

COOPER: How has this been for you? I mean, how was making that decision when you all realized, OK, the last holdout juror has decided. OK, manslaughter doesn't -- we can't hold George Zimmerman to manslaughter.

There's nothing we can really hold him to, not guilty. In that jury room, emotionally what was that like?

JUROR B-37: It was emotional to a point, but after we had put our vote in and the bailiff had taken our vote, that's when everybody started to cry.

COOPER: Tell me about that.

JUROR B-37: It was just hard thinking that somebody lost their life. There's nothing else that could be done about it. I mean, it's what happened, sad. It's a tragedy this happened, but it happened.

But I think both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into. I think both of them could have walked away. It just didn't happen.

COOPER: It's still emotional for you?

JUROR B-37: It is. It's very emotional.

COOPER: Can you explain the emotion?

JUROR B-37: It's just sad that we all had to come together and figure out what is going to happen to this man's life afterwards.

You find him not guilty, but you're responsible for that not guilty and all the people that want him guilty aren't going to have any closure.

COOPER: Do you feel sorry for Trayvon Martin?

JUROR B-37: I feel sorry for both of them. I feel sorry for Trayvon and the situation he was in and I feel sorry for George because of the situation he got himself in.

COOPER: Did you realize how big this trial had become?

JUROR B-37: I had no clue, no clue whatsoever.

COOPER: Did you realize there was this much attention on it?

JUROR B-37: It didn't to me because I didn't see it as a racial thing. I saw it as a murder case, as a second degree murder case.

It just -- it was just unbelievable that it had gotten so big and so political -- not really political, I don't want to say that, but so emotional for everybody involved.

And I never would have thought when we went over to the hotel to get all of our stuff from the hotel, we got to the hotel and the parking lot was just a regular parking lot.

By the time we came out, it looked like Disney World. There was media. There were police. There were -- and it really kind of started to sink in.

We went to get our stuff and then the state police showed up because they were going to be our escorts home.

COOPER: Are you scared now?

JUROR B-37: I'm not scared. I don't know how to say it.

COOPER: You clearly don't want people to see your face.

JUROR B-37: No. But I don't want anybody else around me to be affected by anyone else. I mean, I'm not really scared, but I want to be cautious, if that makes any sense.

COOPER: It's understandable.

JUROR B-37: Yes.

COOPER: But you want people to know -- why? Why do you want to -- why did you want to speak?

JUROR B-37: I want people to know that we put everything into everything to get this verdict. We didn't -- we didn't just go in there and say, we're going to come in here and just do guilty/not guilty. We thought about it for hours and cried over it afterwards. I don't think any of us could ever do anything like that ever again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Wow, what an interview.

Now that we have heard from this first juror here exclusively, Juror B-37, we'll talk to our legal experts.

What do they think of the cases? Are they won or lost even before the trial starts in jury selection? We'll discuss, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Juror B-37 is not finished. She will reveal much more tonight with Anderson on "AC 360," so tune in for that, but for all of you who've been watching in this last hour I want to bring in two of our legal minds, bring them back, criminal defense attorneys Darren Kavinoky and Tanya Miller.

And, Darren, let me begin with you because do you think that the defense won this case before it even began back during jury selection?

DARREN KAVINOKY, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Yeah, and by the way, Brooke, it's a little hurtful that you say you're going to bring in the legal minds, but you don't say they're great legal minds.

BALDWIN: The great. I salute you, my friends. Go.

KAVINOKY: Yeah, I think ultimately jury selection is the most important part of any case.

You can have the most compelling case in the world, but if you don't have an audience receptive to hearing it, you're not going to get anywhere.

And it's an insanely difficult task we ask jurors to take on and that was really highlighted in this interview, that we take people that, generally speaking, have no legal training because most of the time we weed out the lawyers, we give them no real discussion about legal principles, throw them back in the jury room to fend for themselves and figure it out, stuff that we spent years studying and still needing to refine.

It's a losing proposition on so many levels.

BALDWIN: Yeah, we heard her say to Anderson all the instructions were -- confusing was the word she used.

But I want to go back. I'm fascinated by the jury selection process.

And, Tanya, we were talking just in the commercial break, a lot of people are saying, look, these were five white women and one Hispanic woman, but really it's about the pool you are selecting or perhaps deselecting from, not just who you're picking.

TANYA MILLER, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Yeah, that's absolutely right, and we know from watching jury selection in this case that there were some African-Americans who made their way into the pool. They just did not make their way onto this jury.

But I think that this really highlights something that is really kind of critical. The juror said that she did not race as being involved in this case, and, of course, jurors make decisions about cases based on their life experiences. They filter the evidence in through their life experiences.

And so when this juror did not have any life experiences that mirrored Trayvon Martin's or Rachel Jeantel, for that matter, I think it became more difficult for her to identify with them.

And this question I've asked lots of people, and people have asked me on Twitter and on Facebook, if people think that race had nothing to do with this case, and we're talking about the jury right now, ask yourself, honestly, if this jury was made up of six African-American women, five of whom were mothers, do you think the result would have been different?

And if your answer to that is, yes, I do, then I think we have to ask ourselves why. And I think that that is probably one of the clearest indications that this case does have absolutely every to do with race.

BALDWIN: Darren, do you agree because a lot of other people are looking at the facts and they were saying this was self-defense period?

KAVINOKY: Without even getting into the facts, from a legal standpoint, the lawyers were not allowed to argue race as being a theory in the case, that this was criminal profiling that Zimmerman allegedly engaged in; it wasn't racial profiling.

And I think that's a critical point. Had it been racial profiling then race would have been a legitimate issue in the case.

I get how the case has surfaced all kind of racial issues, and I'm a huge proponent of having fierce, authentic conversations, but I don't see this case as being about race.

And personally I always saw Zimmerman as being an equal opportunity "butt-in-sky," and I could perhaps pick stronger words than that.

I don't personally necessarily believe that he was motivated by race in profiling Trayvon either.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, I want to get a break in. I'm also fascinated not just by these three jurors, including this one woman, who walked in the deliberations thinking not guilty.

There were three others who saw proven guilty, either murder in the second- degree or manslaughter. How did they change their minds?

Let's talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Quickly, Tanya Miller, first to you, how does a juror who walks into this deliberation room thinking guilty of second-degree murder change her mind to not guilty?

MILLER: I think they get beat down.

I think if they're back there and there are other jurors who are strong in their disposition and that juror who initially is thinking murder does not have the tools to really make case to the other jurors to persuade them over to her side, she just gets beat down.

BALDWIN: Darren, 20 seconds then we've got to go.

KAVINOKY: Yeah, group dynamics are a really tricky thing. And this is why during jury selection you'll often see one or both sides saying to the panel, what if it was all of them against you, if it was 11-to- one or five-to-one, could you be that strong soldier?

That's something that lawyers usually try and suss out during the selection process.

BALDWIN: Darren Kavinoky and Tanya Miller, my thanks to both of you.

Thank you for watching. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Now we head to Washington. "THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER" starts now.