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cloudboy -> RE: Zimmerman Threads -- Quite Complaining to the Mods (7/5/2013 2:20:51 PM)
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T. Martin's mother and older brother testified today that the voice screaming for help on the 911 call was Tayvon.
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See below for background:
Zimmerman Judge Bars Testimony On 911 Call
By CARA BUCKLEY
SANFORD, Fla. — The screams are clearly coming from a distraught male, whose repeated cries for help end abruptly with a gunshot. What is not clear from a recording of a 911 call, however, is the identity of the screamer: George Zimmerman, the volunteer community watchman, or Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old he killed that night.
While jurors in Mr. Zimmerman’s second-degree-murder trial, in which opening statements are scheduled for Monday, may get to hear the recording in court, they will not hear the opinions of two audio experts for the prosecution about who the screamer is, or is not. One concluded that the voice was not Mr. Zimmerman’s; the other said it was very likely Mr. Martin’s.
In an order released on Saturday, the judge in the case, Debra S. Nelson, excluded their testimony. She said the science supporting the experts’ analyses “is not as widely accepted at this time” as the more established methods relied on by defense witnesses who said it was impossible to conclude whose voice it was.
A neighbor made the 911 call on Feb. 26, 2012, during the fatal encounter between Mr. Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, and Mr. Martin, who was black and was returning to a home where he was staying after buying snacks. Mr. Zimmerman claimed self-defense, and was not arrested for six weeks, setting off protests nationwide.
The opinions of the state experts were crucial to the prosecution’s case because they cast doubt on Mr. Zimmerman’s insistence that he had fired his gun in self-defense. The defense said that the testimony would only confuse the jurors, and that the science behind the prosecution experts’ techniques was faulty.
“It’s not founded in science anywhere,” Don West, one of Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyers, said of the techniques used by one of the experts for the state. “He’s making it up.”
In days of pretrial hearings, prosecution lawyers pushed hard for the inclusion of their experts.
One, Thomas J. Owen, a forensic audio consultant, compared the 911 recording with clips of Mr. Zimmerman’s speaking voice and concluded that it was not the defendant who was screaming. The second expert, Alan Reich, a forensic acoustics consultant, said that the screams had most likely come from Mr. Martin, and that he could also discern the teenager pleading, “I’m begging you.”
But four experts presented by Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyers, including one expert from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said it was impossible to determine who was screaming because of the recording’s limited quality and brevity. They also sharply questioned the methods used by both of the prosecution’s experts.
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