https://youtube.com/watch?v=N_jq_7Q876o
Testifying Tuesday for the prosecution, Valerie Rao, a medical examiner, provided analysis of the injuries George Zimmerman received on the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Rao deemed the injuries “insignificant” and said that they were not life threatening in any way. “He has no loss of consciousness whatsoever,” said Rao “he didn’t have to go to a hospital, he went to a clinic.”
Rao discussed the injuries to the back of Zimmerman’s head and the injuries on his nose and forehead. Zimmerman told police that Martin slammed his head onto the cement sidewalk several times and punched him in the face dozens of times. Rao’s medical analysis suggested that this estimate was not likely.
Prosecutor John Guy asked if Zimmerman’s injuries were consistent with having his head slammed into concrete a single time and being punched only once. Rao said that the injuries on the face can be explained by a single blow to the face, but are unlikely the result of numerous strong beatings.
“If he was beaten repeatedly but with no resulting trauma on the face,” then it is possible Zimmerman was beaten multiple times, said Rao, but in that case the strikes must have been weak.
Mark O’Mara, a defense attorney, picked up on these answers in the cross examination, clarifying that it is possible for Zimmerman to have been beaten repeatedly, so long as those strikes were not individually serious.
Although the defense seems to concede that Zimmerman’s injuries were not themselves particularly severe, defense attorney Mark O’Mara argued yesterday that Zimmerman does not need to have received life threatening injuries in order to justify the use of deadly force.