Persuasive Speech in the Case of George Zimmerman vs The State of Florida Arielle C.

Knight On the evening of February 26th 2012, a 17-year-old black boy made his way home from the corner market. It was late and dark and the boy, Trayvon Martin, was certainly out of place in the gated Twin Lakes housing complex. As he made his way through the dark back to his fathers home, Martin caught the attention of George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, tasked with patrolling the streets that night. Zimmerman began to observe the boy from afar, concerned by his suspicious presenceMartin donned a dark hoodie. Zimmermans concern prompted him first to call the police and eventually to get out of his car and pursue the boy himself, finally confronting him. It is alleged that the two engaged in a physical altercation, Zimmerman armed with a 9-mm handgun and Martin armed with a bag of skittles and a large can of ice-tea. When it was over, the 17-year old was dead. In July 2013 a Florida state court found 30-year old George Zimmerman not guilty of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin on the basis of self-defense. This highly controversial and racially charged case gained national media attention and hit the nerve of complex issues in American society. Supporters of Martin argued that George Zimmerman racially profiled Martin. They claim that the fact of Martin blackness made him immediately suspicious in George Zimmermans eyes. Those vying for Zimmerman argued that he was well within his right to bear arms and protect his community against a perceived threat. Media portrayals of the trial showed support for both individuals divided along racial and political lines. In this paper I will make use of two dominant theories of persuasive speech Lakoffs framing and Aristotles three pisteisin order to examine their role in assigning guilt and innocence, credibility and doubt in the case of George Zimmerman vs. the state of Florida. My inquiries are an attempt at understanding the impact of deeply rooted socio-historical and cultural cues on these persuasive speech techniques. I argue that in the case of Georoge Zimmerman vs. the state of Florida, these persuasive techniques served to refocus the trial on Trayvon Martins guilt rather than George Zimmermans innocence, revealing in the process established social anxieties and pathologies. In order to do this I will focus on two elements of the case, first the framing of innocence and guilt in portrayals of Trayvon Martin. Second, I will focus on the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, the last person to speak with Martin the night he was killed and the star witness in the case. For the scope of this paper, I will not devote much attention to George Zimmerman, as I will show that the aforementioned persuasive techniques are of equal importance in determining the results of this trial. I will instead focus on interrogating the statement of one writer who astutely wrote, Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.1 My analysis will focus primarily on a combination of courtroom testimony, news media coverage of the case, and social media commentary from both the blogosphere and Twitter. As my analysis focuses on a number of textual sources rather than a set of speeches, I will place these sources in dialogue with one another in an attempt to show that persuasive speech techniques trigger culturally informed responses.

https://twitter.com/reetamac/status/355716480404430849

Framing Innocence and Guilt Lakoff asserts that effective frames build upon deeply held moral belief systems that constitute our view of the world. He argues that essentially human beings construct all meaning through these so-called deep frames (Lakoff, 2006). According to Lakoff, these frames structure how groups of people come to understand complex issues from one perspective vs another. His theory explains why, for example certain issues are viewed positively, such as tax relief, or negatively like Obamacare. While Lakoffs work focuses mainly on political issue framing, I extrapolate his theories to look at how the American justice systems, media and society writ large ascribe guilt and innocence through the use of deeply engrained racial frames. Evidence of the effectiveness of these frames is visible not only in the verdict of the George Zimmerman trial, but even in the language used to talk about the case in mainstream media. A brief analysis of major news coverage during the height of the trial reveals that the media referred to the case almost interchangeably as the Trayvon Martin trial, or the Geroge Zimmerman trial. It is almost as if in the public imaginary both individuals are on trial, though only one is physically present. This is result of the effective use of framing to focus the narrative squarely on proving or disproving Trayvon Martins guilt rather than George Zimmermans innocence. Further evidence of this can be visible in the defenses attempts to call into question Trayvon Martins moral character, depicting him as a wayward youth looking for trouble. Martins moral character played a prominent role in the media coverage of the case in a way that Zimmermans did not. This was achieved through the evocation of the contemporary surface frame of juvenile delinquent and that of the black brute, a deep frame dating back to nineteenth century post-slavery era. In a statement to CNN, Tracy Martin, the mother of the victim asserted, "I think it's wrong that we attack the victim,"[]"Our first priority shouldn't be to assassinate the character of the victims and make dead children seem as though they're the perpetrator."2 Tracy Martin spoke out as the grieving mother to a slain child and her words worked not only to counter attacks on her sons character, but also to reaffirm that indeed Trayvon Martin was, both a victim, and a child. At only 17 he was still legally a minor at the time of his death. While these facts may seem obvious to casual observers, Tracy Martin and supporters were in fact engaged in a battle of representation. On one side, they worked to frame Trayvon Martin as an innocent child. They also attempted to create an image of Martin as every African-American child with the compelling hoodies up campaign in which protestors donning black hoodies proclaimed, I am Trayvon Martin. On the other hand, the defense and much of the mainstream media depicted Martin not as a child or victim, but a delinquent with a history of disruptive behavior. Media outlets reported that at the time of his death Martin had been suspended from school after traces of marijuana were found in his backpack. Other outlets released incriminating photos in which the 17 year old is pictured with a gun and text messages where he talks about fighting and smoking marijuana. While some of this evidence was eventually deemed inadmissible in the court, it effectively called into question Martins moral innocence and mainstream media outlets and blogs soon began reporting headlines like:
2

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/19/justice/florida-trayvon-martin

Trayvon Martin was apparently a 17 year old undisciplined punk thug, drug dealing, thief and wannabe gangsta(The Conservative Treehouse, 27, March 2012) New Evidence: Trayvon Martin Had Drugs in His System(Time.com , 27, May 2012 ) Did Marijuana Use Make Trayvon Martin Violent? (Huffington Post, 10, July, 2013 ) I have chosen this selection of headlines because they show the chronological progression of media perceptions of Martin from a range of media outlets. Two months before toxicology results confirmed Martins marijuana use, headlines from the blogosphere like the first one were already making use of the juvenile delinquent surface frame. While more reliable news media showed more restraint in the language used to talk about Martin, the second headline still relies on the juvenile delinquent surface frame in that it is vague enough to let readers draw their own conclusions about the details of this so-called drug use. One must read two paragraphs into the article to discover that the drug was THC, a chemical trace of marijuana, with no clinically proven connection to violent behavior. The frame has been set in place. The third headline two months later show that attitudes and opinions link Martins drug use to violence. These headlines are effective not only in weakening Martins moral character, but also in shifting the burden of proof from the defense to the prosecution. The narrative of the trial begins to veer from proving if George Zimmerman acted in an illegal and violent way the night of Martins death, to disproving the idea that Martin was the violent one. So why was the frame of the innocent child ultimately trumped by that of juvenile delinquent? Primarily because the frame of the innocent child still refers back to the juvenile delinquent frame in that it seeks to counter the frame instead of breaking with it completely. Why should the family seek to prove that their child was morally innocent? What does this fact have to do with the circumstances surrounding his death? These are the questions that the prosecution should have been asking if they had an understanding of how frames work. Instead, the juvenile delinquent frame was so effective in casting doubt upon Trayvons character that a jury of six women, nearly all mothers, identified more easily with George Zimmerman, a killer, than Trayvon Martin. The verdict shows that these women were ultimately more convinced by Martins guilt rather than his innocence. By working to undermine the frame of moral innocence, the defense moved closer to convinving the jury that perhaps it was Trayvon Martin who was the aggressor. The juvenile delinquent frame created this opportunity. This frame helped the jury and public to understand how Zimmerman must have perceived a young African-American boy walking alone at night in a wealthy neighborhood, because the frame has taught them that such a boy in such a scene must surely be guilty or soon to be guilty of a crime. The juvenile delinquent surface frame is directly related to other surface frames embodied by phrases like walking while black, a well-rehearsed idiom used to talk about black people and particularly black men and the presumption of guilt. Walking while black refers to the idea that one can be deemed suspicious or even guilty of a crime simply for being black (Lang, 2003). Attacks on Martins character may seem like an obvious move for a prosecution looking to cast doubt around the events of that night, and indeed they

were effective in doing so. I would argue that the photos and texts showing Martins delinquency helped in shattering his innocence, but ultimately the frame of juvenile delinquent was more convincing due to the pervasiveness of deep frames. The frame of the innocent child, while compelling, had no deep frame to support it, while the juvenile delinquent frame rests at the heart of American racial anxieties about violence and black people (and black men in particular). The term black brute comes from the nineteenth century post-civil war era in America and was represented visually in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The image of the black brute showed a violent, stupid and lustful caricature of the black man. According to theories founded on Darwins theories of evolution, the black man was an under evolved brute prone to violent unpredictable outbursts and was an object of abject fear for white society and particularly white women (Feagin, 2013). Fast forward 150 years and the deep racial frames still inform race relations today. In his work, The White Racial Frame, social theorist Joe Feagin asserts that anti-black racial frames are deeply ingrained in the cognitive and metaphorical values that guide everyday life and perceptions in America (Feagin, 2013). In a contemporary study on racial frames in America, Feagin shows that at an early age white children as young as three years old have already unconsciously assumed anti-black inclinations that do not decrease in white adults or older children. Feagin connects these contemporary racial frames to historical frames founded on fear and prejudice. In the case of Trayvon Martin the juvenile delinquent frame relied on the black brute deep frame to convince a jury of five white women of Trayvons indisputable guilt, in spite of warnings from the police dispatcher for Zimmerman to stay in his vehicle, in spite of the fact that it was Zimmerman who pursed Trayvon Martin in the dark, armed with a 9-mm handgun, in spite of the fact that Trayvon Martin held only a bag of candy and an iced tea and even, in spite of the fact that it was Trayvon Martin who ended up dead. Rachel Jeantel-Credibility and Doubt The defense was effective in using frames to cast Trayvon Martin as the guilty party in his own murder. Without Martin there to speak for himself, the work of creating his identity and persona for the court and jury mostly rested in the abstract work of framing, however, the prosecution had an asset that that not many murder trials can claim, a witness who was on the phone with Martin as he walked home the night of his murder and minutes before his death. Rachel Jeantel was considered the star witness and a key asset in the trial, but after three days of wrenching testimony it was unclear whether Jeantels testimony had done more harm than good. In the case of Jeantels speech another set of persuasive speech techniques are useful in contextualizing her testimony and its reception by the courts, media and public. According to Aristotle, rhetoric or the art of persuasion relies on three interacting elements. Logos, which he understood as the content of the speech itself, ethos, or the moral character of the speaker, and pathos, the affect of the speech on hearer. Many would argue that of these three elements, ethos is the most influential. So what was Rachel Jeantels Ethos and more importantly what does her ethos say about Trayvon Martin? What preexisting assumptions/prejudices were in play before she opened her mouth and after?

To begin with, Jeantel is a large, dark-skinned young woman. She is the child of Haitian immigrants and she has grown up in the urban south. She also has attitude, lots of attitude. Her testimony was rife with head-rolls, cut-eyes and other culturally informed expressions of distress, anger and discomfort that led to descriptions of her as hostile, aggressive and difficult.3 Mary Elizabeth Warren of Salon writes, Jeantel does not fit the comfortable image of the grieving girlThere is confusion over whether or not she was Martins girlfriend, which eradicates her chances of being depicted as a devastated young quasi-widow. Warren makes the case for the importance of courtroom ethos, when she asserts that Jeantel falls outside of boundaries of what is expected of her. Warren recognizes the preexisting tropes that individuals passing through the justice system must inhabit in order to successfully navigate. Jeantel fails in a number of ways to comply with these tropes, which spell out how a grieving young friend, or girlfriend should behave within the courtroom ethos. Her failure to appear sufficiently compliant, sufficiently polished and sufficiently acquiescent to the defense attorney mark her as foreign, unintelligible and untrustworthy in the eyes of the jury. If Jeantels physical appearance and body language work to distance her from the sympathy of the jury, the defense creates a situation in which her language is also a point of contention. Jeantels speech represents a further trespass against courtroom ethos. She is trilingual; she speaks Haitian Creole, and Spanish and English. In this exchange with defense attorney Don West, West asks:
Can you understand English? Jeantel: "I don't understand you, I do understand English," West: "When someone speaks to you in English, do you believe you have any difficulty understanding it because it wasn't your first language?" Jeantel: "I understand English really well,"4

During the course of the three-day testimony, much was made of Jeantels language. We are made to wonder if the defense attorney really could not understand her English or if his multiple requests for her to repeat her words were an attempt to depict her as confused and unintelligent. This exchange was but one example of the miscommunication. It is clear that Jeantel understands English, but has difficulty understanding the questions that West poses. Instead of addressing the content of what he has asked her, West instead uses the opportunity to challenge Jeantels comprehension of the English language in general. In terms of the effect of her speech on her ethos and ultimately her credibility, the defense is effective in casting doubt on her character based on her manner of speaking, so much so that media and audience and jury begin to discredit the content of the words that she speaks. In an article on rhetoric and culture, Kevin Brown writes of media reactions to Rachel Jeantels speech:
It is the speaker who lacks the intelligence, skill, capital, and credibility to be effective. Not that the listener has either failed or
3

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/29/196709577/what-blank-folks-dont-understand-aboutrachel-jeantel
4

http://enculturation.gmu.edu/rachel-jeantel

refused to listen to what was being said. A person subject to deficit lacks the polish, the sense of sophistication that would garner respectability in the mainstream.5

Brown points to an important linguistic theory of deficiency. In Jeantels case, her use of black speech marks her as linguistically deficient rather than multilingual. Based on long established models of linguistic deficiency, Jeantel is seen as failing to make herself understood. To say that Jeantel is a native speaker would be more than accurate, she speaks a regional variant of African-American vernacular English or black speech however, commonly held associations of black speech are based on early linguistic theories of cognitive deficiency. This theory asserted that black speech was characterized by intellectual indolence or laziness, mental and physical. American linguists like J. Bennett and others (Smitherman-Donaldson, 1988) attributed these deficiencies in black speech to the cognitive inability of African descended people to master the intricacies and nuance of the English language leading to the shortening/ modification of difficult words and syllables and the resulting African-American vernacular English. These theories were later replaced by more progressive understanding of black speech as a complex dialect with its own ever-evolving grammatical structures and patterns, yet still today African-American vernacular English, like other regional English variations such as cockney and R.P. are linked to specific socio-cultural contexts (Gilyard, 2011, Brown, 2013). The effect of Jeantels speech is that she is treated more like a suspect than a witness. Because the court cannot understand her both linguistically and culturally, she raises suspicion about both herself, the story that she tells and Trayvon Martin. As the last living person to speak with Martin, Jeantel has the power of association. How the court sees her is a reflection of how they will see Martin. If the jury perceives Jeantel as hardened and defensive it reflects poorly on Martins innocence, since courtroom ethos tell us that the innocent should not be defensive. Because she is not, as journalist Mary Williams put it, thin and blond and demure, Jeantel does not win the sympathy or trust of the media and we assume neither that of her nearly all white jury. The frames established by the defense of Trayvon Martin as suspects are only supported by Jeantels ethos. In this paper I have focused primarily on the use of persuasive techniques in framing Trayvon Martins guilt. I have shown that persuasive techniques like framing and ethos are mediated by social-historical and cultural factors which serve to highlight distort or and control narratives about people and events. Because much of what informed media and courtroom perceptions of Trayvon Martin and Rachel Jeantel were shaped by non-verbal elements of both speech and character, elements, which would be difficult to manipulate in a written speech. I have chosen to write a short speech from the perspective of Trayvon Martins attorny as he attempts to recreate the scene the night of his death. The most contested part of the trial was the issues of self-defense. The defense sought to prove that George Zimmerman was the victim of Trayvon Martins violence that night. This for me was the most troubling aspect of the case and the greatest failure of the prosecution in controlling the narrative and framing of the trial. If they had been able to successfully argue the point of self-defense from Trayvon Martins perspective
5

http://enculturation.gmu.edu/rachel-jeantel

they could have avoided arguing the case on the basis of Trayvons guilt or innocence. My speech will attempt to refocus the jury on the issues of self-defense from Trayvon Martins perspective. By avoiding the entire debate of Trayvons innocence or guilt and instead flipping the defenses argument, the speech intends to wrest the image of Trayvon from the frames established during the course of the trial. Speech-writing Exercise Good afternoon ladies of the jury. I stand here before you today to speaking on behalf of my client who tragically could not be here today to speak for himself. Over the course of this trial we will try to get an understanding of how and why my clients life was cut short on that February night when he encountered Mr. George Zimmerman in the Twin Oaks housing complex. We dont know the details of that night, only Trayvon and George Zimmerman know exactly what happened in moments leading up to his death but I dont think anyone here could argue that Trayvon set out that night looking for trouble as he headed to the local corner store to get some late night snacks. Regardless of what the defense will try and get you to believe about Trayvon as a person, I will set out to prove that he was a normal teenaged boy. I will set out to prove that Trayvons reaction to George Zimmerman that night was a logical reaction for someone in his position. Let us begin by imagining that the defense is correct in their argument that George Zimmerman fought for his life that night. Let us imagine that indeed both Zimmerman and Trayvon fought for their lives that night, because I believe that they did. I will set out to show you that Trayvon acted in the way any person would have if they were being stalked like prey in an unfamiliar neighborhood late at night. I beg you to remember one of the most basic rules of human and animal nature, when humans and animals are stalked, they will defend themselves. I beg the jury to remember that Trayvon had committed no crime that night as he walked home, no crime other than being a bored teenaged boy looking to escape the house for a few minutes. The defense will try and get you to believe that it was my client who precipitated the violence that night and George Zimmerman who defended himself. I will ask you to put yourself in Trayvons shoes. In Trayvons eyes George Zimmerman was the suspicious one. It was Zimmerman who watched creepily from his car that night as Trayvon walked home and it was Zimmerman who finally got out of his car to pursue Martin in the dark. I want you to picture Trayvon, I want you to really picture him. Do not try and imagine Trayvon as a hardened, drugsmoking delinquent because that isnt accurate. I dont even want you to imagine a nave young boy comfortable and safe in his gated Twin Oaks neighborhood, that was not Trayvon either. Trayvon was a normal 17-year old boy from the urban south. He was from Maimi, Florida, one of Americas most dangerous cities. He was child, but he was also savvy. He had been raised in environment that required him to perceive threats. He had been raised in environment where he learned to survive. This is Trayvon Martin. Now picture him, better yet, try and imagine that you are him. You are walking. It is dark and rainy and you are in an unfamiliar place. You walk slowly, bored from being locked up at home all day. This neighborhood isnt like yours; there is nowhere to go except the corner store. You walk slowly and aimlessly in the direction of your fathers home, you are not in a rush. You talk to your friend on the phone absentmindedly, looking about for something to do or see. The suburban landscape

is a predictable one, identical house with darkened windowspeople go to sleep early in the suburbs. You find nothing entertaining, but out of the corner of your eye you notice a truck across the street. It is stopped but the engine is running and there appears a man in the front seat. You cant quite make it out in the darkness but you can feel him watching you. You tell your friend you think someone is watching you and you feel the hairs on your arm prickle as the mans eyes scan you in the dark. You dont feel afraid per say, you are after all from a much bigger and more dangerous city, but you do feel out of your element. These are not your streets and youve heard that freaky stuff happens in these rich neighborhoods. You feel alert. If the man tries to do something you wont be taken by surprise you are smarter than that We dont know what happened that night after George Zimmerman decided to get out of his car and follow Trayvon Martin. We only know that Trayvon did not approach Zimmermans car looking for trouble that night, he did not run up and assault Zimmerman while he sat watching. We will prove that the defenses argument of selfdefense were rendered illegitimate the moment that Zimmerman stepped out of the car in pursuit of Martin. We will build the case around the basic idea that Zimmerman turned Trayvon into prey that night when he decided to follow him and that Trayvon did the only thing any of us would have done. He fought.

Books Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counterframing. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Gilyard, Keith. True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy.New York: Routledge, 2011. Heumann, Milton, and Lance Cassak. Good Cop, Bad Cop: Racial Profiling and Competing Views of Justice. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Print.
Lakoff, George. Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision : A Progressive's Handbook. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.

Articles Brown, Kevin. "Rhetoric and the Stoning of Rachel Jeantel." Enculturation: Rhetoric, Writing and Culture (2013): 1-6. Print. Williams, Mary E. "The Smearing of Rachel Jeantel." Editorial. Salon. Salon Media Group, 27 June 2013. Web. <http://www.salon.com/2013/06/27/the_smearing_of_rachel_jeantel/>. Smitherman, Geneva, and Teun Adrianus Van Dijk. Discourse and Discrimination. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. Web. Hutchinson, Earl O. "Did Marijuana Use Make Trayvon Martin Violent? (Huffington Post, 10, July, 2013 )." Huffington Post: The Blog. HPMG News, 10 July 2013. Web. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/trayvon-martinviolent_b_3567568.html>.