ORLANDO, Fla. – The attorney for George Zimmerman, the man who was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, has called juror B29 a "model juror" after speaking out to the media.
Defense attorney Mark O'Mara said juror B29, who is going by her first name Maddy, said in an interview with ABC's Robin Roberts that Zimmerman "got away with murder." But O'Mara called the "big headline" being used from the interview an "inaccurate distillation of Juror B-29's statements," in a posting on his law blog on Friday.
O'Mara said the part of the interview in question is when Maddy says "for myself he's guilty, because the evidence show's he's guilty ... of killing Trayvon Martin. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can't say he's guilty."
"We acknowledge, and always have, that George killed Trayvon Martin," O'Mara wrote. "Over the last 15 months, we've heard from a lot of people who feel that anytime a life is lost at someone's hands, the person responsible is guilty of something."
But O'Mara said self-defense is one of the instances "under the law when homicide is justifiable." O'Mara continued, saying that it's not the juror's job to decide what a law should be, but to apply the facts at the trial to the laws they're told by a judge.
"Based on her statement, it seems Juror B-29 looked at the law, and whether or not she agreed with the law, she did her job and made her decision on a legal basis," O'Mara wrote. "This is the essence of what we seek in a juror: the ability to use one's common sense, apply the law to the facts, agree not to be swayed by sympathy or emotion, no matter how loudly it's argued by the prosecutors, and decide a lawful and fair verdict."
O'Mara also said "any juror that follows Juror B-29's process will deliver a fair and just verdict," adding that jurors aren't expected to be "heartless people," but to deliver a verdict based on the law and not their emotions.
Maddy is the second juror to speak about the high-profile case since the six-person, all-female jury acquitted Zimmerman earlier this month.
Watch Local 6 for more on this story.