Today there are several pretrial motions and proceedings scheduled.
But the big event is the judge’s ruling on the Frye hearing as to whether the State’s audio experts will be allowed to testify as to the screams on a 911 Tape. That ruling may be in a written order or given by the Judge from the bench. We will have a separate post when that ruling is made. [Update — Judge indicates she’s still working on the Frye Order and it will come later today or over the weekend.]
This weekend I will post a separate wrap-up discussing what happened and implications for the case moving forward. Thanks for joining us! Check out our Day 9 end-of-day wrap-up discussing the final jury selection and the insights the voir dire process suggests into each side’s trial strategy. To see all of Legal Insurrection’s recent coverage of State of Florida v. Zimmerman, take a look at our previous posts.
For more on this issue, see below the Twitter feed on this post.
[Hearing over, video feed removed]
[For live-stream video without commentary, see NBC live feed at bottom of this post.]
(My tweets can be identified as coming from @lawselfdefense.)
Tweets from @LegInsurrection/zimmerman-trial
LIVE-STREAM WITHOUT COMMENTARY FROM NBC
[Hearing over, video feed removed]
The Frye standard requires that an expert’s methodology be generally accepted, and not new or novel, within relevant scientific community. The court has been conducting a Frye hearing on Witness #11 911 screams over the last several weeks. The relevant portion of that recording can be heard here:
In addition to testimony by the State’s two witnesses, testimony was heard by four defense expert witnesses. We previously covered the testimony of both State and defense experts in detail:
Zimmerman Trial: Frye Hearing Continues with Prof. James L. Wayman.
Zimmerman Case: Experts Call State’s Scream Claims “Absurd” “Ridiculous” and “Imaginary Stuff”
Zimmerman Prosecution’s Voice Expert admits: “This is not really good evidence”
Zimmerman Case: Dr. Hirotaka Nakasone, FBI, and the low-quality 3-second audio file
This issue is important to the case because the State believes that it is Trayvon Martin screaming in the background of the Witness #11 911 recording, suggesting that Martin was a victim of an act of aggression committed by Zimmerman. If believed, such a finding could profoundly undermine Zimmerman’s claims of having killed Martin in self defense. The State’s experts claim to have at least tentatively identified the recorded scream as that of Martin.
The defense experts, on the other hand, have adamantly contested any claim that it is possible to identify a person from a scream made in extremis, nor to exclude such an identification on the same basis.
Update: Some rulings by the Court on what the prosecution can say in opening statements:
The State also acknowledged that Zimmerman was out of the car when the 911 operator told him that they didn’t need him to follow Trayvon Martin — which debunks a common accusation that if Zimmerman had not gotten out of the car when told not to do so, this would not have happened.
Judge also is working on the Frye decision, which will be released in writing probably later today:
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