The Sarah Palin Defense Strategy
George Zimmerman’s lawyer is using social media like a pro.
George Zimmerman, charged with second-degree murder for the killing of Trayvon Martin, is shutting down his old social media accounts. (Not helpful: The 2005 MySpace page where he wrote “I dont miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft ass wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars.”) Zimmerman isn’t going dark online, however. Instead, his defense lawyer, Mark O’Mara, started up a new Web page for his client this week, with Facebook and Twitter accounts to go with it.
O’Mara noticed that Zimmerman had raised $204,000 from a website he started in April, and the new page will raise money, too. More interestingly, O’Mara said that social media will be his tool for responding quickly and efficiently to “misinformation” about his client and the case. If his strategy works, O’Mara will be the Sarah Palin of defense lawyers: The guy who changed the legal publicity game via the Twitter and Facebook blast.
What differentiates O’Mara from the politicians, though, is that lawyers have an uneasy relationship with publicity in general and pretrial publicity in particular. High-profile attorneys, of course, use the press. But the rules for the bar prevent them from making public statements that are likely to prejudice a legal proceeding. What does that mean? The pat answer is that lawyers aren’t supposed to taint the jury pool by trying a case in public before they do it in the courtroom.
In cases like Zimmerman’s, though, the media will serve up endless coverage whether O’Mara stays silent or goes on TV every day. (The prosecutor in the case announced the charges against Zimmerman in a nationally televised press conference while the screen behind her flashed adorable pictures from Trayvon Martin’s childhood.) The defense is responding to the coverage, not driving it. O’Mara gets this. He used the new website to put out a statement about the 2005 MySpace page when that story broke, instead of calling a press conference or talking to a reporter. This is the part that’s Palin-esque. As ethics guru and New York University law professor Stephen Gillers puts it, “Before the Web, defense lawyers played whack a
mole trying to counter not only the adverse publicity leaked by law enforcement (not necessarily the prosecutor), but the stories reporters find on their own.” O’Mara even uses social media to beat back the criticism of his use of social media. When @roblesherald tweeted this week, “O'Mara hints that if Crump criticizes #Zimmerman's Myspace, Trayvon's tweets will be fair game,” referring to Martin’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, O’Mara tweeted back “ONLY in court. Not publicly.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/05/george_zimmerman_s_social_media_strategy_.html
