“How Lawyer Got Nation Talking About Trayvon Martin” (Source: NPR.Org/April 5th, 2012)

The prosecutor investigating the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., has not yet decided if she will bring charges against the shooter, George Zimmerman.

It took several weeks for the Feb. 26 shooting to draw the nation’s attention — after Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Trayvon Martin’s family, launched a campaign to get the case before media and civil rights activists nationwide.

Two days after the shooting, the high-profile civil rights attorney started getting calls about the case. “My phone was buzzing,” Crump says.

But Crump, whose firm’s motto is “We Help David Fight Goliath,” initially didn’t think there would be any reason to take the case. When he heard Trayvon Martin was unarmed, he assumed the Sanford Police Department would make an arrest.

“A neighborhood watch volunteer with a 9 mm gun? And he kills your son, who’s an unarmed teenager? They’re going to arrest him,” he recalls telling those who approached him about the case.

But there was no arrest. So Crump and Trayvon’s parents began holding news conferences to tell their side of the story.

After the release of 911 recordings of the incident in March, Crump enlisted prominent civil rights activists, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, to the cause. The group organized rallies in Sanford and across the country.

“When attorney Crump called me I told him, ‘I don’t believe in drive-by activism,'” Sharpton told the crowd at a March rally in Sanford. “If [we’re] in it, [we’re] gonna be in it till we in and win.”

A Tried-And-True Strategy

Crump’s strategy for getting Trayvon Martin’s case into the public eye is similar to his approach to his first high-profile legal battle.

In 2006, he represented the family of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old boy who was beaten by prison guards and died in a Florida juvenile detention boot camp. Seven guards and a nurse were charged with murder, but found not guilty.

“You kill a dog, you go to jail. You kill a little black boy — nothing happens,” Crump said at the time.

Crump won a multimillion-dollar settlement for the teen’s family, and the case prompted such outrage that Florida ultimately closed all of its juvenile boot camps.
Crump was born in Lumberton, N.C., where his mother worked in a shoe factory and as a hotel maid. He says his grandmother helped to raise and teach him, subscribing to a newspaper so they could read it together.

Crump graduated from Florida State University law school and opened a firm in 1996 with his partner, Daryl Parks, in Tallahassee, Fla. The two started taking — and winning — personal injury cases.

Identifying With The Public

The two’s success is due in part to their strategy of enlisting public support.

LeRoy Pernell, dean of the Florida A&M University law school, says the Trayvon Martin case is about dispelling racial stereotypes — and pressuring state and federal authorities to act when the local police would not.

“A good attorney who wants to seek justice for their client needs to make the public understand that these are people just like them,” Pernell says. “[To] make the public identify with their client. And that’s what I think you see going on here.”

Outside the Florida A&M law school, some students say the story may have gone unnoticed if not for the public pressure.

“You want to say that it would have,” says student Aleisha Hodo. “But in all honesty, I don’t know that it would have gotten that far if it had not been advertised nationwide. … It’s a sad story that it may not have been publicized how it should have been.”

Crump continues to work with high-profile activists and has kept the Martin case in the news for weeks.

“If they’re trying to sweep it under the rug,” Crump says, “don’t let ’em.”

Crump says he wants to assure fairness in the criminal justice system. In this case, he says fairness means arresting and charging George Zimmerman — and letting both sides of the story come out in court.
(Source: Npr.Org)
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“Boot Camp Death-Caught on Tape” (Source: ABS News)

Everywhere you look there are cameras — from street corner surveillance to camcorders to cell phones. Many of these cameras are used to solve crimes, and when it comes to all the crimes caught on tape in 2006, the story of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson stands out. In Anderson’s case, a camera actually changed the course of justice, and gave voice to a victim who could no longer speak.

You may have seen the 30-minute silent surveillance tape that captured the last conscious moments of Martin’s life, surrounded by multiple sheriff’s guards and a nurse at the Panama City, Fla., juvenile boot camp where he had been sent after violating probation on charges that he took his grandmother’s car for a joy ride.

It’s a day juvenile boot camp supervisor Charles Helms had not spoken about in public until his interview with “20/20.” And he probably wouldn’t be talking at all if it weren’t for the grainy videotape that led to manslaughter charges for Helms, his staff, and the nurse who was there when Anderson died.

What those three cameras in the exercise yard of the boot camp recorded was the actual death of a teenager. His parents had hoped he would serve his time close to home and “come out and be a 14-year-old kid, but it did not turn out that way,” they said.

‘Standard Law Enforcement Techniques’?

In fact, just two hours after Anderson was processed at the boot camp, and just six laps into his first mandatory mile run, the incident that led to his death began. Helms says that Anderson refused to continue running and was deemed “uncooperative.”

“He said something to the effect…that ‘I’m not going to do this,’ or ‘I’ll do this tomorrow,'” says Helms. So, Helms and his men used what they claim were “standard law enforcement techniques.” They punched the boy in the arms to unclench his fists and kneed him in the thighs to make him collapse to the ground.

Helms says the officers were “trying to see if the kid was faking it, feigning illness, which happens quite often with a new kid coming into the program, because a lot of these kids are used to manipulating people and the system.”

Their final act was to break open ammonia tablets under Anderson’s nose a total of five times, hoping to shock him back to his feet and resume the exercise. Helms admits, “it’s very abrasive, if you’ve ever smelled ammonia while you tried to mop the floor or anything.”

The officers can be seen in the videotape holding their hands over Anderson’s mouth so he was forced to breath in the ammonia through the nose. But the boy was not reacting, and when Helms looked into his eyes, he says he saw something alarming that made any thoughts of Anderson faking disappear.

 

‘I Knew He Was Not Faking’

“I saw a grain of sand touch his eye and to me, that was a shock,” says Helms. “That’s an irritant in your eye, and he was not trying to wipe it out of his eye, he wasn’t blinking to try to get it out of his eye…I knew he was not faking and I said ‘That’s it. Call 911!'”

But the call came too late. Anderson never regained consciousness and died. His mother and father accused the sheriff’s deputies of killing their boy.

The local sheriff said on the day of the incident that Anderson simply collapsed during the run, and the local coroner ruled that the 14-year-old healthy teenager died of natural causes, blaming a sickle cell trait that made it difficult for Anderson to absorb oxygen.

The Tale of the Tape

Anderson’s parents claimed conspiracy, and the case might have all gone away — except for those surveillance cameras. Robert Anderson, the teenager’s father, said that “everything had been shoved right up under the rug. Martin Anderson been forgot about if it wouldn’t have been for this tape.”

The tape was eventually released, and after it was widely played on television and the internet, there was a public outcry, and a second autopsy followed. Prosecutors believe that this second autopsy showed that Anderson did indeed die because of the incident: He had been suffocated to death.

A special prosecutor was appointed and Helms and his crew were charged with manslaughter and gross negligence. When asked if he thought he would have been charged had the tape not existed, Helms says, “I don’t believe so.”

Helms says he did not neglect Anderson once he determined the boy was in trouble. “We did not disregard the fact that he was in trouble as soon as it was recognized. We changed hats and went to a rescue mode,” he says. “I feel terrible…this is a devastating thing. I can only imagine what it would be like to lose one of my children, one of my sons.”

The Andersons don’t have to imagine — they just have to grieve. Florida juvenile boot camps were closed after Anderson’s death and the use of ammonia capsules on juveniles is now banned in that state. And Helms, along with his deputies, will go on trial in 2007.

All because what they did was caught on tape.

(Source: ABC News.Go.Com)