SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? Past police dispatcher calls made by George Zimmerman should be presented to jurors at his second-degree murder trial since they show his state of mind and provide context to his fatal encounter with 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a prosecutor argued Tuesday.
Prosecutor Richard Mantei told a Florida judge the five calls are central to the prosecution's argument that Zimmerman committed second-degree murder since it shows his growing ill will at people he viewed as suspicious who were walking through his neighborhood. In each of the calls, which were played for Judge Debra Nelson with the jurors out of the courtroom, Zimmerman described the suspicious characters as black males.
The calls made in the six months before Zimmerman fatally shot Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, reflect the neighborhood watch volunteer's growing frustration with repeated break-ins at his gated community of townhomes and plays into the prosecution's theory that his view of Martin as a suspicious character was "the straw that broke the camel's back," Mantei said.
Defense attorney Mark O'Mara argued that the calls were irrelevant and that no previous incidents matter except the seven or eight minutes prior to when Zimmerman fired the deadly shot into Martin's chest.
"They're going to ask the jury to make a leap from a good, responsible, citizen behavior to seething behavior," O'Mara said of the prosecution's depiction of Zimmerman's actions.
Nelson said she would make a ruling after reviewing prior cases.
Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder for gunning down Martin as the black teenager, wearing a hoodie on a dark, rainy night, walked from a convenience store through the gated townhouse community where he was staying. Zimmerman is pleading not guilty, claiming self-defense.
The case took on racial dimensions after Martin's family claimed that Zimmerman had racially profiled the teen and that police were dragging their feet in bringing charges. Zimmerman, who identifies himself as Hispanic, has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race.
Prosecutors on Tuesday called the former coordinator of the Sanford Police Department's neighborhood watch program who testified how she had worked with Zimmerman to set up a watch program in his neighborhood, The Retreat at Twin Lakes.
When asked by prosecutor John Guy if neighborhood watch participants should either follow or engage with suspicious people, she answered "no."
"They are the eyes and ears of law enforcement," said Wendy Dorival, the Sanford Police manager. "They're not supposed to take matters into their own hands."
But Dorival said she was impressed with Zimmerman's professionalism and dedication to his community and asked him to join another program, Citizens on Patrol, which trained residents to patrol their neighborhoods. He declined.
"He seemed like he really wanted to make changes in his community, to make it better," Dorival said.
The prosecution began opening statements Monday in the long-awaited murder trial with shocking language, repeating obscenities Zimmerman uttered while talking to a police dispatcher moments before the deadly confrontation.
The defense opened with a knock-knock joke about the difficulty of picking a jury for a case that stirred nationwide debate over racial profiling, vigilantism and Florida's expansive laws on the use of deadly force.
Guy portrayed the then-neighborhood watch volunteer as a vigilante, saying, "Zimmerman thought it was his right to rid his neighborhood of anyone who did not belong."
Defense attorney Don West told jurors a different story: Martin sucker-punched Zimmerman and then pounded his head against the concrete sidewalk, and that's when Zimmerman opened fire.
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/prosecutors-want-admit-calls-zimmerman-trial-083739961.html
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The Drapers visit Don's childhood home.
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Microsoft has long resisted this move, but starting June 26 — the date the Windows 8.1 preview will ship — it will finally launch its own security bounty program. The company will offer bounties up to $100,000 for “truly novel exploitation techniques” that expose security issues in Windows 8.1 Preview. It will also pay up to $11,000 for Internet Explorer 11 vulnerabilities and up to $50,000 for “defensive ideas that accompany a qualifying Mitigation Bypass submission.” Microsoft says it made this shift to bounty programs “in order to learn about these issues earlier and to increase the win-win between Microsoft?s customers and the security researcher community.” It’s worth noting that the IE 11 Preview program will only be open for 30 days after the launch of Windows 8.1 Preview. This makes sense, though. The IE 11 bounty, Microsoft says, is mostly meant to “fill a gap in the vulnerability marketplace to the benefit of researchers, Microsoft engineers and our customers.” Most existing bounty programs and white market vulnerability brokers like HP?s Tipping Point Zero Day Initiative and iDEFENSE?s Vulnerability Contributor Program also don’t offer bounties for beta software. The company acknowledges that it isn’t exactly the first vendor to offer this kind of program, though Katie Moussouris, a Senior Security Strategist at Microsoft Research, argues that the company has long sponsored hacker conferences and awarded cash and prizes through other programs in the past. She also notes that Microsoft will likely announce a number of other ways to work with users and industry partners to discover security issues. Here is a full description of the three programs: Mitigation Bypass Bounty ? Microsoft will pay up to $100,000 USD for truly novel exploitation techniques against protections built into the latest version of our operating system (Windows 8.1 Preview). Learning about new exploitation techniques earlier helps Microsoft improve security by leaps, instead of one vulnerability at a time. This is an ongoing program and not tied to any event or contest. BlueHat Bonus for Defense ? Microsoft will pay up to $50,000 USD for defensive ideas that accompany a qualifying Mitigation Bypass Bounty submission. Doing so highlights our continued support of defense and provides a way for the research community to help protect over a billion computer systems worldwide from vulnerabilities that may not have even been discovered. IE11 Preview Bug Bounty ? Microsoft will pay up to $11,000 USD for critical![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 12-Jun-2013
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