On Tuesday, Florida prosecutors filed a perjury charge against the wife of George Zimmerman, the man accused of killing Trayvor Martin. The prosecutors submitted that Shellie Zimmerman lied to the court about the family’s finances during the hearing of George Zimmerman’s bond. Deputies from the office of the Seminole County Sheriff arrested Shellie Zimmerman at her home and took her to the same jail where her husband is being held. She was later released on a $1000 bond.
Earlier this month, George Zimmerman’s $150,000 bond was revoked and he was taken to jail after prosecutors alleged that the Zimmermans had misled the court about their finances.
Prosecutors alleged that the accused failed to properly bring to the notice of the court the more than $135,000 contributed by donors to help pay for his legal defense, and that the couple had also withheld a valid passport of George Zimmerman from the court.
On George Zimmerman’s April 20 hearing for setting his bond, the prosecutors allege that Shellie testified that the family had no money and she was unaware about how much was actually raised by the website that was collecting donations for her husband.
However, family credit union accounts showed that she had transferred more than $74,000 from her husband’s account to her own five days before the bond hearing, and transferred more than $85,500 from her account back to his account after George Zimmerman was released on bond.
George Zimmerman’s lawyers have acknowledged that Zimmerman hurt his credibility by claiming to be penniless and misleading the court about his financial status.
The whole affair is of course questionable since at all times the website raising donations for George Zimmerman, openly claimed that the money was being collected both for legal expenses as well as for personal expenses since George Zimmerman was cut off from any source of income. Contributors funded him knowing the truth. Zimmerman used the money to pay his bail. And the money was not his, nor belonged to his family, as he had openly declared the purpose for which the contributions would be used. His own declaration on the website made him a trustee for the money to be used for the purposes stated for which the contributions had been made. The whole world knew about the contributions, the court and the prosecutors did not.
This guy is going to get it anyhow in this election year, as the President has already put him through trial by media even before any proper evidence surfaced about the incident. If George Zimmerman goes free, political heavyweights would lose face, and vote banks can be disrupted. Of course, today, the election is more important than finding out the truth and having justice done, so some are fighting to have George Zimmerman convicted, and some are fighting to have him set free.
Harassing the wife, when you can’t get the man, seems the strategy of those struggling to have George Zimmerman convicted.
A silent contribution of more than $135,000 from donors across the country states the stand of a part of the public on the issue.