Jackson Jambalaya

The media is starting to turn up the heat on George Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey.  Check out some of her other persecutions, oops, I meant prosecutions:

The Black Panthers protested over her trying a twelve year-old as an adult. A court ordered a new trial for a 65 year-old man with no criminal record she prosecuted.  His crime? He fired warning shots into the ground when he saw burglars breaking into his neighbor's home.  Her prosecution earned him 20 years of free government health care, room, and board. The court found the jury instructions misleading. The NAACP marched after she prosecuted a woman who fired a gun into the ceiling in self-defense against a husband who had a history of domestic violence. Kirsten Powers described the case in great detail in her latest column at The Daily Beast:

"I think social media is going to be the destruction of this country,” Corey complained to The Washington Post of the online agitation to free the 32-year-old African-American mother of three.]

No, it’s not Alexander’s abusive husband Rico Gray—who said in his deposition, “I got five baby mammas, and I [hit] every last one of them except for one”—that makes Corey see red. What really fries her bacon is the idea that anyone questions her overzealous prosecution of a battered woman acting in self-defense.

Like most domestic-abuse cases, this one is complicated. But the basic facts are these: In July 2010, after Rico Gray saw texts on his wife’s phone, he confronted her in a rage and threatened her. Alexander used her gun to fire a warning shot into the ceiling to scare off her husband. Nobody was hit, injured, or killed.

Alexander, who had no criminal record, was arrested. Contrast this with another Florida resident, George Zimmerman (also prosecuted by Corey), who had a record including an arrest for battery of a police officer and a restraining order for domestic abuse. He also had killed an unarmed teenager. Yet he wasn’t arrested until there was a national outcry and was later acquitted. Alexander—who did not kill or injure anyone—is in jail for 20 years.

Angela Corey’s prosecution was based in part on the premise that, as she told the Huffington Post, “[Alexander] was not in fear” at the time she fired the gun. This is a ludicrous thing to say. It’s worth reviewing in detail exactly what Gray said in his 2010 deposition to fully appreciate how disturbing Corey’s claim is.

Gray admitted in his deposition there had been “about four or five” incidents of domestic violence with Alexander prior to the shooting incident, including when he “pushed her back and she fell in the bathtub and she hit her head.” He said that she went to the hospital and he went to jail for that.

In describing his abuse of another woman he said, “She just wouldn’t shut up.” So he hit her in the mouth. Asked about another woman he had a relationship with, Gray said, “She got hit in the mouth, same thing.”

As for the day of the shooting incident, he says when he saw the texts on Alexander’s phone he pushed his way into the bathroom to confront her. He said in the deposition: “I was mad, you know. I said, what the f—- is this, and you know, I told her that ... if I can’t have you nobody going to have you … She ain’t shit.”

Gray said that when she tried to leave the bathroom, “I met her where the sink was, and she wanted to get by me and I wouldn’t let her by and I was backing up slow but I was using my body to pretty much contain her in that one area where I want her to be at. [S]he got the bathroom door closed and she locked it, so I were beating on it. [I] was there waiting for her to come out of the bathroom.”

“I was in a rage. I was in a rage, so I was saying a lot of things.” He said, “I beat on the door hard enough where it could have been broken open. [P]robably has some dents.” And: “I was mad, you know … I called her a whore and a bitch.”

“She was trying to get by and I was sitting there trying to make her talk to me. [T]he more she didn’t want to talk about it, the more I was not letting her by.” After she got out of the bathroom, “I was telling her, she ain’t going nowhere, she going to sit right here. [S]he was trying to get by … and I was telling her she not going nowhere.”

He was asked, “Did you ever tell her you knew people that would do your dirt?” Gray said, “Yeah. [I] ain’t going to lie. I been in the streets … I know a lot of people …” Asked if the purpose of “saying something like that was to let her know if she didn’t do what you wanted her to do that you could have hurt her or something?,” he answered, “That’s correct.”

He described her going to the garage, “but I knew that she couldn’t leave out the garage because the garage door was locked …” He reiterated, “I knew she couldn’t get out of the garage.”

“She came back through the doors and she had a gun [from her car]. And she said, ‘You need to leave.’ I told her, I ain’t leaving until you talk to me … and I started walking towards her and she shot in the air.”

Remember, Corey claims that Alexander was not scared at this point. Really. She also claims that Rico Gray lied in this deposition to protect Alexander. Because misogynist monsters always implicate themselves in crimes to protect women.

It’s amazing that Rico Gray can admit in excruciating detail in a deposition to violent attacks on multiple women and be a free man, but when one of those women tries to defend herself, that’s just a bridge too far for Angela Corey...." Column

Not enough for ya? National Review published a rather critical piece of the persecutin' prosecutor this week:

"Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty. When Ron Littlepage, a journalist for the Florida Times-Union, wrote a column criticizing her handling of the Christian Fernandez case — in which Corey chose to prosecute a twelve-year-old boy for first-degree murder, who wound up locked in solitary confinement in an adult jail prior to his court date — she “fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state-attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.”

And that was moderate. When Corey was appointed to handle the Zimmerman case, Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, a former president of both the American Bar Association and Florida State University, criticized the decision: “I cannot imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to serve in the Sanford case. There is nothing in Angela Corey’s background that suits her for the task, and she cannot command the respect of people who care about justice.” Corey responded by making a public-records request of the university for all e-mails, text messages, and phone messages in which D’Alemberte had mentioned Fernandez. Like Littlepage, D’Alemberte had earlier criticized Corey’s handling of the Fernandez case.

Not many people are willing to cross Corey. A Florida attorney I spoke with declined to go on record because of “concerns about retaliation” — that attorney has pending cases that will require Corey’s cooperation. The attorney mentioned colleagues who have refused to speak to the media for the same reason. And to think: D’Alemberte crossed Corey twice. He should get a medal.

But what these instances point to is something much more alarming than Corey’s less-than-warm relations with her peers.

In June 2012, Alan Dershowitz, a well-known defense attorney who has been a professor at Harvard Law School for nearly half a century, criticized Corey for her affidavit in the Zimmerman case. Making use of a quirk of Florida law that gives prosecutors, for any case except first-degree murder, the option of filing an affidavit with the judge instead of going to a grand jury, Corey filed an affidavit that, according to Dershowitz, “willfully and deliberately omitted” crucial exculpatory evidence: namely, that Trayvon Martin was beating George Zimmerman bloody at the time of the fatal gunshot. So Corey avoided a grand jury, where her case likely would not have held water, and then withheld evidence in her affidavit to the judge. “It was a perjurious affidavit,” Dershowitz tells me, and that comes with serious consequences: “Submitting a false affidavit is grounds for disbarment.”

Shortly after Dershowitz’s criticisms, Harvard Law School’s dean’s office received a phone call. When the dean refused to pick up, Angela Corey spent a half hour demanding of an office-of-communications employee that Dershowitz be fired. According to Dershowitz, Corey threatened to sue Harvard, to try to get him disbarred, and also to sue him for slander and libel. Corey also told the communications employee that she had assigned a state investigator — an employee of the State of Florida, that is — to investigate Dershowitz. “That’s an abuse of office right there,” Dershowitz says." Read the rest of the essay.

Please keep in mind Corey never took the Zimmerman case to a grand jury and withheld evidence from the prosecution. Even if you disagree with the verdict and think Martin's family was robbed, those two facts should bother you. One suspects the more scrutiny is applied to Corey's history, more questionable cases will arise.