In the first 911 call received on the night Trayvon Martin died, the call picked up some screaming. A forensic analyst hired by the Orlando Sentinel used a voice-identification machine to say that the screams were not those of George Zimmerman. However, I have yet to see any claim by Zimmerman or anyone else that the screams were his.
The issue is more than about who was screaming. This is particularly true if the eyewitnesses who said there was a scuffle on the ground are credible (we just don’t know how credible these witnesses are at this time). This is because a person could scream and still be attacking someone at the same time.
Let’s posit this scenario just for the sake of argument. Trayvon Martin is upset cause he thinks Zimmerman was giving him a hard time. He attacks Zimmerman. During the course of attacking Zimmerman, he sees the gun for the first time and starts screaming for help. At this point, the struggle continues, and he is shot.
Under this scenario, self-defense cannot be ruled out. There is no rule in self-defense that you must stop defending yourself if the attacking party starts yelling for help. There is no such thing in the law.
Is this what happened? I don’t know. I am one of the honest ones on this issue that is saying we DON’T know enough facts yet to draw a conclusion.
The point is that even if the screams are from Trayvon Martin, that simply does not rule out self-defense on the part of George Zimmerman. Anyone who says it does is just spinning the facts again like they have been from the beginning.
With that said, a forensic voice-identification result showing that the screams were not George Zimmerman’s does mean that he has some additional explaining to do. Whether said explanation is believable depends on facts we just don’t know at this time.
Finally, the expert did not say that the voice was that of Trayvon Martin’s. By the process of elimination, we could conclude that it is. But we aren’t talking fingerprints or DNA here. Voice identification is subject to interpretation, so we would need both a negative result for Zimmerman and a positive result for Martin to establish convincing evidence of voice identification. This is also true because we can’t rule out that a third party saw the scuffle, didn’t know what to do, and started yelling for help. That party may be staying quiet because he does not want to be involved in the case, so a positive ID of Trayvon’s voice is also necessary. And also remember that other experts who run the same test may disagree. This issue, like the case as a whole, is far from over.