A Sanford judge today ordered George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, released on $1 million bail but called him a manipulator. It was not immediately clear how long it would take the 28-year-old Zimmerman to arrange his release.
Defense attorney Mark O'Mara said Friday that Zimmerman's legal defense fund had a balance of $211,000, more than enough to cover the 10-percent non-refundable portion charged by most bonding companies.
Zimmerman had been free on $150,000 bond for five weeks when Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. ordered him back to the Seminole County Jail.
That's because Zimmerman's wife had testified under oath that the couple was nearly destitute when bank records show money was pouring in from a support-George-Zimmerman website at the rate of $1,000 a day.
On the day Shellie Zimmerman testified that the couple was broke, she and her husband had access to $130,000, a defense financial expert testified Friday.
In his nine-page order, the judge today chastised Zimmerman.
"By any definition, the defendant has flaunted the system," Lester wrote. "It appears to this court that the defendant is manipulating the system for his own benefit."
Lester also was troubled, he wrote, that Zimmerman and his wife hid the money and that George Zimmerman had a second, undisclosed passport.
"Notably, together with the passport, the money only had to be hidden for a short time for him to leave the country if the defendant made a quick decision to flee. It is entirely reasonable for this court to find that, but for the requirement that he be placed on electronic monitoring, the defendant and his wife would have fled the United States with at least $130,000 of other people's money."
Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda had asked Lester to keep Zimmerman jailed. He killed an innocent teenager, de la Rionda argued, then made matters worse by working with his wife to transfer money between accounts and hide it.
But O'Mara argued that it would be wrong to keep Zimmerman locked up before trial, especially because he has a strong self-defense case.
The judge's ruling today, however, made clear that that was not the most important issue for him.
In his order, the judge banned Zimmerman from having or opening a bank account. He again ordered the defendant to wear a satellite monitoring device and this time put him on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.
Zimmerman told authorities that after calling police and reporting Trayvon as a suspicious person, he lost sight of him and turned to walk back to his truck when the teenager punched him, knocked him to the ground then began banging his head into a sidewalk.
