hi doma,
the whole outrage thing was cooked up from the beginning. martin was portrayed as an innocent angel and zimmerman as a cold-hearted racist white assassin.
the truth was rather different. an apparently troubled and aggressive teen who had plenty of time to get himself and his skittles home, but who spent three minutes in the shadows before emerging, breaking z's nose and beating his head on the concrete.
z turns out to have been a latino who volunteered for neighbourhood watch, had no fighting skills and who actually worked with troubled african-american kids.
the jury listened to the evidence against z and noticed there wasn't much of anything. the prosecution's case was explicitly all emotion and little or no evidence.
when viewed without the lens of television commentary, the story was one-sided. but the media were advancing a narrative.