Now follow that up with his arrest and the failure of his next lawyer to firmly tie down his financial situation. We have conversations in the first bailbond hearing between MoM and the judge about the Paypal money and how or whether it can be used. Everyone on planet earth knew that there was Paypal money, and the judge implies in his own words that he is not sure whether that Paypal money can be used for bail, that it depends how the account was set up. None of the professionals in the court that day seem any too concerned with the precise amount of money in the account -- only getting SZ on record saying something, anything, even "I don't know".
If the judge didn't know and MoM didn't know, the SZ's "I don't know" seems to have been perfectly understandable.
It was all done to impeach SZ as a witness so she could not testify again in court on her husband's behalf. Read the transcript. 90% of her time was spent denying the state's accusations against her husband for his RO and incident with an undercover officer. I doubt that MoM had spent any time prepping either of them for court that day.
Both Hal Uhrig and Craig Sonner had appeared multiple times in the news media on GZ's behalf. But I was shocked when I learned how little actual communication had actually taken place between lawyers and client. From a post on 10 April:
Zimmerman attorney’s Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig give lengthy press conference announcing that they no longer represent George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting incident of Feb 26, 2012. Sonner & Uhrig both state their announcement was based primarily on calls both received from State Attorney Angela Corey’s office informing them Zimmerman contacted the State Attorney’s office today telling the SA that [neither] Sonner nor Uhrig were his attorney’s. Uhrig and Sonner said that while they did assist Zimmerman’s father in setting up a bank account for pay-pal donations to go into and a website on behalf of Zimmerman, they did not establish the web site “TheRealGeorgeZimmerman,” nor did either have access to or control over any donations made to George Zimmerman through Pay-Pal.
Apparently, GZ's inability to communicate effectively with counsel (or counsel to get it out of him or even counsel to surf the web) continued with his new lawyer. According to this post on Friday, 27 April, it was not until 25 April that Mark O'Mara learned of the PayPal account:
O’Mara said he was only aware of two accounts maintained by Zimmerman’s friends containing about $2,700. He found out about the PayPal accounts on Wednesday night.“In talking to George [Zimmerman], after I was trying to shut down his full Internet presence because of some impersonators and other problems with Twitter and Facebook, he asked me what to do with his PayPal accounts,” O’Mara said Thursday during the CNN T.V. interview.
“I asked him what he was talking about, and he said those are the accounts that had the money from the website he had, and there was about $200,000 to $204,000.”
Sheesh!
Everyone on planet earth knew that there was Paypal money,
Yep, and they knew it at the first bond hearing, and, although Shellie Zimmerman declined to give an estimate of the balance, she did offer to bring her brother-in-law into consultation. But the offer was declined.