What’s the cost of being found “not guilty” after a murder trial?
Apparently $2.5 million. That’s how much former neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman owes his legal team after they helped prove he didn’t murder 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
According to the Orlando Sentinel:
Two months ago, he received a $2.5 million bill from his two lead attorneys, Mark O’Mara and Don West.
They had kept track of the time they worked on the case. Each billed him for about 3,000 hours, according to O’Mara.
O’Mara took on the case in April 2012, saying he would represent Zimmerman at no charge. Then he discovered that Zimmerman and his family were raising funds via a website and that money was pouring in, at least initially.
After that revelation, O’Mara and West were expecting to be paid. Throughout the case and after the trial, both said they had not been paid a dime. In an interview this week, O’Mara revealed that Zimmerman did pay them a minute amount, but not anything close to the millions he owes them.
But O’Mara has already benefited financially from the Zimmerman legal defense fund, according to the Sentinel:
Several months ago, O’Mara reported spending $52,550 on “law firm support and infrastructure.”
O’Mara and his spokesman never provided a detailed accounting as to what that included, but they said it was such things as more computers, upgraded software, new phones and improved office security.
West and O’Mara also formed a private partnership, Timber Run Enterprises LLC, and bought the building next door to O’Mara’s Concord Street office in downtown Orlando. That building, like O’Mara’s office, is a former single-family home for which the lawyers paid $270,000.
O’Mara said he and West did not spend Zimmerman’s defense-fund money to buy the building but that they leased it to O’Mara’s firm, and defense-fund money was used to pay rent.
Messy, that’s what this is.
SOURCE: Orlando Sentinel | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
