George Zimmerman is preparing to surrender himself to the Seminole County Sheriff this afternoon, according to his lawyer. It's back to jail for the man who has been charged with the shooting death of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin.
Reuters reports:
On Friday a judge revoked Zimmerman's $150,000 bond, posted in April while he was awaiting trial, after prosecutors accused him of withholding one of two valid passports and said his wife did not tell the court about money donated for his legal defense.
Circuit Court Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. gave 28-year-old Zimmerman 48 hours to surrender to the Seminole County Sheriff.
Zimmerman returned to Central Florida from an undisclosed location, arriving late Saturday evening, his lawyer, Mark O'Mara, announced in an online statement.
"The defense team has coordinated with the Sanford Police Department to ensure Mr. Zimmerman's security when he turns himself in before today's 2:30 PM (1830 GMT) deadline," the statement added…
O'Mara told Reuters after Friday's hearing that he would request another bond hearing after Zimmerman surrenders to authorities. In the latest statement O'Mara said he hoped his client's voluntary surrender "will help demonstrate to the court that he is not a flight risk."
UPDATE:
George Zimmerman has turned himself in to Florida authories in Seminole County.
The Washington Post reports:
On Sunday afternoon, about 40 minutes before the 2:30 p.m. deadline to surrender, Zimmerman was listed as an inmate on the jail website. He was listed as being held without bail and having $500 in his jail account.
Prosecutors had said Zimmerman and his wife told the judge at a bond hearing in April that they had limited money, even though he had raised about $135,000 through a website. Defense attorneys said the matter was a misunderstanding.
Furthermore, the Tampa Bay Times has conducted an investigation into Florida's "Stand your ground" law and its intersection with race, reporting:
A Tampa Bay Times analysis of nearly 200 cases — the first to examine the role of race in "stand your ground" — found that people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time.
"I don't think judges or prosecutors or whoever works in the field of criminal justice is consciously saying black life is worth less than that of other ethnicities,'' said Kareem Jordan, a criminologist at the University of Central Florida. "But at the end of the day, it could be something that's subconscious going on if you look at how the media depicts black life.''
Questions of race have surrounded Florida's "stand your ground" law since the February shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by George Zimmerman, a Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer.
Expect plenty more twists and turns to this case before it makes its way to trial, which is expected to happen in 2013.
Sheryl Huggins Salomon is senior editor-at-large of The Root and a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based editorial consultant. Follow her on Twitter.