And about Rachel: she came across as unsophisticated and slow, but these same traits go to her credibility as well. If she’d had an agenda to make Trayvon look saintly, it would have made little sense for her to have attributed “creepy-ass cracker” to him. The reasons she lied about her age and about not attending the funeral are plausible as well, not to mention wholly irrelevant to what she heard that night. West had her on that stand for 5+ hours, which was overkill for what little she had to say. And even still, the basics of her testimony–the stuff that damns Zimmerman as the aggressor–were not successfully challenged by West. He had to put in a lot of work to make her look bad, and in the process, he got her to drill into the jury’s head that Zimmerman went after Martin. Not the other way around.
When Rachel said she told Martin to run because Zimmerman could be a rapist, the ears of that all-female jury (with 5 out of 6 mothers) should have perked up. What better way to get this jury to see that Martin was the vulnerable victim than to remind them of how vulnerable a woman would be if they’d been in his shoes.