Florida officials announced Wednesday that the state will not file charges against George Zimmerman in connection with a domestic incident with his girlfriend Samantha Scheibe.
The announcement from the State Attorney’s Office comes after Zimmerman filed a signed affadavit from Scheibe which urged prosecutors to drop charges against him and recanted the allegations she made after the Nov. 18 incident, saying she believed she may have been “misinterpreted” by police and that she “may have misspoken about certain facts in my statement to the police.”
Scheibe told a 911 operator and Seminole County deputy that Zimmerman had pointed a shotgun at her during a “verbal dispute.”
State Attorney Phil Archer commended the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation into the incident and said it had made the correct decision to arrest Zimmerman and to pursue the charges.
“[U]pon reviewing the recent affidavit of the Ms. Scheibe and taking into account the conflicting statements about what occurred, the failure to cooperate with the ongoing investigation, and a lack of any other corroborating evidence or witnesses, there is no reasonable likelihood of successful prosecution,” Archer said in a statement released Wednesday.
“The state has a burden in every criminal case of being able to prove all the elements of a crime beyond and to the exclusion of a reasonable doubt before filing charges,” spokeswoman Lynne Bumpus-Hooper said in press release from the State Attorney’s Office. “The facts and evidence of this case do not meet that burden.” Archer expects no further criminal charges in connection with the incident. Zimmerman was acquitted this summer in the Feb. 26, 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
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