'George Zimmerman's old Myspace page includes slurs against Mexicans' (video)

George Zimmerman's old Myspace page includes slurs against Mexicans

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George Zimmerman's attorney defends his move to the Web as a counter to fake sites. Cara Moore of NBC station WESH of Orlando, Fla., reports.
By msnbc.com staff

The lawyer for George Zimmerman, who's charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has confirmed that Zimmerman was the owner of an old Myspace page featuring slurs against Mexicans, the Miami Herald reports.

Posting under the pseudonym "Joe G,"Zimmerman wrote about "mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft a-- wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around" and "gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!"

Read the full story at The Miami Herald
The discovery adds another social media element to a case that came to national attention largely through Twitter and Facebook. After initially having ordered Zimmerman to scrub his social media history, his lawyer, Mark O'Mara, has embraced a controversial social media strategy to keep the defense side of the case in the spotlight, complete with its own website.

Msnbc.com's Suzanne Choney has examined the ramifications of attorneys using social media to make their cases in public:

The American Bar Association's standards of professional conduct does not deal with social media, a spokesman for the ABA told msnbc.com, but "it's certainly going to be on everyone's radar screen" now.

Stephen A. Saltzburg, a member of the ABA's governing body, the House of Delegates, and former chairman of the ABA's criminal justice section, said "generally speaking, lawyers are not supposed to be making public statements that could compromise a fair trial."

Whether the Zimmerman social media effort will do that would be up to a judge, Saltzburg said.