Police officials detained the three men on Tuesday.

Investigators said that they believed that the dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, hired two men to accost Mr. Filin outside his apartment building late on Jan. 17. As Mr. Filin punched in an entry code, the police said, a masked man called his name and tossed the contents of a jar of sulfuric acid at his eyes.

At around 8 a.m. on Wednesday, a police spokesman told the Interfax news agency that all three men — Mr. Dmitrichenko and the men he hired to throw the acid and drive a getaway car — had signed confessions.

The crime set off weeks of soul-searching in this ballet-mad city, especially because Mr. Filin said he was sure he had been attacked over a professional grudge. Detectives worked their way through the ranks of the Bolshoi, becoming so entranced by the world of the ballet that they began asking Mr. Filin for tickets, he said in a recent interview.

Mr. Dmitrichenko had not been mentioned publicly as a potential suspect. A theatrical, athletic dancer, he is a fierce advocate of classicism in the Bolshoi's repertory. He is also romantically linked with a ballerina in the company, Anzhelina Vorontsova, whose supporters blame Mr. Filin for stalling her career. Neither Mr. Dmitrichenko nor anyone representing him commented on Tuesday.

The company's spokeswoman, Katerina Novikova, said the day's revelations had given her hope that the theater could leave a dark chapter behind.

"It's important for the future," she said, "so that nobody acts like this, because they will know that they're going to be punished. It's important for the theater, and it's important for the whole country."

Investigators had been combing through the records of cellphone calls placed from areas around the scene of the attack. Before dawn on Tuesday morning, police officers carried out a raid in Stupino, a neighborhood outside Moscow that is also the site of summer cottages used by Bolshoi Theater personnel.

There they detained Andrei Lipatov, who the police believed drove the attacker to the scene, an investigator told Interfax. Within a few hours investigators had asked Mr. Dmitrichenko to lead them to a Moscow apartment registered in Mr. Dmitrichenko's name. A witness said they arrived together, and left empty-handed after about 30 minutes.

At nightfall, the police announced two more detentions — those of Yuri Zarutsky, suspected of throwing the acid, and of Mr. Dmitrichenko. All three men will be held for two days pending a formal arraignment, most likely on charges of inflicting grave bodily harm, which can bring a prison sentence of two to eight years.

The accusation against Mr. Dmitrichenko is certain to resonate in Moscow.

Born into a family of prominent dancers, he told one interviewer that his mother tricked him into taking an entrance exam for ballet school by promising him a Mars bar. He was singled out by the Bolshoi's longtime director Yuri Grigorovich, who led the company for three decades, and remained passionately loyal to him years after Mr. Grigorovich's dismissal in 1995.

Ms. Novikova said she was not aware of any "sharp conflict" between Mr. Dmitrichenko and Mr. Filin, who cast him in the lead role in the ballet "Ivan the Terrible" last fall.

"In addition, I want to say that it doesn't matter how sharp the conflict may be between people — it doesn't mean anything," she said. "I think investigators should work and find proof."

Mr. Dmitrichenko, who held the rank of lead soloist, had expressed grievances toward the company, complaining to Private Correspondent magazine that dancers' salaries were so low that "migrant workers would not agree to work on a construction site for this money."

The principal dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze — who has himself come under scrutiny because of his feud with Bolshoi management — said Mr. Dmitrichenko served on the Bolshoi's commission on grants paid to dancers and often complained about Mr. Filin's decisions.

"They clashed openly about money," Mr. Tsiskaridze said on Tuesday in an interview. "Everyone knew it."

After news of Mr. Dmitrichenko's detention was made public, Mr. Tsiskaridze said he was distressed because of the pain it would bring Ms. Vorontsova, who is his student and protégée. He said he had not spoken to Ms. Vorontsova about it because she was onstage dancing in the Balanchine ballet "Jewels."

"I am really sorry for everyone," said Mr. Tsiskaridze, who described Mr. Dmitrichenko as "an explosive person — he might throw a punch, for instance."

"But I don't think he is capable of this," he added.

Mr. Dmitrichenko has also been known to lash out when offended. After a prominent ballet critic displeased him with an essay on Mr. Grigorovich, he posted a tirade on the Web site of her newspaper, saying she was taking revenge for her own unsuccessful dancing career.

"All informed fans, viewers and especially artists laugh at your writings, because they display nothing but malice toward Grigorovich," he wrote in the newspaper's comments section. "Grigorovich is a recognized genius in the whole world, and when you write poorly about him, you simply disgrace the newspaper that publishes your words."

Mr. Filin, 42, who is receiving treatment at a clinic in Germany, made no comment on Tuesday. In an earlier interview, however, he said he believed a group of people had planned attacks on him in hopes of wresting control of the theater's top administrative jobs. He suffered burns to his face and his eyes in the attack and has undergone a series of operations in hopes of preserving as much of his eyesight as possible.

He accepted the post of artistic director in 2011 just as Gennady Yanin, who occupied the more managerial position of director, filed for voluntary leave, after sexually explicit photographs of a man resembling him were sent to e-mail addresses in Russia and elsewhere.

"I felt that I became a continuation, the next participant in the story," Mr. Filin said. "As one might say, 'You'll be next.' "

"I took one look and was like: 'Oh, boy. Here we go again,' " Stock said.

The shorts bear more than a vague resemblance to Zubaz, the loose-fitting, zebra-print pants that grew into one of the most recognizable fashion motifs of the early 1990s. The go-to brand of the professional-wrestling set, Zubaz were bold and colorful, with their tapered inseam and elastic waistband. After starting the company in the storage closet of a Minneapolis health club, Stock and his business partner, Bob Truax, sold thousands of them.

Now, thanks to Adidas, Zubaz are enjoying something of a rebirth. Like mildew, ragweed and Rubik's Cube, Zubaz refuse to die.

"I love it," Truax said in a telephone interview. "I know this is getting a lot of negative press, all these people saying, 'Ah, these look stupid!' But from what I've heard — and this is the key — the kids like it. It's supposed to be fun."

To be clear, there is no actual relationship between Zubaz and Adidas. Stock and Truax, who relaunched the Zubaz brand in 2008 after a 12-year hiatus, trademarked their particular stripe pattern, and any design that replicates theirs by more than 70 percent would be in violation of those rights. The Adidas design is distinct — its new Adizero shorts feature more of a zigzag pattern — but Stock and Truax said they were enjoying the publicity, especially as they try to rebuild their brand.

"It's all supposed to be taken with a wink and a smile," Stock said in describing the Zubaz ethos.

That was not always the case. Originally, the pants had an actual purpose, aside from embarrassing spouses. As co-owners at the Twin Cities Gym in the mid-1980s, Stock and Truax heard a common complaint among their powerlifting friends: they could never find pants that fit. Stock and Truax began experimenting with different cuts until they found a design that worked, and presto, Zubaz.

The pants were born of humble stock — Stock said they initially outsourced the assembly to a women's correctional facility — but the Zubaz partners were committed to the company's success. For six consecutive years, whenever Truax had a business meeting, he wore a pair of Zubaz. The location made no difference, he said. A bank? A fancy restaurant? N.F.L. headquarters? Truax went straight for his drawer full of Zubaz.

"That was the gig," he said. "And it worked."

When Minneapolis hosted Super Bowl XXVI in 1992, the Zubaz brand had reached its zenith. It made for a magical convergence of pop-culture starpower and animal-print poly blends. Truax said a cavalcade of athletes and celebrities showed up at the company's headquarters not far from the Metrodome to mingle and stock up on gear before the big game: Patrick Ewing, Jason Priestley, John Madden.

"Madden used to come out quite a bit, actually," Truax said. "It was very, very common on a year-round basis for people to stop by and get some product. We would have country singers' buses pulling up outside. But during the Super Bowl, it was everybody."

At its peak, Truax said, the company grossed more than $40 million in annual sales. Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino became a partner and pitchman, his Zubaz plastered on billboards across Florida. Stock and Truax even enlisted the services of the supermodel Claudia Schiffer, who posed in a pair of snakeskin-print Zubaz — and little else. Stock, who was a bachelor at the time, attended the photo shoot. Truax, who was married, did not.

Like any great empire, however, the Zubaz brand was vulnerable. By 1995, with the company buffeted by rising costs, Truax and Stock decided to sell their remaining stake. One year later, Zubaz went bankrupt. It signaled a global downturn in the production of zebra-print fabrics, which was cause for despair or celebration, depending on your point of view.

The two friends went in different directions — Truax worked for a clothing retailer, Stock opened a health club — but the lure of Zubaz was strong. In 2007, Truax began to see teenagers wearing vintage Zubaz and wondered whether there was a new market. He called his old partner.

The relaunch was almost entirely Web-based, at Zubaz.com. In the first six weeks, Truax said, the company sold about $200,000 worth of merchandise. Rather than spend a fortune on advertising, he and Stock relied on word of mouth, nostalgia and frat-house theme parties. To Truax, it proved the power of the Zubaz brand in the cutthroat world of patterned trousers. He drew a comparison.

"It's almost like Kleenex," he said. "Every tissue you pick up is a Kleenex, and every pair of print pants is a Zubaz. And that's a wonderful thing for us."

Stock claims to have an expert eye about these things. "I can look at a thousand different zebra products and know if it's our print," he said.

The N.F.L.'s Gronkowski brothers — Rob, Dan and Chris — are such huge Zubaz fans that they hawk Zubaz gear on their Web site, GronkNation.com. An advertisement urges fans to "show your support for a Gronk" by ordering the same style of Zubaz that the brothers have proudly displayed "on the beach, in the weight room, on the golf course and anytime they want to Get Hyped!"

Stock said: "They're some of the best promoters anybody could have. They do a lot of charity work and a lot of partying and a lot of everything."

Truax and Stock appear to have big plans. Truax said he had spent much of the last month on the road meeting with retailers, though he is a bit more discreet in his choice of apparel these days. He typically leaves his Zubaz behind.

"I still wear them around the house a little bit," he said, "but not too much, not at my age."

Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because some employees were working as little as possible and leaving early.

Then there were the 200 or so people who had work-at-home arrangements. Although they collected Yahoo paychecks, some did little work for the company and a few had even begun their own start-ups on the side.

These were among the factors that led Ms. Mayer to announce last week that she was abolishing Yahoo's work-from-home policy, saying that to create a new culture of innovation and collaboration at the company, employees had to report to work.

The announcement ignited a national debate over workplace flexibility — and within Yahoo has inspired much water cooler conversation and some concern.

But former and current Yahoo employees said that Ms. Mayer made the decision not as a referendum on working remotely, but to address problems particular to Yahoo. They painted a picture of a company where employees were aimless and morale was low, and a bloated bureaucracy had taken Yahoo out of competition with its more nimble rivals.

"In the tech world it was such a bummer to say you worked for Yahoo," said a former senior employee who, like many Yahoo insiders, would speak only anonymously to preserve professional relationships. The employee added, "I've heard she wants to make Yahoo young and cool."

Restoring Yahoo's cool — from revitalizing behind-the-times products to reversing deteriorating morale and culture — is hard to do if people are not there, Ms. Mayer concluded. That view was reflected in Yahoo's only statement on the work-at-home policy change: "This isn't a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo, right now."

Yahoo declined to comment further.

On Monday, another ailing company, Best Buy, announced that it, too, would no longer permit employees to work remotely, reversing one of the most permissive flexible workplace policies in the business world.

Inside Yahoo, there has been mixed reaction to the policy change. Some employees said that they were able to be highly productive by working remotely, and that it helped them concentrate on work instead of the chaos inside Yahoo.

Brandon Holley, former editor of Shine, Yahoo's women's site, said she built the site and signed on big-name advertisers while she and most of her team worked from homes across the country.

"It grew very rapidly," said Ms. Holley, who is now editor of Lucky, Condé Nast's shopping magazine. "A lot of that had to do with the lack of distraction in a very distracted company."

The change to the work-at-home policy initially angered some employees who had such arrangements, and worried others who occasionally stayed home to care for a sick child or receive a delivery. Reports that Ms. Mayer built a nursery for her young son next to her office made parents working at Yahoo even angrier.

This week, the policy continued to be the topic of much discussion at the company, as people wondered aloud whether they would lose that flexibility, said employees who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

But for the most part, those employees said, those concerns have been eased by managers who assured them that the real targets of Yahoo's memo were the approximately 200 employees who work from home full time.

One manager said he told his employees, "Be here when you can. Use your best judgment. But if you have to stay home for the cable guy or because your kid is sick, do it."

Many of Yahoo's problems are visible to people outside the company. It missed the two biggest trends on the Internet — social networking and mobile. Its home page and e-mail services had become relics used by people who had never bothered to change their habits. It ceded its crown as the biggest seller of display ads to Facebook and Google. Its stock price was plummeting.

Inside the company, though, there were deeper cultural issues invisible from the outside. For Ms. Mayer's ambitious plans to turn around the company to work, employees briefed on her strategy said, she believed Yahoo needed "all hands on deck."

Jackie Reses, Yahoo's director of human resources and the author of the new policy, is an extreme example of this philosophy. She commutes to Yahoo's campus in Sunnyvale, Calif., from her home in New York, where she lives with her children.

"Morale was terrible because the company was thought to be dying," said a former manager at Yahoo, who would speak only anonymously to preserve business relationships. "When you have those root issues, an employee work force that is not terribly motivated, it built bad habits over years."

Yahoo has withstood many changes over the years, starting with a turnover of six chief executives in five years, each with his or her own deputies and missions for the company. This led to confusion among the work force about the company's goals and frustration that projects would be pulled midstream by a new chief executive.

The company had hired many managers to oversee new tech products, but the extra levels of management slowed product development, former employees said.

"Where Yahoo competes, with companies like Facebook churning out a new release every single day, there was a lot of bloat slowing down product decisions," the former manager said.

The new policy is the first unpopular big move Ms. Mayer has made. Yahoo insiders said they did not expect the employee and media outcry that followed.

Employees said that unlike previous chief executives, who focused outside Yahoo, she has prioritized fixing the company internally and motivating employees.

She introduced free food in the cafeterias, swapped employees' BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android phones and started a Friday all-employee meeting where executives take questions and speak candidly.

A recent internal employee survey found that 95 percent of employees were optimistic about the company's future, a 32 percent bump from the previous survey, Ms. Mayer said in a call with analysts in January.

Résumés have begun arriving from employees at competitors like Facebook and Google, which rarely happened in the past, according to one person briefed on Yahoo hiring.

Since Ms. Mayer made food free, there are now crowds in the cafeterias, lingering to talk about new ideas, employees say — exactly what she wants to encourage by requiring people to work in the office.

"I understand why Marissa Mayer would want to call everybody back into work," Ms. Holley said. "It's kind of a necessary step."

Just then, the Internet connection cut out, and the wedding was abruptly over.

Normally one of the most intimate moments two people can share, the marriage had taken place from opposite ends of the globe over the video chat program Skype, with Ms. Chowdhury, an American citizen, in a mosque in Jackson Heights, Queens, and her new husband, Tanvir Ahmmed, in his living room with a Shariah judge in his native Bangladesh.

Their courtship, like so many others, had taken place almost entirely over the Internet — they had met in person only once, years earlier, in passing. But in a twist that underscores technology's ability to upend traditional notions about romance, people are not just finding their match online, but also saying "I do" there.

These are called proxy marriages, a legal arrangement that allows a couple to wed even in the absence of one or both spouses. They date back centuries: one of the most famous examples was between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were first married in her native Austria in his absence, before she was shipped to meet him in France. Proxy marriages via telegraph have also been documented.

The procedure had been used infrequently in the United States, usually by deployed members of the military worried about being killed and leaving loved ones without benefits. But it is increasingly being used in immigrant communities, where people are seeking to marry partners from their homelands without the expense of matchmaking trips abroad.

Such convenience has also raised concerns that it will facilitate marriage fraud — already a challenge for immigration authorities — as well as make it easier to ensnare vulnerable women in trafficking networks.

The practice is so new that some immigration authorities said they were unaware it was even happening and did not typically provide extra scrutiny to ensure these types of marriages were not misused to secure citizenship. But even those who conduct or arrange these ceremonies have expressed reservations as the practice has grown more widespread.

The imam Mohd A. Qayyoom, who runs the New York Qazi Office in Jackson Heights and officiated Ms. Chowdhury's wedding in February, said he had turned away people seeking to marry cousins in Southeast Asia in order to get them to the United States. Mazeda A. Uddin, a community activist from Queens, who often plays matchmaker, said she stopped organizing proxy weddings after witnessing people being married and left brokenhearted by unscrupulous foreigners seeking a green card, not a life partner.

"Part of the reason for having the two people come and appear before a priest or a judge is to make sure it is a freely chosen thing," said Adam Candeub, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law who has studied proxy marriage. "There are some problems with willy-nilly allowing anyone around the world to marry."

Technically, the Chowdhury-Ahmmed marriage "took place" in Bangladesh, where it was legally registered, not New York, where the practice is not allowed. Only a few states permit proxy marriages, and most require one partner to be in the military. But the United States generally recognizes foreign marriages as long as they are legally conducted abroad and do not break any laws here.

George Andrews, the operations manager for Proxy Marriage Now, a company in Fayetteville, N.C., that facilitates such unions worldwide for a fee, said technology, like Skype, was driving the growth of proxy marriages. In the seven years the company has been in existence, business has increased by 12 percent to 15 percent annually to between 400 and 500 weddings a year. The share not involving someone in the military has grown to 40 percent.

Some of those couples are trying to circumvent restrictive local laws, like those in Israel and other countries, which recognize mixed-religion marriages but will not perform them, he said. Others who live in different countries seek marriage to pave the way to be together, a first step to attaining a visa or citizenship for a spouse, he said. Couples usually dial in to a ceremony in El Salvador, which has comparatively little red tape surrounding the process.

All people applying for American citizenship through marriage must first be interviewed by officials from the Homeland Security or State Department who are charged with rooting out fraud. Officials said that if the spouses were to explain they had been married thousands of miles apart over the Internet, it would quite likely raise a red flag.

And yet, while the agencies ask interviewees for details of their wedding during the immigration interviews, they do not specifically inquire whether it occurred by proxy.

Archi Pyati, the deputy director of the Immigration Intervention Project at the Sanctuary for Families, an organization that helps battered women, said the center frequently saw ways in which proxy marriage was abused. Some cases involve women, many from West Africa, who were married by proxy without their consent, or as children.

Other cases have involved proxy marriage used to bring women into the country who then find themselves pressed into sex work by traffickers.

The practice of proxy marriage is particularly widespread in Islamic countries where the Koran has long been interpreted to explicitly endorse it.

"After all these advancements in technology and all kinds of telecommunication tools, scholars came to the conclusion that it is acceptable," said the imam Shamsi Ali, of the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens.

"Skype is making it easier," he added. "These days you have Google Hangout, too."

There are those who oppose the practice for traditional reasons.

"It seems strange; I just feel like a wedding begins your new life together, not apart," said Angela Troia, who owns the Wedding Company, a shop in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island, that sells invitations and offers planning guidance for many Queens couples. "I think it takes away from the meaning of it."

But for Ms. Chowdhury, 21, and Mr. Ahmmed, 31, the giggling pair pretending to feed each other wedding dessert by holding forkfuls of cake to their computer screens that day, it felt full of the gravity of any other wedding. Ms. Chowdhury noted that her aunt had married similarly, long before the Internet age — by telephone.

Peering from the screen of a laptop, Mr. Ahmmed agreed. "This is my lawful wife," he said.

At the last word, his bride squealed with joy.

Nine years after being sentenced to prison for lying about a stock sale, Ms. Stewart took the stand on Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court in a very different trial, this one concerning which retailers have the right to sell her sheets, towels and other home goods.

Ms. Stewart, who never testified in her insider trading trial, seemed at ease on the stand. She presented cool, crisp testimony meant to support her attempt to sell her home merchandise not just through Macy's, with which she has an exclusive contract in some categories, but also through its rival J. C. Penney.

Ms. Stewart stayed on point and reinforced her brand during her four-hour testimony. Discussing her deal to sell goods at Kmart, starting in 1997, she said, "I paid the price for going mass very early on: the garden club of Greenwich canceled my speaking engagement."

She added, "That was a very difficult deal for me to sign — I lived in a pretty house with a pretty garden; I wrote about upscale things."

But, she said, the home products for the less affluent at the time were unappealing. "They were buying polyester; they were buying designs that were really, really sad," she said. She recalled critics telling her, "Oh, poor people don't do their laundry as often as rich people, so they don't want light colors," but the top-selling towel color her first year at Kmart was white.

The proceedings were part of lawsuits first brought by Macy's in 2012 against Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and J. C. Penney. The main allegation is that Ms. Stewart's company violated a contract with Macy's when it agreed to provide similar merchandise to Penney's.

Despite the declining financial picture at her company, which reported last month that it had lost $56 million in 2012 as revenue fell, Ms. Stewart seemed confident.

"Why do you think the headlines are pitting me against J. C. Penney's and Macy's?" she asked. "They're fighting over something, and it's not just home. It is our amazing product."

She touched briefly on her time in prison. In 2003, Ms. Stewart was indicted on charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice having to do with insider trading of shares in the drug maker ImClone. A trial followed in 2004, and in October of that year, she went to prison for a five-month term.

"I had a terrible time personally, and that could have taken down the company; it did not. It could've taken down the brand; it did not," Ms. Stewart said on Tuesday. "But I must tell you that rebuilding is a lot harder than building."

In 2006, as Macy's considered doing business with Ms. Stewart, it had a public relations firm research her reputation. "Lots of people don't like her, but they like her products and will happily buy them from Macy's," the retailer's chief executive, Terry J. Lundgren, wrote to other executives.

Macy's began selling Martha Stewart products in 2007; in 2009, when her contract with Kmart expired, it was the only retailer to sell her products in categories like home décor, bedding and bath.

Until Penney's came along. As part of an ambitious — and, so far, faltering — plan to turn the retailer around, its newly appointed chief executive, Ron Johnson, decided in 2011 to woo Ms. Stewart and devote big sections of Penney's stores to her product.

Ms. Stewart testified that she was "flabbergasted" by Mr. Lundgren's reaction when she tried to tell him about the Penney's deal in a phone call.

"I don't know if I got through even half the points before he hung up," she said.

Ms. Stewart said on Tuesday that she was "disappointed" with parts of the Macy's relationship: she had expected her products to sell $400 million a year there, and they are only selling $300 million. "They have really kept us, I think, pretty static, where we could've been bigger," she said.

She seemed sporting about the media attention — during a break, she took pictures of the courtroom with a small camera — but her comments about how this lawsuit had blown up recalled remarks from nine years ago.

"I've spent the entire episode of this lawsuit wondering what — it's a contract dispute, an understanding of what's written on the page," Ms. Stewart said on Tuesday. "It just boggles my mind that we're here sitting in front of you, judge. It's a real problem for a company like ours."

In 2004, while she did not testify, she read a statement before the judge that similarly deplored the frenzy. "A small personal matter" became "an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions," she said then.

During questioning from a Macy's lawyer, Theodore M. Grossman, on Tuesday, Ms. Stewart often spoke over him as she looked into the middle distance. Mr. Grossman, trying to make a point that competition from another store could reduce demand for Martha Stewart products at Macy's, displayed a picture of a casserole dish on a video screen and asked whether someone who bought a Dutch oven at one store would be less likely to go to the other end of the mall and buy another Dutch oven.

"No," Ms. Stewart said.

Mr. Grossman posed a similar question, this time using a knife set. Ms. Stewart first said that shoppers, with access to smartphones, QR codes and Amazon, are "really going to buy that knife set where they feel comfortable shopping, where the price is the best and where they feel they're getting the very best quality."

When Mr. Grossman rephrased the question, Ms. Stewart remained firm. "They might have two houses," she said. "They might have two kitchens."

With a lawyer for her company, Eric Seiler, Ms. Stewart was more relaxed.

Mr. Seiler, trying to indicate how Ms. Stewart split her day between the publishing and merchandising divisions of her company, asked her, "How do you do your time?"

"I did my time," she replied, as the courtroom broke into laughter.

At a "Stand Your Ground" hearing, the judge is tasked with weighing whether to grant immunity from prosecution under a Florida law that gives people who believe they are in imminent danger of being killed or seriously hurt the benefit of the doubt to protect themselves. A defendant who claims self-defense in Florida has a right to a pretrial hearing on the evidence if immunity is requested.

Mr. Zimmerman, 29, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., said he had shot Mr. Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, in self-defense after Mr. Martin attacked him on Feb. 26, 2012. Prosecutors said Mr. Zimmerman had pursued Mr. Martin inside the gated community where Mr. Martin was staying with his father's girlfriend and forced a confrontation, which led to the shooting.

Mark O'Mara, Mr. Zimmerman's lawyer, did not close the door on an immunity hearing but made it clear that there would be little time to prepare for both a hearing and a trial in June. Mr. O'Mara told Judge Debra S. Nelson in Circuit Court in Sanford on Tuesday that he would not need the time she had reserved in April, when the hearing was expected to take place.

"This will give us time to get ready for one hearing, and that's a jury trial where my client gets acquitted," Mr. O'Mara said at a news conference after his courtroom appearance. "The trial is our focus."

In light of the national attention on Mr. Zimmerman and the coming trial, Mr. O'Mara said, a verdict delivered by a jury would be more meaningful than a decision made by a judge in a pretrial hearing.

"George wants to have a jury of his peers decide the case," Mr. O'Mara added.

The hearing on Tuesday also chipped away at the credibility of a main witness in the case, called Witness 8, giving a boost to the defense. Witness 8 is a teenage girl who was on the phone with Mr. Martin shortly before Mr. Zimmerman shot him. The witness has said Mr. Martin told her that he was being followed by a man and was frightened.

Afterward, Witness 8 said she had been unable to attend Mr. Martin's funeral because she had been ill and had gone to the hospital. The defense asked to subpoena her medical records. On Tuesday, just before the hearing, prosecutors told defense lawyers that there were none.

"In fact, she lied," Don West, one of Mr. Zimmerman's lawyers, said in court, asserting that she had not gone to the hospital.

The testimony of Witness 8 is important because she described Mr. Zimmerman as the aggressor and said Mr. Martin had been trying to get away from him before he was killed.

"I think Witness 8 is a very significant, if not the most significant, witness," Mr. O'Mara said.