I think he is not guilty according to law.
Some here will remember my posts in another forum, and the discussions on whether or not Scott is more than simply "not guilty according to law" but also factually innocent. I waver back and forth on that latter issue, I tend to believe the last person who posted on the subject!
But the one thing that is for sure is that Scott is not guilty according to law. The prosecution all-but admitted it in summation when they said, "I can't tell you how he did it, I can't even tell you when he did it.... but I am certain he did it." That's where the prosecution lost me.
As much as people are in a hurry to hate Scott for infidelities, or for telling Amber Frey he was in Paris on New Year's Eve (while at a Laci-vigil in California!), or for alleged lies he told, or for his laisser-faire demeanor at trial including his blank face even when sentenced...
The case stands or falls on the prosecution first demonstrating that a homicide, in fact, took place. Birgit Fladager, one of the prosecutors, talks about circumstantial cases sometimes being more powerful cases than those where there is direct physical evidence. She also talks about how fortuitous it was to have Det. Grogan testify near the end of the prosecution phase, because he gave the needed overview which tied together all the tidbits of circumstance presented before. She basically said that the circumstantial stuff in total was so overwhelming that no other reasonable hypothesis concerning Laci Peterson's death was possible.... it simply had to have been Scott, and it had to have been a homicide. For her, there's no other explanation.
Yet I go back to - where is there even one iota of evidence that this was a homocide? I mean, giving Fladager the benefit of the doubt for a moment that Scott was somehow involved, could this not have been an accidental death that Scott was trying to cover up? Could Laci have fallen in the pool and drowned (as Laci said to Karen Servas had almost happened some days before due to dizziness)? Could Scott then have panicked? At most, then, Scott would have been guilty of something like manslaughter, or failing to report a death... you get the drift - where's the evidence that this was even 1st degree murder?
I'm also taken by the evidence that there is neither cadaver scent at 7 alleged crime scenes investigated by the MPD, nor any evidence of a cleanup. At the very least there should have been evidence of the latter at just one of the scenes if Scott was involved. At best the MPD says that Scott seemed too quick to make "an excuse" for the mop being out, saying that Laci had used it on Dec 24 in the morning, or that he had straightened a mat at the door with his toe that evening in the presence of detectives. A crumbled mat, say the prosecution, is evidence that Scott had dragged Laci's body out through that door. Is it? If those were the only two things Scott forgot to do to cover the crime, it is only reasonable to assume there'd be other things he had no opportunity to cover. Which is he - a careful or sloppy cleaner?
All in all this is fairly shakey stuff on which to send a man to death row, all because of a larger and allegedly overwhelming circumstantial case that points to him and him alone. For me, the evidence diverges, rather than converges. I just may be one of those people who don't "get it", when people like Fladager talk about "waiting patiently for the overwhleming circumstantial case to sink in." I have also met plenty of people whose emotional reaction to stressful events is exactly as Scott's was - they seem detached and (on the surface) uncaring, or something less than desparate.
One thinks of Australian Lindy Chamberlain, who was said to be "rather detached" at trial when she claimed that dingos had dragged off her daughter in 1980, and that that had influenced the conviction. She was later proven innocent (as opposed to simply not guilty), released and pardoned. Thank God they don't have the death penalty in Australia!
While most people probably do react to these horrible events the way Sharon Rocha did (I probably would), there are others who don't.
In a sense, then, what I believe the prosecution achieved at trial was to demonstrate that of all the ways Scott might have committed homicide, the things shown at trial demonstrate he neither did nor could have done it that way, nor that it was even necessarily a homicide.
For those who need to hear a character assessment to hang the guy, he's still a bounder. But being a bounder does not make one a murderer, apart from some other evidence that he committed homicide.
I also have no evidence to support what I'm about to say, but since when did that stop anyone who considers Scott guilty? I believe that the reason why the Rocha's dropped the civil case in 2009 was because they were afraid that he'd be found not liable for wrongful death. Unlike the O.J. trials (!), that would have put the California legal system into disrepute - enough evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, but not enough to find liable on the balance of probabilities? That would be something to see.
by marlene on Fri May 15, 2009 4:31 pm 
, but these are the most compelling arguments IMO. 
