by S Lyster on Wed May 20, 2009 6:50 pm
I'm going to give it a go, even though I do not believe in Scott's guilt in law.
This is based mainly on the reading and video on-line available from prosecutor Birgit Fladager, who made the comment that "it takes time for the circumstantial evidence to sink in" regarding her belief in Peterson's guilt. This, then, means that one must understand the nature of circumstantial evidence itself, in relation to direct eivdence.
Yes, her comment was that it "takes time" for the finding of guilt to sink in - meaning that at trial the jury was initially exposed to all sorts of unconnected bits of circumstantial evidence. She credits (blames?) defense lawyer Geragos for being so disruptive to the prosecution's timeline that they had to resort to entering evidence in a confusing piecemeal.
She says it was only until Detective Grogan testified near the end of the prosecution's case, that the linkages were provided for all the formerly unconnected circumstantial stuff. Grogan provided the much needed overview so that the circumstantial evidence "sunk in" for the jury.
One poster to this board implied that the fact that this required "time to sink in" was itself reason to doubt the overview's veracity leading to guilt. If the circumstantial stuff itself wasn't readily pointing to guilt, then one could be forgiven for thinking this was more preparing the jury for "group think", something they could be prone to given that the prosecution spent time trying to get the jury to hate Scott to begin with. (Heck, even Geragos conceded that it was easy to hate his client!) To counter this, the prosecution claims that Gerago disrupted their flow - there was no intent on the prosecution's part to unfairly bias the jury against Scott.
But back to the place of circumstantial evidence at trial.... most experts in this area state that contrary to popular belief, circumstantial evidence is often more powerful than direct evidence. For the latter, all sorts of subjective criteria apply which can and should rule it out - meaning that so-called "direct evidence" is not always as it seems. Direct evidence, contrary to popular thought, can often have MORE interpretations than the circumstantial variety.
Circumstantial evidence, on the otherhand, is often (if not always) buttressed by expert testimony who show why a certain set of circumstances must point to only a few, and perhaps even one logical conclusion.
Case in point, particularly when circumstantial stuff falls apart. When the defense presented Dr. Charles March as an expert who would show that Laci must have died a week after going missing, he was destroyed as an expert witness on cross-examination by getting flustered and asking that he be "cut some slack" on some errors he'd made. Acc. to Wikipedia: "Summing up this key defense witness, Stan Goldman, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles said, "There were moments today that reminded me of Chernobyl". "
So, this reasoning concludes, the jury would have no other option than to accept the prosecution's experts over the defense experts and further conclude that the overall prosecution theory was correct beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, Scott was found guilty.
Circumstantial evidence becomes a war of experts. The prosecution won the war.
Gripes with this line of reasoning seem to revolve around the defense strategy to leave a lot of the prosecution's experts unchallenged. A lot of the stuff on-line seem to be re-doing the expert analysis on things like tides or autopsies and what should or shouldn't have been entered into evidence at trial. A lot of the stuff on-line is a "re-do". It may be right, but that's not the point for a trial which is already concluded.
Prosecutor Fladager's reasoning is that Scott is guilty because that's what the experts, in total, say. There is no other credible or logicial explanation for this body of evidence at trial other than that Peterson committed a homicide.
I was going to say something snide at this point, but will refrain. I am legitimately interested in hearing from people who can make a non-emotive case for Scott's guilt. Me being snide would tend to prevent them from the attempt.
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If you eliminate the impossible, what ever remains (however improbable) must be true.