I'm right with another contributor on here who said he has to keep checking himself for confirmation bias. Of course you must always give the same weight to evidence that you find troubling or inconvenient as you do to evidence that you find reassuring. Apart from anything else, it can save you from looking like an idiot. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, as long as you have the humility to be alert to that possibility. As John Maynard Keynes said: "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"
But you really have to work at it! At least I do. I confess that I don't like this defendant. I almost think he could be convicted simply on a reconstruction of the choreography of the incident as he himself describes it - enacted in a scale replica of the balcony/bedroom/bathroom complex - so improbable (and, to me, seemingly impossible) is the purported sequence of events and the interlocking movements of killer and killed. Of course the judicial process cannot treat the matter so superficially, and luckily it doesn't matter what I think.
Donald Rumsfeld was spot-on with his unknown unknowns. I shouldn't speak for others, but there are things that I think I know about this case, and I can devise elaborate scenarios to take account of every possibility that I can think of in the unknown realm. Still, just around the corner could lie a fragment of evidence that causes this edifice that I've constructed to fall apart. "How was I supposed to guess that?!", I might wail. Well I shouldn't have been so confident about the adequacy of my imagination - is the answer to that one.
For all that, OP really put my back up in his bail affidavit! "I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder", he said. Steady on, old son! You have just shot someone dead without provocation, don't forget. It's got to be worth a look, surely; even if ample mitigation can ultimately be proven. His posturing just seemed kind of graceless in the circs; indicative of the air of entitlement he's often accused of possessing. Hiring a company with "Reputation Management" in their name didn't help. He might as well have saved his money and called a press conference to announce that he intended to delude the public as to his true nature.
At the moment, I can't help hoping he gets sent down, although if he does turn out to be (relatively) innocent it would be a travesty if he isn't (relatively) exonerated. Even graceless people deserve justice.
But I think he must be guilty of something. At the time, an expert on SA firearms law said the situation doesn't exist where you are legally entitled to fire upon an unidentified target. Assuming that's accurate, OP's got problems whichever way the pre-med aspect goes - even if it doesn't amount to a 25-stretch.
