Answering your (T-4-2) " Devil's Advocate: what were Nurmi's options?"
YOUR GIVENS (condensed).
" Even Jodi was innocent until proven guilty, She had the right to a vigorous and competent defense, Failure on Nurmi's part to represent Jodi in the manner she saw fit could be grounds for a mistrial and/or malpractice suit, Failure on Nurmi's part to do the following could be viewed as incompetence: question and cross-examine witnesses; present defenses; object to improper questions from the prosecutor and/or improper instructions from the judge; file appropriate motions with the court, He had to present all possible defenses, even if he thought she was guilty. He was required to defend Jodi according to her wishes, regardless of whether or not he agreed with her."
"• He was not supposed to (is completely prohibited from) knowingly present false information or suborn perjury... but he could avoid learning specific information in order to be technically unaware of the truth (plausible deniability)."
OR… and perhaps more pertinent to this case, he could take a neutral or merely suggestive datapoint and present it as collaborative “evidence” in support of what he suspected were lies, but which couldn’t be definitively disproved.
"Any ideas about how Nurmi & Co. might have gone about mounting a vigorous defense that stopped short of becoming malicious and despicable? What could he have done to fulfill his obligations to Jodi without stooping to her level? In Jodi's case, she realized that the State had proof that she killed Travis, but maybe there was some wiggle room on whether or not it was murder. She would reject outright any concessions of being a horrible person or that she had "snapped." In order to get the jury to believe it could have been self-defense, she'd need Nurmi to cast her in the best possible light and cast Travis in the worst possible light."
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Accepting your parameters, here is an alternative approach Nurmi could have taken (he went part way there in PP2, but his other tactics erased the storyline): Portray Travis as a decent man, loved by his friends, successful in business. BUT who had been horribly abused as a child, which affected him in many ways, including his ability to commit emotionally to any significant relationship. The closer he drew to anyone, the more conflicted he became, which gave rise to anger, directed both at himself and at the woman who was drawing him closer.
His ambivalence about JA made it impossible for her to know where she stood with him. She tried to give him what she thought he was asking from her, but increasingly, after each time they became intimate, Travis became angrier with himself, which made him push her away. She finally left Mesa, thinking that it was better for both of them if she moved far away, giving him time to understand what it was he wanted.
But she realized pretty quickly that moving away wasn’t going to help resolve the problems they had. Travis wrote in his journal and told friends about how lonely he was, how he thought it would be better after JA left, but it wasn’t. He kept reaching out to JA, had phone sex with her, sent her a tied to the tree fantasy.
When she didn’t respond by telling him she was willing to move back, Travis, in desperation about his age and his approaching exile from the singles ward, began an almost manic campaign to find a wife, and at the same time, to fill the gap left by his lover JA moving away.
He became increasingly depressed after JA left. In his despair he even reached back to his failed relationship with Lisa, and in escalating self-loathing, blamed himself for it not working out.
Adding to his stress, pushing him to a breaking point, was the fact that though most of his friends didn’t know it, he was in serious financial difficulty. He faced losing his house and even his job with PPL, given the brutal political games within the org that were being waged in April and May 2008. He was well aware and very frightened that he was on the verge of losing everything that he had worked so hard to achieve.
All JA had ever wanted was the best for Travis. The emotional, sexual, and physical abuse she had suffered as a child, though, made her vulnerable, as did the abusive relationships she had been in as an adult, with the exception of Darryl. She blamed herself when Travis became angry. She didn’t understand at the time that both of them were abuse victims, and that Travis had no more understanding of why he got angry at JA than she did.
She reached out to Ryan Burns, she tried to move on. On that trip in June, after she had made a number of calls to him because she felt terrible about the May 26 misunderstanding, he finally returned her calls and they talked long enough for both of them to feel OK about her stopping by on her way to a new life.
She arrived, he had waited up, they went to sleep. They had sex when they woke up, took pics, and she thought their sweet goodbye was going well. But nothing had changed. Having sex made Travis as angry as it ever did, even more, because he was furious with himself for giving in once again, even after he swore to himself that he wouldn’t, having been especially humiliated by the experience of Mimi’s father listening in to his transgressions, and in T’s mind, judging him harshly, finding him unworthy as a husband candidate for a good Mormon wife.
JA didn’t realize just how angry he had become. She was happily taking the pics he had asked her to shoot of him in the shower, when she dropped the camera. She tried to make a joke about being as clumsy as a 5 year old child, but her joke pushed Travis over the edge. HE snapped. He got up from that sitting position where he looks so angry and.. (blah blah blah).
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I see why you asked the question- as in, how much of her defense was Nurmi’s responsibility, really, given her insistence that she killed him in self-defense? One answer above, and in any case the question omits much of what was most putrid and offensive about Nurmi’s performance, including his personal, ugly, vituperative attacks on JM et al.
And here’s something else that IMO should be kept in mind about what Nurmi might have done if unrestrained by his client. He has written that his preferred strategy would have been to portray her as a troubled victim of abuse who snapped because of the emotional (and possibly physical) abuse inflicted by Travis the highly sexual, lying bad Mormon.
IMO it is disingenuous at best for Nurmi to claim that his client made him drag Travis through the mud. He’s made it plain he would have done so of his own volition, just minus that pedo stuff which he objected to NOT because of the pain that lie caused the many people who loved T, but because he thought the lie might harm his client.
