I went back to Chad's preliminary hearing and noticed that even then, Prior was 100% driven to conflate all of the beliefs that many would consider fringe with mainstream LDS.
I don't get the purpose, but wanted to do so then, and appears to want to now.
I am inclined to think that the debate is irrelevant to the murder trial for the most part. Murder is murder is murder. It doesn't matter if the murderers were fringe firstborns or mainstream firstborns.
Iindicolite had a point up threading that Chad couldn't be accused of leading the mainstream church but could be accused of leading a fringe group. It's a good point. But still, Chad did have influence over his circle in any case, as a cult leader or just a righteous church guy. So I don't see how disavowing the cult by making it all mainstream is super helpful.
Yet, conflating Chad's beliefs and the LDS church are very important to Prior. I wonder if the reason is as simple as Indico suggested.
I tried to quickly review Melanie Gibbs past court testimonies. Prior wanted to conflate the LDS church and other groups, while Melanie drew a distinction. Prior and Lori's attorneys said or insinuated that Melanie is a liar. Lori's attorneys attempted to get all of Melanie's testimony stricken from the case because she had some prosecution prep document leftover from the preliminary hearings that the defense felt they should have had before the trial. For some reason, paper about witness preparation between Melanie Gibb and Wood really is valuable to the defense. I'm not getting something....
MOO