Maybe Carter was right, the perp had an ounce of conscience. Possibly dressing Abby, posing them, covering them with a blanket of leaves, sticks, if there was any way to interpret the crime scene thusly. But RA may indeed have an ounce of conscience, highly self-centered but that's why it's not more than an ounce. He's worried about his soul, eternity...
Consider: once RA made these confessions, the Defense could have conferred with their client, and moved to change his plea to guilty. Move to sentencing.
Imagine confessing to a crime you did commit and no one supports you. Your attorneys won't hear it, your wife hangs up on you. You confess to anyone in your limited orbit, you write to still others. You want to get it off your chest so you can focus on the relief of the next life. But nobody will listen to your confessions.
I can't get my head around this! We wish guilty suspects would own it and plead guilty and here's one who wants to confess. Who are his attorneys to go against that? Maybe THAT was RA's torment. He's talking and no one's listening.
Just like these attorneys FALSELY represented to SCION that they were ready for trial, it's no jump to imagine they FALSELY represented to RA that he NEEDED them to keep representing him.
I'm sorry. I think they had/have an ETHICAL responsibility to help him navigate a guilty plea. They should have done that months/nearly years ago.
My prediction: RA will now plead guilty or be found guilty, he'll be sentenced to LWOP or the DP. He won't care. Like so many convicts, he will have found Jesus. He'll adjust to life in prison, still segregated for his own safety. He will never have more than an ounce of conscience but it will serve HIM well. He'll forgive himself, imagine he's been forgiven, will justify what he likes, and rely on the promise of On The Other Side.
He'll do fine in prison, after sentencing, provided he is protected from "prison justice". He'll have Prison Jesus, he'll have meds, he'll have routines, he might still have his wife, if she can't break free of a lifetime of what I'd call encoding, her whole adulthood bonded to him, codependency mistaken for fidelity.
I never went to law school, not even for a day, but it has to be that sometimes the right thing for a defendant is to navigate his guilty plea, especially if he wants it.
His attorneys have created a circus, supplantimg their questionable best interest against their client's confessed one. For whom are they working?
JMO