For me, it is the following:
- There is 0 direct evidence linking Scott to the murder of his wife. Zero. There is no DNA, blood, forensics, etc. linking him to this crime.
- His behaviour when she went missing and during the investigation/search efforts - Of course, I can agree, his behaviour is odd at best. But as someone who has been through significant loss, I know this - no matter the circumstances, you absolutely can't judge someone based on their behaviour and outward appearances when there is a loss/someone is missing/ etc. That isn't evidence he is a murderer. People handle extreme experiences and situations vastly differently to cope with what is happening.
- His affair with Amber - personally, I feel, as soon as it was made public he was an adulterer, the heat especially from the media was cranked and this truly felt like the turning point where everyone said "He did it" Remember, before this information was made public and Amber made her statement, even Laci's family was defending Scott from any involvement
- His calling Amber at the Vigil - again, I don't think this guy is a Saint. He is a cheater and liar, 100%. That move was in extremely poor taste BUT as hard as it is for any of us to understand, it was his escape from the media, the attention on him, Laci missing with their unborn child, etc. I would probably want to escape into something else if I was dealing with all of that too
- His death penalty has been overturned due to inappropriate jury selection
- The LA Innocence Project has taken on his case to request a new trial which, in itself, indicates, like the evidence they have, that something is amiss here
You make some valid points and some of them taken in isolation might stand on their own merits but in conjunction with the totality of evidence against Scott Peterson I don’t think it overcomes the one answer that satisfies a spectrum of questions about what happened to LP and her son. The who, the when, and the where has always led back to SP and only rank speculation insisting on far, far less likely answers to those questions leads elsewhere.
- You don’t always need DNA to prove a case against someone. If we did then there would be a greater number of murderers walking free. It would mean that with careful planning and enough lead time a murderer could ensure they left none of their DNA where it shouldn’t be and thereby evade conviction for a crime they committed no matter how obvious their guilt might otherwise be. Meticulous planning regarding the elimination of physical evidence could turn into an actual get out jail free card in a system where physical evidence or a confession are conditions must be met in order to secure a conviction. We’d have a lot more Casey Anthonys in such a world.
Scott and Laci shared all of the same spaces so if he were to have killed her at home in a way that doesn’t make a mess of blood then his work with respect to cleaning up after it would be fairly easy and finding his DNA all over the house would be meaningless since he lives there. He also had the ability to clean up anything he would have used to transport and dispose of a body before anyone took notice of her missing in the first place. In fact he was the one who got that ball rolling on that and so he had a chunk of time that day to do whatever he needed to do before he felt confident about proceeding with the declaration to the Rochas that Laci was missing and getting police involved.
- I agree that behavior isn’t an airtight indicator of guilt.
- The affair with Frey matters because of what he said, when he said it, and what he was actually doing. He told her before LP went missing that he lost his wife and this would be the first Christmas without her. Then he bought the boat and made anchors and shortly thereafter LP goes missing the same day that SP takes his boat out to the bay and LP and her baby later wash up on the shores where SP had by his own admission been fishing.
You could also argue that Frey matters because the recorded calls between the two shows the ease with which SP can tell lies. I personally don’t see how all of the lies he told Frey are a mental escape from a personal hell he was experiencing at the time and even if they were could we not also argue that the escape was from his own guilt having murdered his wife or an escape from his fear of getting caught? If it’s an escape into fantasy due to the stress of what’s happening then how do we know what the stress was specifically over? It could be any of these things, can’t it?
Moreover, you’ve just said his behavior isn’t indicative of guilt since people react to stressful situations and loss in different ways. If his behavior isn’t indicative of guilt for those reasons then it can’t be indicative of innocence either and so by your reasoning that whole line of thought must be discarded when making judgements about his guilt or his innocence.
- With respect to Laci Peterson’s family not turning on SP until the affair was revealed - Sharon Rocha does say that she was skeptical of SP earlier on but she also doubted herself about it too. The affair was the last straw, she was already on fence. The Rochas probably could not initially allow themselves to contemplate SP’s involvement for a number of reasons, the biggest one IMO being the utter hopelessness of her returning safely if indeed SP had done something to cause her disappearance.
- His death penalty sentence was overturned because the judge didn’t ask follow up questions of the prospective jurors who said they were against the death penalty in what was a capital murder trial. It was a procedural error on the part of the judge but doesn’t rise to the level of manipulation of the process such that the outcome was engineered by the state against Scott Peterson. Peterson also attempted to get a new trial on the basis of juror misconduct, that claim was taken seriously by the court, arguments were heard, and the court determined that claim was not substantiated and that he had received a fair trial.
- The LA Innocence Project isn’t THE Innocence Project. They do not operate under the aegis of the Innocence Project you are familiar with. They are their own separate and distinct organization and the actual Innocence Project has released a statement saying they have absolutely nothing to do with the LA Innocence Project. LAIP was formed in 2022 and it is not the only organization of its kind operating in southern and central California either. We don’t know to what extent this particular organization is selective about the cases it chooses or precisely how it makes decisions regarding which cases it takes it on. The fact that LAIP took on SP’s case simply isn’t a point in SP’s favor, it really doesn’t mean much if anything at all. They’re too new of an organization for us to know enough about them to determine the significance of them specifically taking up Peterson’s case. I know a member of Peterson’s original defense team made a huge deal about it but the fact that she didn’t make the distinction between LAIP and The Innocence Project IMO damages her credibility as far as that argument of hers is concerned.
- Defense of Scott Peterson relies on a lot of conspiracy against him on the part of many different entities: the police, the media, the DAs office, the courts, and the jurors themselves. In cases in which a person is wrongfully accused, wrongfully charged, wrongfully incarcerated, wrongfully convicted, and wrongfully sentenced a lot has to go wrong so much so that in the vast majority of such cases the person on the receiving end of it is a victim of larger oppressive forces in society that through decades of prejudice have been reinforced and take larger concerted societal efforts at examining and discrediting in order to even begin to reverse them. I’m talking race, class, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. We understand now how those forces can silently work in concert without having to carefully construct and articulate a clear and determined plan to railroad an oppressed person - such a person is born into a society whose institutions don’t recognize that oppression or think that oppression is justified, hence why it is so difficult and takes so long to undo it.
Scott Peterson is not a member of any such category. Peterson had every advantage. Peterson, his family, and the professionals who support him are doing everything they can to convince you otherwise , they want you to believe that SP is oppressed due to being LP’s husband, that his identity as her husband is THE reason that we can’t trust the many, many processes that have over the previous 21 years kept him behind bars under a murder conviction. They don’t want you to see all of the opportunities SP has had post conviction to formally air complaints about the process that put him behind bars to begin with. They will have you believe that this is the first time in 21 years that any court has extended him any opportunity to challenge any facet of his case and that simply isn’t true. Unlike the majority of people who land behind bars due to systematized oppression and bias leading inexorably to denial of due process Scott Peterson’s right to a fair trial has always been taken very seriously and he has had opportunity after opportunity to argue before the court that his rights have in any way been violated. That his sentence was overturned is proof of that fact and yet the overturning of his sentence is being contorted to argue the exact opposite.
