I really think that the defense has an uphill battle in this trial coming up, and not because of the strength of the evidence. Rather it is because of what has been allowed to be produced as evidence in the previous trials and will almost certainly be allowed to be produced in the next trial.
I had posited in an earlier post in this thread that Jason was made to be as unlikeable as possible by the prosecution in order to enhance their chances of a conviction. Some posters demurred saying that they did not really dislike Jason. They did not know him and really had no opinion one way or the other.
Yet, the way that some posters presented their arguments intrigued me. They seem supremely confident in their belief that Jason is guilty and react with impatience and even some bit of umbrage when others question things like Gracie's documented problems as a witness and the way that her testimony was elicited, rather than actually discussing the problems. One poster even criticized Jason's explanation about the HushPuppies saying that he thought that Michelle had given them to Goodwill as "blaming" it on Michelle.
I was trying to think of a term to describe what I am reading and "hearing". The term "moral outrage" came to me. So I typed 'conviction by "moral outrage" ' into google. The results were very informative. I will just provide a couple of the links, but there are a lot of them.
https://asunews.asu.edu/20131203-anger-disgust-studies
http://www.thejuryexpert.com/2014/0...rage-and-their-effect-on-mock-juror-verdicts/
I will quote just one part of the latter article.
"We again found that disgust was an even more consistent predictor than was anger: The more disgusted the jurors felt, the more moral outrage they experienced, which in turn made them more confident the defendant was guilty—this pattern existed regardless of how angry they were (even if they were experiencing no anger). This finding was consistent with other researchers’ findings that disgust might increase punitive tendencies to a greater degree than does anger (Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011)."
I think that this is food for thought as it concerns our attitudes towards this trial and any others that we may be a witness to or maybe even participate as a juror.
No one likes to be manipulated.
Glenn