I started out in the Guilty camp, but this right here above is what it came down to for me. As someone who is still dizzy from all the spinning of defense lawyers in other cases I follow (Morphew and Delphi), I pretty much discount any pre-trial statements from defense attorneys as spin, if not outright half-truths as best. In general, I am about as pro-prosecution as they come. If I follow a trial, I tune out the defense, never watch their closing arguments, and just generally roll my eyes at everything they say. (Yes, I know, I would make a terrible juror.) Even when people said "But the FBI report said she couldn't have hit him..." I thought, yeah, that's what the Defense said the report says, but I don't trust them. Add in the Turtleboy and online blogger noise and I was highly skeptical.
Fast-forward to the trial. Days and days of absolute nonsense about snow, a parade of hostile witnesses, Troopah Proctah and his abhorrent texts, total lack of chain of custody on the evidence, lack of following protocols and demonstrating any type of competence in testing for DNA - they didn't DNA swipe the arm wounds, who knows where on the shirt they swabbed, and there was only touch DNA on the taillight, the taillight that left those inexplicable wounds on his arm? C'mon! I was still open-minded until the end, though was skipping pages and pages of mind-numbing irrelevant testimony (the Aruba stuff - are you kidding me?) and shouting Monty Python style "GET ON WITH IT!" - expecting a highly-competent accident reconstructionist, complete with 3D computer animations that would show exactly how this highly-improbable vehicle hit happened, along with a super-imposition of the taillight fragment edge matching the wounds on JOK's arm. Instead, we were served a big fat Nothingburger of incompetence, guesses, ambiguity, STUFF, and oh yeah, a huge helping of reasonable doubt.
Defense case, on the other hand...those unbiased, credible, credentialed, qualified, authoritative expert witnesses were *chef's kiss*...I didn't get to see much of Yanetti, but Alan Jackson - I'd hire him in a second. I went from "she probably did hit him, but there's not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt" to "there is a very slight possibility that she did hit him in a one-of-a-kind world's most weird and atypical sideswipe while he was in some weird half-bent position that sent him pirouetting in the air where his head struck the flagpole...nah, never mind. She didn't hit him."
I don't have a strong theory of what actually happened. And sadly, thanks to the incompetence of everyone involved, we likely never will, even with the FBIs involvement - but maybe!
I predict a NG verdict by lunch time. But...yeah. Juries are unpredictable, and you never know.
