This may or may not help some of you who are curious about where they are headed here.
http://www.3cx.com/PBX/FXS-FXO.html
I hope they are going somewhere with these "foundations" but I have a feeling that a rough translation of what we are going to see at the end is:
Ladies and gentleman of the jury, we have a mixed bag here. He could have ______. He did _______. He was _________.
_______ + _________ + _________ + BC = 1st degree murder.
Because a lot of this looks like spaghetti and kitten chow thrown on the wall at this point. The closing should boil it down in a nice time-line (a la Sleuthygal) for them.
But, again, I think Alice Stubbs did some SERIOUS damage to the pros. today. She basically provided reasonable doubt in a nutshell.
I think we will have a jury struggling over the idea of anger killing versus first degree murder.
We have clearly witnessed premeditated retaliation to a divorce, but I can tell you from experience that it SUCKS to have a law firm check bounce and that would have sent me into popping kittens out of every pore. (Mainly because of how threatening and unrealistic divorce attorneys start out to be to get to "resolution").
At this point, with all the convoluted technological crap and the fact that they have summed it up to be possibility after possibility, we have lost the idea of premeditation of murder. This guy was definitely ALL of the the other things we are calling him and POSSIBLY a "rage killer".
But proving that he "snapped" crushes the first degree murder and puts the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove the length of time she was asphyxiated. (Give me til midnight and I get off work and go over this one with case law in North Carolina if you'd like) The idea here (with this trial) seems to be that he "snapped" and that the strangulation was what made it first degree, but they have muddied the waters so badly, I don't think this jury will come back to it. I keep hoping for an amendment to the indictment mid-trial to include the 2nd degree, but I think THAT would lay the ground for a hung jury because it would call into doubt everything else they've done for the State.
Remember that there is an awful case going on in Hickory where a women is alleged to have chain sawed a little girl she abused for two years and THAT case was only indicted as second degree.