When I heard his interview and his speculative nature and his need to reach to justify Jodi Arias's actions, I knew he was the one writing most of, if not all of the questions that were freaking us out, particularly the ones about Jodi snapping, the ones about Jodi killing because she saw no other way out, the ones about the tiger and the bear. And now I can see that I was right.
The ones about her killing to escape a violent situation and because she saw no other way angered me then and they anger me now. Maybe the other jurors set him straight because he hasn't seemed to reiterate those opinions. But how misguided are they? When women kill to escape a violent situation and because they see no other way out, it's because there really is no other way out. There is a set of factors that make it near impossible to leave. They live with and/or are married to the man. The are financially dependent and controlled by him. He won't let them leave. They have kids that they can't leave and have to think about. And they simply are too terrified that he will kill them if they do find a way to leave.
This is not Jodi's situation at all. She never lived with Travis. She never had financial dependence or ties to him. She borrowed money. But she was financially independent of him. They were not even in a relationship when the "abuse" began. She always went to him. He never went to her. She made the decision to continue going to his house and "putting herself in harm's way." When she finally decided to leave (move away to Yreka) she was free to go with no resistance from Travis. In fact, he was glad to see her go and said so to others and in his journal. If she was in a situation she couldn't get out of, he would have made her stay some how. Had her live with him where the control really would have began. Lent her money so she could stay in her apartment. He didn't. After 4 days of staying with him, he made her leave. After she left, he, again, never went to her. She went to him, of her own free will...with weapons.
It's so misguided. Even if you believe the abuse, this was not a situation where she had no way out. She WAS out! Infuriating. Perhaps that is why he was forced to concede premeditation. She clearly planned it then carried it out. He also said he doesn't believe her story of self defense. Someone set him straight. But he still wants to believe the verbal and emotional abuse because it's easier.
He seems to believe, based on his questions for ALV, that there is much more to the story and it's in the journals and texts he hasn't seen. Boy is he in for a surprise. He doesn't know ALV was going on basically what they'd seen as well. That's what's so frustrating. There's no evidence that there was more to the story yet believes there must be. Jodi MUST have been abused.
Wow! You have just stated everything SO CLEARLY. Thank you for that!! I wish Mr. Foreman could have read this!!
I wonder if it would have been beneficial for Juan to put a (different) domestic violence expert on the stand in rebuttal? I'm thinking he would be allowed to do that by law, but not sure. Since CMJA is the defendant who's claiming abuse, I don't know if he was allowed to do that or not. I think it would have been extremely helpful to have someone tell the jury what you just said...how she was free to go, Travis was in no way controlling her, he let her go, she kept coming back to him, even the phone sex tape she initiated it, etc. etc.. She could have also read the "thousands" of documents that ALV read, and testified about them, so some jurors would not feel like there was anything more to the story than there really was.
I'm guessing Juan felt like he obviously had enough pre-meditation evidence, and he didn't want to focus more attention on CMJA's abuse claim. That would make sense. That would have just doubled the time spent on talking about abuse, b/c JW would have crossed the witness longer than Juan did on direct. I feel like he did the right thing, I think, for the guilty phase, but that left the door open for some of the defense's story to get through for penalty phase.
I just wonder what the 4 jurors response would be if you laid it all out so clearly for them? Would they say that even though she was in Yrecka, he was somehow emotionally abusing her over the phone? Well then the response would be, she was the one who was calling him....and she didn't have to pick up the phone when he called her. Even the May 26th text, it starts out with Travis saying something like, I responded to your "dire" request. Meaning
she had staged some drama for him to
respond to.
I honestly believe that,
because this case was so long, some of the jurors got out-of-touch with reality. They got sucked into Jodi-land. Especially ones like Mr. Foreman, who seemed to take great pride in his supposed un-bias and giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt because "our system is innocent until proven guilty." I believe some took it to the extreme in over-analyzing every single piece of information and forgetting the part about seeing it through the eyes of a "reasonable person" and what a "reasonable person" might have done in that situation. Living in Jodi-land makes you live in an alternate universe, consisting of a psycho person who's
pretending to be a normal person. It's easy to get sucked into something like that, when on the outside they appear so "normal." I know they did, b/c it happened to me, too....sometimes when I would step back and think, geesh, how would a normal girl react in this situation, everything would suddenly become
CRYSTAL CLEAR. But I was used to seeing everything through a Jodi-lens, where everything is dramatized and exxagerated. OMIGOSH he said a mean word to me = I perceived it as the end of the world, felt like a used piece of toilet paper, and just wanted to kill myself, so I just killed him instead. And all the while saying it like it's the most normal thing in the world.