I will say this about the appeals, based on what I know from experience, and what I know of the case as it was presented, with the disclaimer that ya never can be 1000% certain until it's over ....
I know EA's attorney tried to put a happy face on their chances with the appeals court, and spin it like they have a winner of a case, but if they are truly basing it on the things they mentioned (and I see no reason why they'd lie), then I think their odds are almost nil.
That's not saying that I really saw other things in this trial that raised strong appeal issues. But rather that the two things they are choosing to chase are the kind of issues that you put in your appeal when you really don't have anything good to work with. The choice of issues tells a story.
1 They're saying the jury was biased by the location of the trial.
....Here's why that's very weak. They had a chance to demonstrate that "fact" in voir dire, and also to eliminate bias there as well with probing questions to discover bias and eliminate such prospective jurors. But that "bias" they had assumed was there really didn't show up. (It's more like the defense had a PRESUMPTION there would be bias, but found no evidence of it, so now they want the appeals court to assume what they could not find.) The judge was alerted in advance to their contention that there would be bias everywhere, wrecking the opportunity to find jurors, and yet they were easily able to sit a jury.
2 They're also saying there was no REAL evidence that pointed to EA having done this.
....Yet instead, the opposite is true, and we've recognized that in this forum for a long time - they had a mountain of proofs that showed EA was the one. (IMO this sort of argument is the kind that you hope to use to trick a naive jury into disregarding what they are seeing, but with this mountain of evidence I think it's fairly absurd to convince seasoned appeals judges of something so extreme). In reality, this is kind of a backdoor attempt to get the appeals court to do what they don't do, which is to be a new jury on the evidence itself, but appeals judges are virtually always going to defer to the jury's ability to properly weigh the evidence rather than try to re-weigh it, so this is an incredibly weak argument to bank your hopes on. If you had anything good, you wouldn't waste the paper on this one.
In general, these are blah whiney issues. I didn't get fair jurors (because they didn't find me not guilty). They really didn't have anything on me (and they shouldn't have even considered all that evidence that the state presented, or used it against me, because imo it wasn't good enough). And I think that if this is all they have, the appeals court won't spend much time on it. They have better things to do.
