What eats me alive is that there are DA's out there, like those in Boulder, who get elected but are terrified of courtrooms and who hire Asst. DA's who are also terrified of the court room and that all of them refuse to get hard nosed with suspects.
This case would have been solved in any other jurisdiction.
It might have been tried, based on the GJ indictment, but I am not so certain it ever would have been solved.
So, if the R's had been tried per the indictment, wouldn't that have required that they convince the jury that Burke had indeed killed his sister and the parents had covered it up? If the R's just kept insisting they had nothing to do with the staging, I would bet at least one person on the jury would have bought it.
The problem with this case has always been, you cannot convict on the fact that one of the three other people in the house killed her. You have to prove which one. I don't think that is so easy.
Here we are, 20 years later. Many of us have followed this case since the beginning, read most of the books, and debated it endlessly and we cannot agree on who did it, only for the most part, that it was RDI.
Even the RDI is not universally agreed upon.
Putting the OJ verdict aside as jury nullification, I cannot help but remember that Casey Anthony and Robert Blake were both acquitted.
A woman who partied while she supposedly thought her daughter was "missing". A pathological liar whose own mother obviously thought she had killed her child (the initial 911 cal), walked. Contrast that to Patsy, a cancer survivor with a reputation as a loving, if pushy, mother.
I don't think anyone would have been convicted. ,