I hate to think either side in a trial like this is playing fast and loose with facts to get a high-profile win. If the P cheats and it turns out they had it wrong all along, an innocent accused suffers and a killer is still free. The good news is I don’t see the cops conniving to frame a poor innocent drug store employee. The investigation has been dogged by mistakes and red herrings, but no cheating. (Purely IMHO.)
The D is visibly playing fast and loose. Those Franks memoranda. That bit about the “untested” hair in the opening statement. Any trick in the book will do to befuddle one or two credulous, uncritical jurors.
This is a vision of their job that I do not share. RA is entitled to a serious, sober, critical examination of the case against him. He does not deserve a 50 / 50 or better chance to walk free regardless of the likelihood he murdered those two girls.
Would I feel differently in his shoes? Yes, but that’s irrelevant. I don’t want to be convicted of the murders of two young girls. That would certainly be true were I innocent. But it would still be true if I’m guilty. We need the system to identify and punish the guilty. It is society’s needs that matter.
Cheap stunts designed to mislead and distort have no place. What is happening here is wrong.
Honestly, I respect what the defense is doing here. It frustrates the hell out of me of course, but they're the arguments I'd expect them to make in order to discredit the prosecution case. If you can't win with facts, stretch them as much as you can. Mislead, misdirect, confuse.
Let's throw out a scenario that an officer bizarrely unholstered his gun, cycled a round, and left it there. It works in theory, because (if I'm not mistaken), the sheriff's department does use the same caliber ammunition that was found at the scene.
Let's plant the seed that the investigation was sloppy, by implying that foreign hair was found in Libby's hand. That works because a hair was in fact found, albeit apparently female and almost certainly unrelated to the girls' killer.
Both of those are stretches, especially the former, but that's nothing like the stretch they're making by suggesting that the girls were removed from the scene, murdered, and bizarrely returned. This one I don't like, because very few people would fall for it, as it's as crazy as laughable. That one does work on some level though, as they can claim that searchers should have seen their bodies that night.
Yes, the burden is on the prosecution. But the defense has to do all they can to prevent them from reaching that burden. I'm sure as things progress they'll be able to get some legitimate shots, in addition to the more outlandish attempts at that.
