It’s not about the evidence, for me.
Intent is very hard to prove. Unless a person leaves journals or speaks words to a living person (and then hearsay can be an issue), what evidence can there be of intent?
Typically, intent is inferred by the jury from a variety of circumstantial evidence. The intent formed in a person’s mind. Intent is never visible. There are no psychological tests for intent.
“I didn’t mean to” is a powerful defense against Murder One. By choosing the Felony Murder trial, no intent needs to be shown. The most contentious piece of “evidence” need not be found.
A classic way of getting juries to find intent from circumstantial evidence is that Accused Wife Murderer was having financial difficulties, wife was having an affair, Wife Murderer was also having an affair and had promised the moon to his mistress, who takes the stand and says he didn’t seem to be the type to kill his wife (beer is evidence he went to his wife’s new apartment in the middle of the night and was caught on camera just before her ToD; he disposed of bloody clothes.
He then claims his wife had a new boyfriend over. And there were words/ Amd the two made fun of him and his lack of sex appeal. They showed him the expensive champagne they were drinking and wife says she put it on Defendant’s credit card to boot.
He LOST it and committed a crime of passion, meaning merely to shut her up when he bashed her with a wine bottle (this is based loosely on an actual case in NYC). He didn’t mean to KILL her, he meant to “teach her a lesson.”
Juries have found intent in this way. Many times.
But there is no way this was a crime of passion or self-defense. Maybe if RA had a stash of child
of girls around this age, some jurors would see that as enough. But some might not.
SO, by taking intent off the table, the State can focus on the evidence that shows WHO did it rather than WHY they did it. Indiana apparently has only one form of murder - but surely Indiana also has involuntary and voluntary manslaughter or similar.
What intrigues me is that it seems impossible to plead Murder One down to involuntary or voluntary manslaughter in this case.
So the Defense concocted a conspiracy theory (RA wasn’t even part of this conspiracy? Because if he was, then the whole bunch of them are guilty under the felony murder rule but ALSO they are guilty of Conspiracy).
IOW, intent is a mental state and increasingly, juries are reluctant to find intent, even in cases like the one I typed out above.
Motive is different to intent. Intent means pre-planning of some kind (even if just a few seconds. All those hot car cases with dead children are difficult to try for this reason (they rarely turn out to be Murder One - the ones who do make the headlines and are in the archives here on WS). That doctor who drove his family (in their Tesla) off a cliff in Big Sur (no one died) has a wife who has decided to stay with him, even though she told police he was ranting and saying, “I’m going to kill everyone1” right before he pressed the pedal to the floor and shot out over a cliff. The lack of braking and the speed he was going are known quantities. But now his wife says, “He didn’t really say that and he didn’t mean to” and she’s back with him. I think he’s still charged - someone will know.
SO, any intelligent prosecutor is going to analyze a crime like the Delphi Murders and factor in kidnapping or false imprisonment or something - because intent is very hard to show, even with eyewitnesses.
Nothing to do with “amount” of evidence, but with the specific type of evidence that there is. If RA intimidated te girls into going “down the hill” to their deaths, that’s kidnapping in my mind. If he restrained them or moved their clothes around, those are felonies too.
So why question the law being applied properly and try to make it about “enough evidence”? Or “kinds of evidence”? If one wants to say it wasn’t felony murder, then just say that the girls weren’t in fact forced off the path by a man whose voice they recorded and be done with it. Because THAT is in evidence. If one wants to say the girls weren’t forced, it doesn’t matter, because we can’t know their minds at all - that cannot be proven. MOST jurors are going to listen to that tape and decide that the man who uttered those words (and owned a gun that had a bullet found at the scene) scared or intimidated the girls, and then killed them. I don’t believe we know their manner of death or anything at all about the real details of the crime scene.
IMO.
lawandcrime.com
