So here is how I am thinking about the upcoming trail. Rider: I only watched parts of trial 1 and am not going to catch it up. I am just going to watch trial 2.
For me, if the tail light pieces were found as alleged on the lawn, the defendant must be guilty of some kind of homicide, subject to what level of intention the jury might find.
So the case, boils down to the defence requiring a criminal conspiracy by LE to frame the defendant, by the investigators. The conspiracy is principally by Proctor, but i guess must include others. I think the simple version of the conspiracy is because he believed the defendant murdered a cop. The more extensive conspiracies I am not bothering with at this stage as i believe them to be speculative and the defence need not prove them.
Regards burden of proof, the defence need not prove Proctor did this IMO, but they must at least raise a reasonable possibility that he did.
So the case boils down to what evidential foundation is there for the idea this fabrication might have happened?
My guess is the dynamic in trial 2 will be quite different, because presumably the CW will come better prepared to show the collision must have happened, and not rely so heavily on the tail light + magical thinking from an alarmingly bad accident reconstruction witness.
On the other hand, i am not sure how the CW ever gets past the ARCA witnesses. And especially not if the jury ever learns they worked for the Feds.
And then of course the firing of Proctor is a boon for the defence. Can this witness ultimately be believed about what he recovered from the crime scene?
Where I stand today is I think there is a good chance the defendant is guilty of at least something but not beyond doubt. And i think there is a structural issue to that - IMO as a policy question the state should not be able to succeed where there is this level of misconduct.
On the other side, and full disclosure, I am strongly opposed to the "Read strategy" of using social media to mobilise fans to attempt to influence the trial. I hope there are consequences for that at the end of the day. If we are going to have this kind of thing, we might as well just allow Read and Yanetti to post and podcast around the trial instead of pretending TB is some kind of media. I'd like to see law reform on this point.
IMO