Van REnsburg says.. the curtains were open, in the bedroom
didn't Oscar get up to pull them closed and bring the fans in?? or fan singular?? first it was one, then it was two.. isn't that when he 'heard the noise in the bathroom??
and if the curtains were open.. how come he didn't see his now vacant bed???
this whole story is falling apart on a daily basis..
The differing ways in which way the two balcony excursions were described in the bail affidavit have always seemed (to me) to offer a look into the minds of the defence.
"I woke up, went onto the balcony to bring the fan in and closed the sliding doors, the blinds and the curtains."
"I rushed back into the bedroom and opened the sliding door exiting onto the balcony and screamed for help."
When retrieving the fan, OP needed to build as much time as possible into the whole operation. "What a chore! First the [plural] doors, then the blinds, then the curtains ... I was there half the night!", kind of thing.
But when he nips back out onto the balcony to do his inexplicable shouting for help (do paramedics prowl the streets of Silverwoods at night?), he and his lawyers don't feel that instinctive need to drag the whole thing out as long as possible. They might even be deliberately downplaying the time that that would have wasted, when the first thing to have done would have been either ringing for an ambulance or getting RS out of the loo to give first aid. So now it's just a single door and no blinds or curtains that he has to negotiate.
If, say, they'd had him going out to his car to get his camera - if they'd felt that worked as a story instead of the fan-retrieval, then they wouldn't have itemised every micro-task involved. ("I unlocked the car, I opened the passenger-side door, I leant in, I opened the glove-box, I took out the camera, I closed the glove-box ... "). They'd probably have described it in very broad terms initially, confident that such an activity would plainly occupy enough time for RS to have got up and gone to the loo.
In the description of the fan-retrieval you can sense them straining to pad out the manoeuvres. The defence knows it doesn't make for a great story, and if they don't fancy it much then how can they expect anyone else to?
Again, that scarcely qualifies as evidence. More just an intuitive feel as to the veracity of a story. Of course if the judge finds OP guilty she'll need to come up with evidentiary reasons to back it up. But she's only human: she probably can't help but have at least a subconscious sense as to whether the defence version sounds right. That could well influence her in deciding how much weight to give to various pieces of evidence, e.g., whether she should punish the prosecution for their flakier witnesses by finding reasonable doubt, or if she elects to just disregard those testimonies as though they never happened - choosing instead to just go by the evidence she feels she can rely on.
