I didn't watch the court hearings yesterday. I just followed along in this thread reading the play-by-play comments. But now I have watched the video of the hearing. It's the first time that I have watched any of the hearings. Baez does appear to be inexperienced in this and is often inarticulate. In spite of this, his questions to the CSI end up being understood and answered. Anyway, I came away from watching that with a different perpective than I got from reading the posts in this thread.
Baez's line of questioning with the CSI has a basic theme. Through the questioning, he was able to show that CSI does not transfer everything from their handwritten notes taken at the time of observation (bench notes) to their final report. After the daily reports are entered into a computer, the bench notes are destroyed.
During questioning, Baez was focused on the "white trash bag". He got CSI to say that Lee did ask to see it and was immediately told that the bag was at a lab in Tennessee. Baez was with Lee, the CSI, and other OCSO folks at their facility during the inspections done by Lee. Baez asks the CSI if he made notations about Lee asking for the bag. He says yes. Then Baez asks him to find that notation in the report. The CSI glances down for a brief period and says that it isn't in the report. We also know it isn't in the report because we have the report from a doc dump. Baez has the same docs that we do. He knows that Lee asked for that bag and was told it was out of state. He knows (and CSI affirmed) that this was hand-noted at the time. He knows that that bit of information is not in the report from the doc dump. Here comes the punchline.... Baez, CSI, the prosecution, the court, and now we... all know that the bench notes contained more information than ends up in the report (doc dump). Baez was banging away at this because the bench notes are quickly destroyed.
We had no clue that Lee asked for that bag because it didn't show up in the doc dump reports. But CSI and Baez remember it clearly. Also Baez begins to broach the subject of Lee finding an additional 17 hairs during his visit. This never gets anywhere because the State instantly objects based on it being outside the scope of Baez's motion. He tried it twice and was stopped each time. I think I may be able to guess at where Baez was going to go if he had not been stopped. It may be that Lee actually did find those 17 hairs (or many of them) and the report doesn't state that. The report has us thinking that these were strictly found by OCSO after Lee left. What may have happened is that Lee saw them and pointed them out to OCSO, and then OCSO began collecting them about 1.5 hours after Lee left. The notation that Lee found them may have been in the bench notes, but did not make it to the report. The bench notes are shredded.
In spite of being stopped by objections, Baez was able to show:
1) The CSI is unfamiliar with his own reports. He thought the white bag question posed by Lee was in the report. It isn't.
2) The CSI remembers things about the meeting with Lee that aren't in the reports.
3) The bench notes contained more information than the resultant reports.
4) The bench notes are destroyed soon after the daily reports are created.
I think that many posters in the thread yesterday were so focused on Baez's amateur demeanor that the missed what he was able to show in his line of questioning and his statements (which were affirmed by the CSI).
