Originally posted by sariebell
I agree Tthoman! Wudge writes so articulately, but I disagree in some respects as well. I do believe that the LE and prosecution have dropped the ball. I do not believe that Michael Peterson is innocent. When I first started watching and talking about this trial, I really thought it was a stretch that a case was brought to court at all. After settling in and hearing the evidence, I drastically changed my mind. I do believe that he is guilty. There are too many cooincidences, and there aren't that many in the natural world. I am afraid that Rudolf has one upped the prosecution team one too many times. They were no match for Rudolf's excellence (I hate him so much I love him). Wudge is probably right, much to my dismay, that Peterson will get ultimate poetic justice when he writes a bestseller about getting away with murder. There is new news about Candace (Kathleen's sister) carrying a long skinny box into the court. I wish that the trial had stuck to the facts and not veered into crazy land with all this blow poke business. Oh well, here we go!
Michael Peterson may not be innocent, and I don't know whether Michael Peterson killed his wife or not, nor does anyone else. Jurors are not asked to find the truth, nor are they asked to render a verdict based on what they feel, think or believe; they are asked to guage the existence of reasonable doubt based on the evidence made available to them.
I approach all cases and trials from the perspective of reasonable doubt. And I do it based on the evidence available at any point in time. This keeps me in perfect tune to what the end deliverable will be, a Guilty/Not Guilty verdict based on the weight of the evidence measured against the reasonable doubt hurdle.
I will leave the determination of the truth to a power far greater than I. I simply wait for the weight of the evidence to take me up and over the reasonable doubt hurdle, and it never came close in this trial. My position throughout the course of this trial was Not Guilty -- Not Guilty does not mean innocent -- and with most every passing day, a Not Guilty verdict was becoming more assurred as I watched he the needle on my evidentiary weighing scales continually drift deeper into the Not Guilty zone.
In this trial, we heard of two alleged murders. One death, Ms. Ratlif's, did not take place in Michael Peterson's home, nor was the woman his wife, nor did she die of bleed out, but she had often complained of the very worst of headache's in the weeks before she was found dead, which the original medical examiner determined occurred from a cerebral hemorrhage.
The other dead woman, Kathleen Peterson, was his wife and she died of bleed out -- as we all are well aware -- and she had also complained of severe headaches, and it is also very significant that she suffered a half hour of blindness in the days just before her death. Additionally, she had taken valium and been heavily drinking the night that she died -- alcohol is a well known blood thinner/lubricant, it acts like aspirin, and will it also facilitate bleed out .
In neither case was any alleged murder weapon found, and in neither case was a clear, much less a compelling, motive established.
I won't go into what reasonable doubt entails here, but it is not comprised of rank speculation and conjecture, which is what the prosecution's case represented..
The evidence simply was not there, and, for the most part, each prosecution witness did far more for the defense than they did for the prosecution. The prosecution never came close to establishing a clear and convincing preponderance of the evidence basket that would enable a jury to breach the reasonable doubt hurdle.
To me, this case represented a major abuse of prosecutorial power, such things do happen, sadly. It simply should never have been brought to the inside of a courtroom, a provable case was not there, period.
I never have an axe to grind with anyone who is charged with a crime, I just guage the evidence that we are aware of. In the Kobe case, things look very bad for him, indeed. Yet, before the alleged rape incident occurred, I liked him a lot and thought he well represented himself to be one of the best models the NBA had to offer to the public. I will wait for the evidence to be tested during a ttrial, but as things stand now Kobe will be fortunate if he walks away with a Not Guilty verdict. In the Laci Peterson case, I think Scott is a louse, cad, liar, and adulterer, but there is no citable hard evidence against him, so my reasonable doubt needle reads Not Guilty at this time.
These cases represent how I have always operated; I am evidence oriented, and I weigh each evidentiary item differently as well. If I classified and weighed all the evidence the same, I would have voted Not Guilty for David Westerfield. However, I had him Guilty, because the DNA of the blood evidence -- it ranked much higher on the evidentiary totem pole -- trumped the scientific testimony of the four entomologists -- including the prosecution's own "expert" entomologist -- who were in David Westerfield's camp.
That's the way I operate; it's just the way things are with me.