As I write this, a Phoenix, Arizona, jury is considering whether Jodi Arias should be sentenced to death or life in prison for the murder of her former boyfriend Travis Alexander. So this is as good a time as any to review what went right in this trial and what went wrong in two others.
Over the past year and more, the media have been in nirvana with three criminal defendants of the type that make their ratings and circulation-driven hearts go all aflutter. All three are attractive white women, and each was accused of the grisly murder of someone very close to her: a roommate, a child, a lover. In each case, press, public and a large part of the investigative force had a preconceived idea – what we in the law enforcement community call a confirmation bias – firmly in place long before each trial began.
But in the murder trials of Amanda Knox in Perugia, Italy; Casey Anthony in Orlando, Florida; and Jodi Arias in Phoenix, we see both similarities and differences that provide a virtual user’s manual on how to, and now not to, prosecute high profile crimes.
The basic problem with the 2009 trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of Amanda’s flat mate Meredith Kercher is that there was no evidence and the entire case was built on supposition and preconceived ideas of the investigators and the monstrous and evil-minded prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.
There is a saying in law enforcement: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But in this case, it certainly was. There was no way on earth Amanda and Raffaele could have “cleaned” all of their own invisible DNA from the crime scene while leaving massive amounts from Rudy Guede, the actual killer. But that is what Mignini got the jury to believe, along with a heaping serving of undiluted hokum that the motive for the crime was a combination of Satanic ritual and sexual adventurism from these two young people whose greatest sin in life up until that night had been smoking dope.
The prosecution and four-year incarceration of these two before an appeals court overturned the verdict was an affront to justice and should have been a huge international embarrassment to Italy. This last supposition is very much in doubt, however, since the Italian high court of Cassation in Rome recently called for a new trial for Knox and Sollecito.
In any event, to those of us who have investigated the case and know the facts, the trial was an object lesson in the horror that ensues when prosecutors simply make up a theory out of whole cloth and totally – and I mean, totally – ignore the evidence.
In the 2011 prosecution of Casey Anthony for the murder of her two-year-old daughter Caylee, the evidence was stronger. She had been caught up in a pack of lies to authorities and took weeks even to admit the toddler was missing. Meanwhile, Casey was videoed strutting her stuff in area nightspots – not exactly the behavior one might normally expect from a mother worried about her missing child’s whereabouts. Examination of her computer revealed Google searches for using chloroform, a likely cause of Caylee’s death.
But here was the problem: No matter how close the metaphorical smoking gun seemed, investigators could never quite put their hands on it. That is, despite a pile of highly suggestive evidence, prosecutors were unable to tie Casey directly to Caylee’s death. And when you’re asking a jury – even in a death penalty friendly state like Florida – for a verdict of capital murder, that is just too high a threshold. Juries really do want to be responsible, but you have to give them the tools to work with. Though I suspect everyone on the jury believed Casey was responsible for Caylee’s death, the absence of a direct tie to that death was enough to qualify as reasonable doubt.
So was the prosecution wrong in bringing Casey Anthony to trial? No. But with the evidence they had, it seems that they did overreach in charging. Instead of going for first degree murder, they should have gone for manslaughter and child endangerment. And on the other end, instead of charging her with lying to a police officer, which is only a misdemeanor, they should have gone for obstruction of justice, which is a felony. It is reasonable to conclude that the jury would have been much more comfortable with standards of proof for those charges, and Anthony would have spent a long time in the slammer, where she probably belongs.
Yes, the jury could have elected a lesser murder or manslaughter verdict, but when you’ve asked for first degree and haven’t proven it, you’ve put yourself behind the eight ball as far as credibility goes, and it is difficult to recover.
With Jodi Arias, though, it all came together. The evidence was certainly there, both forensically and behaviorally, and Jodi’s long trail of lies was both well documented and eventually self-admitted. Her version of events was so far from where the evidence led that her attorneys couldn’t even come up with an alternate scenario.
In her sentencing hearing, she even went so far, according to CNN, as to admit to the jury “that killing her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander was the worst thing she has ever done, and that she’s still horrified by the violence she is capable of.”
Ya think?
She may be no worse a human being – and I include her in our race reluctantly – than Casey Anthony, but there is one main difference:
The evidence was better, and lead prosecutor Juan Martinez and his team knew what to do with it. So at least in this case, truth won out, and justice was served.
It’s interesting to note that in Italy the head judge of the trial, who makes all the in-trial decisions, also sits on the jury. I think it’s fair to say he/she has an inordinate amount of power during deliberations as an authority figure to the lay jurors.
The first judge, Massei, allowed the police crime lab to keep hiding the data and procedures behind their DNA analysis “results” against Amanda and Raffaele. He then refused an independent review of the analysis, which clearly did not follow any international standards. Then he used these results in his explanation for the guilty verdict, along with his fantasy crime theory.
I have enough science background to understand that CSI Stefanoni’s evidence against Amanda and Raffaele was fabricated. But I often ask myself: If I had been on that first jury would I have had the guts to confront Massei. If I could not have found the courage I would have felt guilty for the rest of my life, interrupted by immense relief when the next judge ordered the independent review.
My heart goes out to the Arias jury. This is a miserable experience that has fallen on their shoulders.