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Two potentially crucial fact issues: Aubery’s reputation and record as to criminal misbehavior, violence, or hot-headedness, and his medication and substance use. If he had a criminal record for burglary, was inclined to be violent and hot-headed, and was on meth, the controversy would take a different course.

None of that matters to the court.

You don’t get a legal right to murder someone because they didn’t live a perfect life.

Sorry, no dice

McMichaels were playing cop here, they had no right to what they did to that man. Now he is dead and hopefully they server three decades in a cage.

So, assuming the worst, you believe that it would be inadmissible as evidence if the defendants wanted to show at trial that Aubery, the supposed victim, had a felony conviction for burglary, was violating a probation condition in his trespass at the construction site, was notorious for being hotheaded, and that his toxicology report showed active user levels of meth and cocaine in his system?

I think that most or all of that (if true) would come in to explain Aubery's motive or intent in the way he responded to an armed citizen's arrest, which Aubery reacted to with a physical attack that turned lethal against him.

Moreover, read carefully, most evidence codes permit character or trait evidence in criminal cases. For example, the much-copied Federal Evidence Code generally prohibits character and trait evidence in Rule 404, but with criminal cases being an exception in which "a defendant may offer evidence of an alleged victim’s pertinent trait." A similar provision in Georgia's evidence code also makes admissible "evidence of a pertinent trait of character of the alleged victim of the crime offered by an accused."

None of that matters to the court.

Yes, it does, first because it can help explain his mindset to jurors, as to why he would attack an armed man.

Second, because the McMichaels may have know of these facts, which figure into their mindset.