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Posted on 08/08/2002 10:18:48 PM PDT by FresnoDA
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:58 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) --A San Diego jury began deliberations Thursday in the trial of David Westerfield, accused of kidnapping and killing 7-year-old Danielle van Dam.
The panel of six men and six women adjourned for the day without reaching a verdict. It is set to resume deliberations Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I get accused of adultery. The proof she has is that a woman was in bed and so was I. We are both naked. There is semen on the sheets. The jury is give the evidence and begins deliberation.
Taking the evidence one by one.
We have three basic pieces of evidence
First, the woman was in my bed = My story is I must of left the door unlocked and she wondered in and went to sleep and she likes to sleep naked. Reasonable explanation. Favors my innocence. Using the interpretation the Westerfield's did it crew we must exclude the woman from the evidence.
Second, I am naked--I was changing my clothes but decided to take a nap. I thought the woman was my wife. Reasonable explanation. Favors my innocence. Must eliminate the evidence.
Third, semen on the sheets---I had a wet dream while sleeping. Reasonable explanation. Favors my innocence. Must eliminate evidence.
Remaining evidence ='s No woman in bed and no semen on sheets. Therefore, not guilty.
The result of believing that it is a one by one approach is absurd in practice. Therefore she I left the doorI can offer up as a defense that I was naked because i was going to change my clothes
Dusek's theory is so absurd
Reread it. You are mistaken. You are confusing the the individual evidence from what is essential to prove guilt. There is a difference.
Hopefully the Jury will take noet of this.
I agree but on an issue that is this essential to the judges jury instructions it would not have gone unchallenged by the judge. Heck he even correct the defense on mistated evidence. Surely he would have interevened on Feldman making several explanations to describe applying the whole instead of the parts.
Sorry, his final rebuttle. Are the transcripts up yet ?
I would hold them accountable as well as Westerfield, yes.
Not Westerfield. One of the first porn ring guys.
I don't know how they could have missed it, Judy. The sarcasm, glaring and the sustaining of Dusek's objections, before Feldman could even get a sentence out of his mouth, would be hard for anyone to miss, IMO. And the "testimony" interjected by Mudd, that the sweater was red and not orange was way over the top and grounds, in itself, IMO, for winning on appeal, if he's found guilty.
"I hope the jury picked up on it."
I see what you are saying, but it seems to me, that Mudd did a pretty good job of endearing himself to the jury. While some of us see his actions as improper, my fear is, that the jury may think so highly of Mudd, that they will, subconsciously, be inclined to share some of this apparent bias toward the defense and DW.
Personally, I feel there is a chance DW is guilty, but that Dusek didn't come close to proving it beyond a reasonable doubt. What evidence he had, was outweighed, IMO, by the questionable actions and testimony of others and lack of evidence and testimony to support most of his speculative scenarios.
I also feel that other likely suspects were not investigated adequately from day-one and that the focus of the investigation centered solely upon DW much too quickly. This has been heavily argued by many here with opposing views, since these threads first began, but it remains my opinion.
Again, it's JMO and I hope I am wrong in this particular instance, but with the jury not having been sequestered and what I consider, seriously biased media coverage of this case, coupled with Avila's arrest for kidnapping, rape and murder of a child, after being previously aquitted and Samantha's abduction and disappearance, I don't think the jury could have avoided being tainted, in a trial lasting this long - not to mention Mudd's antics - and I don't feel all that confident that DW will be judged entirely on the merits of the case.
Several that are convinced that DW is guilty, have stated, that DW must be the unluckiest defendant in the world. Well, based just on the events I outlined in the previous paragraph, I would have to agree, that DW really has been pretty damn unlucky.
Anyway, I have personally had several seperate experiences with unscrupulous LE. Well, by unscrupulous I mean dishonest. I guess there are other forms of unscrupulous.
Fist was when I was about 11 yrs old. I had been hanging around with a guy who was 13(we'll call him R), and we were at the elementary school playground one weekend, and someone had broken into it the same weekend. A cop pulled into the area where we were, and took our names and addresses. Fast forward about 6 months or a year. A cop comes to my house, sits me and my parents down and say that the middle school had been vandalized, that he just came from R's and that R had admitted that he and I had done it. My mom and dad believed him, and my mother beat the crap out of me after the cop left. Bear in mind, I hadn't even hung around with R in a couple months. Well, after my continued protests, my dad drove me over to R's house to talk to him and his parents. When we got there, R came out of the house threatening to kick my butt for being a damn liar. See, the cop did go to R's house before he came to mine, but when he went to R's house he told them he had just come from my house and that I had confessed that it had been us that did it. BTW: we didn't have anything to do with it, and never heard anything else about it.
Next time I was 17, a friend woke me up to ask if I would come pick him up from a bar(it was 1 in the morning). I did, and on the way home, we were pulled, basically for being the only car on the road at the time. The police in that area(Cayce) had and still have a rep for corruption and brutality. My frined was drunk, and made fun of the way the cop was talking, one thing led to another, I was arrested for DUI. I told the cop(very nicely, i was in no way belligerent, and tried to stop my friend from behaving stupidly. I was so nice in fact, he took me to the station in the front seat with him, no cuffs or anything.) that I had had nothing to drink, and that I would take a breathalyzer. He said "That don't matter, look what I found in your car." He held up a fresh baggie with a small amount of weed in it. Now I knew I didn't have any with me, but I did smoke it regularly, and I was trying to figure out when I had lost some. He said he could see my little gears turning, and not to worry about it, just plead guilty and nothing would come of it. He winked at me and told me my car smelled strongly of marijuana smoke when he stepped to my window. It took a second, because I was one naive young man, but I got the picture. Pled guilty. My buddy got a baton-whuppin back at the station. I guess he had something coming to him, and he didn't get any permanent injuries out of it. But still. Just to be spiteful, the cop was a Sgt. Tincher. So if you know a guy named Tincher who was a Cayce, SC cop in 80/81, don't trust him.
Third. I was 18, my roommate was dealing small time(weed), the house got busted. To make a long story not quite so long, it was the type of case where the guy that was dealing would usually pay a large fine and it remain on his record, the other two roomates get simple possession, expunged after 10 yrs. Well, the cops said we had alot of stuff that we didn't but that it had been lost on the way to sled headquartes for analysis. My favorite was a baggie of "mexican brown heroin" found in the kitchen cabinet. Everyone who lived there knew about the baggie of shake and bake that had been in the cabinet all summer because we decided not to cook it one night at the last minute. Anyway, because of that, I had to take a simple possesion charge that could not be removed from my record. so far as I know, it is still there, since 1981.
There have actually been a few others, but I wonder if you get the picture about why I think that even if Mudd had said you could weigh two reasonable theories, I would still clear Westerfield, because a theory that involves the cops lying and falsifying evidence is eminently reasonable to me. Even more reasonable with the dubious circumstances surrounding the gathering of the evidence.
Now I really must say, that have had occasion to interact with four seperate Lexington County cops in the last year and a half or so(nothing about me doing anything wrong, but I don't want to go all into it) and every single one of them impressed me. Great guys, integrity and all, really really good folks. One was was maybe not too bright, but he almost brought a tear to my eye with his sheer, raw, niceness. So I am not a cop hater, and know there are some cops who are just super super good people.
But based on my experience, no way do you just assume the cop is honest. The problem with the cleaning ticket, the polaroids, the rag placed on the floor after the first LE search where the blood speck would later be found, they found time to supposedly test everything orange owned by anyone in the pictures at the last minute(dusek: "good thing i cought feldman's little trick in time") but twenty day was not enough time to even look at the unID'ed fibers, prints and DNA associated with the crime scene... I am very very skeptical.
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