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In this actual Westerfield case I think the Jury should have heard it all -- the K&O interview tapes, all the rumors in float, etc., the lawyers should have their run to raise questions and alternatives, there should have been no pre-quel plea bargaining phase and no "sentencing phase". I also think the trial should have been heard one or two counties away from SD to better get an impartial jury.

But that's perfectionist fantasy. In the real world, did Feldman "signal"? I don't know, and I don't know that Westerfield is guilty or not either.

That's why I asked for a hypothetical answer. Is it okay to say a man is guilty of a capital crime -- or any crime -- based on intuition and feeling? Or should some mininal logic and reason be necessary as well? How many trials are like Westerfield's & OJ's -- emotional, emotional, emotional, and how many like Captain Preston's or William Penn's, where emotional force was used to bring home logic and reason out of the current common wisdom and mob feelings, and Jury's acted and were taken far more seriously?

Well I certainly agree that the jury should have heard everything, the neighbors, the patrons from Dad's, the friends at the VD's, even the pizza delivery guy. There is nothing I have heard so far, before, during or after the trial, that would lead me to think he was innocent. Every thing I hear make me more & more sure. Westerfield did it!

It's all very well to claim that Westerfield's was an "emotional" trial--as if that's an option; few people can refrain from feeling some emotion when they are confronted with the most inimate details including photographs, etc., of a child's murder--but the one thing you people will refuse to do is come to terms with the fact that twelve separate people heard all that evidence, and reached the unanimous conclusion that Westerfield is guilty of the murder.

Those twelve people came to the unanimous conclusion that he should die for it.

And none of your semantics and word-parsing and cute little logic-juggling tricks is going to overcome that stark, staring, LOGICAL fact.