Posted on 08/21/2002 10:03:52 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
I agree with what both of you have said regarding juries. It irritates me when I see some conservatives brag about getting out of jury duty, like it's beneath them or something. And then some of these folks are the very same ones who complain about juries making bad decisions. Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Again you show your knowledge of the media over the evidence presented at trial. The only bleach present was in Westerfield's washing machine, not his motor home. Your dismissal of evidence does now 'wash'. There was no evidence of 'bleach' in the motor home.
Please explain to this humble nurse the signficance that bruising was not evident on a mummified body with much flesh missing?
Once again you must read what the ME testified to instead of what you have heard on the boob tube. The ME said that there was NO evidence of bruising on her wrists or the ankle that remained, and that there was suffieient flesh that remained to make such a determination......
But please keep askin questions, for in your asking you may find the need to find the truth.....the truth that lies beyond the screen and lays in the real world.
Society can only hope that in 30 years or so he grows up and matures like most teen boys do.
The records say nothing about how his cousin was transported there, only that he was there. Hospital emergency rooms don't ask how the patient arrived and don't record who was with the patient. Every emergency room I've been to didn't care how I got home!
And a hospital record for a nosebleed, the frequency of Danielle's which was in evidence in this trial? Come on.
DW offered no explanation or witnesses to place the victim in his MH in an innocent fashion
Feldstein, his spokesman, did.
I think a large part of this comes from the increasing desire in this country to BE somebody. If you can't be a music or a movie star, or if you can't get notoriety any other way, one sure way to satisfy that little itch is to be controversial. Maybe the best example I can imagine comes from the legion of people on this board who, throughout the trial, have posted things like, 'what about X piece of (possibly exculpatory) evidence? Why isn't the defense mentioning this?' when in fact everyone can rest assured that the defense was using every iota of exculpatory evidence to its fullest. If I can find some bit of minutia that, when examined at the proper angle, makes the case against DW appear shaky, then I have DONE SOMETHING. I have BECOME CONTROVERSIAL. I have RAISED PEOPLE FROM THE MORASS OF THEIR OWN TROUBLES, AND ENMIRED THEM IN MINE.
The problem, of course, is that the entire X-Files-influenced, conspiracy-theorist, fervently not-guilty, someone-else-is-involved crowd takes such items well out of context and obscures them accordingly, when in fact the job of the jury is to align such information in a way that allows for the proper application of the 'reasonable doubt' standard.
Of course, the nihilists, because of their nihilism, implicitly reject the reasonable doubt standard in favor of the 'I won't convict unless I hovered above the known realm and personally WITNESSED the crime, or, failing that, had a really snazzy DVD of the crime, produced by my buddy, who usually videos weddings.' That's what you get in a postmodern world: a required standard of proof that can't be constructed, specifically because it's bound to be DECONSTRUCTED. It's as though they're all saying, look, there is a chance, though tiny, that DW did not do it. Since no one will ever know what REALLY happened (besides a dead girl and DW), I'm going to opt for the thing that makes me look like the hippest iconoclast if a miracle happens and he DIDN'T do it. Runnin' with the crowd is for CHUMPS.
There is no evidence of him being in the home. Ever.
Perhaps not, but there is evidence that Danielle is dead, and her DNA was found on his personal items. The lack of evidence of DW in the VD home is sufficient for conviction, but not NECESSARY.
Put differently, the prosecution need not show HOW Danielle got into DW's world, only that she WAS in his world, and now she is dead.
There is no motive.
None that was made public. I did not hear DW utter a word during the entire trial, so we can only speculate about his motive.
The VDs continuously changed their stories.
Which, I assume, means that they must somehow be complicit, if not downright guilty. We can rest assured, with probability one, that the defense team sought any shred of plausible evidence that the VD family had something to do with it, and that DW was either totally innocent, or was covering up for them. I submit that DW would have sung like a canary if the latter were true, and that the overwhelming police investigation would have uncovered evidence of the former.
The Prosecution went from smoking gun to smoking gun. ie bleach, binocs, blinds, hose, etc.
It's the confluence of the evidence, taken in concert. Circumstances would have been too coincidental, too idiosyncratic to reach the conclusion that DW had nothing to do with it. The combination of the circumstances allowed the prosecution to cross the reasonable doubt threshold. It's a movies-and-TV mentality that requires a single, absolute, incontrovertable, metaphysically consistent smoking gun to justify conviction.
I regret to inform the nihilists that the most obvious answer is almost invariably the answer. I'm sorry you did not get your way, and that the verdict only added to your mistrust of the system. But fear not: another episode of the X-Files is probably about to start on the FX Channel, and soon you can crawl right back into your world of implausibility and least-likely solutions.
If they'd have found him "not guilty" then I would have concluded that they saw the evidence was lacking.
Simple.
Now, let me hear you say it: "Since the jury proclaimed him guilty, then he must be the murdering child rapist that I've been denying all along."
That's the first step toward recovering your sanity.
Oh my dear Dave--you can't see the forest for the trees are in the way...
I suppose you have a fantastic explanation for why Mr. Meticulous Westerfield left his uncoiled hose on the lawn, since he was so full of time on his hands not wiping his RV clean of all but one handprint and a drop of Danielle's blood while the bleach and empty bottle was only in his laundry with her hair because he was going to meet and entertain friends that never materialized, and he made the early quick stop to innocently drop off the bloodstained jacket and contaminated comforter while dressed in his skivvies and bare feet on a very chilling Monday morning.
Have you considered writing fantasy movels?
Do you realize how ridiculous that statement is?
I do thank you for the correction, though, because it was a terribly written sentence. Let me try again. Did you realize that when answering questions concerning time of placement of bodies, forensic entomology is as reliable and exact as fingerprinting is for determining the presence of certain individuals at a location, or for determining what objects an individual has touched?
No, you didn't know that. I dare say all you know about forensic entomology (and I wonder if you even knew such a science existed prior to this trial) is the account given by the popular news media of an account given by a prosecutor of an account given by a careless, paid expert witness. That's pretty flimsy evidence on which to condemn the utility of a whole science.
An analogy to what happened in this case would be the following: A man robs a house, and the alarm system was tripped at 5PM, sharp. A man later arrested for robbing the house has a tight alibi for where he was from 4 to 5:30PM, and it was not at the house. His lawyers bring in two witnesses for the alarm company who state that the alarm was definitely tripped at 5PM. The prosecutor brings in an expert on electronic alarms who states that, although he knows of no actual cases, it is possible that there was a glitch in the clock, and that the alarm could have actually been tripped as early as 4PM, if the clock had some unprecedented glitch in it. That's not a very discriptive analogy, but that's roughly analogous to the "disagreement" among the three entomologists. Westerfield may well have killed the child, and maybe the other evidence proves that beyond a reasonable doubt, but it seems a stretch to say he put the body where it was found. I would more easily believe that the police screwed up in their surveillance of Westerfield long enough for him to have put the body there, than to believe the wild speculation for a buck of entomologist #3.
My defense here is not of David Westerfield, but against the ridiculous and uninformed attacks on the science of forensic entomology, all based on a shameless job taken by an entomolgist offered by a prosecution desperate to muddy certain troublesome facts.
LOL
The most solid evidence I have seen for his guilt is a drop of the victim's blood on his jacket, and his apparent attempt to have it dry-cleaned.
But I am not a DW defender. I just can't help thinking that someone else is getting away with something, even if DW is being justly convicted. The entomological data disturbs me a great deal. As I told Greg W., I will research it more carefully.
Regardless, it gets me to see all these people (including idiot reporters) who before this trial had never even heard of forensic entomology so confidently calling it an "inexact science." They don't know what they're talking about. It's as much as an exact science as DNA analysis. As in all forensics, the handling of samples is crucial.
It's the misconceptions about forensic entomology that this case has caused that bothers me more than anything. As far as I'm concerned, the Van dammes and David Westerfield can all be lined up and shot, and I'll eat my breakfast quite heartily. Much better people have been wrongly killed.
Gone since 8/21. RIP, dedicated spinner for convicted child-killer. I guess his contract didn't extend to the penalty phase.
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