November 12, 2004

High profile criminal trials, like the Scott Peterson double murder case, seem to attract some real screwballs into the jury pool. These are people who live relatively normal, low profile lives, and they see being empanelled as a juror on this kind of case as an opportunity to make a few bucks and bask in their 15-minutes of fame. They will lie and say anything they can to get on the jury, and it most definitely does not bode well for justice to prevail.

Just remember the O.J. Simpson trial. Not only did the jury find Simpson not guilty in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, but they gave paid interviews afterward, got paid for writing about their experiences, and one of the female jurors later posed nude for Playboy Magazine! You surely know she didn’t do it for free.

The opportunists and pretenders wouldn’t know a case was high profile or not if we did the same thing as the Brits, which is to prohibit salacious news stories about the crime, the accused and the trial itself until a verdict has been rendered. The silly Brits think it is more important for an accused to get a fair trial than it is for the public to be entertained and informed, and I have come to agree with them.

Just like the O.J. Simpson case, the pre-trial news stories about the Peterson murders were almost entirely slanted toward Peterson’s guilt, and because the nature of the crime was so heinous, just about everybody in the entire United States thinks they know most everything about it – even though they really don’t. That would include all the jurors picked for the Peterson trial, regardless of their claims to the contrary, and their glib assurances they would be open-minded to the evidence and arguments presented.

Come off it, we’re dealing with human beings here! Human nature doesn’t change, and media-honed prejudices are damn difficult to dislodge once they are set in place. Probably the only place Peterson could get an honest-to-God fair trial would be Chechnya. Maybe.

So it doesn’t surprise me that three of the jurors hearing the Scott Peterson case have been dismissed and replaced with alternates. Three more and there won’t be any more alternates left.

The first was Justin Falconer, who got caught on camera talking to Laci Peterson’s brother. Who doesn’t know that’s prohibited? The second, a woman from Foster City, California, got nailed for doing a little Scott Peterson research on her own, and now the third juror, a guy who has a law degree and a medical degree, got sent home for reasons that remain secret. He was the jury foreperson, and it is rumored he asked to be replaced!

Okay, so we know the jury had previously told Judge Delucci they were deadlocked, and now they’re not only smiling, (You know, like they see the chance to go home soon?) but they also elected a pal of Falconer to be their new jury foreperson! What the heck is going on here? Since when does a judge allow a jury to trim members here and there to reach a verdict? It looks as if the jurors sort of played “Survivor” and figured out how to run a few people they disagreed with off the panel. Call me crazy.

We know Justin Falconer told interviewers that, based on the evidence, he wasn’t convinced of Peterson’s guilt. We are told the new jury foreperson is a friend of Falconer, so we might be inclined to speculate the jury wants to find Peterson not guilty. We are told several of the surviving jurors nod and smile at Peterson and his attorney, Mark Geragos, from time-to-time.

Trust me; it means nothing. In high profile cases like this, some jurors get together and deliberately give false signals because they know they are under scrutiny by everyone for every little sign they might betray, and some do it out of a sadistic little impulse to further torture a defendant they find particularly onerous – like Scott Peterson. They want a finding of guilty to be that much more devastating – and it works really well. Defendants subjected to that kind of false hope have been known to collapse hearing their guilty verdict. It’s great fun for all involved -- except the defendant.

One thing I do know is that a guilty verdict will be appealed successfully. Judge Delucci has allowed the Prosecution to present arguments consisting of pure speculation based exclusively on circumstantial evidence that has nothing to do with the commission of the actual crime. There are no eyewitnesses to the crime or its cover-up. The judge even allowed the testimony of dog handlers who claim their dogs told them Laci had been here or there. How do you cross-examine a dog? And now that a third juror has been allowed to leave the panel, this trial has gone totally bonkers.

What really bugs me are these so-called “legal experts” on Court TV and other venues who think a not-guilty verdict would be a tragedy. Hellooo! -- “If the glove don’t fit, you can’t convict”, remember that one? Well unlike the Simpson trial evidence, which was overwhelmingly incriminating of O.J., there is hardly a scintilla of evidence Scott Peterson committed the crime of murdering his wife and unborn son, let alone evidence that he disposed of Laci’s very pregnant body.

How do you pull off a crime of murder where the best and brightest of forensic evidence technicians come up blank time after time, inspection after inspection, search after search? How do you avoid somebody, anybody seeing you? How do you avoid anybody seeing you at all on Christmas Eve launching your boat or pulling it behind your car? How do you avoid somebody seeing you cleaning the boat up – if you even had to?

There are only three possibilities, people:

1: Scott Peterson is the luckiest amateur murderer in the world’s history of murder, or;

2: Scott Peterson is an accomplished murderer with a cool head and many victims who has never been caught or even suspected, or;

3: Scott Peterson really went fishing the day Laci disappeared. She was grabbed and eventually killed by a third party, who disposed of her body near the Berkeley Marina after all the news reports revealed where Peterson went fishing that Christmas Eve. (Note: If Peterson paid somebody to kill Laci, he wouldn’t have had the hit man dump her body near where he went fishing -- unless the check he wrote to the hit man bounced.)

If we were following the Brit’s media gag rules, and Laci and unborn son Connor showed up right near where Scott Peterson went fishing that day, I’d beg to stick the needle in Peterson’s arm myself, but that media boo-boo is the absolute worst flaw in the entire prosecution against Scott Peterson. If the media hadn’t revealed where Peterson went that day, the killer wouldn’t know where to dump Laci’s body in an attempt to frame Peterson and avoid personal detection – if that is what happened. If not, refer to items 1 and 2 above.

Anyway, if my instincts are running as usual, we’ll only have to wait maybe three more days for a verdict, and it will be unanimous. The jury might come in with a verdict in as little as one day, but I think they’ll give it a day or two for show.

Let’s see if I’m right.

Carl F. Worden

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