I have long believed that police often make up their minds about a suspect before really analyzing any evidence or logic, and that “police procedure” thereafter often consists of rounding up the evidence need to convict, rather than the evidence that shows who the guilty party is. That is why in so many cases– sometimes I think it must be nearly all of them– there is a jailhouse snitch.
I cannot believe than any judge nowadays even allows testimony from a jailhouse snitch. But then– I’m insane.
So in the May 23, 2005 issue of “People Magazine”, we have an exclusive inside story on how the prosecutors “got” Scott Peterson. You may have already noticed that they don’t talk in terms of “discovering the truth” or “finding the evidence” or “proof”. No. They got him.
It is rarely quite this transparent. Prosecutor Rick Distaso admitted– without shame– that he had a “gut feeling” right at the start. Okay– he thinks that’s because he’s got great intuition. How about if we call it prejudice instead? You can call it whatever you want, but what we have, right up front, is a prosecutor admitting that he made up his mind about the case immediately and thereafter was primarily interested in proving his “intuition” correct.
Not to mention that… well, for heaven’s sake– he had a “gut feelings” that the husband might be involved? Have you ever not had that feeling when encountering the homicide of a young wife?
The prosecutors observed that his phone call home from his fishing trip on the day Laci disappeared was unduly friendly and affectionate. That led them to suspect he murdered his wife. I can’t even imagine what they might have imagined he’d done if his phone call had been distant and matter-of-fact! Or what if he had called up and screamed, “you bitch– you forgot to pack my lunch! I hate you! When I get home, I’m gonna kill you!” Would the police now be saying, he almost threw us off with that phone call. What murderer calls up his wife and leaves a threat on her answering machine? Fortunately, we saw through that clever ruse…
What sealed it, of course, in a case utterly devoid of any physical evidence or proof, was the affair Scott was having with Amber Frey, who called the police when she saw Scott’s face on TV in connection with the disappearance of the wife she didn’t know he had. “It was the moment the cops were waiting for” reports People magazine, a little breathlessly. Again, I guess I’m the crazy one in the room. You’ve never heard of men cheating on their wives before? Did they all kill their wives?
Peterson went on TV and was interviewed by Diane Sawyer. It was clear to the police that he had lied to them, or he lied to Diane Sawyer, and an entire nation of vidiots who were just waiting with baited breath for the Michael Jackson story to break. He denied that he was cheating on his wife.
That makes him stupid and irrational, but it still didn’t prove anything.
Laci’s body washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay on April 13. Police made much of the fact that this was the same body of water in which Scott Peterson went fishing. Imagine that. He actually went fishing in the nearest body of water.
The prosecution produced a pair of pliers that had a single hair in it that “might” have been Laci’s.
The prosecution implied that a life insurance policy that was two years old had been taken out just days before Laci’s disappearance.
Prosecutors admitted that they could barely keep from crying when Laci’s mother read an impact statement in court. But Scott did not react appropriately. The prosecution seems only dimly aware of the possibility that Scott Peterson might be a simple adulterer. By their logic, he was either a faithful husband or a murderer. He could not plausibly be an unfaithful husband whose wife was murdered by somebody else.
Now someone will try to tell me that all of this does not prove that he didn’t do it. Of course not. But nobody has any obligation to prove that he didn’t do it.
Considering the prosecution’s theory of how Scott Peterson allegedly killed his wife, it seems rather stunning that the evidence is so thin. Did he have a different boat that they didn’t know about? Did he perform a singularly magical act of sanitation afterwards, removing every trace, every hair, every drop of blood from his car and boat after murdering her and driving her 90 miles and putting her into a boat and navigating out into San Francisco Bay and dropping her body off?
Blink!
Your intuition is not always right.
Listen to you!
“An innocent man does not behave the way Scott did…” From a review of “Presumed Guilty…” on Amazon.com.
You are a liar and a scoundrel and you should never, ever be entrusted with any role whatsoever in the administration of justice anywhere on this earth. [2011-12-24]