Monday, November 15, 2004

Scott Peterson

Old news, I know. Three things:

1) How the jury convicted this guy is beyond me. As Talk Left noted, there's no murder weapon, no cause of death, no time of death, no identifiable crime scene, no witnesses. He may have been a cad, a liar and a cheat, but there's no proof that he's a murderer and definitely no proof beyond any doubt. The police bungled the investigation, honed in on Scott and never pursued any other possibilities. Also the judge kept changing jurors until the desired verdict was achieved. The original foreman who was kicked off right at the end was both a doctor and a lawyer, had 16 notebooks full of notes on the case and was an analytical type who allegedly was making the jurors look at the facts. He was replaced by a firefighter, a guy who was clearly bored through a lot of the trial and, one must assume, was more amenable to go with the jury's emotional, rather than considered, verdict.

2) Explain to me how you can convict someone of murdering someone who was never a legal person. The fetus does not have a birth certificate; the fetus was never born. So how can Scott Peterson be convicted of killing a non-person?

3) Which leads me to my biggest concern about this case and why I followed it when I usually don't give a damn about these sorts of media frenzys. The whole raison d'etre of this case was to prove that a fetus is a human being and that raises all kinds of problems for abortion rights.

Watch out -- this one isn't over yet.

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