I started this blog to discuss high-profile trials. Thinking back over the "biggies" (Casey Anthony, George Zimmerman, O.J. Simpson (original), etc...) I was struck by just how many of those trials were losers for the prosecution. It isn't coincidence.
Trials that capture the public imagination typically have the same factors in common: a relatable victim (child/wronged spouse/everyman/missing white woman) PLUS some hot-button issue that fires up our passions like sex, racism or religion. Excluding celebrity cases (would anyone care about Lindsay Lohan's DWI's if she wasn't Lindsay Lohan?) we care about "big" cases because we can imagine ourselves or someone we care about suffering through a similar outrage and it makes us angry or afraid. We get invested. Unfortunately, the passion that we feel sometimes makes us overlook the difficulty of proving a case. We see that something horrible happened (i.e. a two year old is killed and her body is left in a swamp to rot) and forget the significant evidentiary challenges that prevent all the gory, outrage-fueling details from presentation to the jury. The juries see very different cases than we do. Accordingly, their verdicts often seem incomprehensible.
The Dr. Martin MacNeill case looks poised to follow this pattern exactly.
The allegations in the MacNeill case are that Dr. MacNeill pressured his wife, Michele to undergo elective plastic surgery. Then, when she was recovering, he intentionally overmedicated her, resulting in a drug-overdose that killed her, clearing the way for him to be with his lover, Gypsy Willis, a mistress straight out of central casting.
The twenty-four hour news cycle has already exposed Dr. MacNeill as a cad in the first degree. At the same time, the court has made evidentiary rulings that will prevent the most explosive and prejudicial tidbits from presentation to the jury. Most significantly, the Court will exclude evidence that Dr. MacNeill changed his will to leave property to his mistress, will exclude as hearsay a statement that Mrs. MacNeill allegedly made to her daughter "If anything happens to me, make sure it wasn't your dad", and has reserved a ruling on whether or not his youngest daughter (the first person to find the body) will be allowed to testify at all. This was already an extremely circumstantial case. I predict that Martin MacNeill will walk free- much to the disgust of the news-watching public.
The local Fox affiliate is providing a live stream of the trial: http://fox13now.com/2013/10/17/live-streaming-martin-macneill-murder-trial/
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