The problem is that we don’t know what the jury will be told.
Even if the jury discounts gang-member hearsay, what if the neighborhood of fearful and compliant people come in and say “Yeah, we heard that old guy was in the military. Wasn’t he having flash backs from 'Nam? He always scared me. I’d have shot him too.”
They’d be lying of course (at least based on what we know from the movie) but if they’re afraid of retaliation by other gang members they’re going to have a strong motive to lie.
A murder rap is definitely not a given… and I wasn’t convinced that any kind of happy ending was a given except that some old guy died in a way that he saw as more noble than wasting away with cancer and old age.
This was my impression, but didn’t the Priest call the cops earlier that day and beg of them to stay there before violence happened? The cops are going to sweat him down as to what he knew exactly about everything.
Even with that, I can’t see how a self-defense story gets spun. Walt was unarmed. They shot him a bunch of times with automatic weapons. The Prosecution’s story was they he went over to talk and they shot him down in cold blood. It’s still not foolproof. What would have happened had the gang members simply to him to get lost and go home? What then?
That sounds very unlikely for fearful and compliant locals though. What I would more expect would be a rash of “gosh, I have no idea what happened that day, I was off visiting my old granny in her nursing home in the next town.”. Which appears to have been what the police kept getting all through the gang’s reign of terror, only now it would work against the gang, not for them.
Didn’t Walt talk about being on missions where they couldn’t take any prisoners?
I figured he killed someone a lot like Thao and that all his Asian hostility was sublimated guilt. Probably thought, on bad days, that it would have been better to have died over there than live with how he’d survived. So after identifying with Thao and his family as people, stepping in front of a bullet for him, so to speak, came pretty easily for an lonely old widower with cancer; Walt had his faults, but weakness and cowardice were not among them. Perfect plan? No, but the strongest play he had.
Would’ve been a lot stronger play, IRL, if he could have arranged an unmarked police vehicle to be parked across the street. Which, IMHO, wouldn’t have been that hard to do. I think they just left that out for Hollywood reasons.