Neil Entwhistle (on trial in MA for murdering his wife and daughter) has a most unusual lawyer-they guy is saying that the judge should strike from the record, the evidence obtained by the police (when they entered the house and found the bodies). the lawyer says they didn’t have a valid search warrant, so that evidence should not be relevant. OK…but how doe you erase a fact? The two dead bodies were found by police-how does a juror "erase’ that fact from memory?
How is his lawyer “most unusual”?
IANAL, but isn’t it a matter of what evidence is given in court to the jury. So the police officers cannot testify on what they found when they entered the house, and the jury doesn’t get to hear any of that. The deceased are still deceased, but the jury doesn’t hear how they were found.
As a juror I don’t think I could. I am open to the presumption of innocence, burden of proof, etc. but as much as I value civil rights I wouldn’t let a murderer go free because evidence was obtained illegally. In the jury room I would not mention the illegal evidence and tell other jurors that we are supposed to ignore it, but it would always be in my mind. I think that makes me a hypocrite.
But that assumes that as a juror you have heard the evidence. Surely the defense lawyer would try to argue on the admissability of evidence before the jury has heard it, arguing the case to the court while the jury is not present.
Agreed.
And ralph, you’re the most consistently entertaining poster since Wildest Bill.
I think you meant to post this in GQ. I’ll move it there for you.
This is all well and good, in theory, but IRL the jury has been reading newspapers and watching TV for months before the case came to trial and before they were selected to be on the jury. Can they be reasonably expected to disregard the images they saw on TV of the police dragging bodies out of the house, etc.
NOTE: I am commenting on cases in general, not the specific case in the OP.
Previous thread on topic: Objection. Move to strike - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
In any community, it’s possible to find people who don’t make a habit of following the news, or who view it selectively – those for whom “the latest news” is whether Sanjaya was voted off American Idol, or whether the Yankees are ahead of the Red Sox, or what Pastor Orkrist had to say about the Book of Obadiah last week, or who came to visit that trashy Jane Farquhar in the third house down last Friday night. Sometimes (rarely), defense and prosecution will agree that a venireman is telling the truth when he says he’s seen a couple of news reports, but doesn’t trust the Globe or WBLT for the truth, and has formed no opinion about the case. It’s these people that a jury in a well-publicized case is made up from.
The point is, you would have to be living under a rock, not to know that Entwhistle’s wife’s and daughters bodies were found by the police 9who were investigating a missing persons report). So, if you are a juror, and the defense lawyer objects, how are you supposed to deal with the evidence? They can say: the police did enter the house, they did find bodies, but this evidence must NOT be considered? truly bizarre!
How would you handle it?
From the articles I’ve read, there’s a lot of physical evidence in the house that ties Entwistle (no “h” in the name if you want to search for stories BTW) directly to the shootings. This is what they’re trying to suppress. Also, it would suppress a lot of the other evidence they found, since it was based on the original search. So it’s no much of “there were no bodies found since the search was illegal” as “here’s blood, DNA, fiber, etc. evidence the jury can’t see since the search was illegal.”
As for the “unusual” move - why not try it? If they win, the prosecution loses a big part of its case - all they’d have then is the fact Entwistle fled the country. If they lose, I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to plea bargain.
The more bizarre story to come out recently - Entwistle is trying to get his last month’s rent & security deposit back (the house was rented).
I think the defence atty should try to convince the jury that they bodies were possibly NOT those of the murder victims…hows that grab ya?
First, this is not a “most unusual lawyer.” You’re talking about pre-trial motions, which are standard in trial work. Second, you’re not talking about a motion to strike evidence from the record. The “record” is the pleadings, motions, rulings, testimony, and instruction that make up the trial. Before evidence may be “stricken from the record,” it must first be in the record – said out loud, in front of the jury, during trial. In this case, Mr. Entwhistle’s attorneys are arguing that the evidence should be excluded – that is, that it should not be allowed in the trial at all, so the jury will never hear it in the first place. So this isn’t a question of how we “unring the bell,” meaning, instruct jurors to disregard evidence they just heard. This is a pre-trial motion to exclude this evidence to prevent it from ever being part of the record or considered by the jury in their deliberations. As the term indicates, pre-trial motions are argued by the lawyers and decided by the judge before the trial even begins.
No. There is a different at law between “relevant” and “admissible.” Evidence that may be relevant to a case – as this clearly is – may still be disallowed for other reasons, such as that it is too prejudicial, or procedural safeguards were not followed. As a general rule, law enforcement may not seach a private residence without obtaining a warrant first (absent exigent, or emergency, circumstances). The violation of the homeowner’s constitutional rights is considered so grave that the penalty for that violation is that the government may not use the wrongfully-obtained evidence to prove its case. The evidence becomes what is called “fruit of the poisonous tree” – i.e., results of a bad search. Entwhistle’s lawyer is not arguing that this evidence is not relevant but that it is not admissible.
Assuming the motion to excude is granted and the evidence is not allowed in – The jury isn’t required to “erase that fact from their memory”; they just aren’t allowed to consider it as evidence when deciding Mr. Entwhistle’s guilt. They are expected to decide the case based on the evidence presented at trial and only the evidence presented at trial, without regard to what they know or think they know from outside sources. They will be instructed to that effect at the close of the evidence (after both sides have rested), before they go deliberate.
If those facts were not presented to you during trial, you don’t consider them when weighing the evidence to decide the defendant’s guilt or innocence.
It’s not “evidence” if you never hear it, and it’s not “evidence” if it’s stricken from the record. You don’t “deal” with it; you disregard it for purposes of your deliberations.
They can’t say that, and they won’t say that. If the motion to exclude these facts is granted, then the jury will never hear how or when or where the bodies were found. The jury won’t be told not to consider these facts; they won’t hear them in the first place. If the motion to exclude these facts is not granted and the evidence is admitted, then the jury will be allowed to consider that evidence during its deliberations.
IOW, if certain facts are not helpful to the jury in making its determination (irrelevant), or if certain facts could not be considered by the jury in making its determination (inadmissible), then in most cases the jury will never hear those facts at all. The proffered evidence will be excluded before the trial even begins.
It is extremely common to try to decide such evidentiary matters prior to trial. Pre-trial evidentiary motions serve to: (1) avoid “tainting” the jury with inadmissible evidence; (2) lay the legal basis for an appeal if evidence you want in is excluded or evidence you want out is included; and (3) let the lawyers know what evidence they will have to work with (what they can get the witnesses to say, or must make sure the witnesses avoid saying). It’s not “unusual” or “bizarre”; it happens before virtually every trial these days.
I must be living under a rock.
Well, it doesn’t grab me very well. On what basis would you try to convince the jury that the bodies were other than the murder victims? You are not allowed to wildly speculate without any basis – maybe it was Hoffa and the Lindberg baby! – you have to have at least a smidge of a basis in fact. What argument could you as a defense attorney make that these are other bodies? The prosecution will put up the officer who discovered the bodies and the coroner who examined/autopsied them, and together they will positively identify them as the victims. I don’t see a viable argument that those identifications were mistaken.
After the state puts on the ME and family members who positively identified the victims? Grabs me like malpractice. :dubious:
So what? The defense is that the cops found some other corpses in the defendant’s house and the victims are really still alive?