No, technically he entered a public building that others had opened.
Fortunately his defense lawyers didn’t get away with whatever nonsense they presented.
The issue isn’t the resolution. It’s discovery. The prosecution has to turn over all evidence as it will be presented. As often is the case technology outpaces case law so I don’t know exactly where it stands in Wisconsin.
He pleaded guilty so I’m not sure what nonsense you are talking about. It never got to court and his lawyers never presented a case.
But surely you can’t declare a mistrial based on discovery violations unless there is at least some plausible reason to think the violation might possibly have changed the outcome. It’s common in big corporate law trials for discovery requests to run to hundreds of thousands of pages; it can’t be the case that if the guy in the copy room misses copying any single one of them, that automatically means the whole trial has to be redone?
I can certainly see that the wronged party (the defense, in this case) deserves the benefit of every possible doubt in deciding whether a discovery violation was significant, but that’s not the same as declaring that every discovery violation is significant by definition.
Well they are claiming it’s significant and purposeful. It’s up to the judge to decide.
Hearing that MSNBC is banned from the trial
Yes, because one of their reporters apparently followed the jury’s bus, which is not something a judge is going to take kindly to in a trial while the jury is deliberating.
NBCs statement is this:
NBC News said in a statement that the man was a freelancer who received a citation for a traffic violation that took place near the jury vehicle, and he “never contacted or intended to contact the jurors during deliberations, and never photographed or intended to photograph them.”
But what a jerk if it turns out he was trying to take pictures of the jurors.
From what I have seen the prosecution says they did send the defense the video they had, but it got compressed during the electronic transfer process and when the defense opened it it had lost resolution. So it doesn’t look like the prosecution was deliberately sending the defense an alternate version of the footage intended to make them use a different defense strategy.
BUT, the version of the video presented for the jurors was the high-quality version, so the jury never saw the lower quality version. I couldn’t figure out what the defense was claiming the difference in quality made.
My question is at what point did the defense (or prosecution) notice this? Wouldn’t the defense have noticed the version difference once the prosecution showed their version in court? It seems this mistake was open for all to see, arguments were made, and nobody mentioned it for days/weeks. Was this mistake only detectable after closing arguments, or could someone have said something back when the issue could be corrected? It almost seems like the defense kept this little fact as a back-up move which comes across as shady.
Maybe the defense went back to review their copy and discovered the delta (‘why doesn’t ours look that clear’).
I think freelancer in this case is a person who tries to sell pictures to news outlets, rather than an employee. I could be wrong.
But unless the prosecution’s case depended specifically on evidence that can be clearly seen in the video shown in court, but not on the one they gave the defense, it shouldn’t matter. And it does seem like this would probably have been raised earlier if this were the case.
No, that’s right, freelancers traditionally sell their pictures to the highest bidder. I suppose it could be like an “independent contractor” deal, where he’s functionally an MSNBC employee, but without benefits.
It’s odd. Based on the story Bo linked, it appears the judge sanctioned MSNBC based solely on this criminal’s claim that he worked for them. I have to assume there was some other evidence there that the article didn’t mention. And although NBC is distancing themselves by calling him a freelancer, they’ve clearly discussed the incident with him.
There is no justification for riots.
That’s what I’m not understanding… apparently the high-quality version was shown in court, and the defense would have seen it during arguments; why not say something then? Had they not even looked at their own version and noticed it was of lower quality until after arguments closed?
They seem to be implying that their blurry footage didn’t show the rifle being pointed in a particular direction, so their argument was X. Had they had access to HQ footage that did shown where the rifle was pointed, their argument would have been Y.
But… when the prosecution showed their HQ footage in court, and made their arguments based on what it showed, the defense said nothing about the difference in quality and apparently didn’t care about it. Wouldn’t that be the time to speak up?
I’m just not seeing how they could have missed something like this.
What if we just call the participants “tourists”?
I’m making the assumption that they went back to review the footage and debated as to what happened/what argument they could make based on the difference between them.
I agree that the time to have brought that up woudl have been earlier - but this could be one of those things that is a ‘we have to get this on the record’.
My impression is that the HQ footage ‘helped’ the defense during the trial overall.
If, as part of discovery, the prosecution hands over 27 8x10 colored glossy photographs to the defense, but during the trial, has them blown up to poster size with circles and arrows on them, is that grounds for a mistrial?
No, but the littering charges might be dismissed.