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Dragonfighter wrote:

Ashlar wrote:I guess that's the converse of the 'a good district attorney can indict a ham sandwich' saying.

I suppose we'll have both Martin's mother and Zimmerman's father on the stand claiming it's their respective sons' voices.

You can bet on that.

Ashlar wrote:Murder 2 is probably over-charging, but I could see Manslaughter as a lesser included charge sticking.

If voice analysis confirms Martin as the one screaming in the background of that one 911 call, Zimmerman's toast.

The catch here is that there will almost certainly be an expert who is certain (or "95% certain" or certain at some other mostly made-up level of confidence) that it is Trayvon, and another who is equally certain it is not. Both sides will have experts, and coincidentally each side's experts will use very similar methods, but support their side's story (or at least rebut the other side's story).

The bad news is that expert witness testimony does very little good, unless you have jurors with sufficient critical thinking skills to figure out which one is full of it. The really bad news is that the average educational level of jurors in America is fourth grade (they may have completed more grades than that, but of course this is in schools that promote failing students rather than deal with angry parents). So, most jurors are utterly unprepared to reason through competing analyses of audio waveforms, RF interference, and whatever else comes up. The good (?) news is that most jurors report simply ignoring all of the experts to a pretty great degree.

74novaman wrote:We've been sliding toward mob rule ever since we went to direct election of senators in 1913.

"Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. . . . Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams