chipbennett wrote:
Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't understand the problem?
A jury convicted him of second-degree murder, and manslaughter. The sentence seems appropriate for second-degree murder.
Now, if the issue is whether the second-degree murder *conviction* will stand up on appeal? That's anyone's guess. But if the jury rejected the self-defense claim, then at a minimum, manslaughter by act is an appropriate conviction. And from the little I know about the case, the facts don't seem to support a self-defense claim.
What am I missing?
For me, the problem was the absence of due process...
The police didn't even bother to secure the scene or begin investigating until 9 days after the fact, when it should have been done that night. The process of securing the scene should have been started by the first responding officer on the scene. They also altered the scene: put the screen back in the door, walked through blood spatter evidence, gave items/money found on Renisha to her family rather than preserving it as evidence, etc, etc, etc.
We have an exclusionary rule that bars evidence if it is collected improperly, and this case demonstrates that there needs to be a counterpart rule on the opposite end of the spectrum that addresses the lack of sufficient evidence due to the fact that the police didn't bother to collect any.
All of the facts that could have been known to the jury to help them in their decision weren't known to the jury specifically because of the police department's not following proper procedure. To make matters worse, the officer who did eventually process the scene had only a week's worth of classroom instruction from years prior.