From: Jasper
Date: 7/9/01
Time: 11:37:25 PM
Charlie,
One thing I think you have to keep in mind is the extent to which the prosecution and the defense both made deliberate efforts to confuse the issues they thought might work against them. The timeline is one of those issues. The defense was no more interested in pinning down the time than the prosecution was. The civil trial should tell you why.
In the civil trial the plaintiffs accepted the defense's timeline presented in the criminal case and simply argued that Heidstra's sighting of the SUV "must have" come later than he thought and the thumps "must have" come later than Kato thought. Nobody officially involved in this case has bothered to work out the logic of those positions and I don't think I could get two people out of a hundred to follow what I did in Iago at gunpoint. It takes too much work. As far as I can tell, Donald Freed is the only one who did follow it in Iago… but I used HIS clock method to do my work, so he doesn't count.
In the end, the defense did not argue that Fuhrman lied about his alibi (they turned it into a question). They never bothered to check anyone's shoe size except Carl Douglas' (so they could argue that the killer might have been less than six feet tall). And they did not present any of the evidence they had which PROVED the blood on the socks was planted and O.J. COULD NOT have left the blood-drops on Bundy. They did not argue one coherent theory to explain ALL of the evidence; they argued as many theories as they could think of to explain any given piece of evidence. They argued that ANY of them might be true.
What all of that blurring of the facts did for the defense -- not only with the timeline, but with anything that MIGHT lock them in to an indefensible position - was to allow them to make the argument that they had the best expectation of winning. It is what they did argue all the way - Reasonable Doubt. --Jasper