8. CAUGHT RED-HANDED - January 2019 Scott Love's trial started out as a disaster for the prosecution. Both defense and prosecution, in their opening statements, said Mulrenin was shot. By the time the jury was done hearing from witnesses at the Lofts, they were no longer even sure he was shot. The prosecution did a half-assed job of coaching the Lofts witnesses to say Mulrenin was shot while fleeing. In reality, the first person witness to Mulrenin being shot was the medical examiner two days later. So the jury was confused if the people at the Lofts who witnessed Mulrenin die, were supposed to provide proof that he was shot, which they didn't. Scott Love's jury was surprisingly normal and intelligent people compared to the average person in Seminole County. It was like every different person from the office of a small business in a high-tech field. Like maybe the CEO, some programmers, the receptionist, and a person who cleans the office. And there were some other normal office people or maybe medical workers on the jury. I met one of the jurors, she was a young black girl who loved mysteries, and movies like "Minority Report." She was just cool and smart. I was extremely impressed, and relieved that of all the lowlifes in Seminole County, the people who report for jury duty are a functional subset. It was clear to these jurors, the prosecution was over-selling the planned robbery narrative. Prosecutor Stone set the tone with a non sequitur, when he said Mandi and Mulrenin's DNA being on the same straw was evidence that this was a planned robbery. The defense said it was a consensual gathering. From that point forward, the jury ignored the prosecution’s explanations of each piece of evidence, and began looking for their own explanations of all the evidence. Jurors doubts were reinforced when bartender/manager Mellinger casually invented that one of the job applications in Mandi's car, was the same one Mandi gave Mellinger at Dollhouse two years earlier. The court spent 20 minutes arguing because there were two job applications, and neither was found at Dollhouse. Then the court basically said okay we want you to pick one of these two identical applications, and lie and say you recognize it as the same one Mandi gave you. The prosecution could have just said "Do these applications look basically the same as the one Mandi gave you two years ago?" But they were determined to have her lie and say "This is the one! " Another one was a piece of paper with Mulrenin’s address on it. It looks like somebody probably wrote it down as the billing address, to try to use his credit card online. But Stone said Mulrenin’s address on a piece of paper was evidence they "targeted him" for a robbery. There are millions of addresses written on paper at this moment, and none of them are used to target someone for an armed robbery. It doesn't even make sense, and the jury saw that. As a hooker, Mandi wrote down hundreds of addresses where guys had cash. In theory they would all be good places to rob. Going to any place requires having an address. You can't go to a restaurant without having the address. So having an address cannot be evidence of an intent to do armed robbery. Why does every house and business in the world even have an address, why would they need one, what is the use, it just exposes them as easy targets for armed robbery. I have never even seen that in a movie, someone write down the address of a bank before an armed robbery. You have to go to the bank, see it, think about it, before you get the idea you want to rob that bank. So when you first decide to rob it, you have already seen it and know where it is. It is only by going to places, and seeing them, that you first get the idea they would be a good place to rob. In movies, they are forced to spoon-feed the plot using contrived devices like addresses on paper. Directors dislike these "expository scenes" which are necessary to show the viewer what is happening, because they are unrealistic and awkward. Prosecutor Stone's presentation in court that day came across as awkward and contrived, an amateur B-movie screenplay. It certainly made no sense that Mandi wrote down Mulrenin’s address to go there and do an armed robbery. Because IV-4l