9. TRIAL BY LEGAL SECRETARY - 2019 Having never seen a criminal trial before, the most shocking thing to me was how the jury was given very little information and never had any idea what really happened. I used to tell people don’t assume you know what happened in a criminal case just based on what you read in the newspaper. Unless you are there at the trial, you don’t know what the truth is. It turns out that the truth doesn't come out at trial, the jury is left with no clue. The jury never would have guessed one tenth of the evidence that existed which they were deprived of. Scott Love's jury was surprised that nobody even tried to give them an honest account of what happened. Like there was no adult in the room. They expect if the defendant is guilty, the defense will paint a different picture from what really happened. They didn't expect the prosecution to also make up crazy things and accusations not supported by the evidence, and exaggerate, and tell them something different from what was right in front of their face. This was not the sort of geeky truth-seeking process that writers idealize in television shows. It was a ridiculous crooked spectacle. The jury was shocked by it. But I guess it is business as usual in a criminal trial, which people outside the law world would never guess. I was shocked at how little of the evidence the jury actually sees. Each side presents only a tiny subset of the evidence, in an effort to contrive a storyboard that is, at best, simpler than the truth. There were 100’s of pictures of the crime scene, but I don’t think the jury even saw 10. Witnesses changed their stories or left things out, and the jury never knew. The jury never saw a floor plan of Mulrenin's apartment, or a diagram of his apartment building. Some of this is just practical constraints of time and money. But a lot of it is case law and the rules of evidence. The rules of evidence also don't give jurors a copy of the testimony, so they can't even remember what they heard. In longer trials, this has a disproportionate impact on their ability to consider small details of what people said. Judges with competing agendas have spent years trying to rig the process by adding new rules to make individual cases come out how they want them to. They have redefined and destroyed the Constitutional right to a trial by jury because they can. One judge will say "I want the case to come out this way, so I am making a new rule that you can't show the jury this." Another judge will say "I think that is unfair based on the outcome I want, so to balance it, I am going to say you are not allowed to show the jury this other thing. Or I am going to broadly interpret what you said, to use it in the situation I want to use it in. Or you have to give the jury this instruction of how to read this evidence which fixes the outcome in this case." You don't need me to tell you Mandi went up to Mulrenin's apartment to smoke weed. The prosecutor in Mandi's closing argument said "Use your common sense." There was a pipe and loose marijuana in plain sight, in plain use on Mulrenin's kitchen counter. The smoke detector was disabled on a table. Mulrenin did not test positive for marijuana. Smolarek photographed marijuana in Mandi's car. The Dollhouse video shows Mandi smoking marijuana with Neisha Cintron. So your common sense tells you that Mandi's motive for being at Mulrenin's apartment was to smoke marijuana. Only problem is case law will not let Mandi's lawyers show that marijuana in Mulrenin's kitchen to the jury. Won't let Mandi's lawyers ask Smolarek if she found marijuana in Mandi's car. The prosecution’s theory, according to their witnesses, is that Mandi was there for two hours, and ransacked the apartment to steal things of value, including things hidden in boxes in closets. The defense's theory is that Mandi left without taking things of value. But a photograph of marijuana, which is Mandi's motive for being there, with direct relevance to proving and disproving the prosecution and defense's version of events, is not allowed to be shown to the jury. Some judge somewhere did not like the outcome of a case where the jury knew that some participant, probably the defendant, used marijuana. So there is marijuana that is in plain use in plain sight in the kitchen. It is clearly the central activity in that room that night. Jury is not allowed to see it. Cash in a box in a closet which obviously Mandi did not know about? Jury is allowed to see that. Jailhouse witness who was in another county when Mulrenin died, read the police story in the newspaper in jail, and is threatened with prison if she doesn't say Mandi confessed to it? She can tell the jury the entire story of the crime, including the content of text messages that the most advanced technology could not get out of Mandi's phone. Marijuana that was actually in Mulrenin's apartment and in use the night he died is hidden from the jury. While a jailhouse so-called witness, who was nowhere near the scene of the crime, is put front and center as the primary witness of what happened in there that night. 1v—44