15. THE BIG PICTURE NARRATIVE - October, November 2019 She will do it in a car She will do it in a bar She will do it late at night Just never in broad daylight I don’t believe you Mandi-Sam I don’t believe you give free ham I mentioned a bunch of stuff that never came out at trial. Like what time did the 911 call come in? What time did Mulrenin go over the balcony? You would think that would be important to determining if Mandi is guilty. So why didn’t Mandi's lawyers bring it up? Why didn't they go into the tiny details that erode the concept of a planned robbery, like Mandi buying a dress right before she left Dollhouse, to wear to work the next day. Are they crazy? The reason they didn't bring it up is because they didn't need to, to raise a reasonable doubt. Because the only evidence Mandi did what she was accused of, was some creepy jailhouse witnesses who were paid to say what they said by an overzealous fantasizing prosecutor. And Mandi used Mulrenin's credit cards. Which doesn't prove robbery, unless nobody thinks to remind the jury it doesn't prove robbery. So Mandi's lawyers tried to use a big picture of what happened, rather than show tiny details to prove what didn't happen. Carrie Rentz summarized the big picture by asking the DNA expert "The only DNA evidence that you found of Mandi Jackson was on a sweatshirt (with her boyfriend's DNA) and on a straw (with her boss’s DNA)?" The big picture is what the fuck is Mandi doing there? It is a jealous boyfriend, she is fucking two guys at once. But there is too much weird stuff. The big picture is not believable, if you don't know Mandi. This brings us to the main reason Mandi's lawyers used the strategy they used: Preconceptions. Anything people look at, they will try to quickly label it as something they are familiar with. Except black people, you are not supposed to do that. But when I say Mandi is a hooker, people say no, she is a "sex worker." They already have a preconception of what a sex worker is, and they want to project it onto her and tell me who she is. They can't be bothered to learn any actual details about Mandi herself. It's like in "King of the Hill" when Kahn says "No ocean, I am from Laos, it's a landlocked country in Southeast Asia." They respond "So are you Chinese or Japanese?" Is Mandi an armed robber? Or is she a girl who drives around town secretly having sex with old guys and wrapping up wounds in duct tape and owns a BMW that her pimp financed in her name when she was a teenager, and the strip-club manager uses "dancer dollars" to make his employees come to his house. The jurors never heard of that second one before. And they are surely not going to avoid nodding off long enough to even absorb half of that. Defense: Today’s lesson? Southeast Asian geography. Let me draw your attention to this map! Prosecution: Objection! What the fuck is this? Judge: Sustained! If it doesn't have to do with whether Mandi is Chinese or not, I'm not allowing it. So Mandi's lawyers instead tried to use the evidence to paint a much simpler picture, of something the jurors had seen before, a jealous dominating boyfriend. But it still sounded a little bit Laotian. So the jurors said fuck it, Mandi must be Chinese, armed robber. I trusted Mandi's lawyers to know a Seminole jury better than I do. And now I better understand how their strategy resulted from what they knew. But they still didn't do a good enough job, because they never did anything to create any doubt about the authority of the police and prosecutors as being always right. They never drew attention to the lies and odd details that said "Don’t necessarily swallow what these people tell you whole. These people can lie." I don’t doubt that part of that came from being former prosecutors, who never say anything bad about police or victims. First, Mandi's lawyers destroyed the jailhouse witnesses and did a good job. They could have done a little better on IV- 74