It’s hard to disagree with the jury’s verdict in the Jodi Arias trial. The evidence of premeditation was all circumstantial, and a lot of it struck me as subject to reasonable doubt, but there was so much of it it was hard to dismiss out of hand. At the same time, the chaotic nature of the killing didn’t really fit with premeditation, suggesting someone who snapped in the heat of the moment. That introduced a doubt about premeditation in my own mind.
I thought it was possible that a juror sympathetic to Arias, or pissed off at the prosecutor’s tactics of badgering and trying to confuse witnesses, might hold out for second degree-murder — and I partly hoped that would happen, since I’m so opposed to the death penalty — but apparently Arias has no sympathizers on the jury.
The TV interview Arias gave about 20 minutes after the verdict was read was strange. Her self-possession suggested to me that she never had the slightest hope of being found not guilty. It would be difficult to imagine a jury returning a verdict of not guilty in this particular case but I thought that perhaps Arias was imagining it.
As I’ve written before, I think Arias felt dead from the moment she failed to win Travis Alexander and realized that he thought of her as nothing much. I think she still sees herself as a dead person, living a posthumous life.
