have been absolutely fascinated this last week by a documentary series shown on BBC 4 called "Murder on the staircase"(?). It was about a case in America which was tried last year I think - very recent anyway. Michael Petersen was tried for the first degree murder of his wife Kathleen and whoever made the documentary was given just about absolute access to "all areas" as they say!
The whole series was shown as two episodes each evening over this last week and was just excellent television. I have to say that my confidence in the way the American justice system is conducted was not enhanced! I'm not talking about the verdict but the way that the events leading upto the trial and the trial itself appeared to become a competition between the various personalities who were involved on the prosecution and defence teams.
Initially when they showed the photos of the injuries to Kathleen's head I thought, "No way could those injuries be caused by a fall down the stairs". But there was no skull fracture and Kriss, who is a nurse, told me that you can get a lot of blood spread around if, as the defence maintained, the person slips over on the blood on the floor and cuts the head again and then you get more blood spread around. Any way, what worried me was that a murder weapon was never found and the prosecution had maintained that a blowpoke(?) was probably the murder weapon. Now these blowpokes had been given as gifts, in the past, to various households within this extended family by a sister of Kathleen but the one in the Petersen household had not been seen for a number of years. There was a whole lot of stuff about Michael Petersen being bi-sexual came out in the trial and I must admit that I thought that if Kathleen had just found out about this maybe they had had an argument and they had had a fight etc which had led to murder. Then, wow, 6 weeks into the trial the missing blowpoke is found in the Petersen's garage, leaning against a wall, in a corner, covered in cobwebs and bugs. Why didn't the police find it during their searches of the property? But what really surprised me was how the defence team dealt with finding the blowpoke. They didn't call the police to get the forensic people to check it out; they didn't call the DA's office - am I just naive about the American justice system - do defence teams think so little of the DA that they reckon they are so "corrupt" that they can't trust them? So the defence team bring in a professional photographer and then move the blowpoke themselves. Surely they have compromised valuable defence evidence?
Now with what we saw & heard in the documentary we reckoned that the DA had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Michael Petersen had murdered his wife Kathleen - but hey, what do we know - but a unaminous verdict of guilty was delivered. Anyway, I'm interested in what my American readers think about it all - http://www.courttv.com/trials/novelist/
Not too much has happened in the last couple of days - Everton play tomorrow, away at Middlesborough. We really need a win as Man. Utd and Chelsea both won today and they are above us in the league. Arsenal are playing at the moment, away to Bolton and Bolton are currently winning one nil, so if Bolton win that would be a good result if we win tomorrow!
Kriss spent most of today in the study preparing for tomorrow evening.
Bye for now.
