But the verdict was not a verdict at all: The jury could not reach a unanimous decision about whether to sentence Arias to death. Instead, they split 8-4 in favor of death.

...

[Judge] Stephens declared a mistrial, then set a date for July 18 to empanel a new jury and reconsider the penalty stage of the trial. The first-degree murder conviction and the aggravation finding that the murder was especially cruel will stand.

Because the jury was hung on the issue of life or death for Ms. Arias, the prosecutor must now decide whether to pursue another jury to sentence Ms. Arias to the death penalty, or offer her a plea bargain in exchange for saving her life. While it may seem like Ms. Arias would obviously accept that offer, I am not so sure. For one thing, it could take about 25 years before Ms. Arias would actually face execution, and considering the likelihood the Supreme Court could turn away from punitive jurisprudence, a new Supreme Court could very likely hold the death penalty unconstitutional. 

But what does she have to lose in any event by accepting a life sentence? In exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, Ms. Arias would have to waive all her appeal rights. That means her appellate lawyers would not be able to argue the various appeal issues, not least of which include no sequestration, the improper felony murder charge, and the government's changing theory leading to finding of cruelty. And considering the fact this jury that found her guilty in the first place couldn't agree to give her the death penalty, why would another jury?  And if a second jury agrees on the death penalty for Ms. Arias, it is not all together clear a second jury finding death after the first jury deadlocked would survive a constitutional challenge. The law on this particular topic is unsettled. 

From my perspective, Ms. Arias has very little to gain by accepting a life sentence without parole in exchange for removing the death penalty. Even assuming the worse case scenario, she is executed in approximately 25 years at close to age 57, her estimated life expectancy past age 60 in prison would very short anyway. 

One interesting side note on this whole mess is, assuming for the sake of argument that it is constitutional for the jury that determined guilt or innocence (Jury 1) to be different from the jury that determines life or death (Jury 2), why shouldn't that be the process in every death penalty case? What I mean by that is if the same jury determines guilt and sentence, then all prospective jurors who are anti-death penalty do not participate in determining guilt or innocence.

That means all the remaining jurors are probably authoritarian, or at least pro-law enforcement, and thus potential jurors who would be somewhat sympathetic to defense are automatically off the jury. Jurors who lean pro-police or pro-defense is normal and common. It is a fair representation of our society as a whole. It is the very essence of a "jury of our peers". As such, why not instead let any qualified juror serve during the guilt phase of the trial, whether or not he believes in the death penalty, and then let a second death penalty qualified jury determine the actual sentence?

By having two separate juries, one determines guilt and another the sentence, we would ensure the first jury would actually be a fair representation of the community. But the way things stand now, Ms. Arias was never actually "judged by a jury of her peers"; she was instead judged by a jury in which all the jurors believe in the death penalty. That is not even remotely the same thing. 

"The family law court has seized all his assets and it's off limits," Phoenix criminal defense attorney Vladimir Gagic said.

The board met to consider recommending that the states reduce the allowable blood-alcohol concentration by more than a third, to 0.05 percent from 0.08 percent, the national standard that was established a decade ago at the instigation of Congress.

The 0.05 percent standard is mostly focused on social and casual drinkers, but researchers hope it will reduce consumption among all drivers. Any recommendation made by the board would carry substantial influence.

While NHSTA cannot change state laws, if NHTSA does recommend the .05 limit, Congress can force state legislatures to change their laws to conform with NHSTA because if state do not follow NHTSA, states will lose hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional grants. And while other nations already follow the .05 limit, other countries do not have the same severe penalties for DUI convictions that the United States has. In particular, an Arizona DUI defendant can be convicted for a felony on the very first conviction and face over a year in prison. Prison sentences for DUI convictions is almost unheard of in other nations, but is common in the United States. For most other nations, the most severe penalty repeat offenders will face is loss of driving privileges.  

Upon reading this article and reading the apparent fact lowering the BAC limit to .05 may save lives, a lesson NHTSA learned from other nations, I can't help but think why the same lesson would not apply to gun control laws. If other nations save lives by making access to guns more difficult, why shouldn't we heed that lesson as well? 

In contrast, Serbs have had a history of intolerance against non-Serbs and Muslims, and of aggression and forced expulsions to create a Serbian homeland in territories where they have historical claims — notably Kosovo, but also Bosnia.

Unfortunately, this "black and white" ethnic chauvinism is all too common, and perfectly acceptable in mainstream media when the victims of it are powerless. 100 years ago it was fashionable to hate the Irish and all Catholics. 50 Years ago anti-Semitism was rampant. Today, hating Serbs, and ironically the Serb's putative victims, the Muslims, is very much in vogue. 

For a detailed criticism of Mr. Phillips, see Prof. David Gibbs' review of Mr. Phillips' book "David L. Phillips. Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention."

Liberating Kosovo is useful primarily as an illustration of victor's history, and the problems that are inherent in this genre. But this book is not serious scholarship, and I am surprised that MIT Press agreed to publish it.

Prof. Gibbs also wrote a letter in The Economist "On Croatia, India, South Africa, service stations, free trade, Iraq, Yale, the Spartathlon, our cover" when mainstream corporate media white washed Tudjman's crimes against Serbs:

When discussing Balkan scholarship in a recent article (“Writing the past”, January 5th), you mentioned the flight in 1995 of ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia and noted the uncertainty about whether this incident should be viewed as a case of ethnic cleansing or a consensual exit. The facts strongly suggest that the Krajina Serbs were indeed ethnically cleansed.

You can see Mr. Phillips' biography here, and his email address is dp2366@columbia.edu. The New York Times email address is letters@nytimes.com. I wrote him and the New York Times an email asking to remove the offensive paragraph from his commentary and apologize for its hateful content. I suggest all readers of this blog who find his language offensive do the same. My email was as follows:

Please remove the sentence in your New York Times commentary regarding Yugoslavia "In contrast, Serbs have had a history of intolerance against non-Serbs and Muslims, and of aggression and forced expulsions to create a Serbian homeland in territories where they have historical claims — notably Kosovo, but also Bosnia." Also, please apologize to all Serbs for such a hateful, not to mention incorrect, comment.

For more information on the neoliberal war against prosperous Yugoslavia, see Neil Clark's many articles here.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jodi Arias capital murder trial Guilty verdict, spectators outside the Phoenix courthouse who made up the banner-bearing “mob” – ironically, Nancy Grace’s term, repeated in her HLN commentary at least 3 times immediately before the verdict – remarked that their faith in the criminal justice system had been restored.

Restored from what? And to what? One Guilty verdict, assuming it is not 100% wrongful, has no significant impact, positive or otherwise, on the integrity of the criminal justice system. That people should be attributing such importance to one obscenely media-hyped case, a case that but for the arbitrary prominence that the media ascribed to it is no different from myriads of cases in the US, is truly disturbing. It speaks loudly about the general public’s distorted notions of what constitute significant news events, and how their perceptions have been grossly warped by the media.

What these misguided trial groupies really mean is “This is just compensation for Casey Anthony.” Two years ago, when Anthony was acquitted in Florida in her capital murder trial, the reaction was exactly the same: the verdict was received as extremely significant in the vast machine that is the US criminal justice system, but for a different reason, the opposite reason - that it made people “lose faith” in the criminal justice system. Just as now, this reaction was wrong-headed in the extreme. Apart from the fact that the outcome was unremarkable given the real evidence - not the irrelevant litany of smut and ridiculous conjecture propagated by the tabloid media and swallowed as gospel fact by every perimenopausal woman watching cable TV – it broke no legal precedents nor established any new guidelines as to procedures of judicial practice.

Do any of those whooping, whistling and air-punching punters congregated outside the Maricopa County courthouse have any idea what is actually happening in the criminal justice system, how it is being tainted by prosecutors, judges and law enforcement departments being so aware of today’s media scrutiny and reporting of their minutest decisions and performance styles that they are either overly-concerned with not arousing public disapproval, or motivated by a lust for fame and resultant promotion or political advancement? These tendencies have intensified over the past thirty years because of government and media exaggeration about increases in crime rates, and the accompanying misinformation that society has become “soft on crime”. The criminal justice system has been falling over itself to convince the public that more criminals are being swept off the streets and that the incentives to commit crime are being greatly diminished by harsher sentences. The fact that the latter correlation is not borne out by statistics does nothing to assuage the impetus towards putting more people in prison for lesser crimes and for longer terms.

How many of those on the courthouse plaza, chanting “Justice for Travis!” in unison after the verdict was announced, understand that “justice for all” is being greatly undermined by a lucrative private prison industry insinuating itself into state budgets, with states guaranteeing private prison corporations full capacity for periods as long as twenty years, so that US incarceration rates are outrageously high, and sentences disproportionately long compared to other countries? The US incarcerates six times more people than the world average, with 25% of the world’s prison population situated in the US even though America constitutes only 5% of the world’s population. The motivation to put people in prison in the US now has less to do with making society safer than it has with lining the pockets of private prison executives. This situation began to take hold in the late 70’s and early 80’s, since when there has been a dramatically steep climb in the numbers of prisoners in the US, as well as a drastic lengthening of prison terms.

These two broad effects, media scrutiny of the criminal justice system and the move towards increasing numbers of private prisons, in turn affect the minutiae of criminal proceedings, corrupting the processes of arrest, charging, collection of evidence and trial. Such conditions increase the incentives to plant evidence or use coercive and even illegal interrogation methods on the part of law enforcement, for police officers to lie in court, for prosecutors to hide evidence, influence witnesses’ testimony, and overcharge crimes, and for judges to collude with prosecutors, all with the aim of assuring convictions and obtaining the longest sentences because the imperatives and the rewards are so great.

And putting the icing on the judicial cake is the increasingly widening and insidious contamination of any impending or future jury pool by a tabloid media that peddles simplistic, boiled-down fairy tales with good and evil archetypes, urging their audience to cheer and fawn at the heroes and heroines, and hiss and boo at the monsters and witches as in some tawdry, childish English pantomime. Murder trials have become a form of immature escapism onto which people project their personal insecurities and prejudices, attaching their anonymous and perhaps unacknowledged private anger and frustration - that in reality comes from their own lives - to a publicly embraced cause célèbre Like children who appropriately play and fantasize through their fears, anxieties and confusions in order to integrate them, these adults are inappropriately playing out emotions that would be better expressed and employed in their personal lives, not through the media-mythologized personal tragedies and misdemeanours of other heretofore anonymous individuals with whom they have no meaningful connection. Unlike for children, where imagining and role-playing in stories helps them to think, develop, mature and separate fantasy from reality, for adults, such misdirected and excessive investment of one’s negative psychic energy in media-distorted stories only serves to stunt emotional flexibility and grossly limit understanding of the complexities of human nature.

The public has been brainwashed into thinking that the criminal justice system does not do enough to punish offenders, so it is necessary for the media to take over and prosecute them in collaboration with the public. Members of the public are cajoled into thinking that each one of them is individually important, not only in making sure the defendant is punished – before he or she is tried, as well as after, but also in “supporting” the victim’s family and friends. Suddenly, anonymous individuals all over the country experience the adrenaline rush of feeling significant, that they can “be there for the family” and make sure the defendant gets his or her “just deserts”: character assassination, humiliation, ridicule, sexual exposure, negative interpretation of everything they have ever done in their life, from removing a cardigan to having the gall to be born with odd-looking eyes.

Such public prosecution by the masses is absolutely necessary and justified because years of detention before trial, separation from friends and family, loss of income, undergoing police investigation and public parading in a courtroom are not sufficient to expose and punish a person while they are supposedly not yet determined to be guilty. A person must be destroyed before they get to trial, just in case they “get off”, and to make sure that as many people know about their awfulness as possible so that hopefully, the jury members will know what the “facts” are and make the “right” decision. The public is complicit with media networks that saturate the airwaves and cyberspace with details about the defendant, however unsubstantiated, particularly during a trial, so that jurors who go home at night are unlikely to avoid “inadvertently” hearing or seeing something that has “need-to-know” value.  Even sequestered juries get family visits, and who knows when a hushed, private moment might not be advantageous for a little “updating” about what “everyone” thinks……….and expects. And if the defendant is acquitted because the jury is a bunch of “village idiots”, there will be the satisfaction of knowing that they can never live safely again in society. Lest they forget and need a reminder of their correctional-officer-substitute status, along with a boost of hate-serum, the public can rely on HLN to nudge them periodically with references to “what happened in Florida” and nostalgic montages of highlights from trials past, or clips from incriminating interviews of the defendant.

But these inconvenient, intrusive and complicated matters don’t concern Mary-Lou, the fine upstanding middle-aged citizen in shorts and T-shirt, milling on the courthouse plaza with her new trial-following buddies who she “met” on the In Session chat-room. They hover as near to Jane-Velez Mitchell and her padded microphone as possible, watching in hushed reverence as she interviews one of the ubiquitous Hughes clan, the leaders of the “close friends of Travis” – as well as the public Travis Alexander adoration cult - who have insinuated themselves, their flimsy feeling stories and subjectively interpretable video clips onto every show during HLN prime time. David Hughes declares vehemently, to the obediently-nodding affirmations of the devotees, that when the verdict was read Jodi had “no emotion” and that she was “smirking” at the jury as each one confirmed their decision. When Mary-Lou gets home and watches the verdict-reading and Jodi’s close-up on TV she will choose not to notice Jodi’s open-mouthed gasp on hearing “Guilty”, nor see her tear-welled eyes, lip-biting and quivering chin, glancing frightened and questioning at each juror in turn as they repeat “Yes.” Jodi is a monster - HLN and the Hughes have taught Mary-Lou that, so she is blind to Jodi’s nonexistent human reaction.

What is important is that Mary-Lou and her friends get a chance to declare their elation and allegiance to Travis’ family on camera - supporting this innately unremarkable group of victimized, bereaved but glamorized strangers with whom they have no connection whatsoever except via the unctuous tones of “Dr” Drew coaxing them to share their good vibes and despising ridicule of Jodi through their flat-screen TVs. They were so afraid they were going to get another “Casey Anthony”! Justice has finally “unfolded”…….. for Travis!

Any one of these “Justice for Travis” faithful could find themselves one day on the wrong side of the law, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps fitting the criteria or profile of a certain demographic group and be subjected to police corruption, deprivation of rights and distortion of interrogation-room statements. If they end up at trial they will be no more immune to media exposure and humiliation than the mugs who end up daily on Nancy Grace’s Facebook page for humping a sofa on the street because they forgot to take their meds, getting a bit sloshed while celebrating their son’s 19th birthday with him at the bar, or turning a blind eye to their daughter smoking a joint with her friends in the basement – with the music turned up a bit too loud.

These naïve and jubilant citizens are clinging to their misguided notion that the Jodi Arias Guilty verdict is a victory for the country, rather than what it really is: a common and banal, though gruesome story of interpersonal violence turned deadly, transformed into a carefully orchestrated and manufactured fake media epic, manipulating the masses and raking in billions in ratings-generated ad revenue. Until now commitment phobia, porkie-pie telling and the penetrability of doggy doors have not been social problems that anyone has marched on Capitol Hill about, but somehow these issues have gained more priority in the minds of a segment of the population than some very real threats to societal order and civility and to fair and due process.

The Jodi Arias murder trial is very significant, but not for the development or improvement of the criminal justice system. Nothing in the criminal justice system has been restored or edified. This trial has been significant only for its embodiment and encapsulation of a sick form of brainwashing and media-requisitioning, for its sucking of thousands of duped television and social media followers into a vortex of excessive and misdirected sympathy and emotion, and for its creativity in distorting and making up stories that evolve into unsubstantiated urban legends gracing every checkout magazine rack. Yes, this trial has been a landmark - in perpetuating the ongoing contamination and insidious destruction of the American criminal justice system. Mary-Lou and her friends have made their small but important contribution to this endeavour.

Perhaps this inane and dangerous syndrome can be succinctly summed up in a Twitter reply I received, just after the verdict, to a tweet I had posted a month before. I had responded to someone who was dismissing the effects of the tabloid media, and the person bided their time till they could throw a triumphant retort in my “face”:

Pitchforks (April 9^th): “That type of nonjournalism DOES matter in that taints future jury pools & incites general Pitchfork mentality against due process”

Reply (May 8^th): “ha...guess it won't matter now for that murdering nutbag Jodi Arias...hahahaha”   

So while Lou Ann and her internet trial-sisters hug and shed tears of joy, clutching their battered and dog-eared “Justice for Travis” posters, their rights and freedoms are trickling quietly down the drain, and maybe their young adult son has been stopped by the police while driving to get a pizza and is now sitting in a windowless room being yelled at by a police officer while another one tells him calmly they have a lot of evidence against him…. He is coming close to signing a false confession, just so he can get out of there and get an aspirin for his thundering headache. He doesn’t know that he could have left hours ago, he doesn’t know that innocent people need to do that thing that Nancy Grace condemns as suspicious - “lawyer up”……… he doesn’t know what his rights are, but he just needs to get out of there and home to mom, so at this point………..

But wait, we can’t go home yet – Jane Velez-Mitchell is coming our way, microphone thrusting, and she wants to know how we feel about the verdict! The answer is obvious, we have been well trained:

Justice has unfolded! Justice for Travis!!!

Pitchforks can be found at babelbooth.com, followed on Twitter @PitchforksPosts and on Blog Talk Radio at Routing Out, and be sure to like the facebook page. 

From my story and interview with Adam Slinger of ABC 15 regarding the Jodi Arias trial:

Vladimir Gagic, a criminal defense attorney, hosts a Jodi Arias podcast on his blog and believes that Arias will be found guilty of manslaughter, not first or second-degree murder.

“I’m taking quite a bit of pleasure the jury has been out for two days,” he told his listeners on Tuesday evening. Gagic was very critical of the prosecutor during the trial, stating the state did not show sufficient evidence for a first-degree murder.

“If we’re going to send someone to death row,” he said, “I want this to be an open and shut case literally.”

If you would like more updates regarding this trial and criminal law issues in general, be sure to follow me on twitter here @vlga, and to listen to the podcast referenced in this story, see this link. 

P.S. As I am sure most people are aware, the jury found Ms. Arias guilty of the top count. I will be writing a updated post on the many appellate issues, least of which is the silly felony murder charge, and have further podcats once the jury decides whether to give Ms. Arias the death penalty. If you would like to be notified when the podcast will air, be sure to click the "follow me" tab on my podcast page here, like my facebook page here, follow me on twitter @vlga, and you can sign up to receive emails announcements here. 

One thing that strikes me right away though is the fact that in any capital case, any prospective juror who says he or she cannot impose the death penalty is automatically off the jury. That has the effect of moving the jury to the authoritarian, or pro-law enforcement, side of the spectrum, and thus, unfriendly to defense arguments. If there had been no death penalty issue, a completely different type of jury, I am convinced the result would have been much different. Sometimes I wonder if that was the real intent behind the death penalty statute from the beginning: who cares if a defendant actually gets the death penalty so long as we make sure the jury is compliant and convicts them, regardless how weak the evidence is or how poorly the government behaves. 

What will be the verdict in the Jodi Arias trial? This is what I told ABC 15 ("Jodi Arias trial: How will it finally end?"): 

“If she walks, I would not be the least bit surprised,” said criminal defense attorney Vladimir Gagic.

Gagic told ABC15 that although the possibility exists for Arias to be found not guilty on all counts, he predicts the jury will find her guilty of manslaughter, and the defendant will be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

“I think the prosecutor did a terrible job,” he said. “They never had premeditation in the bag.”

Also see "Will Jodi Arias Go Free?" in the Daily Beast and Newsweek from writer Christine Pelesik: 

There’s also a slim possibility that the jury will accept Arias’s claims of abuse and find her guilty of manslaughter, Arizona defense attorney Vladimir Gagic says. “I think there is quite a bit of evidence that Travis was not a saint and he had bad tendencies,” Gagic says. “He wasn’t all that was cracked up to be, and she had some reason to be fearful.”

But if she’s acquitted, he says, “she will be the most hated person in the world until George Zimmerman goes on trial.”

For more information, you can follow me on twitter @vlga, like my page on facebook, and sign up for updates.

Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 23.3 requires the trial judge to provide the jury with verdict forms "for all offenses necessarily included in the offense charged, an attempt to commit the offense charged or an offense necessarily included therein, if such attempt is an offense." If requested to do so and the evidence supports it, the trial judge must also instruct the jurors on all offenses "necessarily included" in the offense charged. Ariz. R.Crim. P. 21.3(c) cmt.; State v. Celaya, 135 Ariz. 248, 251, 660 P.2d 849, 852 (1983).

Although the terms are often used interchangeably, a "lesser included" offense is not always a "necessarily included" offense for purposes of Rule 23.3. State v. Dugan, 125 Ariz. 194, 195, 608 P.2d 771, 772 (1980). An offense is "lesser included" when the "greater offense cannot be committed without necessarily committing the lesser offense." Id. But an offense is "necessarily included," and so requires that a jury instruction be given, only when it is lesser included and the evidence is sufficient to support giving the instruction. Id. In other words, if the facts of the case as presented at trial are such that a jury could reasonably find that only the elements of a lesser offense have been proved, the defendant is entitled to have the judge instruct the jury on the lesser-included offense. Id. (citing Sansone v. United States, 380 U.S. 343, 351, 85 S.Ct. 1004, 13 L.Ed.2d 882 (1965))...

We deem evidence sufficient to require a lesser-included offense instruction if two conditions are met. The jury must be able to find (a) that the State failed to prove an element of the greater offense and (b) that the evidence is sufficient to support a conviction on the lesser offense. State v. Caldera

What this means the jury could reasonably find the defendant guilty of lesser included offense based on the evidence presented, the judge must instruct the jury on the lesser included. That means the jury can find Ms. Arias, if Judge Stephens rules it would be reasonable, guilty of manslaughter as a lesser included of murder. Importantly, the Jodi Arias can request a lesser included instruction even though the defense has claimed self defense, an all or nothing defense. 

Why does courts allow lesser included instruction?

The rule requiring instruction on lesser-included offenses is designed to prevent a jury from convicting a defendant of a crime, even if all of its elements have not been proved, simply because the jury believes the defendant committed some crime. As the Supreme Court explained: "Where one of the elements of the offense charged remains in doubt, but the defendant is plainly guilty of some offense, the jury is likely to resolve its doubts in favor of conviction." Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625, 634, 100 S.Ct. 2382,

In Ms. Arias' case, both manslaughter and second degree murder would be lesser included offenses of count one murder in the first degree, intent to kill with premeditation. All the elements of the three offenses are the same except for the mens rea or "state of mind". First degree murder requires "specific intent to kill" without justification. Second degree murder requires "general intent" or depraved indifference to death. Finally, the manslaughter state of mind is "recklessly causing the death" of another person, or it could be "depraved indifference" that resulted from the "heat of passion from adequate provocation". The difference between manslaughter and second degree murder in this case is nothing but academic because I believe if Ms. Arias is convicted of either charge she will receive the substantially aggravated term of prison. For manslaughter, the maximum sentence is 21 years, while the maximum for second degree murder is 25 years. 

Note that the lesser included instruction only apply to count one. They would not be lesser included offenses of count two murder in the first degree murder, felony murder.

A judge in the marathon murder trial of Prescott financier Steven DeMocker denied a defense motion to dismiss the case, concluding that Yavapai County investigators did not engage in prosecutorial misconduct when they obtained confidential defense documents.

In a 57-page ruling issued Thursday, Judge Gary Donahoe said privileged records divulging DeMocker’s defense strategy were unsealed due to a series of mistakes, and the revelations did not benefit prosecutors.

So what exactly is prosecutorial misconduct? It is a term that comes up quite a bit in criminal trial, both on TV and in real life, Jodi Arias for example. All I can tell you for my own experience is the same exact thing as the Supreme Court definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. In a recent case, the US Supreme Court refused to take on the issue of prosecutorial misconduct and the "Hyde Amendment":

A jury acquitted Shaygan and a Miami federal judge later awarded the doctor $602,000 under a federal law called the Hyde Amendment, which allows judges to sanction prosecutors for taking positions that are "vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith."

The judge found that prosecutors acted in bad faith by pursuing new charges and secretly recording Shaygan's defense team. The steps were taken in retribution after Shaygan's attorney tried to keep statements the doctor made to investigators out of evidence, the judge found.

The judge called the prosecution's tactics "profoundly disturbing," adding that they raised "troubling issues about the integrity of those who wield enormous power over the people they prosecute."But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned the award, ruling that prosecutors have broad discretion under the doctrines of sovereign immunity and separation of powers.

("Supreme Court rejects appeal of prosecutorial misconduct case")

The testimony from defense expert on domestic violence Alyce Laviollete triggered an "unusual" cross examination by government prosecutor Juan Martinez regarding Snow White and the Seven dwarfs. Was it effective? Is Mr. Prosecutor right that Ms. Laviolette will say anything, even a fictional character is abused? Or is the government desperately attempting to distract the jury from the Travis Alexander emails?

ZoeB from Pitchforks will be my special guest as we examine the psychological testimony, evidence, and bizarre developments in this fascinating trial. Be sure to follow me on twitter @vlga, and like my facebook page. You can also go here to sign up for updates on future podcasts.

And be sure to see the excellent posts "Snow White’s Brush with Maricopa County Department of Social Services" and "Juggling Apples and Meatballs" by Pitchforks: 

[Jodi Arias Prosecutor Juan] Martinez is floundering now and is determined to make the associations that LaViolette had not made in her talk. He tries to portray her as “not wanting to talk about Snow White now”, when she did talk about her then. He has become ridiculous and is beginning to look sloppy. He obviously did not take the time to watch the video and is flying by the seat of his gaping pants.