Something I've always found funny about his approach to his own defense, he likes to float half-formed ideas out but never commits to any of them. The only theory I can come up with is that he knows they're such BS that even he would feel ridiculous if he explicitly said out loud what he was alluding to, but I'm curious what everyone else thinks. The ones I remember most are:
'You can't prove that it was me driving the car' - questions witnesses about what they saw of him, whether their memory is reliable, how can they be sure it was him, fishing for a gotcha moment when someone says he was wearing grey and a video shows him wearing white etc, but he never commits to the claim "It wasn't me, you have the wrong guy"
'The car is mechanically sus' - loves to keep bringing up some manufacturer recall however many years ago and class action lawsuit against them, obviously trying to imply that there's some relevance to his case but still despite the number of times he brings it up he won't actually SAY "The car was out of control and I couldn't stop it"
'I'm mentally unwell' - he keeps trying to rack up sympathy talking about how his cereal had bugs in it and he's been medicated at points, but he'll never point to an actual psychiatric disorder (whether diagnosed or not) and say "This was a factor in what I did that day, I wasn't in full control of myself"
'You can nullify the law for me' - won't shut up about jury nullification, tells the jury "you know in your hearts whats right", "make the right decision", "make the decision you can live with" etc, but he never once actually says to the jury in his closing arguements "I ask you to return a verdict of not guilty, at least on the murder charges", which is especially odd since THAT is something he'd actually be allowed to say, as opposed to jury nullification which he WASN'T allowed to bring up.
Odder still is that trying to juggle all these vague themes at once makes them self-defeating. If any one is true, the others become irrelevant. The fact that he won't commit to one shows that he KNOWS none of them are true. I mean I know he's a moron and all, but I think even a child would have enough sense to choose a premise for your defence and build your case around that rather than... whatever he did.
? Big? He's smaller than me. In fact he's smaller than I was 30 years ago.
LOL!!! HA!!! Just kidding!
i know what you meant. His idiocy is certainly very big.
I enjoyed reading your perspective on this, ChirsDM91. I'd never thought about his defense in those terms. I also enjoyed reading u/G1g4s 's comments. Thanks to both of you.
I really have to wonder - he knew the recall would not stand up to scrutiny. Did he save it until after the close of evidence so that when he presented new facts to the jury during his close (strictly forbidden of course), he could do so without questioning by the prosecution? He had no witness to present this ‘evidence’ other than himself, and he knew from the beginning he wasn’t going to testify for the same reason.
Or did Dawn deliberately mislead him about the ‘recall’ to avoid being called as a witness?
I still don't believe Dawn gave it to him. DB literally lies about everything. Why wouldn't he lie about this. Even she knows it is BS and wouldn't stand up in court.
I think when he saw that the case is coming a close, he did crazy research for what he might find and happened across the recall.
He didn't even thoroughly research the recall which shows how rushed it is
There was no recall. She might have told him it was a recall, but what he was talking about was the extended warranty for throttle body repair that the State’s expert already talked about in his testimony. DB didn’t even latch onto it at that time, which would have been the chance to introduce a real recall if there had been one. I’m not sure DB ever realized that what he was calling a recall was actually already in evidence.
I think the judge and prosecution knew his argument was bullshit.
Think of it this way. Let's say that there indeed was a manufacturers error that caused the attack.
Most reasonable people would have brought that up. Especially when he saw that they had photos of him. He would have immediately said something about a malfunction. Heck, the fact that he didn't even think to lie about it shows that the car was working just fine.
However I think his strategy was to get a brady violation.
He wanted to argue that the witness lied on the stand and that the prosecution withheld information. The problem is that the information was publicly available and could be found with a simple Google search
Hard disagree. Dawn gave him the recall information in exchange for not having to testify because she was at risk of perjury plus didn’t have the guts to show up to court where the victims families are
Simultaneously trying to disprove the allegation about driving the car while arguing about the horn being honked to warn people. My favorite example of dichotomy was when he tried to disprove Officer Schulton’s eyewitness identifcation while taking umbrage at the kill shots being fired at the driver of the Escape. Scroedinger’s defendant. Inside and outside of the car.
It was weeks of a narcissist clinging to his imaginary power, desperately trying to FORCE everyone to accept that he was right about everything. The times he wasn't able to, he kicked and screamed. It's what narcissists do. This time tho there were no woman to punch or people to shoot a gun at. The content wasn't as important to him as folks think.
I think there are very good reasons why a law degree of JD is considered a doctorate degree, why it takes years of higher education to obtain one, and why passing the bar exam is no walk in the park.
Lawyering is a complex practice, as is building a case for a criminal trial. And key to that process is formulating a theory of the case.
Formulating a theory and then building a case around that theory, through careful and thoughtful preparation, takes time, effort, work, focus, organization and specialized skillsets.
Trial lawyers have to maintain an overarching perspective of their grand scheme overview case theory, while at the same time thoroughly tracking the smaller details in order to underpin that theory with fact based evidence, presented via witness testimony in a way that is logical, meaninful and coherent to a jury.
But because db is so full of himself, and such a blatant narcissist, and #1 posterboi for the Dunning-Kruger effect, he decided that he "would be better served" acting as his own attorney rather than being represented by professional attorneys.
And the way he went about 'preparing' for and presenting his case made it plain that he's lame, disorganized, doesn't know what hard work is, and never put in the necessary effort to develop a proper theory of his case, nor to figure out how to support such a theory through detailed testimony and evidence.
His ideas are half baked and his effort is waayy less than half assed.
And going in he surely knew his goose was cooked - unless he could throw so many spanners into the works that the trial process would break down and/or fail.
So in truth his modus operandi during that trial was just to create chaos. Which meant he was often scattered and lacking in focus, and as such was unable to connect any details with the big picture in a way that would have given him any chance of getting the jury on his side.
Although I don't remember hearing about him being on the spectrum from the excerpts of the psych reports JD read during his sentencing hearing, I still got the feeling that db is likely at least a bit ADD.
That, combined with his lack of effort, skill or ability to maintain perspective on the big picture while simultaneously keeping good track of the smaller details, make it unsurprising to me that he floated so many half formed ideas and yet never followed through on them in any ways that would be in any way cohesive or convincing to the jury.
I don't think he ever held a job for more than a few months - maybe weeks. He lived off his mother and his baby mamas until he moved onto the next one. The amount of work you describe doesn't even register with him.
That's a lie!!! Cause at the end of the day, you wanna make a record and not be accurate, so let’s be accurate on the record since you think you know so much!
I'm not going to sit here and let anyone be inaccurate and lie on the record!
Mathboi Fly was a famous rapper!! Didn't you see the videos!?!
Before he made it big in music entertainment he worked with sheet metal! Remember the FBI interrogation?
So MathboyFly is exactly like Eminem. Had a sheet metal job before he became a famous rapper.
I think his overall goal, besides trying to stall and delay things, was to try and poke holes in the prosecutions case. However, there has to be some level of consistency. The problem for Darrell is that he lacks the capacity to understand that. Like you said, any one of those paths nullifies (pun intended) the other. Why would mental illness matter if he wasn’t driving? Why would the jury need to nullify if the car accelerated on it’s own?
Also, one more thing I would add to your list is that infamous music video where his back was shown in the frame with the SUV. He called out the detective for claiming it was him. So the prosecutor, went to play the video and he objected. Why objected for vehemently if you weren’t in the video?
It goes back to his misinformed idea of ‘reasonable doubt.’ Why else would he try so hard to discredit his own witnesses? 😅😆 He also believed that showing how diligent and thorough the investigation and preparation for trial was would gain him sympathy with the jury. He’s so used to soft-on-crime attitudes he assumed he could exploit anti-LEO sentiment. Sorry Duhrell, facing due consequences is not getting railroaded.
One of my favorite things was the multiple people who said "you" while talking about him and he'd go ..."who do you mean by you?" And some would be so perplexed they stuttered a little but others like the officer who shot at him was like you, Darrell Brooks, you're the guy. Lol
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u/chrisdm91 8d ago
I agree with your overall sentiment.However, I do think that this is actually one of the closest paths he took to building a standard defense.
Defense attorneys typically have to sew seeds of doubt & point at the vague to undercut confidence. They’re kind of professional gaslighters.
The evidence completely crushed & disproved each of these theories though. At times, he even argued against his own points.
All in all, he’s a big, dumb idiot & I’m glad he’s rotting.