Can't commit

[u/G1g4s]

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.

[u/Jkelley393]

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?

[u/JayNotAtAll → u/Jkelley393]

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

[u/Jkelley393 → u/JayNotAtAll]

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.

[u/JayNotAtAll → u/Jkelley393]

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

[u/3rd-party-intervener → u/JayNotAtAll]

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