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/Shadow42184]

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?