the word from one of these captives that she once saw, quote, another girl in the house. and those girls, they are so brave and they will be so integral into the investigation and grand jury investigation. you mentioned earlier they had gone to another house. there is so much yet that we have to learn about what went on with mr. castro s life. what happened in those homes. we are hearing now about his domestic abuse against his ex-wife. there is just so much to learn. shepard: heather hanson. thank you, heather. continuing coverage of another enormous story. guilty verdict in the jodi arias murder trial. relatives of the victim travis alexander have revealed that they might file yet another lawsuit against the woman who testified that she could not remember stabbing her ex27 times and slitting his throat from ear to ear. plus, some of the victims, friends, join us live with their reaction to the possible death sentence for
really, a strange defense that the jury would have to accept. so i think most people will be stunned if there is an acquittal in the case. frankly, on the issue of whether it s first degree or second-degree murder, the thing that i m looking at carefully there is a lot of people think first-degree murder requires a lot of advanced planning. you know, you have to sit down and plan it out and certainly there is evidence of that in this case. but the law doesn t require a whole lot of time. you can commit first-degree murder and plan a murder even in the matter of a few minutes. you could be sitting in the living room and plan on going into the bathroom to kill somebody. so the jury has a lot of range there if they want to come down with first-degree murder. the second thing to remember is this. there s a lot of talk about first degree and the death penalty. she doesn t get the death penalty automatically if she is convicted of first-degree murder. there is a second part to this trial whe
in front of the maricopa county courthouse talking to some of the hundreds of spectators, some of them arizonans, some tourists, who have flocked to the courthouse with the news that in roughly 12 minutes there is going to be a verdict read in the jodi arias murder trial. ted, walk us through why some of the people there are there. reporter: well, jake, as you can imagine it s because they re hooked. they are hooked on this story and they have been for months. it s gone on so long as you were just talking to ashleigh about. here s a great example. this is don from miami. he is a prosecutor on vacation, been watching this trial. you said it s one for the books. you re on vacation. what are you doing here at a courthouse? you work at a courthouse. yeah. we work at a courthouse. i ve been practicing law about 30 years, prosecuting 20 years. i ve been following the trial from miami. it is just amazing. as a prosecutor i know that every time you go to trial you re rolling a dice even th
effect. dan springer is outside the courthouse. let me talk about the aggravation phase. if this is first-degree murder conviction, the prosecution and defense will present very short arguments as to whether or not they think there was an aggravating circumstance which would lead to the death penalty. we ve been told by the prosecution what that aggravating circumstance is they believe took place. the crime was done in a cruel, had heinous and depraved american. that s something they ll argue if first degree conviction. if not, the jury is released and sentencing is a later day. shepard: in california, murder with special circumstances. those that followed the o.j. simpson trial remember if convicted of murder with special circumstances there would have been the next phase. that s not what happened. chris hughes is a friend of travis alexander, at one point a
self-defense. reporter: the amount of time you ve spent in a courtroom compared to the amount of time you ve seen analysis on television it is so critical to lay out for our viewers the difference. if you are a jury panel and you are sitting through the hours upon hours of live testimony, the boring part, the side bars, all of that, you could create a formula for how different it is for a juror to sit through a trial than for someone who watches it on television. maybe that s what leads to our surprise sometimes when we see a verdict that perhaps we don t agree with in tv land. that s true. there is no substitute for seeing every single minute of testimony as the jury does of course and there is a scenario here where the defense has presented a story of a battered woman, of someone who snapped in reaction to bad treatment, from her boyfriend. if the jury believes that, that is a recipe for perhaps manslaughter. frankly, i don t see how there is any recipe for a flat out