insular lesser offense so you have aggravated assault, not just with the shotgun but also with the truck. you had fulsome imprisonment by cutting off arbery. basically the prosecution was spreading its bet. they only needed to nail one of those lesser offenses define the predicate felony to get felony murder. that paid off for the prosecution. it turned out the jury did not accept some of those lesser offenses but they only needed one. the result is really quite complete for the prosecution. they ran the table. they got convictions on all three men. bryan was the most difficult one. he was at a distance from the shooting and he was the person who videotaped the ultimate shooting. his defense counsel took a rather curious approach. he suggested that his client had been brought to the scene by providence making it sound
came out in that courtroom had to do with some recorded conversations between justin harris and his wife. they didn t realize they were being recorded. they thought they were having a private conversation. and she started asking him, how much did you tell them, did you tell them too much? what about that standing out to you? first of all, i m astounded how the public is unaware that once you are in custody, there is virtually no such thing as a private conversation. i know d.a.s who build evidence, they just go to the records at the prison where a client s being held and just look at who he s talked to. so those recorded conversations can be very damning because the public or a jury s going to assume, they thought nobody was listening, now we get to hear what they have to say. and all of the conversations like that, all go to intent. it s fascinating too. when you remember, this probable cause hearing was about felony murder. and that predicate felony was a negligence crime. and yet
mind, a death penalty case. except, and i ll just present sort of the defense view of it, he s charged with felony murder. the predicate felony here is not an intentional crime, it s negligence. all this evidence of intent and motive and everything else is a little inconsistent with the prosecution s theory of the case. in georgia, the death penalty is a possibility, however, the aggravating circumstances here are usually reserved for intentional-type crimes. unless they end up charging him with an intentional malice murder, as phillip can tell us more about, this in this case, i don t thing the death penalty, it s going to be a tough hill to climb, only because the law appears to err on the side of life instead of death. so i will only counter that, and phillip, i ll bring you in on this, with a notion that what we re working off here are arrest warrants, measure not working off an indictment from a grand jury yet, and we know a grand jury can do a whole lot more. in this case,
cruelty, first-degree bumped down to second-degree and felony murder. you need the predicate felony. if they thought they had premeditated murder, wouldn t they have just charged him with murder? yes. you know something, they definitely would have, but so in truth, they looked at this and they decided they couldn t make the case for premeditated murder, but many cases are filed with a lower level of charge, and then the police continue to investigate and they make out the higher level. now, i m not saying that s going to happen here, because we don t know, but certainly this is a disturbing piece of evidence that they have. what they ve done, though, is, they ve done something very unusual in the way this case was charged. usually this would be charged as a cruelty to children case. but they charged it as a felony murder case. now, they almost never do that in a case like this, where there s, what appears to be the accidental death of a child. so it looks like they re setting this up