July 2014

Well today continued to be a bad, bad day for the Prosecution in the Detroit trial of Theodore Wafer, charged with second degree murder for the shooting death of Renisha McBride on his front porch in the early morning hours of November 2, 2013.  The prosecution team seems to completely lose its footing when tasked with cross-examination, in part (I would suggest) due to the extraordinarily high quality of the defense's expert witnesses. I recounted in today's mid-day wrap-up how the wheels seemed to come entirely off of the prosecutorial train when they sought to engage with defense forensic pathology expert Dr. Werner Spitz (you can read all about that here:  Detroit Front Porch Shooting case: Day 6 Mid-Day Wrap-Up) and taking a lunch break didn't seem to help them pull things together.  I note, as an aside, that Dr. Spitz is 87-years-old, and yet it was the prosecution that came across as tired and inept. The prosecution's cross-examination of Dr. Spitz continued after lunch, and they sought to impeach his credibility via the mechanism of contradicting him with his own work product--to wit, his 9 pound textbook on forensic pathology.

Welcome, all to the morning of the 6th day of the Michigan front porch shooting case, in which homeowner Theodore Wafer is up on second degree murder charges for the shooting death of an extraordinarily intoxicated and likely concussed Renisha McBride on his front porch ~4:00 AM on November 2, 2013.

Continued Direct Examination by Defense of Expert Witness Dr. Werner Spitz, Forensic Pathologist

The morning began with the continuation of the defense's first witness, forensic pathologist (and former medical examiner of the local county for 16 years) Dr. Werner Spitz.  The heart of this morning's direct focused on evidence of swelling of McBride's hands.  Such swelling would run consistent with the defense narrative that McBride did not merely knock politely on Wafer's door in those early morning hours, but was doing so with sufficient force to actually injure herself to the point of swelling and bleeding. The swelling and bleeding could not have come from McBride's early car crash, Spitz testified, because it would have subsided/clotted respectively in the intervening three and a half hours before her death on Wafer's porch.  Indeed, these characteristics of swelling and bleeding made it all but certain that the injuries occurred in the minutes immediately preceding her death--e.g., within proximity of Wafer's home.

So we find ourselves at the end-of-day wrap-up for day 5 of the murder trial of Theodor Wafer for the shooting death of Renisha McBride on his Detroit front porch in the early morning hours of November 2, 2013.  This afternoon the State would rest with its final witness, Medical Examiner Dr. Kila Kesha, the defense would have its motion for a directed verdict summarily dismissed, and proceed to begin its case with its own expert witness Medical Examiner, Dr. Werner Spitz (pictured above). Highlights of the afternoon included some continued questionable conduct around the magically appearing-disappearing-appearing $100 bill. Defense counsel Cheryl Carpenter is still obviously unhappy with the tenuous explanations offered for this--particularly as it followed that while the Prosecution, their LEO witnesses, and McBride's mother have all claimed that she was delivered the $100 by ME Kesha, he himself testified that he'd never seen the $100, according to observers present at the court house. More substantive, however, was the direct expert witness testimony--to be continued tomorrow--of defense witness Dr. Spitz. The key vulnerability of Wafer's self-defense claim is on the issue of reasonableness, or lack thereof. The law does not, however, require that the person acting in self-defense be perfect in their reasonableness. To the contrary their conduct is judged on the basis of whether it was that of a reasonable and prudent person, under the same or similar circumstances, possessing the same or similar capabilities, the same or similar specialized knowledge, and under the same degree of stress. As the Supreme Court noted almost 100 years ago:

We're back for day 5 of the second degree murder trial of Theodore Wafer in the shooting death of Renisha McBride on his front porch in the early morning hours of November 2, 2013. As has been the case since mid-day of day 1, Judge Hathaway still refuses the trial to be live-streamed.