Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

On December 18 a pre-trial hearing was held in the shooting case of Renisha McBride in Detroit. The purpose of the hearing was to determine whether the second degree murder charge against the defendant, Theodore Wafer, ought to be dismissed or whether there existed sufficient grounds to bind Wafer over for trial. The judge ruled the matter was to go to trial. Legal Insurrection previously posted on the Wafer/McBride case here: Analysis: Self-Defense Claim May be Legally Weak in Michigan Porch Shooting. As the title of the piece suggests, the evidence as then available seemed inadequate to support much of a claim of self-defense. In the course of the pre-trial hearing, however, the defense team called to the stand a crime scene reconstruction and firearms expert witness, David Balash. In the course of his testimony under defense questioning facts began to emerge that seem likely to form the structure of the team’s legal defense. Some of the forensic evidence remains in dispute, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make several likely presumptions. One of these is that Wafer was standing inside his home, looking through the closed (and perhaps locked) screen door, and McBride was on the other side of the door standing on the rather small front porch, so within two to three feet of the screen door. Finally, that the shotgun round that struck and killed McBride was fired through the screening of the door. When police arrived on the scene in response to Wafer’s 911 call, they found the screen, and its associated frame, had been knocked lose from the screen door proper, and noted the hole in the screen through which the fatal shot had likely been fired. Prior to taking crime scene photos, they replaced the screen in its proper position in the door, the position in which they assumed the screen was placed when pierced by the shot.