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Good evening, everybody.
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And welcome to episode 26 of the particulars.
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Tonight we have two very different files sitting on the desk.
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So one jury is still deliberating, and one case you helped us choose just had a major pretrial development that changed our trial watch calendar today.
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We're checking in on Lindsay Clancy after a second jury impasse, then opening the file on people versus a Fraser Bomb.
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Including the July 27th fight over the murder counts and the major development that moved the September trial date.
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Tonight is about what changes when you keep checking the record.
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A jury can report another impasse, a trial date can move, and a pretrial fight can change what we need to watch next.
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As always, hear the evidence, check the source, walk the case, then decide.
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Our opinion, our analysis, never legal advice.
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Welcome to the particulars.
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So first, Lindsay Clancy.
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Today the jury again heard Judge William Sullivan give another wonderful moment there where the jury comes in and says, couldn't reach an unanimous decision.
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This was this morning, the second straight day.
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The jury has reported an impasse.
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This time the procedure changed.
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Judge Sullivan gave the jury Massachusetts supplemental deadlock instruction, commonly called as Tui Rodriguez instruction, and sent the jurors back to continue deliberating.
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So that instruction asks jurors to seriously reconsider opposing views, but it also tells them not to abandon consciously held beliefs simply to reach the agreement.
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It tells us nothing about the vote count, which side has more jurors, or which charge is causing the disagreement.
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And we can lock the end of the day posture from the courtroom record itself.
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Judge Sullivan brought the jurors back, then thanked them for their time commitment, continuing on, telling them they had worked diligently.
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And then they uh were instructed to return tomorrow at 9 a.m.
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And we are assuming they're going to resume deliberations.
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That makes, again, the jury count day, depending on which which uh source you're going with.
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But this is now accordingly roughly day five with still no verdict.
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We're continuing on verdict watch.
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If you were on TikTok today and you did get to see we went to Chick-fil-A, and what was even funnier is we had both cell phones on the table, both watching The Seal.
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Yeah.
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Um, so anyway, as of right now, I'm not gonna tea leaf read, okay?
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I know that if you guys have been watching any of this, which I think there's more people watching the jury uh the verdict watch than the actual trial itself, but it's so much commentary.
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So we're not gonna do that.
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I'm not gonna tell you what I think, other than at this point, I think we're pretty much set.
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And at this point, I think it was like 29 hours and some change.
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I think it's pretty safe to say that if somebody is locked in on their position after 29 hours, I don't really think that that person's gonna be swayed one way or the other.
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But you never know.
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Yeah.
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So never know.
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Anyway.
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All right, one quick follow-up from Monday.
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Dwayne Keith D.
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Davis was found guilty of first-degree murder in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur.
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That file has now moved into its post-verdict phase.
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And we're going to follow our own follow-up rule with this.
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So we covered the verdict.
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We're not gonna go remanufacture another 20-minute segment segment without the material development prompting that.
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So if the written judgment, next tort setting, sentencing posture, or appeal materially moves, we'll bring that file back.
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But for right now, it's kind of actually in my filed away category.
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For now.
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Monday night, we asked you guys what case we should follow next.
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You picked it with us.
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So right here it is.
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We discussed this on Monday, right?
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We are on Wednesday.
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So we're officially opening it.
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The Frasier Baum file.
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On October 17th, 2023, four Pepperdine University seniors were killed in a crash along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
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Naem Ralston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir, and Deslan Williams.
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Frasier Michael Baum was behind the wheel.
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He is pleaded not guilty.
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The Los Angeles Superior Court record shows eight charges.
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Counts one through four are murder under Penal Code Section 187A.
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Counts five through eight are vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence under section 192C1.
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The prosecution alleges Baum was driving at an extreme speed on a road with a 45 mile an hour limit.
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The defense does not dispute that the crash was catastrophic.
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The legal fight is whether the evidence supports murder.
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So why does a car crash end up as a murder case?
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That is the question this trial is going to answer, and it is why we are watching it.
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California draws a line between gross vehicular manslaughter and murder, where the murder theory rests on implied malice.
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The prosecution says you look at the full driving behavior, not just speed as a number.
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The defense says the distinction matters because dangerous driving, even extraordinarily dangerous driving, is not automatically murder.
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So that's the fight.
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And before we watch a single trial witness, you need to know what was argued on July 27th.
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Um, so Alan Jackson is the attorney in Baum's defense.
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And he actually asked Judge Thomas Rubinson to dismiss the four murder counts.
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The defense argued that the preliminary hearing determination was made without evidence that says should have been available earlier.
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With this case, we have fight one, which is the phone.
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The prosecution witness, Victor Kalandra, testified at the preliminary hearing that Baum had his phone between his legs and his thumbs moving on the keyboard immediately before the collision.
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So the defense later relied on forensic phone analysis showing the phone was locked with no user interaction from 8 15.5 p.m.
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to 8 30.06 p.m.
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So roughly the 15 minutes before the crash.
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The defense argues that evidence contradicts Calandra's account.
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The prosecution's response was that a pretrial extraction had already been provided before the preliminary hearing.
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That partial data shows no text, calls, or app interaction.
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And the defense used that information during cross-examination.
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The full unlock came later.
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So the defense called Kalandra's testimony false and called it a lie.
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That is a defense advocacy position, not a court finding.
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On this show, we'll say the defense argues the forensic evidence contradicts his account.
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Credibility is for the jury to determine.
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So the second fight, what Baum knew.
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The prosecution also relied on Baum's awareness of a friend's fatal crash as part of its subjective knowledge theory, the idea that he understood speed can kill.
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The defense countered with a police report identifying DUI at a reported.12 blood alcohol level as the primary factor in that friend's crash.
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The defense argued that mattered to the way the prosecution had framed BOM's prior knowledge.
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The prosecution answered that Baum's own understanding is the point.
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It argued that he acknowledged speed as a factor and was familiar with the phrase, quote, speed kills, end quote.
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Now, do not identify the friend, which we did not, because it's it's describing a person only as a friend, and that's where we're gonna leave that for right now until we get further into the trial.
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The defense also presented government traffic data.
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It says it obtained after the preliminary hearing on the specific point 0.8 mile stretch of PCH.
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The defense said SWITRS identified 129 collisions, and CALTRANs produced roughly 50 additional reports.
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That's 179 collisions over 10 years.
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The defense argued that this crash was the only fatal collision in that combined data set and used that to challenge the proposition that extreme speed on that stretch by itself carries a high probability of death.
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The defense separately cited broader Malibu data, 3,345 collisions over 10 years, with 49 fatal collisions.
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Those are two different data sets, and we are not merging them.
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So the prosecution's response is important.
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Speed alone is not its theory.
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It pointed to the overall driving behavior, including allegations of swerving and bearing across lanes.
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Separately, current courtroom reporting attributes to prosecutors an allegation that bomb reached approximately 104 miles per hour before the crash.
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I will also clarify on that that depending on which outlet you are looking at, that speed has been, I've actually seen 109.
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So we're just going to say over 100 for right now.
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And again, that 99 miles per hour.
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We've seen different ones.
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Yeah.
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And I I mean, I'm just gonna say for right now, until we get further into the trial itself, and we can actually pin down what they are stating in the actual testimony.
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I think that'll get cleared up.
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Judge Robert uh Robinson, Rubinson, sorry, denied the motion.
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And the role the ruling had two layers.
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Clearly, I can't say are you.
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First, the judge said the prosecution had no constitutional obligation to disclose the evidence at issue at the preliminary hearing.
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That alone was enough to deny the motion.
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So, second, the judge said that even if the evidence should have been disclosed, adding it to the preliminary hearing record would not have changed the probable cause determination.
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So the four murder counts remain.
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That ruling did not decide guilt.
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It decided the charges had sufficient basis to continue past this pretrial challenge.
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And this is the update that changes our trial watch tonight.
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So September 8th had been the court's target for jury selection.
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We have courtroom audio confirming that date.
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That date is now off the board.
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Here's what happened in court today.
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Source to the California Post, published at 6 45 this evening at today's hearing.
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The prosecution advanced a new theory involving a 10 to 12 pound nitrous oxide canister recovered from Bomb's car.
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Prosecutors told Judge Rubinson the tank was on Baum's lap at the time of the crash, that a pressurized gas canister of that size is distracting.
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The defense said it needs at least three to four weeks to inspect the canister, review chain of custody, and analyze swabbing from the tank, which had blood on it when recovered.
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After the parties met privately with the judge in chambers, a trial start date of December 1 was announced.
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So Bomb's$4 million bond stands.
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We're going to move on to our next segment.
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Yes, yes.
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The phone record.
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So tonight's evidence of the night is not a dramatic photograph or single quote.
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It is a conflict between eyewitness testimony and digital evidence.
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So Victor Calandra testified that Baum had his phone between his legs and his thumbs moving on the keyboard immediately before the collision.
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The later forensic analysis cited by the defense showed the phone locked with no user interaction from 8:15.
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And this is exactly why digital evidence matters.
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A witness can sincerely remember something one way.
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Device data can preserve a different kind of record.
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But the existence of a conflict does not tell us by itself which explanation a jury will accept.
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The prosecution says the defense already had a partial extraction before the preliminary hearing showing no text, calls, or app interaction, and used that information during cross-examination.
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The defense says the later full forensic analysis more directly contradicts Calandra's account.
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Judge Rubinson did not rule that Calandra lied.
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He denied the motion to dismiss and concluded the additional evidence would not have changed the probable cause determination.
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Credibility remains a trial question.
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So that distinction matters.
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Evidence can be important without a pretrial judge deciding what a future jury must believe.
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So with that, we're going to move on to our legal minute.
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All right.
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So you are going to hear people call what happened in Clancy an Allen charge.
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That term comes from the United States Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Allen versus United States, which approved a supplemental instruction encouraging jurors to keep deliberating and seriously consider one another's views.
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But Massachusetts has its own history, and tonight Judge Sullivan used the Massachusetts deadlock instruction, commonly called Tui Rodriguez.
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The history is unusual.
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The instruction approved in Allen was itself drawn from a much older Massachusetts charge in Commonwealth vs.
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TUI, Massachusetts, later revisited the language in Commonwealth versus Rodriguez and set out rec set out recommended models for what judges should tell jurors when deliberations reach a genuine impasse.
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And today we heard the instruction in this specific case.
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So Sullivan reminded jurors that the Commonwealth still carries the burden of proving every element beyond a reasonable doubt.
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He told them to give proper respect to one another's opinions and to listen to the reasoning of jurors who disagree.
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That is very different from telling a juror to change a vote just to produce a verdict.
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And timing matters, so Massachusetts appellate guidance cautions against giving this kind of supplemental instruction prematurely because of the pressure it can carry.
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That helps explain the procedural difference between the first and second impasse.
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After the first, Sullivan sent the jury back under the instructions already given.
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After the second, he delivered the supplemental instruction, and the courtroom transcript shows the court then sent an actual written copy of that instruction into the jury room.
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Now we are going to move on to our red flag for tonight.
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A headline is not the current posture.
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Tonight's red flag is simple.
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A headline can be accurate when it's published and still be wrong for the case you are watching today.
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For weeks, the BOM calendar pointed towards September 8th.
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We even have courtroom audio showing the judge had targeted that date.
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And the then the record moved.
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Today's hearing introduced a new evidentiary issue.
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The defense asks for time to inspect and test it.
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And courtroom reporting says December 1st was announced as a new trial start date.
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So in this case, that does not mean the earlier reporting was fake or inaccurate.
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It means court calendars move.
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It also does not mean the prosecution proved the nitrous canister theory or that the defense disproved it.
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A scheduling consequence is not an evidentiary finding.
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And there's one more particulars-level distinction here.
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The public docket still labels December 1 as pretrial conference trial setting, while the September 2 courtroom report says December 1 was announced as the trial start.
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We keep both source descriptions visible instead of quietly forcing them to match.
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So, as we've also talked about at the top of tonight's episode, we're going to continue.
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Um, in regard to a little bit of production side of things, when it comes to this, we do have, so to speak, a cutoff.
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A typical day for us, I try to cut off updates at about 5 30 Eastern because we go live at nine, and that gives me time to do graphics and and things like that.
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And typically things are cut off if it's on the East Coast, we're at close of business.
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However, on the West Coast at 5 30, it's still 2 30 in the afternoon.
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So you will notice in some of our Vegas we had an issue with everything going on in Vegas.
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So and it and two two very high-profile cases being in trial at the same time, and some of their times uh for watching was so we try to do the best we can with the production.
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Bear with us when it comes to that, and thank you for sticking around, even with our technical difficulties that we had tonight.
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Okay, so the next case, I did I did pull some preliminary stuff.
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Um, I almost thought about throwing it into tonight's episode, but I didn't because I thought we were gonna have a full episode.
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Um, but the next case that we will begin to officially cover is United States versus Matthew Farwell.
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Farwell.
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That is the Sandra Birchmore case.
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That's the cop in Massachusetts, isn't it?
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Oh my gosh.
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All right, so tonight Lindsay Clancy remains on verdict watch after a second impasse and a Tui Rodriguez charge, which we discussed tonight.
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And Fraser Baum's September 8th trial start is off the calendar as of tonight.
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A December 1 trial start was announced after the new development in the case, and we will continue to bring you updates as we get them.
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Different cases, different procedural moments, same rule.
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Follow the record when it moves.
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If you want to follow bomb with us as the case moves towards trial, follow here on TikTok and subscribe on YouTube.
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The full replay is chaptered, so you can jump straight to the file that you want.
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So hear the evidence, check the source, walk the case, then decide.
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And Friday, we're opening another federal file that is moving toward trial, United States versus Matthew Farwell involving the death of Sandra Birchmore.
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Because headlines end.
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And details begin.
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This has been the particulars.
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We'll see you Friday night, 9 o'clock p.m.
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Have a great rest of your week, guys.
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We'll see you Friday.