Scott Peterson
From Cyberlaw
Three Ways of Looking at Scott Peterson
Scott Peterson was guilty as sin.
Around 10am on December 24, 2002, the morning of Laci Peterson’s disappearance, a neighbor witnessed Peterson load a tarp-wrapped bulk into his trailer-truck. Peterson told the neighbor that he was going fishing, and that the tarp held large umbrellas he would store at the dock warehouse. Later he admitted to police that he had “forgotten” to unload the umbrellas, which he returned home. In mid-April, after a concerted search effort by authorities and volunteers, the decomposed bodies of Laci and her unborn son, Conner, washed ashore the lake where Peterson had gone fishing. At trial, prosecutors established that Peterson knew how to make a concrete anchor heavy enough to weigh his wife’s dead body and introduced traces of concrete found on his trailer. They also produced a tell-tale piece of evidence: a pair of pliers holding a strand of Laci Peterson’s hair, which authorities found on Peterson’s boat.
Peterson’s extramarital activities also helped prove his guilt, as well as his motive. At the end of 2002, with police beginning their investigation and Laci’s family still holding out hope for their daughter’s safe return, Peterson called his mistress, single mother Amber Frey. Frey first encountered Peterson in October. Claiming to be unattached, he had intercourse with her on their first date. Then, in early December, just over two weeks before Laci’s disappearance, Peterson told Amber that he had been married but had “lost” his wife. After December 24, Peterson continued to lie to Amber, calling her from a vigil for Laci even while telling his mistress that he was in Paris with friends. Tipped off by a police friend as to Laci Peterson’s identity and disappearance, Amber agreed to the recording of her conversations with Peterson. The hours of tapes showed Scott Peterson to be an amoral, sociopathic liar, just the type to murder his wife for freedom from impending familial responsibilities.
The press and police identified Peterson as the prime suspect almost from the first. Finally, days after finding Laci and Conner’s bodies, authorities arrested Peterson near his parents’ home in San Diego. Peterson had dyed his brown hair and eyebrows blond, had grown a goatee, and was carrying his brother’s driver’s license. Tellingly, his recently-purchased vehicle contained over $14,000 in cash, four cell phones, credit cards issued to family members, directions to Amber’s workplace, Viagra pills, a shovel, camping gear, and several outfits of clothing. Had authorities not acted at that moment, a murderer might still be hiding out in rural California or in Mexico.
Scott Peterson was unjustly convicted of murder, by the jury and in the eyes of the public, on the basis of his adultery and his physical appearance.
The evidentiary case against Scott was uniquely weak. There was no incriminating physical evidence found at the Peterson home, on Scott’s trailer, at the dock warehouse or on the boat. As for the cement residue, Scott often worked with cement, improving his home’s driveway and making a barbeque pit in his family’s backyard. Needless to say, the prosecution never entered the supposed “murder anchors” into evidence. The strand of hair on the boat was Laci’s, but it is no feat of detective work to find a wife’s hair among her husband’s possessions. Furthermore, there was no eyewitness linking Scott to Laci’s murder or her body’s disposal. There was a neighbor’s eyewitness report of finding the Petersons’ dog running loose the morning of December 24, which is consistent with Scott’s account that he went fishing and Laci disappeared while walking the dog.
As for Amber Frey, it is true Scott had an affair with her - but that does not make him a murderer. It is difficult to say what exactly went through Scott’s mind when he spoke to Frey after Laci’s disappearance. No doubt he was overwhelmed and wished to maintain stability through maintaining contact with someone for whom he cared. And though the state used Frey to get at Scott during his period of such vulnerability, he never so much as hinted at his involvement in his wife’s disappearance. Much was made of Scott’s dalliance with Frey, both in court and in the media, to demonstrate Scott’s untrustworthiness and his motive to kill. But to lie to one’s mistress is not a crime. And as a motive, it makes little sense to “free” oneself from a pregnant wife in order to make a new life with a woman with a child of her own.
In the absence of solid evidence, those who believed Scott guilty did so not only because of his affair with Frey, but also because of how he looked. His appearance at the time of his arrest raised eyebrows, but really, his new look and the contents of his car showed he wished to avoid the cameras of the sensationalist media. Indeed, the media succeeded in turning public opinion so against Scott that the trial had to be moved. Portrayed as sleazy, dishonest and callous, Scott was convicted by the media before the trial even started. At trial, perhaps weary of the intense scrutiny, Scott was typically impassive, taking in the story of his wife’s murder without making a show of his emotions. The pre-trial media portrayal combined with Scott’s courtroom stoicism to lead some jury members to conclude that he was coldhearted. This judgment made it disappointingly easy to cast a guilty verdict in spite of the paucity of evidence distressing the state’s case.
Too many reasonable doubts remain to justify conviction. Other stories could explain Laci’s death. For instance, as Scott’s attorney suggested, her murderer could have seen the fishing alibi on the news and dumped the body where it was sure to emerge to “prove” Scott’s guilt.
The above accounts of the Scott Peterson case differ in how they view the evidence. The first, underneath its accusatory bluster, emphasizes that the circumstantial evidence formed a coherent story, which the jury was correct to believe corresponded to the truth. The second pokes at the points of evidence, argues that they were too weak to convict, and maintains that the glue holding them together, in the public eye and in court, was distaste for the character of Scott Peterson. The first views the evidence as ample enough to convict the killer of one’s daughter and aims to de-humanize the accused; the second sees the evidence as insufficient to convict one’s all-too-human son.
The prosecution won the battle for coherence because the evidence, taken together, fit its story. The jury would not strain to imagine alternate stories for each point of evidence – to put each fact in its own context, forming no one master story – as the defense argument required. If the defense presented evidence permitting a narrative of when, how and why someone else killed Laci Peterson and framed Scott, perhaps the jury would have found reasonable doubt. Instead, the second account of the case is relegated to a half-finished narrative about media and/or juror bias corrupting truth-finding.
The media bias issue nonetheless introduces questions about the primacy of the Law Lord. In this case, the important evidence was almost entirely circumstantial, so the jury was not in a privileged position with regard to the “truth” of Laci Peterson’s death. The Media Lord, then, competed with the Law Lord to issue a judgment to the public, and in fact was equipped to do so faster, more colorfully, and with more specificity than the jury’s eventual verdict of guilty or not guilty. Enabled by mass media, the public found itself engrossed in the police investigation, the missing person hunt and the search for the remains. By the trial stage, interested parties were as close to the truth as the jury, and though they could not see Scott Peterson in the flesh, the talking heads on Larry King could confirm or dismiss their suspicious about the import of the defendant’s icy visage.
Thus apprised of the Media Lord’s awesome power, we ask a question whose answer we can never know – whether in this case the media thwarted the Law Lord by prejudicing the jury pool. The unavoidable uncertainty itself causes unease. We do know that the Media Lord runs a truth-creation machine perhaps more effective at forging public consensus than the Law Lord’s, and that its conclusions are accepted as legitimate – if not legally finalized – by the public. Legal results that contradict the these conclusions, such as in the Rodney King or O. J. Simpson cases, breed distrust of the Law Lord’s machine. Even in the Peterson case, where the verdict tracked public opinion, jurors went of out of their way post-trial to deny media influence on their verdict. This disclaimer could reveal growing social discomfort with the power of the Media Lord, or it could be the Media Lord shrewdly parrying attacks that it has too much influence, as against the Law Lord, through reporting the non-existence of its own influence.
