Sandra makes a good case for the defence but the jury heard ALL the evidence, first hand. They would have been warned repeatedly about being influenced by media coverage.
No, the jury didn't hear all of the evidence - far from it. They didn't hear Ferris's claim that it was Alice Walker who told him not to come forward. They didn't hear that at least 6 members of the Jones/Walker and Dickie families knew they were on the path, and kept schtum for nearly a week. They didn't hear anything at all about Falconer or Kane (including the witness who would have been able to tell them that Kane wore a Parka jacket in the weeks prior to the murder, and how she could be sure of that).
They didn't hear about Joseph and a 9 bar (or anything else about Joseph, in fact). They didn't hear about the forensic report that stated the possibility that a number of semen/sperm samples may have come from one person (further testing required) and that person was not Luke Mitchell. Or the education professionals who were willing to testify that the stuff on Luke's jotters was "tame" and nothing at all unusual, in their experience, or that the claimed "satanic" slogans were lines from a computer game.
They didn't hear that, rather than the finely detailed story about Jodi coming in from school, sitting listening to a song with her mother and brother, then kissing her mother before leaving to meet Luke, Judith had no idea what time Jodi came in or left, where she was going, or what she was planning to do. She hadn't a clue what Jodi was wearing, and told police she remembered Jodi sitting on the settee trying to talk to her (Judith) and Judith was telling Jodi to "
be quiet, shoo and go out."
And that's only a fraction of what the jury didn't get to hear.
Even if the jury was warned to ignore the media coverage (experts have since pointed out that this would have been impossible because, after so long, it would not be possible for people to identify, far less erase information which had been absorbed over that length of time) it seems Nimmo Smith himself was influenced by media coverage. At sentencing, three weeks after the end of the trial (when the media had had a field day) he said he thought cannabis had made Luke unable to tell the difference between right and wrong (no expert evidence was given about the effects of cannabis) and that he believed Luke had carried the Dahlia images in his mind (to commit a "copycat" murder), yet there was no evidence whatsoever at trial that Luke had ever seen those pictures - it was purely conjecture by the prosecution. How did Nimmo Smith come to those "conclusions" - it was certainly not on the basis of evidence at trial?
