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Sword and Scale

Episode 122

Sword and Scale

Incongruity

History, Society & Culture, True Crime, Documentary

4.063.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2018

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

51-year-old Ruth Pyne is found beaten and stabbed to death in the garage of her home in Highland Township, Michigan. Her immediate family members become the focus of the investigation, and one of them has a questionable alibi. Indirect evidence begins to pile up, and a jury is left with the following question: at what point does circumstantial evidence overcome reasonable doubt?

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Sword and scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences.

0:06.3

Listener discretion is advised.

0:12.2

And you say that you left at 130. Can anybody verify that you left at 130?

0:17.3

How can we verify that?

0:22.6

I don't know. I can't.

0:26.6

I can't. This is Season 5, Episode 122 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real.

1:07.2

Yeah. that the worst monsters are real. Well, by the time you hear this episode, we should be back up and running with our store.

1:13.2

The store has been down now for a couple of weeks because we had to transfer all our merch to a different place.

1:19.6

So if you've been waiting to get that t-shirt or mug or water bottle, it should be either up right now or coming very, very soon. So keep checking at

1:29.7

store.sore.com. Oh, and we will be putting up the hot sauce for general sale in the store

1:36.8

as soon as we relaunch it. So watch out for that. It's a spicy. Oh, and one more thing. As of this

1:43.1

week, Sword and Scale Rewind is on twice a week.

1:45.6

Go check it out today. In any criminal case, evidence is typically divided in two categories.

2:27.0

First, there's direct evidence.

2:29.6

The type of evidence that directly ties a suspect to the commission of a crime.

2:35.1

For example,

2:42.5

testimony from someone who witnessed a defendant robbing a bank. Then there's circumstantial evidence,

2:48.5

which requires interpretation. If a witness spotted a defendant a few blocks away from the scene of a bank robbery carrying a sack of money,

2:55.6

their testimony would be considered circumstantial evidence, because it doesn't quite fill in all the blanks. There's a common myth that circumstantial evidence is somehow weak or unreliable,

3:02.4

but that's not exactly true. Perpetrators are often convicted based solely on circumstantial evidence.

3:10.8

There just has to be enough of it to persuade a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

3:17.2

The problem is, it's not always clear where that line is. It's a matter of interpretation, just how much evidence should be required

...

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