I'm always fascinated by the argument by some people that if a jury of 12 found a person

guilty, they know better than those outside of the courtroom because they got to see all the evidence.

Now, if things worked like that, well, there would never be any wrongful convictions, and at this point, if you've been following our podcast long enough, it should be clear that the jury gets a very carefully curated story by both the prosecution and the defense.

A story that's often not the entire story for a lot of different reasons.

Poor lawyer, their stuff either side, has it isn't individed into evidence in front of the jury, or even more problematic, there's evidence that never gets collected due to a poor police investigation.

Now, poor police investigations can happen for lots of reasons, like lack of resources, or bad training, or outdated and unscientific investigative methods.

But sometimes, they happen deliberately, because there's a story the police have created at a bits of unreliable information, who got feelings, or sometimes out of whole cloth, and now they have the task of gathering enough evidence to make that story stick.

They have to investigate just enough, but not too much, gather just the right information, but nothing that could hurt their case, just like they did in the Domingo Martinez murder.

The story of the murder is just a story that's often not the entire story for a lot of different reasons.

The story of the murder is just a story that's often not the entire story for a lot of different reasons.

Let's start with the state witnesses, the stalwarts, cousin Nathaniel, and brother John and William.

Last week, we already discussed Nathaniel recanting almost immediately after his confession.

Remember the letter he wrote in 1994 to most of his lawyer, apologizing? He said he lied about everything.

He said the cops told him that Mustafa and John had committed the murder, and that if he didn't go along with it, he'd get charged with the murder too.

Now, let's pause for a second here and think about this.

At the time the police brought Nathaniel in, as far as we know, well, he was apparently the very first witness they spoke to.

They hadn't gotten to his cousin's John and William yet, but if he's telling the truth, they weren't really investigating the crime to try and figure out who was involved at that point.

They had already decided Sean and his brother were guilty. They were just rounding up the kinds of witnesses, vulnerable ones, to help make their case.

Just speaking to Nathaniel, they had no evidence at all that Sean and Mustafa were involved in the murder.

No weapon, no forensics, nothing. And yet, they demanded confessions from the stalwarts, fingering the Thomas brothers, in order to create evidence where there was none.

Okay, so Nathaniel retracts his confession nearly immediately.

Then there's William stalworth, who tells the innocence project all these years later that the police showed him his brother John statements, and told him to basically repeat everything in there.

...