The Scot Peterson trial has ended very quickly–far quicker than anyone thought it would, and too quickly, I think, to do justice to the real complexity of the issues involved. That said, the narrow issues raised by the criminal charges against Peterson are so obvious that there’s a sense in which the trial could reasonably have been shorter–by not happening at all. So from that perspective, a short trial may well be appropriate.

The case for acquittal is, in a certain sense, so simple and obvious that it can be stated fairly briefly. For Peterson to be found guilty of the main charges against him, it had to be proven that he was a “caretaker” in the legally relevant sense, that he knew where the shooter was, and that knowing where the shooter was, he failed to engage the shooter as he was (supposedly) required to do. To acquit, all that the jury needs is reasonable grounds to doubt any one of these claims.

Set aside any complications regarding the first and third claims–whether Peterson was a caretaker in the legally relevant sense, and whether it was really “negligent” of him to fail to enter the building even if we assume that he knew the shooter’s location. The question remains whether he did know the shooter’s location, or even could have. And there’s ample room for doubt that he did know in any relevantly strong sense of “know.” Any reasonable person looking at the totality of the evidence would grasp that the scene of the shooting was chaotic, that communications had broken down, that the gunfire was difficult to localize (is in fact, generally difficult to localize), and that as the first armed responder on the scene, Peterson had to deal with all of these issues at once under conditions of extreme duress and time constraint. 

The first shots Peterson heard were fired from inside the building to the outside through an open door. Having heard these initial shots, he may well have fixated on the possibility suggested by them: that the shooter was outside. Torn between this possibility and all the others, he hedged his bets and stayed in one place, coordinating information as (temporary) Incident Commander, and waiting for others to arrive so as to enable everyone at the scene to coordinate their efforts. When other officers arrived, they confronted the same dynamic as Peterson did, and did essentially the same as he did. It’s worth noting (as Hayden does) that when officers outranking Peterson arrived, no one ordered him to stop doing what he was doing, or to enter the building.

No one entered the building until well after the shooting had ended. And when they did make entry, no one entered it because they “moved toward the sound of gunfire.” There was no such sound at that point. The tactical team entered the building because they had visual proof–video–that told them that the shooter was inside. Peterson was not alone at the scene, and no one at the scene regarded auditory evidence by itself as sufficient to localize the shooter. There is a simple explanation for this: it isn’t. 

My excerpts from Philip Hayden’s report in a previous post show this well enough to support acquittal, but Peterson’s attorney has called twenty-two witnesses in support of the same claim. It defies credulity to believe that all of these witnesses are lying to cover for Scot Peterson. Here are four articles from recent press coverage of the trial indicating, briefly, how these witnesses have testified.* 

From “Witnesses describe fear, uncertainty during Parkland shooting in Day 9 of former deputy’s trial,” 

BSO Deputy Brian Goolsby, who is now a sergeant with the agency, responded to the shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, and, like Peterson, didn’t race into the 1200 Building, but did take a position of cover.

“When you saw Coach Feis [lying dead on the ground outside the building], did you go rushing into the 1200 Building?” defense attorney Mark Eiglarsh asked.

“No, I did not,” Goolsby said.

“Did you think he was dead?” Eiglarsh asked.

“Yes,” Goolsby responded.

“Did you get on your radio and announce he was dead?” Eiglarsh asked.

“I did not,” Goolsby said.

“Did you think to do that?” Eiglarsh asked.

“I did not,” Goolsby said.

“And even when you see the bullet holes [in the third floor teacher’s lounge windows], you didn’t go in?” Eiglarsh asked.

“No,” Goolsby said. “I took the job of securing that area.”

“You are doing that from a position of cover?” Eiglarsh asked.

“Yes,” he responded.

“How come?” Eiglarsh asked.

“There is a lot of area in front of me that a shooter could be hiding,” Goolsby responded. “By having some cover, if he did start shooting, I can return fire.”

Two sisters, Peri and Ruby Harris, students at the school at the time, testified as follows:

“Where did you think the sounds were coming from?” Eiglarsh asked her.

“I thought the soccer field or West Glades — the middle school,” Peri Harris said.

“It could have been anywhere here,” Ruby Harris said during her testimony, pointing to the senior lot on a map.

“Did you think the sounds were coming from the 1200 building?” Eiglarsh asked.

“No,” she said.

From “Dispatcher testifies that failing radios hampered deputies’ response to Parkland school massacre”:

From the first minutes of the shooting, the system repeatedly failed as more and more deputies tried to radio information as they arrived at the suburban Fort Lauderdale school where Peterson was the on-campus deputy. Instead, the deputies got a tone that was the equivalent of a busy signal. …

Oakley said that another major problem during the shooting was that the 911 cellphone calls students and teachers made from inside the three-story 1200 building reporting shooter Nikolas Cruz’s location didn’t go to the Broward County dispatch center, but instead went to Parkland’s neighboring city of Coral Springs. Its police officers worked on a separate radio system from the county and it was transmitting without issues.

That meant responding Coral Springs officers knew Cruz’s location, but Peterson and other Broward deputies were never told about those calls. 

From “Witnesses to Parkland massacre describe their confusion in pinpointing gunshots’ location”:

Student Ruby Harris, who had exited a neighboring building, thought the shots from Cruz’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle were coming from straight ahead from a parking lot behind the 1200 building. Her younger sister Peri thought they were coming from the left, from a neighboring middle school. Their friend Dylan Redshaw thought that a building somewhere had exploded.

From “Off-duty officer testifies he didn’t know just where shots were fired from during Parkland massacre“:

PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) — An off-duty police officer who was on the baseball field at Florida’s Parkland high school during the 2018 massacre testified Thursday that he mistook gunshots for fireworks before he realized what was happening and approached the school unarmed.

Coral Springs Sgt. Jeffrey Heinrich, testifying a second day in the trial of a deputy accused of not stopping the shooter, said he first thought the shots were coming from in or near the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High classroom building where the 17 killings occurred. But it wasn’t until he interviewed a wounded student minutes after the shooting started that he knew for certain.

Heinrich, testifying for the prosecution, conceded he never got within 200 yards (182 meters) of where former Broward Deputy Scot Peterson had taken cover on the opposite side of the building and never saw the deputy. …

“My training is that you run toward the sound of gunshots,” he said. “It was just instinct.” He said officers are told to get to the shooter because every gunshot is potentially another death.

He said he ran past an unarmed security guard who told him there was an active shooter and that an assistant football coach had been shot. But he said he couldn’t tell if the shots were coming from inside the 1200 building, a neighboring building or their rooftops.

Amazing that this last witness was testifying for the prosecution. His testimony is the evidential equivalent of an “own goal” for their case: virtually everything he says above supports Peterson’s defense without offering a shred of support for the charges against him. Multiply this testimony by a factor of four or five, and you get a sense of the case for the defense, and the precarious absurdity of the case for the prosecution. 

The prosecution’s response to this testimony has been disingenuous, feeble, and frankly stupid. One response made is that not all of the witnesses are police officers with trained experience of how to follow gunfire in the absence of visual clues. This claim collides headlong with at least one undeniable fact: some of the witnesses are police officers. And I would also challenge anyone–including the prosecutors in the Peterson case–to produce verifiable, scientific evidence that anyone can be “trained” to localize the position of a moving sniper, firing intermittently in a semi-urban environment, in the absence of visual clues as to his location. This claim “sounds” a lot to me like a bluff which I would localize as coming out of the asses of the people making it.

Another response has been to pick with desperation at the testimony of one officer (Goolsby) who, having been just as uncertain as Peterson about the origin of the gunfire, walked toward the building in an attempt to investigate. Did he conclude that the gunfire was in fact coming from the building? No. Did he enter it in real time? No. So how does any of this prove anything about Peterson’s guilt? Totally unclear. Beyond desperation, it’s unclear how these lines of “argument” bear any relevance to anything at all.

The prosecution doubtless has other rhetorical sleights of hand, red herrings, well poisonings, and appeals to pity, outrage, and spite to offer. But what these really amount to is the absence of a case against Scot Peterson, and the beginnings of a case for malicious prosecution against them. 

The Scot Peterson prosecution is a case of law enforcement run wild. This is a professional guild that claims to be upheld by norms of honor, justice, and fidelity to law. What they’ve actually shown themselves to be is a bunch of unscrupulous, careerist hacks willing, under oath, to run off at the mouth, to throw one of their “brothers” under the bus, and to sell their souls to the Devil. Not quite as bad, but bad enough, are the Rambo cops who played it safe by attacking Peterson from the safe distance of Big Shot media interviews, or simply kept their mouths shut to see which way the wind would blow.  No one is safe under the “protection” of such spineless people. If you want to see the true face of “negligence”–neglect of what’s required for the pursuit of truth–that’s where you’ll find it. 

I’ve given this post the coarse title it has because I can’t think of a better summation of this case. The evidence against Peterson really is shit. And it leads of necessity to a single inference, a single verdict, and a single course of action. One can only hope that the jury will see reason, and take it.

*I added the fourth item on June 25, after initial posting. It had originally been sitting in a comment.