Justice is done, for now. Personally, as I see it, this is just the first of many vindications to come. In the end, blood can only be cleansed by truth–and there’s plenty of cleaning up left to be done. But a sigh of relief for now. My congratulations to Scot, to his attorney Mark Eiglarsh, and to the entire team that supported him, including Kevin Bolling and Lydia Rodriguez, whom I know from afar, and so many people that I don’t.  The verdict is what we all hoped for, an 11-0 win. It’s good to have some good news in a world where good news seems so rare. 

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. Continue reading →

In the five years since the Parkland shooting, I’ve read my fair share of books, reports, articles, and editorials regarding the charges made against Scot Peterson. Peterson, we’re told, was a coward, derelict in his duties, neglectful of the welfare of the children he was tasked with protecting, and, aside from Cruz himself, the fundamental cause of the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of this material makes a valuable contribution in a narrowly limited way: it identifies facts relevant to reaching a verdict on Peterson’s actions. Read carefully, and taken cumulatively, I would say that at the very least, it exonerates Peterson of the criminal charges against him, and plausibly of all the others as well. But virtually none of it–literally none of the hundreds of pages I’ve read, the vast majority of the pages written on the subject–really drills down to ask the right questions, seek the right answers, or get the right answers. To read this literature is, for the most part, to drown in a sea of irrelevance. Continue reading →