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I've watched the Dateline NBC episode on Vincent Brothers, and was disturbed that the evidence used to convict him was exactly the kind that UFO crackpots like to use. Here's a pretty good summary of the show, even though it's from an unreliable-looking website:
http://pysih.com/2008/12/08/vincent-brothers/
So the court proved that Brothers drove far enough to commit the murder, and that his rental car was at some time in the Western or central United States. There was no evidence that he was in the same city the murders took place, or even in the same state, at the time of the murder. The prosecution presented no physical evidence from the crime scene and offered no convincing motive (according to the show, they just guessed one); it relied purely on circumstantial evidence.
This strikes me as very similar to the "reasoning" supporting alien abductions, ghosts, ESP, etc: "I don't know why these strange coincidences are taking place, and my imagination isn't good enough to guess a reason, so I'll just assume it's ghosts/aliens/mind reading." In this case, it's "I don't know why he drove 5000 miles on the weekend, and my imagination isn't good enough to think up a few possibilities, so I'll just assume he was busy murdering his family." It seems that if there was even one scientist on the jury, Brothers would have been acquitted.
What do you think?
http://pysih.com/2008/12/08/vincent-brothers/
So the court proved that Brothers drove far enough to commit the murder, and that his rental car was at some time in the Western or central United States. There was no evidence that he was in the same city the murders took place, or even in the same state, at the time of the murder. The prosecution presented no physical evidence from the crime scene and offered no convincing motive (according to the show, they just guessed one); it relied purely on circumstantial evidence.
This strikes me as very similar to the "reasoning" supporting alien abductions, ghosts, ESP, etc: "I don't know why these strange coincidences are taking place, and my imagination isn't good enough to guess a reason, so I'll just assume it's ghosts/aliens/mind reading." In this case, it's "I don't know why he drove 5000 miles on the weekend, and my imagination isn't good enough to think up a few possibilities, so I'll just assume he was busy murdering his family." It seems that if there was even one scientist on the jury, Brothers would have been acquitted.
What do you think?