S01.E11: The Sauna at the End of the Stairs

[Chicago Redshirt]

37 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

Can Cody's lawyer make a case that Cody thought his mother's life was in danger, and, at 15, he would not have considered notifying the police? Or even that his family would not brook his reporting it? 

Keeping in mind that I'm an attorney but not a criminal justice attorney and I have not done specific research on this or any other topic and the law can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, my from the hip thoughts are:

Assuming for discussion's sake that the event happened basically as Morgan hypothesized and Cody confirmed, I would think that Cody's attorney would have a couple potential lines of defense with mixed likelihood of success(should Cody allow him to pursue them at trial): 

Defense of others: For this defense to work, a reasonable person in Cody's position would have to think that his actions were necessary to prevent imminent harm to another. I do not think this defense would fly because at the moment Cody killed Barry, Mom was safe downstairs with the family and Barry did not pose an imminent threat to her. The law generally doesn't allow you to use a threat that may come days, weeks, months later as justification for taking actions now.  

Defense of self: similar, but in this instance, Cody would assert that Barry beat him too. It likely would fail for the reasons defense of others would fail. That said, Cody can single-handedly say what led to him doing it. If he wanted to, I'm sure he could spin a story where he only threw the hair drier in the shower after Barry attacked him or something, and maybe get a jury to believe him. 

Imperfect self-defense/defense of others: This is essentially what you are talking about: that Cody thought that Barry posed a threat to Mom that could not be dealt with other than through killing him. It gets the label "imperfect" because it is not strictly true (on the facts that we know them) that Barry posed such a threat.

Temporary insanity: Cody was so messed up by the scene caused at dinner, the persistent abuse of him and/or his mom, the subsequent confrontation with Barry that he couldn't help himself/didn't know right from wrong, etc. (there are slightly different tests for what it means to be temporarily insane). I don't think this defense is viable in that he immediately was able to embark on the coverup he did.

Youthful offender: At 15, Cody was too young to be held to the standard we would hold an adult to and deserves mercy. (I originally typed "merci," French for thanks, which is probably true too, lol). This is really a defense in support of a lighter sentence rather than acquittal and would likely come into play. Hence, the 3 years for a crime that for adults is probably 25 to life.

Jury sympathy/nullification: Occasionally jurors do not follow the letter of the law but do what they think is right. Even though there's not much argument against the notion that Cody intentionally planned to kill his father, killed his father, covered up the killing of his father, stayed silent while his grandfather was at risk for being convicted of the killing of his father, jurors may decide to acquit him just because they feel he has suffered enough or because Barry had it coming or any other reason.

Reasonable doubt: This would be the trying to say the state hasn't met its burden with its circumstantial evidence and the confession. This would involve trying to get some explanation for why the confession shouldn't come into evidence or Cody recanting in such a way that a jury might believe the confession was invalid and the circumstantial evidence is not enough. This seems like a non-starter to me. 

Edited 6 hours ago by Chicago Redshirt

[shura]

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It is weird that Soto was so blase about the footage being deleted. The best explanation being that the writers threw in the thing about the video footage to cover up a perceived plot hole and/or offer a clue (I suspected Cody when told he had piqued MIT's interest and knowing that the murderer had to have some level of comfort with tech to delete footage).

Yes, she did actually say “the family said the footage was deleted 🤷‍♀️” and that was it, wasn’t it?  As if it’s not at all crucial in a murder investigation to find out who deleted the video of said murder and why and under what circumstances.  This is why, assuming that the initial investigation was at all competent, I am thinking there must have been a reasonable explanation that did not involve anything nefarious.  What that might be I have no idea, and the writers probably didn’t think it through, either.  Honestly, the story would have worked just fine without having this mansion equipped with security cameras everywhere, even if it didn’t offer an extra clue.

[possibilities]

The plan was to make the death look like a heart attack, but once the coroner found the broken neck, I'd think someone would wonder how his neck got broken, whether he died sitting in the sauna OR if he died of a heart attack. 

[iMonrey]

You can spin this any way you want, to me it all amounts to a lot of hand-waving and excuses for formulaic writing. Not atypical for a network procedural, but not true to life in any real sense of the word. 

The show relies on the appeal of Kaitlin Olson, and I do think she's an appealing lead, but the show itself just isn't very clever. A police chief might in fact listen to something a consultant had to say, but not allow her to put on this grand display with the entire family present, in their own home, pontificating and hypothesizing and pointing fingers while everyone just sits there in silence like they're watching a play unfold. It's absurd. It felt like they were doing one of those Murder Mystery dinner parties and Morgan was playing the part of Sherlock Holmes. 

I know they can do better than this, not all the episodes up to this one have been this silly.

[shura]

2 hours ago, possibilities said:

The plan was to make the death look like a heart attack, but once the coroner found the broken neck, I'd think someone would wonder how his neck got broken, whether he died sitting in the sauna OR if he died of a heart attack. 

The broken neck was not part of the plan, and it only happened when Cody panicked and decided to move the body for no good reason.  If Barry had broken his neck in the shower after having his “heart attack”, the ME probably could have explained it by the fall in the shower.  As it happened though, they found a broken neck in someone who died sitting in a sauna with no sign of falling down, that’s what triggered a murder investigation.

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, shura said:

The broken neck was not part of the plan, and it only happened when Cody panicked and decided to move the body for no good reason.  If Barry had broken his neck in the shower after having his “heart attack”, the ME probably could have explained it by the fall in the shower.  As it happened though, they found a broken neck in someone who died sitting in a sauna with no sign of falling down, that’s what triggered a murder investigation.

The two potential problems with this are:

1. Would slipping in the shower be enough to cause the type of break in the neck that occurred? Maybe, maybe not. I would tend to think that the actual break was greater than could be explained by a simple slip and fall in the shower (the force of falling, say, 6'), since the corpse fell at least one story (say 20') and possibly more. But maybe a break is a break is a break, or maybe the coroner would not think twice about it once it seemed like it was a heart attack/slip.

2. The outlet caught fire, which the kid wasn't expecting, and it would basically eliminate the "heart attack" story.

Which I guess I'm belatedly only now thinking that it would have been way smarter and easier for the kid to just be like, "OMG, I smelled smoke from the bathroom and found Dad like this with this hairdryer in the shower. I guess he decided he couldn't stand being outed as a wife-beating *** and electrocuted  himself out of shame" than to do the scrambling around.

[shura]

38 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

2. The outlet caught fire, which the kid wasn't expecting, and it would basically eliminate the "heart attack" story.

Oh, you think the body was burned by the outlet fire too?  Maybe, I don’t remember if anybody said anything to that effect.  If it wasn’t burned, then, as someone pointed out upthread, there was no need to move the body from the shower.  Just leave it there and go switch out the plate.  This way, whatever bones break, it really happened during the fall in the shower, everything looks like it would had he really had a heart attack.

Instead, the fire makes the kid panic, he dumps the body in the laundry chute, causes a fracture that cannot be explained by natural reasons and overcomplicates things in general.  And still has to go switch out the plate.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

8 minutes ago, shura said:

Oh, you think the body was burned by the outlet fire too?  Maybe, I don’t remember if anybody said anything to that effect.  If it wasn’t burned, then, as someone pointed out upthread, there was no need to move the body from the shower.  Just leave it there and go switch out the plate.  This way, whatever bones break, it really happened during the fall in the shower, everything looks like it would had he really had a heart attack.

Instead, the fire makes the kid panic, he dumps the body in the laundry chute, causes a fracture that cannot be explained by natural reasons and overcomplicates things in general.  And still has to go switch out the plate.  

Sorry, we may have gotten signals crossed. Presumably the body wasn't burned by the fire. All I was saying was the fact that the outlet scorched would have (at least in Cody's mind) point to the outlet/hair dryer/electrocution causing the death rather than a simple heart attack. 

Dumping the body might have been a panic-born move, or it might have been a clever one. He may have come up with the plan to fake the sauna death instead of heart attack death instantaneously. Dumping the body means Cody can switch the outlet plates more leisurely -- given that beefy Karadec wanted help moving the bed to get to the outlet, I tend to doubt that 15 year old Cody could have quickly done without risking being caught with Barry's corpse still in the shower.  If anyone comes upon the dead body while Cody's doing all the plate switching, it will potentially incriminate him. As in, how come he didn't hear Barry dying?  Also, Cody didn't have necessarily any reason to really expect the neck might break.