All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Jan. 19, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:23:09
20240119_crime-friday-new-murdaugh-trial-potential-adult-dw
|

Time Text
Becky Hill Juror Tampering 00:15:09
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111, every weekday at least.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
It's a Kelly's Court Friday today, and I am so excited to bring you some great analysis of some unbelievably interesting cases.
I've been dying to talk about these cases.
And today we've got time to go in depth on all of them.
They're equally great.
On the docket today, updates in the Gypsy Rose story, the Alec Murdoch case.
And we have got to get to the one topic that we have not talked about on this show.
Have you heard the story about Natalia Grace?
OMG.
Okay, we're going to get into it today.
It's insane.
Mark Garagos is a famed defense attorney and managing partner of Garagos and Garagos.
And Jonas Bilbor is a defense attorney and founder of Jonas Bilbor Law.
Guys, we have so much to talk about.
Thank you so much for being.
These are like the juiciest cases ever.
I don't like to know where to begin, but I'm going to start with the one that's the newsiest, and that's what's happening with the Alec Murdoch attempt to get a new trial this week.
Well, I mean, in general, but the proceedings have been underway this week to see what will be the standards at this three-day hearing at the end of January.
There's a new judge in town.
The guy who oversaw the case has kicked it to this now retired, but still she comes in for the occasional big legal battle.
Judge Toll, I'm told she's 80 years old, and she's supposedly a total badass.
Like she runs a very strict courthouse, the courtroom.
Lawyers are afraid of her.
She's apparently still very sharp and she's the one who's going to decide whether he gets a new trial.
And as far as I can tell, you know, you tell me, Mark, it looks like things could not have gone worse for Alec Murdoch than they did this week at this hearing, at which the judge is deciding things like what will be the standard for determining whether he gets a new trial and what kind of evidence will I let in when we have this three-day hearing that's going to include several jurors.
That's going to include court clerk Becky Hill, who's been accused of jury tampering.
That's why this whole thing is happening and who has been accused of being an all-around like serial criminal and not a trustworthy person who should have been within 12 feet of the jurors, all of which the defense is alleging.
So am I right?
It was a very bad week for the defendant and his quest for a new trial.
Yes, it was a bad week based on what they had hoped for.
They had hoped for kind of a full-blown hearing where you were going to be able to get in and cross-examine it to your heart's content.
They're now very limited.
It will be at least partially public in the sense that she has, her honor has ruled that you won't be able to seek the or identity of the jurors, and it will not be done in chambers, apparently.
But other than that, the kind of strict ground rules of this have already hamstrung the defense.
I would imagine that they're not pleased.
I have not talked to Jim or Dick about it, but I'm going to channel that they probably are a little bit crestfallen that after all of this, that they're at a point where it's somewhat anticlimactic.
She, it's the most devastating ruling, John, is on the legal standard that's going to be applied in determining whether Murdoch gets a new trial.
There was a question about whether she would rule.
You've got to prove not only that this Becky Hill interfered with the jury, that she tampered with the jury, as one juror alleges she came to them and said, watch his body language, something like, don't trust him.
You know, that would definitely be jury tampering.
And the defense wants to argue that's the legal standard, just tampering.
That's enough for a new trial.
The prosecution wanted to argue that's not the legal standard.
It's tampering, plus it affected the verdict.
It affected the verdict.
And she seems to have held tampering is enough.
I mean, tampering is not enough.
You have to prove that the verdict was affected.
And that's very bad for the defense.
I don't know that this juror is going to testify that it affected the verdict as opposed to, yeah, she said some inappropriate things to me.
Well, and you know, part of the problem is, is that you're on very kind of treacherous ground because normally you can't talk about juror deliberation and what went into their thought processes.
Virtually every jurisdiction, federal and state, has a prohibition of that.
That's kind of a no man's land in terms of going to.
So here, while you want to talk about obviously the tampering and what was said, you're almost kind of walled off from getting into how that affected the deliberations themselves.
So it'll be interesting.
Well, that's what she said.
The judge said that.
So Jonna, I want to get your take on this legal standard ruling because it doesn't sound like it went the way the defense wanted.
But that's another thing the judge said.
She said, we will not be asking, we will ask the jurors about whether it affected your final decision, but it doesn't seem like she's going to make that the determining factor on whether he gets a new trial, but she does want to know whether it did affect the conclusion.
But she said, we will not be talking about how they reached their decision.
Nobody gets to ask jurors about that.
But your thoughts on how this is going for him?
It's so completely unfair.
I mean, yesterday I figured they were already dead in the water because I was listening to it on Sirius, actually.
And she could not have been more, for lack of a better term, anti-Murdoch than she was in each and every one of her rulings.
Why wouldn't it be enough, Megan, to simply prove that there was tampering?
That should be, you know, the end of the story, because if there were tampering, you can't apply a harmless error rule, so to speak, to something like that, especially when the jury tampering comes from inside the courtroom.
I mean, my philosophy would be, let it all in, let it all in, and then whichever way the judge wants to rule, she's going to rule.
But why limit what is going to be admitted into evidence on something as serious as this instead of giving them, you know, a wide breath.
And then the judge can decide what is relevant or not for this purpose.
I think, you know, look, nobody loves Alec Murdoch, but this really seems to be an unfair ruling.
We're talking about a man's freedom here.
So like the standard should be pretty exacting, but it shouldn't be impossible.
And I mean, in this case, I've never seen such good evidence of jury tampering as they have here.
An actual juror has come forward to say, I'm telling you, this happened to me.
And you look at the clerk who says, Your Honor, it's all lies, but the clerk does not appear to be a truthful person, Mark.
And the judge is also going to limit all the bad facts about what Becky Hill has been doing over the past month, according to what I read.
And the evidence against Becky Hill is terrible.
We've talked about it on the show before.
She allegedly plagiarized the book.
She allegedly worked with her son, who was a courthouse employee, to spy on the people who were investigating her and whether she'd done bad things.
She allegedly sold access to the courthouse.
She allegedly let somebody in with closed circuit TV video of Alec Murdoch before he heard the verdict, who wasn't supposed to see it.
I could keep going.
This judge has basically said, you're not getting any of it in.
And by the way, the one that just infuriates me, because I've been there before, is they disqualified one of the jurors based on something, which now turns out something she had told the judge.
Apparently, they make a credible argument that that had just been ginned up as well.
I mean, that talk about tangible.
You're talking about the egg lady?
Egg lady.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's important.
So during the trial, there was a juror who got booted on the day they began the deliberations, right?
Day they began the deliberations, I think it was, it might have been verdict day.
Either way, she had made it the whole time and she got booted because Becky Hill, this problematic court clerk, had apparently told the judge, that's your, who brought in the eggs.
She's up to no good.
She may have been talking about the case outside of the courthouse.
And one thing led to another, John.
And the juror did indeed get booted because of originally because of what Becky Hill said.
Yeah, exactly.
And there was some, you know, Becky Hill also either she made up or fabricated some sort of Facebook post that implicated this juror and who's talking out of school, so to speak.
And that's why the juror got booted off, but she didn't leave without her eggs.
So good for her.
But apparently the defense camp wanted to bring her in also on this motion.
And I believe the judge said, no, egg lady can't come in, which again, why the hell not?
I mean, she was a victim of Becky Hill, so to speak.
Why wouldn't you want to hear from her?
Because the allegation was that this was a pro-defense juror and that Becky Hill could tell.
And the court clerk spends a lot of time with the jurors.
So it's possible Becky Hill knew what she was talking about.
So this was a pro-defense, pro-Alec Murdoch juror.
And suddenly she gets booted because Becky Hill, who again is accused of telling the jury, don't believe him.
Don't believe him when you watch him and was writing a book about the case and had a financial interest, reportedly said to somebody, my book will do better if they come up with a guilty verdict that Becky Hill saw this juror and went to the judge and said, oh, I think she was talking about the case outside of the courthouse.
I saw a Facebook post or something like that.
And she's accused of falsifying the Facebook post, Becky Hill.
So, I mean, why wouldn't Mark, a judge allow, I realize I don't want to turn into a circus, but if Becky Hill is a serial liar, why would that not be relevant given that the whole juror thing is that he said she said at this point?
Well, you know, there's a couple of kind of things, I suppose, that you can attribute this to.
Number one, and this goes to what you had just said, it's not like he's going free if they find out that, in fact, the jury was tampered with.
He's got a federal sentence there that he's going to serve that's basically for the rest of his natural life.
Against that backdrop, you would think that would give them some cushion to do the right thing.
But it sure seems like that you get a different form of justice because this was a lawyer and it was the justice system and it goes to the heart of the integrity of the justice system and you don't want to show that it's been corrupted to its core because that is to some degree when you recite what you just did Megan,
how do you come away with the from this with anything but just disgust that here you've got an entire case and mind you I talked to Jim Griffin and Dick Harputli on the night before they put Murda on the on the stand and they were you know they were betwixt and between as to whether or not they were going to do it.
I guarantee you if they knew that they had a court clerk who was throwing the the this into the mix they never in a million years would have put him on him.
It's the hardest decision you can make to have somebody then kind of going even a step farther, not just tainting the jury, but then telling or basically trying to reconstruct the jury by fabricating a post and not allowing that in when you've got the safety net of he's not going free, just do the right thing.
So I don't know.
Is it true he's not going free?
I thought he got 27 years on this other crime, the financial crimes.
I mean, he's what, he's like 50, young 50s.
So I don't know.
He's not going.
He's not going anywhere.
Okay.
Either way, the appearance, like I realize the state did a great job in prosecuting this case, John.
That was obvious to those of us watching.
And some of us had some nitpicks on how they, you know, did this or did that, but they got a conviction and he was sentenced to jail for life.
Still, the appearance of justice, you know, like people need to have faith in the system.
And if you have a court clerk who's doing all those things wrong, yes, she'll face discipline on her own.
But if you're actually telling a juror, you know, don't believe him, how, of course, the juror is going to come out and say, like, I don't know if that affected my verdict.
You know, I was smart and they don't want to say, yeah, I listened to the court clerk.
I think it's really unfair to make the defense, like if it's egregious enough interference, shouldn't that be enough?
Exactly.
It should be any interference, any intentional act that shows any sort of bias on the part of the court clerk should actually be enough.
Because, I mean, look, these jurors are human.
We don't know what gets into their head.
We don't know exactly how the process was once they determined or subliminally or otherwise that this clerk was basically chastising them to make sure that they didn't vote for a not guilty verdict.
But you know what these the judges in that courthouse are thinking.
This is the slipperiest slope around.
If it is determined that Becky Hill actually tampered with this jury, you think this was her only child?
You're going to have defense attorneys running, running to that courthouse to maybe make similar claims with cases of theirs where their clients got put away for a very long time.
I mean, she's been there for a minute.
So how many times is this the only jury that she tampered with?
Because this is the only time she wanted to write a book.
I mean, who the heck knows?
So it's this is why I think the judges in that courthouse are like, oh, hell no.
But I know that's not fair.
That's got to take it.
It's not just Alec Murdoch that we're saving here.
It's the justice system, as you pointed out, past, present, and future in that courthouse and maybe other courts.
It's not over.
The trial, not the trial, but the hearing on whether he should get a new trial is set for January 29th.
It's supposed to go for three days.
As Mark points out, we're going to have televised proceedings.
We're not going to be allowed to see the jurors' faces and they're going to have to go by numbers instead of names.
But I'm glad the press will have access to this and we'll see, you know, like she's issued some preliminary rulings.
We'll see whether all of that holds the standard by which she's going to judge this, what she will and will not let in.
Maybe there'll be some door opening where she wasn't allowed.
Alec Murdoch New Trial Date 00:04:37
She wasn't going to allow all the Becky plagiarized her book.
Becky worked with her son just to tap or wiretap somebody in the federal courthouse or state courthouse and they'll make a mistake and it'll come in.
Okay, we got to move on to Nicholas Rossi.
This may be one of my favorite stories of the past year.
I was listening to a dateline.
I love the dateline podcasts, the crime podcast, and they made reference to this podcast.
They had a woman on to talk about the case who had done a podcast herself, a BBC journalist.
And her podcast was I Am Not Nicholas.
And it was nine episodes long.
And it was about this guy who, for these purposes, I'll just call Nicholas Rossi, though that's not really his name.
He's got a different name.
He's got a lot of different names.
I don't know where to begin on the number of names he's got.
It's Nicholas Olaverdian, but then he changed it to Nicholas Rossi, but now he's going by Arthur Knight.
And he claims he's not either one of those other people and never has been.
So this guy grows up in like the foster care system and goes from house to house and winds up sort of making something of his life, but had problems as a kid.
And his, I think it's his now ex-stepfather speaks out about him and says he's evil.
Anyway, he gets into like local politics and he starts getting on the stump and people are like, oh, wow, this kid's got a real future.
He could be like a spokesperson for kids who have been unhoused and so on.
Well, he went a different way.
One thing led to another.
He got in trouble after trouble, like minor things, and it sort of escalates into alleged sexual assaults.
The name changing starts.
Yada, yada, yada.
You got to listen to the whole podcast.
In 2000, I think it was, is it 2000?
Was that too long ago?
2020, sorry.
2020, he faked his own death.
He came out with an article in 2019 saying he had stage four Nons Hodgkin's lymphoma.
He told his friends he was dying.
An obituary appeared online for him in early 2020 saying he had, in fact, died and his ashes had been scattered at sea.
All those people back at like the, in the local politics and the state house, they were all like giving tributes.
It's so sad.
He was such a gunner.
He had a great career ahead of him in politics.
Can't believe he's dead.
And in this podcast with this woman, I am not Nicholas, they have there's an interview with a priest that allegedly spoke to his like widow or his whatever, who's like, he died.
I need you to give this beautiful tribute to him.
And he was about to do it when the feds contacted him and said, we don't think he's dead.
The priest was like, I'm out.
Okay, this is just by way of background.
So then he, it turns out he moved.
These are the allegations.
He denies this.
It turns out he moved to Scotland.
He changed his appearance somewhat.
He starts using an oxygen mask to mask his identity.
He's in a wheelchair and Dateline catches up with him.
Andrea Canning got an interview with him.
He's now going by Arthur Knight.
Arthur Knight, he says he's Irish, but he's living in Scotland.
He's trying to speak in an English accent with an Irish lilt.
It's amazing.
And she's like, Are you Nicholas Rossi?
You're Nicholas Rossi, aren't you?
And he's pretending, I believe, and these are the allegations that he's not, that he's this British guy who's like Sir Arthur Knight and in a wheelchair and can't and has oxygen and can't move.
And there's a clip of him with Andrew Canning that you can't make up.
Watch this.
We were once a normal family, but thanks to the media, our lives have been interrupted.
And we'd like privacy.
And I would like to go back to being a normal husband.
But I can't because I can't breathe.
I can't walk.
People say that's right.
Let me try to stand up.
Let me try to stand up.
Exactly.
Please.
Exactly.
What do you say to someone who believes that you are Nicholas Oliverian?
I am not Andrea.
I am not Nicholas Ali Verdi.
And I do not know how to make this clear.
What do you say to people who say these are crocodile tears?
He's putting on a show.
Nicholas Oliverian Identity Challenge 00:10:48
This is all an act.
Oh, Ika.
Andrea, that's a right way.
That's a right lab.
Wow.
I love this story so much.
Okay, I'm about to talk.
I'm about to toss it to you guys, but just to put the pin on the end of it, turns out a court in Scotland said, you are Nicholas Rossi or Nicholas Oliverdian.
You're going back home to Utah to face sexual assault and rape charges that have been made against you, which appear to have been the reason for the whole identity shift and him fleeing the country in the first place.
So he gets sent back this month.
He just got back.
He's in Utah and he appeared in court on Tuesday in a scene.
You just, you're never going to see this again in your life.
Here it is.
Here's a bet in court.
My name is Arthur Mike Brain.
My date of birth is 22nd of the 11th, 1986.
Tamar Bosque is for the state.
This individual has been extradited and he has not admitted his name or birth date accurately.
And so I don't think we're going to be successful on that today either.
Objection, my lady.
That is complete, fair.
And I would ask your ladyship that the prosecution to calls for.
My lady.
Jonna, you tell me what challenges it poses when you're going after a guy who won't even admit he is the defendant who allegedly committed the crime.
You know who's going to have the biggest challenge is his lawyer.
I mean, holy cat, like either this guy is unbelievably insane, which may or may not be a defense to what he's accused of doing.
Or when you have a client or defendant who won't even, who's got 18 different personas and you don't know which one you're representing, it is a challenge.
And the sad part, many sad parts, but he's accused of some heinous crimes that he might have had a defense to had he not created this concoction that he that he was dead.
Like he could have maybe legitimately defended himself, but now he's so far out there.
I don't know if he's even competent to stand trial.
This is absolutely nuts.
I feel sorry for his attorney more than I feel sorry for the prosecutor in this case.
I love this story.
I hate the crimes of which he's accused, but I just love how farcical the whole thing is.
Mark, he is, he won't admit that it's him.
And even in this documentary or this podcast by this BBC journalist, I am not Nicholas, she writes about how she went to his house.
He was in that interview with Andre Canning is sitting next to his wife.
He found somebody to marry him.
And that's one of the most shocking things.
And this guy, Nicholas, and his wife invite the BBC journalist over to their house in Scotland.
And the real Nicholas Rossi or Aloverdian has tattoos all up and down the one arm.
So she goes in there.
She knows that she's looking at his arm and it's bare as a baby's bottom.
And she's like, can I see the arm?
And he's like, sure.
So he shows her the arm.
Nothing, nothing.
She's like, geez, I guess it's not him because he's, you know, the real guy doesn't have a British accent, even a crappy one, and isn't with the oxygen tank and all this.
And she left being like, lo and behold, you know, I guess it's not him.
I don't know how he did it.
It looks like he had tattoo removal.
So he's really going to contest identity.
And maybe, maybe, maybe plan B, Mark is what John just said, which is I'm too to even sit here for this trial.
The, you know, as a undercover Armenian without the IAN on the end, I'm fascinated by the fact that his last name, or at least who they claim he is, is Alo Verdian, which is an Armenian name.
And he has-I think that's his real last name.
And that's his brother.
Which supposedly is his real last name.
He doesn't seem to, if you could take a look at somebody, although it's tough to tell behind the scale.
He's either, I'm with Johnna, he's either clinically insane or one of the worst Saturday Night Live skits I've ever seen in my life.
He's not.
I disagree.
He's not insane.
He's just a criminal.
That's my opinion.
I believe he committed these crimes and now he's just doing whatever he can to evade the law.
So as a legal matter, what do you do?
If you're the judge, you know, they already found in Scotland that he is Nicholas Aloverdian slash Rossi, that he is not Sir Arthur Knight or whatever he's calling himself.
Isn't that ballgame, John?
I mean, what do you do if you're the judge when he just refuses to acknowledge it, but you all know what the truth is?
The judge actually has the easy job.
And again, I hate to sound selfish.
Imagine representing him when you can't say to a judge, nope, my client really is who you think he is, but because you're not allowed to say that.
You have to address your client as whatever, you know, he could Mary had a little lamb if that's who he says he is.
That's how you have to address your client.
So it's going to be very, very tough for a person to represent him competently when he is so nuts that you don't even know who he is exactly, even though you are charged with the duty of keeping him.
But not clinically nuts.
Not clinically, not legally nuts.
I don't think he's nuts at all.
He's cunning.
He's a terrible actor, but he's cunning and he's putting on a show to try to avoid responsibility here.
I don't know.
So Mark, literally, what do they do?
They have a trial just saying, okay, if you're the prosecutor, you say he's claiming he's not.
A judge has already found he is.
I'm going to proceed in this case in front of you.
And I ask you to do the same as though I have the right man.
I'll prove that to you with the Scottish court's finding.
But whether he wants to engage in this or not, here we go.
A man named Nicholas Rossi, who I'm telling you is sitting right there, raped this girl and sexually assaulted another.
Let's go.
Well, I don't think that the Scottish finding is going to be binding here.
They'll probably have to redo the entire process.
If he's not admitting to who he is and the identity, there's a couple of different ways that the defense will probably play this.
Number one is they may, at least initially, depending on what evidence is accessible to the lawyer, they could either challenge competency to begin with, or they could still go down the road of the identity.
I mean, there is a, you know, at some point, they may have to do a DNA.
They may have to do something.
They did a DNA in Scotland.
Why shouldn't that be?
I don't know that it's necessarily a foreign kind of a foreign determination of a foreign court is not necessarily going to be binding here in the U.S.
I don't even know.
I mean, I assume somebody gave them some hair from a hairbrush of the actual Nicholas Rossi.
You know, they're, I mean, there's DNA in the rape test, John.
That's how they found him.
That one of the victims did a rape kit.
And while it didn't have a hit at the time, you know, they went back and tested it again and it came up.
So he was in the system and they matched it to Nicholas Rossi.
So or Aloever.
Right.
If they have Alo Verdean's DNA, which they probably already do, and then they test it against the person they have there in custody and they test it against the sample, then the lawyer's going to take a look at that.
And then, as long as they're all consistent, then the lawyer is going to move to the competency argument because there's not going to be a whole lot of play if the same DNA hits that are in the sample that they now have also match the person who's sitting next to you in a courtroom or at least on the video and is claiming not to be the person.
If it's one in the same, then you move to the mental defense.
He is accused.
He's already a convicted sex offender.
He's been accused of raping a woman in Utah, in Orem, which is in Utah County in 2008, another woman in South Lake County later the same year.
He's going to face separate trials for each allegation.
His stepson, or stepfather, estranged, is named David Rossi Jana.
And he told the press: by the way, this stepfather is an Engelbert Humperdink impersonator.
You cannot make this shit up.
It makes sense.
Who can name me an Engelbert Humperdink song?
Anyone?
No.
I was pretty sure.
I did not know.
No.
What?
I didn't Google this, but I am pretty sure it's sing you a song after the loving.
Right.
I think somebody will Google and tell me.
I think so.
He says that this guy is quote the devil spawn, that he was an evil child who punched his mother and his grandmother, and that, quote, he will do anything to hide from the law.
The wheelchair, the mask, it's crap.
There's nothing wrong with him.
Everything about him is Nikki.
That's what he used to call his stepson.
My first impression of Nikki when he became my stepson was he had mental problems.
He got worse with every day.
He would urinate in his brother's bed just to get his brother in trouble, jump out of windows, run away in his underwear.
On and on it goes.
This is a seriously messed up guy, and I think he belongs behind bars.
So are we predicting the court will get to the right identity and conclusion in this case?
Yeah, I don't think that there's any question the court's going to get to identity if they haven't already, in terms of that all of the elements that they need are there.
Then, but what the stepfather is actually helping the defense to some degree, if there's real-time anecdotes about how what a problem child or what a mentally challenged person he was, it would be almost incumbent upon the defense to plumb that.
They have to.
Natalia Grace Birth Certificate Age 00:11:11
Natalia Grace.
All right.
My hairstylist and friend Sarah told me I needed to watch this documentary.
So I did this past year.
I don't know if you guys have seen it.
It's called The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.
I watched season one last year, but season two just came out in the first week of January, all right, last week.
So the curious case of Natalia Grace.
It's about this dwarf, alleged dwarf.
I mean, no, she is a dwarf.
She's actually, she's an actual dwarf.
She's one alleged.
She is one.
No, she's an actual dwarf, alleged child at the time of the adoption.
And that was in dispute, just how old she was.
So she was from Ukraine and she got adopted by Michael and Christine Barnett.
Here is Michael Barnett, who is reason enough to watch this series.
This is the adoptive father, who is one of the most colorful characters I've ever beheld in a television series.
Listen to him talking about what happened after they adopted what they thought was a six-year-old Ukrainian girl.
So we get to the hotel that night and Christine's going to give our brand new daughter a bath.
And I hear a shout from the bathroom.
This was a, I'm not playing around.
Come here right now, Michael.
Shout.
I get up.
I go fly into the bathroom.
And the color's almost gone from her face.
It's almost like she's seeing a ghost.
She's truly frightened and she just doesn't know what she's seeing and what's going on.
She says, Michael, Michael, look.
Look down.
And Natalia had full pubic hair.
And I don't know what to think.
Google's telling us, well, earliest possible time, lowest common denominator, eight.
So we just go, okay, look, our mission, we were going to show love and compassion to somebody that never had it before.
That doesn't make a difference.
There was a day.
I came home from work.
Christine's got a pair of Natalia's underwear.
Christine asked Natalia to tell me what's going on.
I remember her physicalness at the time.
Her hands were just out in front of her like this.
And she said, well, I have a period and I've been hiding it.
And I just don't know what's going on right now.
Okay.
So they live with this person, child, right?
They're not sure now what exactly is the age of this person that they've adopted.
And they start to see what they say is very disturbing behavior.
They think she's six, but now they have real questions about whether she's six.
And the father, the adoptive father, Michael, tells, among other stories, this story about when they all went to, I think it was a Christmas tree farm or a farm all together, what happened with their newly adopted, quote, little girl.
I turn and look.
Natalia and Christine are in a physical altercation.
It looks like Natalia's trying to pull Christine.
Now, you might think, hey, she's a little person.
How strong can she be?
She uses her arms a lot, push herself up on things.
She goes up the stairs using her arms.
She's got guns that Schwartznader would be impressed with.
She's very strong.
My wife is frail.
She's got a degenerative disease called lupus.
She's weak.
I start to go back.
Christine says, no, go.
Okay.
She wants my son to have his birthday.
We go.
And me and the boys double time it.
We get a little bit farther down.
And we hear the sirens.
The second I heard the sirens, I thought Christine was dead.
Okay, you got to watch the whole series in order to fully appreciate all that the family says happened.
They come to believe that the person they've adopted is not six, but is 21 years old.
That she was not born in 2003 or 2004.
She was born in 1989.
And that this whole thing has been a ruse, potentially by this Ukrainian mother, potentially by Natalia Grace.
I don't know who was in on it, the alleged scheme.
But they are like, not only is she not telling the truth, but she's a scammer and she's dangerous.
She tried to kill my wife.
So they get rid of her.
They find an apartment and they move this, quote, daughter, they're now saying is an adult into the apartment, like unsupervised, which if she's really 21 is not a problem.
But if she's six or nine, whatever, it is.
Yada yada.
A court has a hearing because they get brought in on child neglect charges under the auspices of you put a nine-year-old in an apartment by yourself.
You're bad adoptive parents.
And they are persuasive enough that the judge says, you know what?
I accept that she was born in 1989.
They revise the birth certificate and the judge throws out the charges against them.
Okay.
Now season two comes out.
Natalia Grace says she really was six.
I haven't done the math.
It's like six to eight when they adopted her, that they were lying.
She wasn't born in 1989.
They put a little girl, a nine-year-old, in a damned apartment by herself and not to worry because she has found a new set of adoptive parents to like help her out, even though now she's definitely older.
If she was born, if she was actually born in 2004, she's an adult now, legally.
But here she is saying we took a DNA test and the DNA test proves today in 2023, I guess when this was filmed, I am 22 years old.
So I was a little girl when they adopted me in SOP 5.
Watch this.
They knew it.
They still did what they did.
This one little piece of paper throws every single lie that the Barnetts has said right into the trash with a match.
This is so big because literally this has been 13 years, 13 years of just two people lying their butts off.
So she's found redemption with a new adoptive family that's going to, she says, take care of her and shepherd her through the civil lawsuits that she says she's going to unleash against the Barnetts, Michael and Christine.
So before I get to the stunning epilogue of this thing, does she have a civil lawsuit against that first family?
And can she revive or seek to revive these old criminal charges that were dismissed for child neglect that were dismissed based on the court's belief that she was in fact born in 1989, not in 2003 or whenever.
This is so, you can't make it up.
Mark, I'll give that one to you, Start.
Thanks a lot.
Talk about a law review question.
As far as reviving criminal charges, I don't know how they would do that or that would be the prosecutorial decision.
I can't imagine that they could do that when they've got a court that has blessed it, unless there's some other auxiliary charge that a prosecutor would want to bring if the prosecutor believed that the parents had done this willfully or maliciously.
I mean, that's.
Well, that's it, right?
Like, let's say they can bring it somehow.
The defense is going to be, we believed she was a grown up.
It's exactly right.
And we believed it so much that we went through the court system and the court believed this as well.
So, Jonna, I mean, criminally and honestly, civilly too, like I guess, do they need to prove that these were just terrible people who knew that it was a six-year-old or six to eight and couldn't deal with her?
So, they made up this lie, like that the whole the pubicare, the period, like those were all lies, or this is just like, how are they going to get past what seems like a legitimate belief by the parents that this kid was older than she was saying?
So, I have questions.
And the first one is, how is it possible that a surrogate court judge changed a person's birth certificate without some sort of serious expert medical testimony?
Numero uno.
Number two, I mean, I suppose because if they didn't go through that process, which I didn't even know you could do, I'll be honest with you guys, doing this a long time.
Didn't know you could go to a certain court judge and say, see this kid here, not a kid.
She's 22.
Change the birth certificate.
Like, I didn't know you did that.
They did go through a process for sure.
They did.
And if that wasn't part of the equation, then I think there is criminal liability for sure, because then they're just taking a kid that if you just think your six-year-old is really 22, now you've got the problem.
And I think they could have been criminally prosecuted.
But because the intervention of the surrogate court actually legitimizing their crime, if you think about it, then you can't go after that judge.
So I think that that's going to lay dead.
That protects them.
Yeah, I think that does.
Absolutely.
It immunizes them to the degree that they've gone to a court, the court made a decision.
I don't know how you get around that unless you say that there was fraud in the inducement there of some kind.
Like they defrauded the first court with whatever documents or testimony they submitted.
And I mean, good luck proving all of that.
But what could she possibly, like if she came into your office and said, I want to sue them, okay, the criminal law is not going to go after them, but I want to sue them for all the pain and suffering they've put me through.
Poor little me, I didn't do any of those terrible things.
Antoine Manns Adoption Fraud Suit 00:06:38
So not only did they kick me out and put me alone, but now they've disparaged me in this movie and said I did all these terrible things and I'm actually a very sweet person.
I'm just a kid.
What's the lawsuit?
Oh, she might have some cause of action, but the real question is going to be how much do they have?
Because if they're not filthy rich and she's not going to get a lot of money, maybe is she going to have a lawsuit against, you know, Netflix or I don't know who put out this movie for her.
She cooperated with it.
Well, then, you know, if there's no deep pocket, so to speak, it might be a pure victory.
They could be held liable, but kind of like OJ never paid dime.
So what's the point?
It makes it very complicated.
Well, here's, yeah, I'm more interested in what the epilogue is here.
Oh, here's the epilogue.
I know.
So she found the adoptive family to take care of her.
Yay, her life is going to be better.
She revealed during episode four of the curious case of Natalia Grace, Natalia Speaks.
This is the part two.
Now they're saying, Natalia, who's 22, they're saying, she reveals that she is going through the process of becoming legally adopted by Cynthia and Antoine Manns, the couple who took her in, quoting here from a Yahoo article, after the Barnetts abandoned her in Indiana.
She explained that this will protect her when she sues Michael and Christine.
I don't totally know how, but what she said through her lawyer, or what she said, her lawyer told her was that the adoption will quote, quote, kind of pave the way for anything legally you want to do in the future.
I don't get it, but she says with this adoption, I'll be legally a part of the family.
So I'll be protected when I do the civil suits against the Barnetts.
You know, abuse, neglect, a whole bunch of other stuff that should not have happened.
So that's what she's planning on doing.
And this was dated January 3rd.
Well, January 15th, there's an update.
The update is Antoine Manns, her soon-to-be adoptive father.
And apparently the docuseries, here's a spoiler alert, spoiler alert.
Docu series concludes with indeed Natalia getting legally adopted by the Antoine Manns and his wife Cynthia.
Antoine Manns is now declaring that he and Cynthia are done with Natalia Grace.
Six months later, listen to this phone conversation he had with producers.
I feel like she's been hitting his house.
If she would ain't talked, we have held her hostage.
Made up with my wordy enemy.
That's how you're stabbing her family in the back.
Over at home, Queen By.
She's done other things too.
But this was a new loan.
That's how it does not have emotions when it comes to put ourselves up.
We're done.
We're done with it.
OMG.
That's the new adoptive family.
So I have to credit the producers on just an unbelievable.
This is, you have to watch the whole thing.
I want to have them on the show to discuss this, but how now is she ever going to sue the first family for all these terrible things and saying the awful things about her when the new family, Johnna, feels exactly the same way from the sound of it and also feels like they've been victimized and she is the abuser.
Yeah, I think Natalya might need a psyche bow.
Perhaps we should start there before anybody decides to file a civil suit on her.
This is the theme of our legal cases so far.
This is the theme of our cases.
Yes.
So bizarre.
I was going to say and also both cases with like a question of identity and like who we're really dealing with here, right?
Is Nicholas Rossi actually Arthur Knight?
Is Natalia Grace a child or an adult?
I mean, these are some tricky issues, but I don't, does the new family's testimonial help the old family in her planned civil suit at all, Mark?
Look, forget the producers.
What you want is whoever the lawyer is that claims they're going to take this lawsuit.
That's who I want to talk to because I want to understand what they think their end game is and why they have this as part of their practice.
What do you mean?
I can make the case for her.
I was six to eight when I was adopted by this family, which in the adoption would have had to promise there's an implicit covenant to take good care of me until the age of majority, or at least for the time being.
And the law requires it of them.
And instead, when I was, all right, I'll get the exact timing here.
They adopted her in 2010.
So she was, they said 21, but she must have been eight, I think, six or eight.
And within a couple of years, they abandoned her alone in her own apartment.
Any measure.
She was a child if her birth date is correct, and that would be illegal.
So they abandoned me, even though I was not a nice child under their version.
You can't just abandon me, that's.
There are parents everywhere who have children who, who they know, children who they know are sociopaths, who are actual socio, who are torturing the family cat.
It's sick.
I've interviewed these parents that you can't just dump them in an apartment and wash your hands of them.
That's all.
All of that is against the backdrop that we believe that the supposed Dna test that was taken shows the true age.
I'm not so sure that i'm buying anything that's being sold here, given that we've now got two different families who come back and uh, apparently have lived and experienced this.
So i'm a little.
I'm a little cynical.
That's a good point.
Maybe we're putting too much stock in what the producers tell us is a legit Dna test.
Uh, because you know they're making tv.
One never knows.
But if she actually was a child, I don't know.
Diminished Capacity Murder Defense 00:09:01
I think she would probably have to prove that they had, they didn't have a good faith belief.
She wasn't anyway.
The whole thing is the most bizarre.
Her bad behavior alleged is well documented in season one too.
It went well beyond the family when they put her in that apartment.
Some of the things that she was allegedly doing to the neighbors to like men, it's dark, it's dark stuff and it does not sound like the behavior of someone who's in the single digits.
Okay anyway, to be continued, and I recommend to everybody to watch the series, you won't be sorry.
So Gypsy Rose Blanchard is now an adult, but she was one of those children born to a mother who has what we used to call Munchhausen's by proxy, where she's inventing illnesses that don't exist in the child for attention or for whatever sick reason.
And she put Gypsy Rose in a wheelchair and she said Gypsy Rose had leukemia.
She forced her to use an oxygen tank even though she didn't need any of that.
She said Gypsy Rose had muscular dystrophy.
It's amazing that the hospital systems did not catch this.
But Gypsy Rose eventually found a boyfriend on a Christian dating website and his name I forgive me on the pronunciation, but I think it's Nick Go To John and Nick Godejohn, her boyfriend.
Quote, unquote.
It's not like I don't think they really knew each other that well.
She convinced him to murder her mom, so they worked together on it.
He went into their house one night while the Mother D was sleeping and he stabbed her 14 times to death.
So that's first-degree murder.
Gypsy Rose, it was very obvious these two did it.
Gypsy Rose negotiated a plea where she copped to the crime.
They gave her 10 years in prison.
She got.
She just got out this month after serving seven.
But Nick Go To John was sent to prison for the rest of his life without the possibility of parole.
He was offered a deal.
I don't know what it was.
It was better than what he got.
And he turned it down, preferring to take his chances with a jury.
Well, that did not work out.
Now, Gypsy Rose is free.
She served her time.
She's going on the media tour.
Here's a little bit of her on the view in SOT 3.
The anniversary of the crime is actually the hardest day of the year.
Do you have, are you going through psychotherapy?
Yes, I am.
I am.
And so, what I do on the anniversary is I play one of her favorite songs and I allow myself that time to cry.
And I mean, ball cry because I feel like I can't do it in front of other people because I'm afraid of being judged for it because they're probably going to make some kind of snarky comment like, well, you killed her.
But I'm like, you know, she was my mom and I miss her, even though everything that she did to me, she was still my mother.
I had spent 24 years of my life with her.
Okay.
So there she is out of prison.
But the problem in this case is that the co-defendant is still in prison and seeking a new trial.
And what he's saying is that he had ineffective assistance of counsel because his lawyer did not find a qualified neuropsychologist specializing in autism spectrum disorder to support the diminished capacity defense of Godajohn, of Nick Godijohn, of whom we have some video.
You can see it here.
Basically, it was an angel and a devil.
I actually had two different ones speaking to me.
They both said one thing and left the decision up to me.
This bitch is dead.
That's all it said.
This bitch is dead.
Basically, once I heard that, for some darn reason, I don't know why it inflamed the emotion of enrage, but it did.
It inflamed emotion and rage.
So I ended up whispering to Gypsy, get in the bathroom, because I just want to get this over with.
I mean, you can see this guy's not, you know, not firing on all cylinders necessarily.
So anyway, he's claiming he should have had a lawyer argue that and should have put on a qualified expert to tell the jury, this guy's not of adequate mental capacity to be even sitting here and he belongs in a mental facility, not jail for the rest of his life without parole.
Mark, could he make the case?
They're making the case now basically of ineffective assistance of counsel.
And it's tough.
It's a tough claim, but they may get some traction.
I mean, as you just indicated, it's obvious that there is some, you know, this is a jurisdiction that still has diminished capacity here in California.
We eliminated it.
And so what diminished capacity is, is you're basically talking about the ability to form a mensrea.
And, you know, you feel for this guy because he turned out an offer as you had indicated that was better than what ended up happening to him, which is often the case.
You get the trial penalty if you go and lose.
I suppose that somebody at some point may decide that this guy probably should have had the benefit of some other expert at his disposal.
But this is a story often told, unfortunately.
I don't know, John.
I mean, like, does it affect a court to see?
Obviously, this, I don't know whether he's just, I don't know what's wrong with him.
He doesn't sound totally right.
But the autism thing, everybody knows somebody with autism or has a kid with autism.
It doesn't make you murder.
It doesn't make you easily manipulable into murder.
So I'm not sure.
Like, how does the court factor that in in deciding whether this expert not testifying rendered counsel ineffective?
Yeah.
And I look at it this way.
Not finding an expert to say that is different from not looking for an expert to say that.
So let's suppose his defense counsel did look for an expert to say that and he interviewed 10 and 10 said, I can't say that.
Now what do you do?
Right.
So now maybe you have to change your defense strategy.
Maybe you talk to your client and say, you know, if you're competent enough to understand what I'm saying, you need to take a deal.
And when the client says no deal, how are you incompetent?
Now, if you don't bother looking and you have a client who clearly might have some mental infirmity and you don't look, okay, perhaps there is some there there in the incompetence argument.
But dang, I would think that this person probably had to take the stand in his trial to explain himself.
I mean, I'm thinking, and if he did, jurors would have, you know, a lot to chew on listening to him testify if he sounds much like he did in that clip.
But maybe he didn't take the stand.
I mean, it's quite possible he didn't.
I don't know.
But yeah, I think the other thing that really makes you think is, okay, so the person who planned and plotted and hired me walks in seven years and I'm doing life.
You know, on the one hand, it makes sense because you're a hitman and you should do life.
You weren't the one who was abused for your entire life.
And on the other hand, there is something that's a little untoward about it when he was hired by somebody and she got so little time.
You know, it's an interesting point, Jonah makes about the person who gets hired versus the person who's actually the subject of abuse, because I've seen prosecutors take completely different positions on that.
Sometimes they'll try to turn the person who actually does the actual killing against who hired them with the justification that that's the person who's actually more culpable as opposed to kind of what happened here, which is the person who was evicted.
Well, obviously the only reason they didn't do that, Mark, is because Gypsy Rose was abused by this woman for all this time.
So they're not looking at her the way they'd look at a regular daughter who took a hit out on her mom.
But shouldn't that abuse factor in for him as well?
Well, I think, yes.
And I'll tell you, one of the, I guess I step back and take more of a macro look.
One of the things when you're talking, whether it's diminished capacity, which is now outlawed in California, or it's one of these mens raya defenses, generally what you're looking for in a criminal case is some vehicle, whether it's diminished capacity, whether it's imperfect self-defense.
Gypsy Rose Relationship Developed 00:04:02
You're looking for something to give a jury the ability to say, we understand, we don't approve of this, but we get why you did it, that you're trying to just give them a vehicle to at least hear you out, hear your client out, have some empathy for your client and give them and reduce the idea of malice, which is required for murder.
And that's what's happening here.
You're trying to find a vehicle now by using stepping back and saying it was ineffective assistance to counsel, but trying to find a vehicle to get to the result, which is that he shouldn't be in for the rest of his life.
So it's like, it's not really, they may not be really finding ineffective assistance in counsel as opposed to an excuse to give this guy another shot at getting out early or getting into a mental facility.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing.
Feels very unfair because now this Gypsy Rose is like a celebrity.
She's everywhere.
And this guy, who really had nothing to do with until she pulled him in and asked him to do this deed, he's gonna be.
He's never gonna see daylight again.
She got married right after she got out of prison.
She, this guy.
His name is Ryan Ryan Anderson.
He watched the 2017 HBO documentary about Gypsy's case Mommy Dead And Dearest and wrote her a letter in 2020.
The relationship developed from there.
This is here.
He is developed from there and they married two years later.
So I guess they got married while she was still in church and um, it's very strange, I mean, i'll just tell you this she apparently, he posted something on Instagram and got some blowback as he married Gypsy and she's a she's a she's, you know convicted murderer.
And um, she posted, don't listen to the haters, we don't owe anyone anything.
And then she writes, besides, they jealous because you are rocking my world every night.
Yeah, I said it, the d is fire the d.
And, by the way yeah, oh god, here she is on camera defending her new husband against some of the online blowback he's getting.
As you know, these two are like celebrities.
Now stop for Ryan.
How are you dealing with the newfound fame and being in the spotlight?
I knew who I married she was like, are you sure?
Are you sure?
And, of course, I was in love with this girl.
Well, you're already clapping back on the social media.
I've seen those.
Uh, I do believe y'all had some spicy things to say to each other.
Well, we're new and I, you know, I mean, we're married.
What's hard for me is watching, you know, the negative comments towards him.
I can handle negative comments towards me because I don't care, but when it's about somebody that I love, I want to clap back and that was my.
You know.
Clap back a little bit, i'm gonna come to his defense.
He's my man.
I think that's what wives do.
Yeah, plus the d is fire.
So you, I knew you were gonna work that in one more time.
I'm sorry, but come on, the poor kid is sitting in jail.
I mean, I realize he committed a murder like the mother doesn't sound like she was a good person.
I'm not saying she deserved to be murdered, but she was slowly murdering Gypsy Rose.
I don't understand why both of these people didn't get a shorter sentence.
Now, you know there's there is something to be said.
Representing the Medundas Brothers, I will tell you there is an evolution, cultural evolution, that has taken place um, in the last uh, decades.
So uh, you know, people understand more today and looking through the prison today than they did in real time.
Well, I don't think I don't.
You know, if you go with the odds, he's not getting out of jail because courts don't like appellate, courts don't like ineffective assistance of counsel, defenses and uh, it doesn't sound like he's raising any new facts that you didn't call the expert.
I don't.
I don't like his odds.
Although I don't, he doesn't seem like he should be a free man to me right now.
Daniel Penny Dulos Case Doubt 00:15:08
Get the Serious XM app for free for three months here.
Over 425 expertly curated channels, including ad-free music for every genre artist, moon and more.
Here are concerts featuring the biggest names in iconic venues and exclusive in-studio performances.
With Serious XM, you'll get more sports in one app than anywhere else, with live play-by-play from Nfl MLB Nba Nhl, SAA and many more.
Get the latest predictions, analysis and fantasy all week long, including sports talk, athlete to athlete and player to fan, from lifestyle, fashion and finance to faith and health.
Hear the biggest names in entertainment, comedy and talk with a list interviews, exclusive specials and around the clock stand-up in every style, plus the latest headlines and in-depth reporting from around the world, including politics from every angle.
All of this and more is available now.
Go to Seriousxm.com slash mk show to subscribe and get three months free.
Offer details apply.
Let's move on to Jennifer Dulos.
Um, I don't know if you guys have been following this case over the years, but this happened in Connecticut yeah, and it's very dark.
Um this.
This guy marries Jennifer Farber Dulos and um.
He allegedly killed her.
He allegedly was having an affair on her.
His name was Photos Dulos, who was cheating on her, and his wife, who's the mother of five.
They had like the perfect life here in Connecticut, this beautiful home, all the nice cars that this gorgeous woman who everybody loved.
The husband had a good job look at these five kids.
And she never reappeared one day.
She dropped the kids off at school, never to be seen or heard from again, while they were in the middle of a contentious divorce and he was living with another woman um, and they definitely believed he did it and he ultimately got charged with it and then he killed himself.
He died by suicide.
Well, his lover is now on trial in Connecticut.
I see it on the local news every night.
His alleged lover, Michelle Traconis, is on trial right now being accused of conspiracy to commit murder, evidence tampering and hindering prosecution.
She's pleaded not guilty.
She says she doesn't know what happened to Jennifer or where her body might be.
This is part of the problem Jonna, here she is that they don't actually have a body, though they were getting ready to charge.
I mean they did charge the husband before he died by suicide with the murder.
So they clearly think they can make this murder case first against him and now against her, even without a body.
So how do you like their odds?
Not very good.
I mean, this is a strange case because they have never proved murder.
Right, we know, we well.
They presumed Jennifer Dulos dead, so we know that she is.
Technically she's no longer alive.
Like they can't say that oh, she's gonna come walking through the courtroom.
She's declared dead but we don't know whether it was murder manslaughter uh self-defense, some sort of accident, and before the prosecution can prove that she conspired to commit a murder, Murder, they first need to prove a murder.
They have to do that without a body and without a main defendant, which was her husband, because he is also dead.
So, this really is going to be a trial within a trial.
And the defense is going to have to make damn sure that the jury realizes she's not on trial for the murder.
She is on trial for conspiring with the person who allegedly committed the murder, who's now dead.
I mean, you got to be, you kind of have to take an exacto knife to the evidence when you're representing her in this case to the jury.
And I do think it's going to be difficult, though, for the prosecution to do that.
And I watched the defense when they were making their pretrial motions.
They're on top of it.
They're on their game.
So it isn't going to be an easy time for the prosecution in this case.
So far, Mark, they've been showing a lot of blood on the husband's car, on her, I think it was on the decedent's car, the alleged decedent, the alleged victim, Jennifer, blood spatter there and around the garage area where he allegedly confronted her.
And their theory is that the girlfriend, Michelle Traconis, who's now on trial, was driving around with him while he was disposing of various evidence connected to his wife so that she knew very well what he had done.
You know, it's an interesting case.
And I, in the interest of full disclosure, I have a fairly good insight into it, having talked with a number of the people who are involved repeatedly.
And I will tell you that I don't understand the process, the prosecution case here.
I know that the theory, as you articulated it, that she's apparently present at various locations.
I don't get it.
I don't understand a lot of the judges overruled their junk science objections, the defense's junk science objections.
But to me, most of what I brought in so far, yeah, does not appear to be peer-reviewed, the type of stuff that you would normally allow in in a criminal case.
I think it's a challenging case for the prosecution.
I don't see how they make this case, Franklin.
Here is Michelle Traconis, one month, less than a month after Jennifer went missing, being interrogated by police.
The date is June 6, 2019.
Watch this.
We think you have information.
Oh, you love John, but I can walk the whole world with you when you want.
I can make you talk like a motor, please.
I can walk.
I can spend the money with you, guys.
I can do whatever you want, but I didn't do what you want.
She's emotional.
She's a beautiful woman.
She's the alleged affair partner.
I mean, the jury's not going to like this woman if they choose to put her on the stand, right?
It's like she's here.
Jennifer's gone.
So what do you do?
Do you is this a case, given the strength that you guys describe with the defense's case, that you take that risk?
I just think you have to wait and see.
I mean, I didn't mean to step on John, but the hardest decision you'll ever make and the last decision you'll ever make in any criminal defense case is whether it puts your client on you.
And you never make that.
At least I don't.
I've never made that decision until I see how the case unfolds.
What do you think, John?
It's got reasonable doubt written all over it.
So she might not have to take the stand.
One of the interesting things from my perspective is, you know, why didn't they offer her like an accessory after the fact?
Maybe she had nothing to do with whatever happened to Jennifer Dulos, except that she was riding shotgun when he was disposing of all the, you know, the bags full of bloody whatever.
That doesn't make her a co-conspirator.
That might make her an accessory after the fact, or it might make her absolutely nothing.
And how do we know that if he was such a bad guy to Jennifer Dulos?
And I think there's ample evidence of that.
How do we know that she wasn't under his thumb too?
How do we know that he didn't threaten her?
And that is something she'd have to come forward and testify about if that were the case.
And that's why she was riding shotgun when he was getting rid of the evidence.
So I agree with Mark.
They're going to have to wait and see just whether or not they're going to have to put her on the stand, depending on what all comes in in the prosecution's convoluted case.
Okay, last one, last but not least, Daniel Penny.
He's the guy, former Marine, if memory serves, that wound up taking the life, though it was inadvertent, of this homeless guy in New York, Daniel Penny.
And Daniel, I always screw this up.
Daniel Penny is the defendant, and Jordan Neely is the man who died.
So Daniel Penny was on the subway.
Jordan Neely was behaving very badly on the subway, was threatening passengers.
This has been a pattern for him.
He had hurt a bunch of people previously on the subway.
And Daniel Penny was ultimately charged with second-degree manslaughter because he got this guy in a chokehold.
Here you see the video with the assistance of some other passengers.
And Neely died.
He died.
And, you know, the left saw political opportunity with this case and tried to blow it into a race thing because the defendant's now white and the decedent's black.
There's absolutely no evidence that had anything to do with race whatsoever, not a comment, not a history, nothing.
But this guy got charged.
So Daniel Penny got charged with second-degree manslaughter and moved and also criminally negligent homicide in connection with Neely's death and moved to dismiss it.
And that motion has officially been denied.
He will go to trial at some point, no earlier than the fall, we're told.
And I wonder whether there's any hope of justice being done here, whether this case ought to see its way in front of a jury, and how you think a New York jury will react to this.
John, I'll ask you as somebody who's in the area.
You know, it's sad to say, but I think judges today have lost their balls.
And I say that because this was an opportunity for this judge to at least maybe even split the baby, Megan, maybe get rid of the manslaughter, the C felony, and leave the negligent homicide, which is just an E felony and give this guy a fighting chance in front of a New York jury because a New York City jury is different than the juries where I am, you know, upstate.
And so I don't know if he's going to get a fair shake at this.
I think there's ample evidence that this was self-defense, but not, you don't even want to have to put that in front of a jury, to be honest with you, because you never know what they're going to do.
The judge had a chance here to make a statement and to be a judge and not worry about getting reelected or worry about inciting a riot or worry about any of those things that judges seem to worry more about these days than anything else.
And that's what ticks me off.
And they didn't do it.
He didn't do it.
So here we are.
I feel for Daniel Penny.
I think he's going to have a lot of witnesses to come forward on his behalf.
It's going to send a big message.
I just don't know if he's going to win.
I hope he does.
I think he did the right thing, but I guess we'll have to wait till the fall to find out.
It's very hard, Mark, because, you know, this is New York City.
They've played the race card in this case, despite zero evidence of racism.
They've described Jordan Neely as just a Michael Jackson impersonator pulling up video that is more than a decade old.
He's been in and out of mental institutions.
He's hurt a lot of people since then.
And he was threatening to hurt them that day that he was placed in the chokehold on the subway, not just by Daniel Penny, but by another man who was a person of color.
But, you know, this is a post-George Floyd era where he was in a chokehold or something that looked like one.
He was definitely being subdued by this guy and he died.
So you've got, you got that dynamic at play, but you also have a New York jury that rides a subway every day where crime seems like it's everywhere.
People are afraid.
They see lunatics like this and they're afraid themselves, which the defense will definitely be playing up.
So how do you see it playing out?
Well, I've never understood the charging decision here.
I really have not.
I mean, this is to, if you look at the video or the body cam, at least what has been revealed.
And arguably the prosecutors have more than what has been out in the media.
This is a classic defense of others.
This is somebody, the accused is coming to the aid of somebody who other people have already publicly stated they were afraid of, they were in fear of.
You have the ability to restrain.
It did not appear for a second, at least on the video that I saw, that this was malicious in a sense or anything else.
This was somebody who was trying to subdue someone because they thought they were going to do harm.
I don't understand the message that you send.
Remember, prosecutors have a lot more discretion, if you will, than judges will exercise.
I agree with Jonna.
It's not like when I first started practicing where judges would use preliminary hearings or probable cause proceedings in order to kind of weed out bad cases.
The prosecutor is the one who makes the decision here whether to bring the case.
What's the message you're sending here?
That you should just sit there on a subway while somebody is going off and could threaten others who may not be as capable as you.
Remember, the accused is somebody who apparently served his country and admirably so.
And if you've watched any of the interviews with this young man, he certainly was thoughtful and considerate and remorseful.
I just don't get the charging decision in the least here.
Yeah, but we're in a day and age now.
You know, there's a story every day out on the West Coast and here in New York where they're now having to lock up the underwear in the Walgreens, the deodorant in the Walgreens, because thieves are coming in, taking all this stuff off the shelves, and they're under orders in the CVSs and the right aids and the Walgreens not to touch them.
A crime's being committed.
No problem.
Step back, let the crime happen.
Don't get involved.
You'll call police after the fact.
And if somebody happens to get hurt or you lose inventory and millions of dollars, that's the way it goes.
Don't interfere.
And I do think that that mentality has spilled over, Johnna.
That's why he got charged, because we don't applaud good Samaritans anymore.
I'm sorry that the man died, but it was clearly unintentional and as a result of his own maliciousness on board that subway.
And I don't think I shared this with you.
We talked about this case a while back, Megan, but three weeks before this Daniel Penny incident, three weeks, I was on a train from Grand Central coming back up to where I live.
And there was a man who could have been Jordan Neely on my train while we're waiting there for 20 minutes before the train takes off.
I don't know if I have ever been more scared.
And I'm not a scaredy cat, but I sat there plotting and planning how I was going to save myself when this person approached me making the same kind of demands.
Like, you better give me something.
You better give me something to eat.
I don't care if I die.
And it was scary.
So I feel for the people who were on that subway who Daniel Penny could have saved by doing what he did.
It's not a nice feeling, especially in this climate.
Jordan Neely Subway Safety Fear 00:06:01
Like you said, we're in a different age now.
And I can't bring my gun to New York City.
I can only carry it anywhere else in the state, but not New York City.
So I was scared.
I bet you those people were too.
It's a sad state.
It's a very sad state.
It's true.
And it's not like, you know, in a subway, you can pepper spray the guy.
Or by the way, they say, forget pepper spray, do bear spray.
They say bear spray is the thing to do.
But anyway, you can't do that in a subway.
You will get charged for hurting innocent people if you unleash something like that.
So what are you supposed to do?
I mean, he tried to use his arm, you know, to get the guy subdued and he kept fighting and he had threatened that he was going to hurt the people on board the subway.
And there's no cops anywhere.
God forbid you see a member of law enforcement down there, right?
Because they're underfunded and all the money of the city is going to house the illegals in tense cities and in schools because they won't say no.
Honestly, there's no money left.
So there's no cops when you need them.
There's no garbage collection.
I'm sorry, but New York, it's just, it's been a disaster.
Bill de Blasio, it's your fault.
You were the worst mayor in U.S. history.
And unfortunately, one of the greatest cities, I believe the greatest, bar none, New York got saddled with you and you ruined it.
And now the new guy, while better than de Blasio, it's a very low bar, he can't fix it.
He doesn't have the money.
And all the people who are super rich, half of them have moved out because the city's so disgusting and was in forever lockdown during COVID.
So it's just spiraling the drain.
And this is part of it.
They're just allowing criminals to roam free with a reticence to confront them, to arrest them or prosecute them, Mark.
It's not just New York.
Well, I've got, you know, Megan, I've got a son who works every day in Grand Central.
And I, the, the stories he tells me about the people that are running around in Grand Central and the mental instability of the people who are down there.
And it's just astonishing.
And it's every single day.
And when I'm there in New York, which is with some, with some degree of frequency, I feel the pain you just articulated because what has happened is that it is, you know, although I do give the current mayor a lot more credit.
I mean, he is, he's done a couple of things or has taken a couple of really good programs and instituted them that I wish they would do here in Los Angeles where I'm sitting, because there is an enormous mental health crisis.
All you have to do is walk around, as Jonas says, Grand Central, and you'll see it.
It's astonishing what, you know, you really can't.
The people who are there are completely unhinged in a lot of cases, unhinged in the sense that they have no awareness of what's going on.
There is nobody down there policing them, so to speak, and it's taken over the city.
We were in New York shortly before we moved out in New York in 2021 with my kids.
We're in the park, not Central Park, Riverside Park, supposed to be safe, broad daylight.
There's a homeless guy sitting on a bench.
We're walking around the loop.
And, you know, we kind of, you know, you're, he's, he's there.
He's on the bench.
You're walking the loop.
You're going to go by him.
And this guy started like, I'm going to imitate the growl.
It was like at me and my children and then got up and came for, like, we ran.
We ran.
He didn't like try to grab us, but he was clearly coming for us.
So we got out of there.
We went to the Dunkin' Donuts.
Another lunatic starts shouting at me and my kids and then gets in this fight with another, with a woman.
Like, it's dangerous.
You're just trying to raise a family.
You're not interacting.
You're not looking for trouble.
You're not trying to bother them.
The trouble comes to you when you allow these people to be out on the street without any mental health help.
They should be in institutions.
They should be institutionalized.
And we've decided that's violative of civil rights.
Nobody gives a damn about the civil rights of those of us who are law-abiding citizens just trying to go for a walk with our kids.
Or we could, you know, bring it to school shootings, right?
Can't lock them up.
Civil rights.
Haven't committed a crime yet.
Oh, well, they're all over social media with things saying, I want to be the next school shooter.
How about my civil rights and those of my kids and everybody else's kids to stay safe at school?
I just, something has to change.
It has to be dramatic.
And it has to be, I think, a much more aggressive institutionalization program.
And then, and that requires us to build more humane facilities, Johnna.
Like we're not going to go back to one flu over the cuckoo's nest, but we need something that we would send people to and that society can agree is a more appropriate place than the damn park bench or the subway.
Yeah.
Amen.
Amen.
And I don't know what it's going to take to, it's not going to happen this year.
Let's put it that way.
But it does need to happen because we're running people out of, I think New York is the greatest city in the world too.
A lot of people have run out of it.
It's not a safe place to be.
It's not as fun as it used to be.
It's problematic and it shouldn't be that way.
It's the heartbeat of our country and it's got to stake through it at this point.
I agree with you.
And I hope it does change very, very soon, but it won't change this year, if you know what I mean.
No, no, it won't.
We need changes in leadership.
Look, this mayor, I've been very disappointed by this mayor.
Anybody would be better than de Blasio, but he may not be with us for much longer anyway, since he himself is embroiled in an alleged corruption scandal that looks a little like Senator Menendez's.
Who knows what the truth is?
We'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now in that he didn't do it, but he's under investigation from the look of it.
And so is one of his aides.
Okay, guys, wonderful to see you.
I don't know.
This is like, this is a wacky day, but we had to get to those cases, all of which I recommend watching.
Mayor Leadership Changes Needed 00:00:29
There's a documentary about each one of them, and they're all on fire at the moment.
Mark and John, all the best.
Thank you.
All right.
And thanks to all of you for joining us today and all week.
We're going to be back on Monday, the day before the New Hampshire primary.
And who better to join us than the EJs?
Emily Jashinsky and Eliana Johnson back together.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
Export Selection