Very difficult case, not open and shut.
ABC News: "An expert hired by the defense testified that the crash happened on the center line of the road and would have occurred even if the truck was in the middle of its lane because Mazza’s motorcycle was heading in that direction."
Hmm . . . Sounds like the opposite could also have happened: The crash would have occurred even if all the motorcycles were in the middle of their lane because the truck was headed in that direction. Or would Zhukovsky have had time to swerve back into his lane and avoid a crash if the motorcycle had not struck his left front tire? We will never know that. My reading of the defense's reconstruction team's report is that the motorcycle hit the truck's tire first, while BOTH were on the center line. Apparently the state police retracted their first interpretation of what occurred.
Prosecutor: "Witnesses were consistent, he argued, in describing the truck as weaving back and forth before the crash. That behavior continued 'until he killed people,' Chase said.'" . . . "The only thing that stopped him was an embankment after he tore through a group of motorcycles."
The crux of the case: "The judge threw out the charges related to driving under the influence. Police never questioned Zhukovskyy’s sobriety at the crash scene and the judge ruled prosecutors had failed to prove he was impaired." Zhukovsky's blood was drawn two hours after the accident. "Donna Papsun of Pennsylvania-based NMS Labs said Monday that [heroin] was found in an amount 'below the reporting limit,' the concentration of substances that can be measured accurately."
If the decision in this case was wrong, the blame seems to rest partly with the prosecutors for not showing that Zhukovsky was impaired. However, it's not likely that an officer would arrive on the scene of that catastrophic crash and immediately get a sample of Zhukovsky's blood. Not at all surprising that it took two hours to get a sample.
Jurors can only decide a case based on the judge's instructions. In this case, the judge had already dismissed the DUI charges, so that could not enter into the jury's decision. Given that the judge ruled that the state didn't prove its DUI case, and the lab said there were not enough drugs detectable to prove impairment, who are we to say the opposite? At this point, no one knows or can prove whether Zhukovsky was impaired at the time of the accident. We only know that he was not impaired two hours after the accident. We do know that the motorcyclist was impaired at the time of the accident.
Clearly there was mutual fault on that day: drunk motorcyclist, possibly or probably impaired truck driver, both on the center line at the same time. "Possibly or probably" isn't enough to prove a case. If the motorcyclist hadn't been drunk, perhaps he could have taken evasive action.
Judgments can only be based on provable evidence, and the evidence was lacking in this case. That doesn't mean there never was any evidence; it only means that the prosecution was unable to produce the evidence, for whatever reason---because Zhukovsky actually wasn't impaired, the state police failed to collect the evidence in time, or the prosecutors were incompetent, it's impossible to say.
In that scenario, our justice system favors the defendant, who is innocent until proven guilty. I'm sure we would all want that protection of the law in our own cases. Some people are not satisfied with the verdict because "not proven guilty" does not mean that someone is actually not guilty and they suspect that Zhukovsky actually was guilty (as do I). We will never know in this case due to the lack of critical evidence about his impairment. We have to accept the outcome anyway, because a system based on "guilty until proven innocent" is not how our democracy works and none of us would want to live under that system.
Emotionally, I'm not satisfied with the verdict, but I believe it was the only legally defensible outcome due to lack of evidence presented in court. I think the jury made the right decision and that Sununu should have known that and not expressed a personal opinion on the case. The reason that people are upset is that something horrible happened that was clearly due to human error, and justice demands that serious human errors be punished. But first you have to prove the cause of the error and that did not happen in this case.
Quotes above taken from various news reports.
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