Circumstantial Evidence

The long-delayed murder trial of Michael Goodwin is finally over. Goodwin was charged with the murder of a former business associate, Mickey Thompson, and his wife.

The Thompsons lived in the small, wealthy foothill community of Bradbury. Two black men rode up on bicycles and shot the couple. Goodwin fled the country, and supposedly lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean for years, but ultimately returned. He was arrested, tried and convicted.

No one saw him do it, and there was no physical evidence such as DNA, fabric, or ballistics connecting him to the crime. The actual killers have never been found and for all we know may have been killed themselves. The evidence consisted, among other things, in Goodwin's threats to kill Thompson, his flight, and reports by witnesses who said they remembered, years later, that they had seen Goodwin in the neighborhood shortly before.

I'm not going to rehash the trial. The papers have done that, and no doubt there will be a book out before long.

The point here is about the law of evidence. Many non-lawyers think that "circumstantial evidence" is legally inferior to direct evidence, as when a witness says he saw the event in question. Not so. Circumstantial evidence has the same standing as direct evidence, and a jury can convict a defendant even of murder based entirely on circumstantial evidence. (In the Goodwin case, there was some direct evidence--descriptions of the crime scene, autopsy results, and so on).

Here we have motive and opportunity, flight as reflecting consciousness of guilt, and the evidence of Goodwin's presence at the scene before the killings. All of this is circumstantial evidence, and it's undoubtedly legally sufficient to convict. On appeal, the fact that the evidence may seem thin won't be enough for a reversal; if a reversal comes it will be due to legal error, not insufficiency of the evidence. An appellate court doesn't need to find guilt beyond reasonable doubt. It just has to find sufficient evidence to make out a case on which a jury could convict.

So, surprise and delight (or annoy) your friends. Next time they say, "It's only circumstantial evidence," set them straight.

The Angels Jury Decides

(Originally published February 12, 2006)


Last week an Orange County jury slapped down the City of Anaheim, and its lawyer, Andy Guilford, who is soon to be a federal judge, if the Senate cooperates. The jury found that the Angels’ new owner, Arte Moreno, did not breach a contract that the former owners, the Disney Company, made with the City of Anaheim, by changing the name of the team from the “Anaheim Angels” to the “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.”

The jury deliberated for only four hours, a relatively short time for a major case. The new name of the team is silly. Although they are in the same TV market, Orange County does not consider itself a suburb of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles tends to think of events occurring here as “behind the Orange Curtain.” The judge found that contract was ambiguous on the point, requiring merely that the name “Anaheim” appear in the title of the team.

Was Moreno within his rights in trying to link the team to a wider area the and a larger demographic by making the rather awkward name change. When a written contract is unclear, “parol evidence” about what the parties said and intended, if it doesn’t contradict the written part of the contract, can be received in a trial so the meaning of the ambiguous term can be discovered. “Parol” is Law French, deriving from the French term for “word,” going back to the Norman French conquest of England in 1006. Perhaps the jury decided that if the parties had meant that only the name “Anaheim” could appear in the team name, that’s what they would have written down.

There’s a lot more that can be said about this case, but for now I’ll just make two points:

• It’s important that contracts be clear. People write their contracts so they will know what to expect. If a contract is sloppy or unclear, the parties are giving an unknown group of 12 people the right to decide what their business deal meant. Skimping at the contract writing stage can turn out to be very expensive.


• Attorney’s fee clauses in contracts increase the risks of litigation. Under the normal “American Rule,” the party that wins a trial and the party that loses each pay their own lawyers. Parties to a contract can repeal the “American Rule” and agree to make the loser pay not only its own attorney fees, but the winner’s. Anaheim may get hit for $ 6 million!

UPDATE: Now the OC Register’s Frank Mickadeit says there isn’t an attorney’s fee clause in the agreement. Mickadeit was confident the city would win, so I guess his face is doubly red. He’s still my favorite columnist in the paper. The result also calls into question the practice of cities spending cash and devoting land to attract or keep professional sports teams. Why the taxpayers should subsidize a profit-making enterprise like a sports team is beyond me, but apparently there’s a myth that the team will bring in swells who will spend money, and make the city famous. It never paid off and it never will. Fill the potholes, arrest the crooks, fix the schools, and lower taxes. Boring, but the true business of cities, and better calculated to bring in business than subsidizing millionaires who think it’s fun to run a team. "