But Judge Paul insisted on trying the case.  He declared that he was not prejudiced.  In refusing to step down, however, he allowed an almost unique situation in which rulings from the bench might plausibly be examined for personal motive.

Ordinarily we would reject out of hand Leigh McEachern's story of the ex parte conference.  Such things do not happen in our system.  But given the extraordinary background of this extraordinary case, McEachern's charges acquired a credibility that otherwise would have been impossible.  The created reasonable doubts that persist even to this day.

*

I set out at the beginning of this project to understand and to explain the verdict of Florida v. Zeigler.  I became convinced that the verdict was unjust because the system that delivered the case to the jury was so faulty and skewed that a just result was impossible.

That is almost self-evident.  The actions of the police and the prosecutor are stark in the record.

There is another issue, though: the reality of the crime itself, the questions about what really happened in the store on Christmas Eve. The jury's decision in 1976 settled most of the legal issues, but it did not end the questions.

Every day the actuality of the crime becomes more distant, and recollections more suspect; memory fades more slowly than the Rh factors of a bloodstain, but just as surely.  We are left with the documentation, which is unchanging.  It has been studied and discussed and argued for more than sixteen years.  After all that scrutiny, can the extended record possibly hold new answer-not just speculation or assumption, but real answers based in fact?

I found that it does.