Scott Peterson will spend the rest of his life behind bars — unless his case gets overturned.
The 52-year-old is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 2002 murder of his wife, Laci Peterson, who had been eight months pregnant with the couple’s unborn son, Conner, when she was killed on Christmas Eve.
“The emotional charge of this trial was off the hooks. I mean I’ve tried over 50 murder trials and I’ve never seen how emotionally affected this jury panel was. I don’t know whether Scott did it or not. I don’t know. But I do know, to my mind, this wasn’t a fair trial,” he explained.
The legal analyst said the process will “take a while” due to “the voluminous transcripts, the voluminous evidence in the case.”
“We’re going to be in it at least a year I would think, if not more,” he warned.
“I know the Innocence Project down in L.A. They go through a very rigorous process of vetting the cases that they’re going to take and in this situation, I would imagine they spent months if not years taking a look at the Peterson case,” Cardoza continued. “The fact that they have decided to take this case isn’t going to mean much to the Appellate Courts. I mean it happens, not a lot, but enough times.”
“The public might think ‘oh if they took it, maybe there’s something there.’ Well, there might be something there, but it doesn’t mean that the Appellate Court will give any weight at all that the L.A. Innocence Project took this case,” he claimed.
Cardoza did, however, point out how “there’s been a lot of criticism of how the police investigated this case because a lot of us think that they made up their minds early on.”
The legal expert said the L.A. Innocence Project has a strong argument when it comes to “confirmation bias,” referring to claims police only looked for and examined evidence that supported their theory. Cardoza alleged investigators didn’t do what they “should have done.”
“Will that alone prove that Scott didn’t do it? No, that’s [not] going to be enough alone,” he concluded.