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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2205 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't see why Item 1 would cause anyone to question their faith in the justice system. This is exactly the kind of case the prohibition on admitting prior bad acts was meant to address. What you have is a guy who engaged in a bunch of extremely suspicious activity pertaining to someone's disappearance, none of which is actually evidence that he committed any crime. No, Branning's actions do not make much sense, and we are drawn to the conclusion that there must have been foul play involved in his disappearance absent any other explanation. The problem is that Stark's actions don't make much sense, either. The prosecution's theory is that Stark, finding himself alone with Branning at work, decided to rob him. From there, the theory goes downhill:

  • The proceeds of this robbery were $500 and a tank of gas. People commonly will rob someone for this amount. People won't commonly turn it into an elaborate jaunt across several states culminating in the victim's murder.

  • The drive to Cape May makes absolutely no sense. There were no further ATM withdrawals, and Branning had an opportunity to escape when they stopped for gas at the Wawa.

  • The drive back to Philadelphia makes no sense. They allegedly visited an open air drug market, which is admittedly not as good a place for an escape attempt as a well-lit gas station, but still not somewhere you take a hostage if you don't have to.

  • Branning was almost certainly alive when they arrived back in Philadelphia. If he were killed at any point prior it would mean that Stark drove an extended distance across the pine barrens with a dead body in his car and rather than dump it in possibly the best spot for such a job in the Lower 48, he decided to drive back to Philadelphia, buy crack, then drive to exurban Baltimore with a dead body in his car. An SUV that doesn't have a trunk.

  • Stark is 5' 2". He would have evidently used a gun to effect Branning's kidnapping, but not use any weapons to murder him. Stark may be built like a brick shithouse, but it would still be quite a feat for him to overpower Branning if he were even 5'7".

It's true that criminals don't always act rationally. But we're more likely to ascribe this behavior to someone whom we've already pegged as a criminal. If Stark is a normal, law-abiding citizen, a jury is unlikely to believe the improbable tales of an prosecutor looking to tie up an unsolved mystery in a nice little package by claiming that Mr. Stark simply decided to kidnap, rob, and murder a coworker one afternoon in the most bizarre and complicated way possible. They are more likely, however, to believe that someone they've already pegged as a criminal to be capable of that behavior. This is exactly the scenario the rules are designed to prevent. Knowledge of a string of 25-year-old robberies that bear no resemblance to what the prosecutor is alleging have nothing to do with the case. The only purpose is to give the jury the idea that Stark is a bad dude and is capable of something like this.

Knowledge of a string of 25-year-old robberies that bear no resemblance to what the prosecutor is alleging have nothing to do with the case.

Allegedly he was also on charges for resisting arrest and drug possession, had a drug debt of $13,000, and was going to be fired from the job anyway. So that gives him more motive to skip out, and maybe hustle a naive co-worker into helping him with the ends of "get this guy to give me money by a sob story". If he semi-truthfully told him "Man, I'm in a bind, I'm gonna get fired and I owe a ton of money to bad guys who will put me in the hospital, any way you can help me out with a temporary loan?" he might have been able to talk him into driving him to the meet to pay off some of the bad guys. Stark meets his drug dealer, persuades him that they can get some or all of the money out of this pigeon, and the three of them head off together to take out the $500 and Branning ends up dead however it happens.

Both were seen working there on Oct. 15, Weintraub said. Later that night, a security camera at a local BB&T Bank branch recorded Branning withdrawing $500 from an ATM, with another person visible in the back seat. Cell-phone data from Branning’s phone, as well as toll information, showed his 2002 Lexus sedan traveling into New Jersey, and later Cape May, according to Weintraub. That was the last trace of Branning that investigators found.

...Weintraub noted that there is a bench warrant out for Stark’s arrest in Monroe County — about two hours north of Philadelphia — for failing to show up in court on charges of resisting arrest and drug possession and he will be extradited if taken into custody anywhere else.

It's true that it can't be established how Branning met his death or that Stark had anything to do with it, but there's a lot of blank space in between that needs explanation. I agree that he was convicted on circumstantial evidence and suspicion, so the quashing of the verdict is correct, but there is something that went on that has not been adequately explained; for instance, why would Branning drive off to New Jersey with this guy and never contact his family? Maybe he did have a dark secret life that his family never knew about, but the cops would have been looking for something like that to explain what happened to him, and nothing seems to have turned up:

Attorney Craig Penglase, who represented Stark in his 2024 trial, called the wording in the superior court opinion significant, especially involving the lack of cause or manner of death for Branning, and describing the state's murder case as "entirely circumstantial, even speculative."

...During the five day jury trial in 2024, Penglase contended investigators immediately targeted Stark, who maintains his innocence, as the only suspect based, in part, on old criminal convictions.

...The Lexus was found abandoned without its license plate in Virginia in December 2021 with Branning's driver's license, credit and bank cards inside. His body was discovered in a ditch a half-hour outside Baltimore, Maryland a month earlier, but he was not positively identified through dental records until April 2023.

At trial the prosecution did not offer a motive for the murder, but revealed that Stark was $13,000 in debt, addicted to crack cocaine and about to lose his job programming machines at Enchlor.

Authorities did not find any detectible injuries to Branning, and also never established his cause of death, or how he ended up in Maryland.

But prosecutors argued that cellphone records, surveillance video, DNA and other evidence provided a clear timeline of events that strongly implicated Stark in Branning's disappearance and murder.

Penglase did not dispute that Stark and Branning traveled to New Jersey together on Oct. 15, 2021, but he suggested the two parted ways in Philadelphia later the same night.

I don't see why Item 1 would cause anyone to question his faith in the justice system.

My wording was too broad. I meant to point specifically at the jury rather than at the justice system as a whole. Quote from Ozy's article:

I was also impressed by the professionalism of the jury. My fellow jury members were thoughtful, intelligent, morally serious people who were conscious of their responsibility as jurors.⁎ Even given how frustrating the experience was, I was impressed by their rationality, how closely they stuck to the evidence, and their determination to follow the norms of good discourse. Sometimes I see people say online “you elites in your epistemic bubbles have no idea how stupid normal people are”. But, judging from my jury-trial experience, normal people are actually pretty smart! At least in Alameda County.

⁎With one exception, whom I haven’t talked about because I don’t like saying mean things about private figures on a blog this big.

Yet the jurors in this case seem to have delivered unanimous convictions on evidence that fell far short of "beyond a reasonable doubt", even with the prior-bad-acts evidence.

Sorry, at first I thought you were implying that the blow to one's faith was caused by the overturning of the conviction of the most obvious suspect in a murder case. As far as your actual concern, I wouldn't worry too much about it for the simple reason that you can't expect jurors to know the law better than the lawyers involved and to not act like humans. The rules of evidence are cognizant of the fact that certain prejudices are so difficult to put aside that we won't even let the jury hear evidence that may inflame them, and in such a situation, I can hardly blame the jury for thinking that these prior offenses were relevant and that fact influencing their conviction. This is an unusual case, where there's no real evidence but also no satisfying explanation. This case can't be conceived of in a way that makes sense, because any angle has some obvious deficiency.

There's also that two other retrials took place in Bucks County and did end with the same result, the original defendant found guilty again and sentenced again. So even though Stark got his retrial and very likely can't be convicted of murder, he may not walk out a free man:

In the last 20 years, at least two high profile murder retrials have taken place in Bucks County.

Richard Laird was retried in 2007 after a federal appeals court cited errors in his original 1987 trial for the murder of Anthony Milano. He was convicted a second time and resentenced to death.

Most recently Alfonso Sanchez was retried in 2023 for a 2007 double homicide in Warminster after it was revealed the prosecution withheld material DNA lab reports. He was convicted again and sentenced to death.

At least in Alameda County.

Yeah, that would do it!

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