D4VD's Online Purchases Raise WHAT Questions

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Robin Drake** (0:07)
Next, I want to really dive deeper on what we've been seeing with the David case because things have gotten really interesting because Hulu just put out a new doc, so it's kind of catch everyone up. A status conference just wrapped up in the D4VD case as David, the singer charged with first degree murder in special circumstances in the death of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas-Hernandez while the court room moves slowly. Social media is on fire and Hulu just dropped the documentary that dives into the alleged relationship. I just finished watching it last night.
It was kind of everything we knew but a little more shocking because they actually had investigators really spilling their guts on it, and to me, showing some real bias on it, but we'll dive into that in a second. Anyway, Eric Faddis joins, breaks down what actually happened at the latest hearing how pretrial publicity and the doc could really affect jury selection and whether the defense team can use any of this to their advantage. So starting with that background, Eric, the status conference just happened. These hearings are usually about discovery and scheduling. What key fights, again, if you had a chance to catch up on it, I understand if not, we can just talk about everything else around it on Crazy David. What key fights are you thinking are likely playing out behind the scenes right now?

**Eric Faddis** (1:18)
Well, gosh, Robin, there's a lot more ammunition on the defense side now with social media than there was before. What I mean is that, let's say it's a case in 1975 and you have publicization of cases then, you got newspapers, you got TV, and that might affect some potential jurors. But here now that we have social media, if I was defense, I would be hiring a digital forensic expert to do a broad assessment. How many impressions have stories negative to my client got? How many of those impressions can we tell are reasonably located within California, where they want to bring this trial? Millions, probably tens of millions at this point, I'd imagine.
Does that give the court any concern about whether a juror can be fair and impartial?
You can ask the specific jurors, hey, did you personally hear about this? But just in terms of this broad swath of publicity around cases, negative publicity, prejudicial to the defendant, I think it's going to be a huge fight in terms of, can we really have a fair trial in California? Or do we have to move this to some small jurisdiction where David might even have a better show?

**Robin Drake** (2:41)
It was really shocking to me because I looked up who was actually on this doc and how they portrayed the information. So it was Scott Williams was LAPD. He's a detective investigator involved in the case. He was interviewed on the doc. Then Nathan Hockman, also LA's district attorney, also appears discussing the charges and evidence.
Typically, when I've seen cases like this where there's been document, I mean, just we're just talking about Heuermann, and so we saw some people testifying on that, and we saw the fake therapist doing things like that. But what really struck me was, again, the verbal leakage I saw was very, very damning, I thought, for David. Granted, I mean, the evidence is pretty overwhelming, but again, there's no open show cases, as you very well know more than anyone else's defense attorney, but I would think that that would impeach them. Although when I did a research on it, maybe not. So, I mean, what compels someone to do that? And what's the, like, what's, how's a judge handle that when you have two people that are gonna be testifying? Seemingly, again, context is everything. From my context, I had a definite bias when presenting information for public consumption like that.

**Eric Faddis** (3:56)
Yeah, you know, a couple of issues come up with that. Certainly, it's fodder for cross-examination once we get there, you know. Oh, Mr. Detective, you were asked to be in this Netflix documentary. You were really giddy about that, right? You know, millions of people would see your face and your work would be validated. And so you wanted to present it in a really compelling fashion, didn't you?
And, you know, I think there are just ways to show that these folks allegedly could have a personal interest in what's happening. And, you know, could that cause a person to have a motivation to fabricate, to exaggerate, to put things in a certain way that's prejudicial to the defense because it looks cool for them in the Netflix series? On top of that, you know, prosecutors cannot make extra judicial statements about a case that are prejudicial to a defendant generally. And usually that ethical rule applies to people in the prosecutor's employer or who are working under the prosecutor in that case. And so does the prosecutor have some duty to curtail their investigative teams' public statements about a case that might be prejudicial to a defendant? I think they might. And I think that that could be an issue as well going forward.