As everyone in the Bay Area knows, Santa Cruz resident Bryan Stow was brutally beaten earlier this year in a stadium parking lot in Los Angeles, after wearing a Giants shirt to a Giants vs. Dodgers game. Since then he has been in and out of a coma, but is reported to be, thankfully, showing signs of improvement after continuous hospitalization for four months.
In May, under tremendous pressure due to the nationwide news coverage this crime was receiving, Los Angeles police investigated and ultimately arrested Giovanni Ramirez for the beating. Despite the obvious difficulties in investigating a crime with few leads and even fewer witnesses, LAPD assured the public that they had the right guy, going so far as to have police chief Charlie Beck 
state that he was "absolutely" confident that police had the right suspect. In fact, he stated it even more specifically than that; "Absolutely . . . I am as sure as you need to be to make an arrest and pursue a prosecution."
Police were later forced to release Ramirez based on a lack of evidence. Now that two other suspects, Louie Sanchez and Marvin Norwood, have been charged for the same crime, how much credibility does LAPD have in asserting they have the right people in custody? Are they as "sure as they need to be?"
What the LAPD's very public mistakes have done is bolster the defense for Sanchez and Norwood. A good defense attorney in this situation will take all of the police reports, investigative records and public statements relating to the case against Ramirez, and use them to illustrate the compelling point that if police were so sure that Ramirez did it, there must necessarily be at least some doubt about their own clients' guilt.
Jurors tend to trust police officers' testimony in criminal trials. The perfectly pressed uniform and shiny badge glistening in the courtroom lights are often too much to overcome, even when there are legitimate gaps in the State's evidence. In fact, highly publicized cases such as this are a perfect storm for the conviction of an innocent person: public outrage, sympathetic victim, desire for justice, and honorable police officers testifying in earnest about their investigation. If there are any gaps or weaknesses in the evidence, it is all too easy for jurors to minimize and look past them, instead putting their trust in the police and voting to convict.
But here, if the attorneys representing Sanchez and Norwood are sharp, they will take the gift that police have given them by being so publicly "sure" about the guilt of another suspect, and use it to dull the sheen on those badges. Done tactfully, this strategy should cause the jury to critically question all of the evidence that, the police now assert, points to different suspects than they previously thought.
We hope the perpetrators of the crimes against Mr. Stow are taken off the streets, as there is no place in our society for that kind of brutality. But anyone following this case, including the jury that is ultimately assembled to hear the evidence against Sanchez and Norwood, must start from a position of doubt about the defendants' guilt and with zero confidence that the police have arrested the right people.
