CHICAGO — With no physical evidence tying Drew Peterson to the death of his third wife and so much of the case hinging on what she said before she died and what his next wife said before she vanished, it was a certainty that his trial would be unlike anything ever seen in Illinois and perhaps in the country.
But nobody expected what unfolded in the first three weeks of the trial: Prosecutors made a series of blunders that prompted the judge to consider at least three defense motions for a mistrial and has some legal experts wondering just how much trust is left.
“If the jury can’t trust the prosecution, everything after that fails,” said Daniel Coyne, a professor at Chicago Kent School of Law and a former criminal defense lawyer.
“The judge has told the jury on a number of occasions that the prosecutor has done something wrong,” Coyne said. “(If) they transfer that wrongness to the witnesses, that is very dangerous.”
It’s particularly important for prosecutors to connect with jurors in a trial such as Peterson’s, which relies heavily on what the former suburban Chicago police officer’s ex-wife, Kathleen Savio, told others before — as the prosecution alleges — he killed her and left her body in a bathtub in 2004.
Peterson also is a suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, though he has never been charged in that case and maintains she is alive.
Prosecutors are trying to let jurors hear Savio’s voice “from the grave” to convince them not only that her death was a murder but that Peterson was capable of making it look like an accident, which authorities initially determined.
While Will County Judge Edward Burmila hasn’t declared a mistrial, he has harshly criticized prosecutors — sometimes in front of the jury — for saying things or asking questions that they shouldn’t have.
As the trial enters its fourth week, there is speculation that the next big mistake might be the prosecution’s last and that Burmila could declare a mistrial and send the jurors home.
And even if that doesn’t happen, it is unclear how much his public admonishment of prosecutors has hurt their credibility in the eyes of a jury deliberating whether Peterson, who has been locked up for three years during the investigation, should stay behind bars or go free.
On Friday, the judge barred testimony from a man who at a 2010 hearing said that Stacy Peterson had told him days before she vanished that her husband came in late the night Savio died and said, “If anybody ever asks, I was home.”
The defense motioned for a mistrial each time prosecutors attempted to put before jurors testimony about Drew Peterson’s character or Savio’s fears of her ex-husband.
One came after Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow alleged that before Peterson killed Savio he tried to hire a hit man to kill her. Another followed another prosecutor asking about Savio’s discussion about seeking an order of protection, about an hour after Burmila ordered that question not be asked. A third came after Savio’s neighbor testified that he viewed a bullet on his driveway as intimidation by Peterson.
