Rovin Romine said:
It's the same, in fact. If you plan the killing you're guilty of the killing, whether or not you're the actual triggerman.
Skimming through the thread, the "best" defense I can imagine at this point is:
AH was angry with OL, but didn't intend to kill him. Another member of the entourage did. AH panicked and concealed evidence because he knew how bad it would look (i.e., people would assume AH did or ordered the shooting.)
That puts AH on the hook for obstruction and possibly the firearms charges. He could also prevail in a civil suit under the same theory. 10 years in jail and out with enough money to float the rest of the way?
If there's no possible other triggerman or there's physical evidence that ties AH to the shooting itself, he may as well sell the house, spend all the cash/savings on a trust fund for his kid, and save a few thousand for the commissary so he can smoke himself to death on the inside.
If the evidence mentioned by the prosecutor today -- triangulating his whereabouts -- is as described and admissible, I think this seems like about the best he can do based on what we currently know.
For what it's worth, I got the sense from the prosecutor's statement that AH was, in fact, not the shooter. Some of what he said today could only have come from someone in the car (or it was rank speculation). Specifically, there were assertions made to the court about what was discussed in the car regarding why AH was angry. If they had someone in the car, and AH is the shooter, it seems like they would have mentioned that. My audio wasn't great, but it sounded to me as though the prosecutor used passive voice and was talking about the victim being shot, without saying who did the shooting. Also, Hernandez was described as the "mastermind," which is really not something you need to say or even want to try to prove if he was the actual shooter. But I guess we'll see.
The problem with this defense is that apparently when Hernandez erased surveillance tape, he did so only of the period after the shooting, and there apparently is video of Hernandez with a gun (not clear if the kind of gun believed to have been involved in the killing) talking about not trusting people. That's going to be tough. Also, there are texts where Hernandez seems anxious to get his eventual accomplices up to join him, which if admissible will help show premeditation. Last, there's the problem that he has to explain what it is they thought they were doing with the victim at 3:00 in the morning in an industrial park. He can't admit to anything like a felony -- if he says, "we just wanted to scare him, I didn't know we were really going to shoot him," that's potentially felony murder anyway if it turned into kidnapping. It would have to be something lame like, "we just wanted to talk to him," but who goes to an industrial park at 3:00 a.m. to talk?
He's in a tough spot. Of course, you can get an arrest warrant based on evidence that is not necessarily admissible at trial. When it comes time to prove the case, it gets much harder, so we'll have to see.
