By Seamus McGraw
(Continued)Homicide does not necessarily mean murder
And while Fawley's defense team has been pressing the court — unsuccessfully so far — to delay the Aug. 17 starting date for Fawley's trial, hoping to win more time to analyze the report, there is reason to believe that the most recent version of the report could work to the defense's advantage.
Fawley, according to published reports, has never denied that Behl was technically the victim of a homicide. But homicide does not necessarily equal murder, and Fawley has instead insisted that the young woman, to whom he claimed to have been briefly romantically linked, was accidentally strangled during rough and consensual sex.
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| Ben Fawley |
Police and prosecutors have disputed that account and a grand jury last year agreed that there was a sufficiently strong case to bring first-degree murder charges against Fawley.
Thus far, prosecutors have apparently been unfazed by the absence of hard evidence of traumatic injury in the autopsy report, and they have resisted efforts by the defense to delay the trial pending further review of the autopsy.
But in the end, it will be up to a jury to decide whether the autopsy results bolster the prosecution's claim of knowing and intentional murder, or whether Fawley's account of a night of rough passion turned deadly is credible.
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