My thoughts after watching the first week of the trial and keeping an open mind:
- Overall this seems to be overcharged. Legally speaking premeditation can be formed in seconds, but juries really, really want minutes, hours, or even days for a Murder 1 conviction, and tend to punish prosecutors that overcharge. IMHO this should have been charged as manslaughter or 2nd degree murder, the whole thing has a drunken bar fight vibe.
- Most of the people involved including the defendent seemed to be somewhere between "drunk as skunks" and "comotose" with regard to their BAC. The decadent had a BAC of .219 and was described as "the least drunk person on the river".
- No one disputes that Miu approached the first group of five boys and then grabbed a hold of their tubes and generally got in their way. I've seen nothing to suggest that he wasn't in fact looking for the phone that a member of his group had lost earlier. Maybe he say one of the teens holding a phone that looked like the one that was lost?
- When asked what he was doing, enough witnesses have said he said that he was "looking for little girls" that I think he really said that. My take is it was meant to be sarcastic, but the teens were too drunk to realize that and that's when they started yelling about home being a pedophile and rapist
- The whole situation seems to have been dying down until more teens and young adults from two other groups started approaching, until there were eventually 13 of them.
- The confrontation got physical off camera so we'll never know for sure what exactly happened, but it appears Maddy either touched or shoved Miu (at the very least she was waving her phone inches from his face), and then Miu either shoved, punched, or slapped Maddy. One of the boys shoves Miu hard enough to knock him down in the river, then he gets up and all hell breaks loose.
- My feeling is that there was so much chaos going on and considering the 13 on 1 situation, based on the video alone a jury won't conclude it wasn't self defense beyond a reasonable doubt, but there's a good chance he's convicted based on him acting shady afterwords. Instead of waiting for police to arrive he tries to ditch the knife and flee, and then lies to police multiple times.