\nIn April 2004 he was charged with murder. In the absence of any DNA evidence linking Mitchell to the scene, the prosecution case was wholly circumstantial. A witness said she had seen Mitchell \u2013 although she failed to pick him out in the courtroom \u2013 near the scene of the crime. Jodi's relatives told the court that Mitchell, who claimed he had reacted to his dog barking, had led them straight to the 14-year-old's body during the night search.
\nThe case also centred on Mitchell's character, his supposedly unemotional reaction to Jodi's death and that he carried knives, sold cannabis and was interested in satanism. After the longest trial of a single accused in Scottish legal history, a majority verdict convicted Mitchell and he was sentenced to life, with a minimum term of 20 years to be served before parole.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mitchell has Asperger's syndrome, and the "unemotional response" is likely to be a result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Luke Mitchell is someone I didn't want to be guilty when I heard the case on the news at the time, but after the verdict and the sentence I had to concede. However, any...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[689],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british_justice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-wD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2023"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41639,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions\/41639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}