"When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me".
Within an hour of the verdict's becoming public, Democrats in Senate races around the country immediately sought to make the conviction an issue for their opponents, demanding that those who had received money from Mr. Stevens, who was generous with contributions to his colleagues, return it.
As a prosecutor, it's tempting to explain to an officer-witness what he would need to say in order to make the conviction, and then ask him what it was that he saw.
But on Tuesday top judges overturned his conviction, and praised the "diligent" work of law students who helped provide the evidence which they deemed made the conviction "no longer safe".
It accepted Nealon's legal team's argument that DNA traces on the 22-year-old victim's blouse and underwear belonging to another unknown male made the conviction unsafe.
But she turned out to be white, which made the conviction that Galindo Street had been targeted because the bomber thought it was home to a distant Mason cousin a little bit more of a stretch.
(On Tuesday, State Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Oakland proposed a law that would make the pot-conviction expungement process automatic, putting responsibility directly on the court system rather than individuals, as the LA Times reported).
Were he to testify, his editors said, he could no longer cover the issue, so he devised his own test of conscience, telling prosecutors he would testify only if it would make the difference between conviction and exoneration.
The US Department of Justice has made the first convictions against distributors of pirated mobile apps.
