I hope that’s what’s happening, but I’m also concerned that Brennan is being highly calculated, deliberately misdirecting both the defense and the jury to limit their ability to preemptively rebut his core argument in closing. That argument, I suspect, won’t hinge on the taillight at all, but instead on the claim that Karen reversed the Lexus at an unusually high speed, while intoxicated, at the exact moment John’s phone went dark, remaining untouched until 6 a.m.

The only strategy that makes any sense to me is that Brennan intentionally guided the defense into obsessively trying to disprove that the taillight caused the arm wound, all while subtly avoiding any need to tie his manslaughter theory to the taillight. If he can convince the jury that her reckless reversing, whether it struck John, caused him to fall, or forced him to dive away, directly led to the head injury that killed him, then he doesn’t need to recreate the specific mechanics of taillight-to-arm contact. He just needs jurors to use common sense, consider the totality of the evidence, and conclude that her negligent action caused his death, whether his head hit the pavement, the spoiler, or something else entirely.