Letters to the Editor
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Sounds like a frame-up to me... Here's why.
I hope that Waters received a competent defense. If I were a juror, it would be hard to convince me that a woman who was about to commit an act which demanded considerable presence of mind and precision would have been stalling around, making a purchase in Olympia, 48 minutes before what might have been the most momentous act of her life. She then would have had to drive 60 miles to Seattle to meet her co-conspirators, averaging 75 miles an hour, not only for her time on I-5, but for the distance from the purchase point to the meeting point, each of which probably involved city street driving, traffic lights, etc. She would have risked a ticket that would not only delayed her, but would have placed her conclusively on the route she took. I don't know where the Seattle meeting location was, but the Center for Urban Horticulture is on the north side of the city, well off Highway 5, down North 45th Street, through the University center and northeast of the main campus.
To cover that distance, I can't imagine that she would have made the appointment without averaging over 80 mph on I-5, probably 15 mph over the limit. The traffic for the portions around Olympia, past SeaTac and through south Seattle, would have been moderate to heavy at that time in the early evening.
I hope counsel checked road conditions to ascertain if there were construction slowdowns at the time of the alleged drive. I would have even pulled the tickets written by the state troopers during those minutes to see how many cruisers she might have passed on her supposed dash to the meeting, perhaps making the prosecution's tale even more implausible.
The testimony of her putative co-conspirators sounds like the stuff of which bogus murder convictions are fabricated: Alleged "confessions" claimed to be made to career criminal cellmates,looking for prosecutorial leniency for instance. One even denied her participation. That would have been a statement "against interest," and would have jeopardized his deal with the Feds.
There were no disclosures to investigators until after much time and many interviews, quite uncommon with cooperating witnesses. I would have looked for videotapes and listened to audiotapes of those interrogations to see if words weren't being put in the mouths of the informants who may have only vaguely known Waters.
This certainly does not sound as if any sort of "justice" was done.