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Australian Prime Minister: "Confident" In Signals; Trying To Track Down Black Boxes; Witnesses: FedEx Truck Afire Before Hitting Bus; Oscar Pistorius Trial; Bubba Burns Up Augusta
Aired April 12, 2014 - 12:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD: Hello again. Welcome back. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. Strong words of confidence today from the Australian prime minister in the intense search for Flight 370. He says it seems pretty clear a black box has been detected. Listen to what Prime Minister Tony Abbott said about four pings heard in the Indian Ocean over the past week.
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TONY ABBOTT, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: The have been numerous, numerous transmissions recorded, which gives us the high degree of confidence that this is the black box from the missing flight.
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WHITFIELD: But those signals are fading fast and batteries powering the pingers could be dead very soon if they haven't died already. Here is where things stand right now. The pings that have given officials so much confidence were heard last Saturday and on Tuesday, but nothing has been heard since. Fourteen ships and ten planes were involved in today's search. More than 1,000 miles off the coast of Australia. Crews right now are focussing on a search area about 16,000 square miles, about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.
Matthew Chance joins me live now from Perth, Australia. So, Matthew, what happens if they don't detect the pings again?
MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they've not reached that point yet, first of all. If they do reach that point, when they decide that they have no longer any chance of finding any of the electronic signals that could be emitted from the emergency beacons on the black boxes. They said that they will stop the search operation under water with these ping locator devices and they will launch a sort of robotic, autonomous submarine, the Bluefin-21 as it's called, which will scan the ocean surface and continue the search in its own way to look for the black boxes.
A much slower process, though, than using the towed ping locator. They want to get maximum -- use the maximum opportunity that they can if there are any further electronic signals with that ping locator. When that stops they will launch that submarine, as I say, and take it from there. The hope is still that despite the fact they haven't located anything, detected anything in the past four days, there's still a possibility of them picking something up in the days ahead -- Fredricka.
WHITFIELD: OK. And at what point do they abandon this effort to listen for a ping?
CHANCE: Well, there's not been an exact timeframe given and, of course, very much left up to the judgment of those involved. I expect we're getting pretty close to that stage right now, quite frankly. The shelf life of the batteries that power the pingers is said to be 30 days long. It's now 36 days since March 8, since the airliner was lost. And so it's not exactly clear how long they will last. Perhaps they've already run out of juice. Perhaps they will last a few more days or weeks. But it's been four days now since the last ping was heard. Clearly those in charge of this search must be trying to assess now when will be the right time to move to the next stage.
WHITFIELD: OK. Matthew Chance, thank you so much in Perth. So if they are able to narrow the search field further, how does that affect the way the search will be conducted? Let's bring back our panel now. CNN aviation analyst, Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation. She is now an aviation attorney who represents families suing airlines in crashes and disasters.
Alan Diehl is a former NTSB, FAA and Air Force investigator and author of a book about air crash investigators right there, and David Soucie is a CNN safety analyst and also the author of "Why Planes Crash." All right, they have significantly narrowed the search area, but we haven't seen anything other than some ocean garbage. The signals haven't been emitted for four days now.
So the question now, Mary, you know, at what point do they abandon the effort to listen for anything else before moving on, I guess, to the next type of search? And is that all going to be based on visualization, what they see some 3 miles down below over the 16,000- square-mile area?
MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It is and I think they're moving at this point to get all the logistics in place. They have to have support ships. They have to have people there to take care of them and their submersibles and the folks working on those. They called for the U.S. supply ship, logistics ship, to come in and the U.S. has agreed to send that. That's like the floating gas station supermarket, if you will, to supply the folks there working.
So I do think that they're mobilizing to get in place to put that in the water. Of course, they want to be ready to go because once they put it in, it could be a couple days or it could be several months. And once they do they can't just stop and give up. I think they're already mobilizing to do it.
WHITFIELD: And so, David, how do you explain that fifth ping now being ruled out? What happened exactly?
DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, the sonobuoys are really not designed for exactly what it received. They were modified slightly to be able to operate specifically in the 37.5 kilohertz range. When it was received, they are designed to be launched out to find submarines. When there are several in an area immediately when there's a sound that might be a submarine sound or any sound that can be triangulated very quickly so it's designed for an attack for a submarine attack. So a singular sound from a singular sonobuoys could have been a number of different sounds and it was ruled out quickly that it was not consistent with the black box pinger.
WHITFIELD: So Alan, does this underscore that false positives is a real problem and still potentially a problem if any one of these devices feels like it is to pick up some sort of audible noise from this point forward?
ALAN DIEHL, FORMER NTSB, FAA, USAF INVESTIGATOR: I'm a little surprised that pinger didn't work better. I worked with the crews before with the NTSB. David's right. They're not optimized for finding pingers. The other thing, why no debris on the surface? I can tell you, I worked a water crash, a 727 that crashed into Scambia Bay in Florida in '78 and that aircraft hit at 1,200 feet a minute. David can tell you that's a very hard impact. And there was no debris with that.
The aircraft, they pulled it out and they said they were thinking about returning it to service. Now we know in Air France it hit at 11,000 feet a minute and it fragmented and the pingers apparently failed partly because of the violent impact of Air France. So the fact we're still hearing pingers tells me that this may have been a more benign water landing than other people have speculated about.
WHITFIELD: But then no fragmentation potentially, if that's the kind of scenario we're talking about here. Then we talk about pings that are 17 miles apart. That still just doesn't make sense to me.
DIEHL: I was going to say I know we covered this ground before, obviously under water these sounds don't travel in a straight line. They're bent by -- temperature layers. They're bent by reflecting off under water canyons. So we can have a lot of things that can distort where the sound is coming from and that's why this is such a difficult hunt.
WHITFIELD: And then given all of this, Mary, the Australians, particularly the prime minister, still saying he has this level of confidence. Is it your feelings the Australians know something about any potential debris down below that they are just not articulating and that helps underscore this confidence?
SCHIAVO: No. I don't think they have any information about debris down below, but I do think that there are so many leads have lined up. First there was just no leads at all and then they got satellite information and then they narrowed that down and thought, well, what if we don't get any pings and then they got pings.
So I think that they just realized that from the hard leads that they have, the facts are lining up and that has given them a fair measure of confidence and in terms of the two different pings, it's hard to say -- at first they thought it was from two different pingers and now they're not so sure.
There have been accidents where the CVR, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have been found miles apart. So that's a possibility, too. I think in another case they were a mile apart. There's possible there's some distance between them. That they're picking up two different signals.
But I think the Australians are just reacting to the fact that sort of layer by layer they've been peeling the onion and it's panned out so far. Gomez, the Yankee player, said it's better to be lucky than good. Well, let's hope for the Australians they're both. And they are going to need it.
WHITFIELD: David, is that your feeling, the facts are simply lining up?
SOUCIE: Well, yes, I think so. I think that's a great deal of it. But I do think there's other information available. If you look at the track of the "Ocean Shielf" from the time it left the harbor it went 15 knots, pretty much maximum speed, other than flank speed, straight towards that area where the pinger was. Made one turn back to the south and hit that two hours of pinging. So they had some credible information. It wasn't just the arc that they had. There was other information that said it was probably in that location.
The United States is very, very protective about any kind of technology sharing with any other country, even those that are allies. So if there was something in that area, I can certainly respect the reason that they wouldn't have said, yes, we had something that there had at the site of this. The evidence points there was information just simply because of the track and you could track that on marine tracking web site and it will show you where that ship went. It went right to that spot the very first try which is millions of a chance.
WHITFIELD: Yes. OK, Mary Schiano, thank you so much. Alan Diehl, David Soucie, thanks to all of you. Please stick around. Of course, we want to bring you back later on as the story continues to develop.
All right, so are the batteries on those black boxes dying? I'll ask an official of the company that actually made those pingers next.
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WHITFIELD: All right, the search for Flight 370 right now is focused on trying to detect the pings heard over the past weekend in the Indian Ocean. Crews heard at least four signals in the water, two last Saturday and two on Tuesday. Officials say all four were within 17 miles of each other, but they haven't heard anything since Tuesday and that may mean the batteries attached to those pingers could be dead.
I'm joined now by Thomas Altshuler. He is the vice president and group general manager of Teledyne Marine Systems, which develops underwater communication systems including those pingers. All right, good to see you. So, Thomas, all four signals are within 17 miles of each other. Can officials use that to determine the exact spot where that box is located?
THOMAS ALTSHULER, VP, TELEDYNE MARINE SYSTEMS: No, they can use that information to estimate the most likely general area, but sound moves very complexly in the water column. It tends to bend, to bounce off things. So really if you wanted to put a box around it, it's going to be much larger than that box they're looking at.
WHITFIELD: And how do they close in on that given that the way you described it, you know, sound can bounce around. The intensity of the sound doesn't necessarily mean that you're closer to that pinger device.
ALTSHULER: Well, that's why they want to find more acoustic events. The reason the sonobuoys were used, the reason that they continue to tow the pinger array is to really increase the number of hits in that general vicinity. That just tightens the box around the highest probability location. If you don't do that, then you have to open up the aperture and have a larger area search. As what stated just a little while ago, when you put underwater vehicles into the water to start doing that they're slow process and it becomes very complex and the search time goes up a lot.
WHITFIELD: And of course, all this is predicated on the life of the battery.
ALTSHULER: Yes, the battery life is critical and it's a complex problem. One of the things we've been talking about a lot over the last few weeks is the 30-day lifetime. That is the required lifetime by the Federal Aviation Administration for the two manufacturers to meet, and we have to meet that at the end of the 30 days, at the end of life when the pingers put on the air frame. It can be on the air frame for six years.
At the end of that, if it goes in the water we're supposed to last 30 days at a required output power, then we'll start to drop off, the pinger starts to decay in amplitude, maybe in frequency which is what they think is happening here. The ultimate lifetime depends so much on the battery storage, the exact design of the pinger, things like that.
WHITFIELD: And as we understand it, the sounds, those pings, were detected after that 30-day period. So we're talking about a real stroke of luck here that perhaps the batteries may have lasted a little bit longer than the 30 days even though the past four days now nothing has been heard.
ALTSHULER: It would have been very unlikely the batteries would have been dead the day after 30. It's what happens at 36, 37, 38, that begins to get a little bit out of the comfort zone of where we want to be.
WHITFIELD: OK. And we have a flight data recorder on the desk here, and we have the cylindrical portion is that pinger that we're talking about. It has a beacon on it. As soon as it hits water that's when it starts emitting that sound. The Australian prime minister has expressed optimism, a sense of confidence. Are you feeling that way as well?
ALTSHULER: Well, I think that there's probably more intelligence on what's going on than maybe --
WHITFIELD: You do?
ALTSHULER: Yes. I think in the last segment your guests were talking about the fact that the "Ocean Shield" went right to the spot where they were looking for the pinger and quickly acquired a target. You know, again, that's a needle in a haystack problem. That's a pretty good jump right on the needle. I think there's more intel.
WHITFIELD: All right, Thomas Altshuler, thanks so much for your expertise. Appreciate it.
ALTSHULER: Thank you.
WHITFIELD: Straight ahead, more on the search for Flight 370. Next, new details in that bus crash that killed high school students and chaperones. What witnesses say they saw before the terrifying collision.
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WHITFIELD: All right, we'll get back to Malaysia Flight 370. First there are other stories we're following. Here is Nick Valencia -- Nick.
NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Fred. There are plenty of news to catch you up on. Here are some of the headlines. Let's start in California where there are new developments today in that deadly bus crash just outside of Sacramento. CNN affiliate, KOBR, spoke with witnesses who said a FedEx truck was on fire before it rammed into the bus on Thursday. The bus was carrying prospective students to Humboldt State University to visit the campus. Ten people were killed, five of them high school students and more than 30 were injured. Our affiliate, KXTV, has an emotional reunion between a surviving student and his parents.
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GABRIEL ROXAS, KXTV REPORTER (voice-over): Prayers were answered for the Hoyt family as they arrived from San Diego at Glenn Medical Center.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good to see you.
ROXAS: On his way to freshman orientation at Humboldt State University, Harley Hoyt expected to see the first glimpse of his future but instead --
UNIDENTIFIED SURVIVOR: Chaos is what I saw.
ROXAS: Sitting in the back of the bus, Harley didn't see the FedEx truck coming, but he heard the screams of the others up front.
UNIDENTIFIED SURVIVOR: Once we hit the impact, the front of the bus was on fire. Smoke started coming through the whole bus.
ROXAS: Harley was able to break open an emergency window exit just in time.
UNIDENTIFIED SURVIVOR: I looked out the window and the FedEx bus was already on fire. We're going to blow up any second.
ROXAS: Getting out of the bus was just the beginning.
UNIDENTIFIED SURVIVOR: We all crossed Interstate 5. And after that everyone just like was laying on the grass, people were out of it, people were crying, people were pulling their hair, people were screaming.
ROXAS: Harley suffered only minor injuries, something his parents had to see to believe.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He did definitely had angel with him.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have a special gift given to us.
UNIDENTIFIED SURVIVOR: Lucky is an understatement. Blessed is an understatement. I don't know how to describe how I feel. I am so thankful I am here, grateful that I'm alive.
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VALENCIA: Just a horrific scene there. Our thoughts to those that are affected by that. That's Gabriel Roxas with our affiliate KXTV. Our thanks to him.
The first family's has dropped from last year. President Obama and the first lady have released their tax returns and recorded adjusted gross income of $481,000 for 2013, about 21 percent less than last year. Most of the income is from the president's salary, of course, the Obamas reported also reported about $100,000 in book sales. Their federal tax bill was $98,000. A hefty price there.
A special stop today for the Duchess of Cambridge during her royal tour of New Zealand visiting a children's hospice, Katherine, had a tea party with a 6-year-old girl whose mother has terminal cancer. Later, she joined husband, Prince William, at the Cambridge Town Hall, delivered flowers to a war memorial. You see the photos there. Baby George is not with the royal couple on this leg of their tour. Beautiful moment there with that tea party, though. I can't get enough of that.
WHITFIELD: I know. That is so sweet. And I'm sure if Baby George was there, he would upstage everybody.
VALENCIA: He would be the star.
WHITFIELD: Probably a good idea not to bring him to the tea party. All right, thanks so much, Nick. Appreciate that.
All right, straight ahead, what will it take to recover the black boxes from Flight 370? Our live coverage continues right after this.
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WHITFIELD: In the air and below the deposition, the flight for missing Flight 370 pushes into another day.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There have now been numerous transmissions from the black box or from what we are confident is the black box.
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WHITFIELD: But even with that optimism, time is running out to retrieve the black boxes before the signals fade and the loved ones of those on board want answers.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The real challenges in looking at this is that the fox is very much in charge of the henhouse, and it makes us question that every step taken.
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WHITFIELD: We'll have the latest information as it becomes available as our live coverage of the Mystery of Flight 370 continues right now.
Today crews desperately tried to detect more pings that officials believe are coming from the plane's black boxes. Search teams are focusing on an area about 16,000 square miles, about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. Fourteen ships and 10 planes were involved, and they're working more than 1,000 miles off the coast of Australia.
The Australian prime minister said even with the confidence the search is likely to continue for a while. As we've said, officials are racing to find those black boxes before the critical signals fall silent. That's not the only challenge for search teams. They also have to retrieve the devices from ocean waters nearly 3 miles deep. George Howell has more on how they manage to do that.
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GEORGE HOWELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Once you found a needle in a haystack, how do you extract it? That's what investigators are up against in the search for Flight 370 as they try to hone in on the black boxes.
LT. COL. MICHAEL KAY, ROYAL AIR FORCE (RETIRED): Authorities and search operators actually found the needle before they found the haystack. It's quite unprecedented.
HOWELL: Once you know where to look, how do you get down there some 14,000 feet below the Indian Ocean? PETER GOELZ, FORMER NTSB MANAGING DIRECTOR: There's one of two ways we do it. You either to it with a remote vehicle that is not tethered to a ship on the top or you do it with a tethered remote vehicle.
HOWELL: The former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board says similar types of vehicles went almost 13,000 feet deep during the search for the cockpit voice and data recorders from the 2009 Air France crash off the coast of Brazil. They were found about two years after the crash long after the pingers have died.
Underwater vehicles were also used to recovered artifacts from "The Titanic." But before sending the vehicles down, investigators must first map the terrain. A step that takes time and requires patience.
GOELZ: If it is in rocky or cavernous terrain, it could be challenging. But once the wreckage is identified, these vehicles and the operators have extraordinary capabilities.
HOWELL: Locating them is one thing, but pulling the black boxes from the incredible depths is another. The remote controlled vehicles armed with sonar, cameras, lighting, and remote control arms may sift through silt and potentially through wreckage in pitch dark waters.
GOELZ: It can be painstaking. It can be very difficult. Sometimes the boxes have separated from the wreckage. Sometimes the boxes have separated from their pingers. So this is going to be a long process.
HOWELL: George Howell, CNN, Chicago.
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WHITFIELD: All right, a very long process indeed. Let's bring in our panel again, Mary Schiavo, Alan Diehl, and David Soucie. Welcome back to all of you. We've seen in that piece it could take a very long time. Once they even locate the black boxes then you have to retrieve it and we're talking about potentially 3 miles deep.
So, Alan, this compares to what in you your view? We know from the Air France incident there was no retrieval of those black boxes. It took a very long time to retrieve the debris. How would you compare these two potential searches?
DIEHL: Well, in the Air France case it did take them 23 months. The pingers failed. The black boxes were recovered, Fredricka, but another accident was mentioned earlier by Mary was a South African 747 in the Western Indian Ocean. That was the deepest recovery of a black box. They only got the cockpit voice recorder. So this is going to be a real challenge depending on whether or not the aircraft is intact and, ironically, if the aircraft is intact, it may make the recovery of the black boxes more complicated.
WHITFIELD: More complicated? Why?
DIEHL: Because they're going to have to somehow get into the fuselage of the tail area of the wreckage and try to extract the black boxes. I think they'll try to get the black boxes first before they make any decisions about attempting to raise the wreckage.
WHITFIELD: Wow, and so if we are talking about and this is a big old potential, if indeed it were all intact, this plane were intact, they were to locate it, et cetera, Alan, what kind of apparatus would be used to try to pull it up from the ocean floor? Would it have to be taken apart and then reassembled once on land? I mean, what device is big enough to lift an entire 777 if, indeed, it were intact under water?
DIEHL: Well, Fredricka, there are devices. You remember the Russian submarine that thing weighed hundreds of times more than the 777. So there are devices that can cable, if you will, this thing to the surface. They may decide after listening to the black boxes they don't need to recover everything. There's going to, of course, be a big push to bring up the fuselage because of the human remains. Obviously we know there's pressure to do that. There is equipment and this is not my field, but I certainly have read about recoveries of much larger devices and aircraft, submarines, et cetera.
WHITFIELD: So Mary, are you in agreement that the most important is the black boxes. If, indeed, it were the fuselage, all that Alan just explained, the most important to retrieve the black boxes and this really could just be a watery grave, the rest is left.
SCHIAVO: Well, yes. Alan is right. They will get the black boxes first, but in TW 800 they use that had equipment of the U.S. Navy's ships for raising scuttled submarines the grasp and they have cables to lift heavy stuff out of the ocean. If they had to bring up the whole plane, they could. They'll want the boxes first to see if it's necessary or even desirable to bring up the whole plane.
WHITFIELD: David, is it time to start sending some of these assets to the area that would be part of the retrieval on a mass scale like this?
SOUCIE: Well, it takes a long time to get the crews prepared and to get all the equipment into one place. You know, I'm not in Perth so I can't speak to it directly, but I have not heard any reports from any of the CNN reporters we have there that any of this type of equipment has been brought to the scene. So it takes months, literally months to get that stuff ready to go. At the very soonest it would be two or three weeks.
So I'm surprised they haven't started getting some equipment there that would help with that, at least the retrieval of the box, as was said before about how you retrieve the whole aircraft. That's a whole different set of equipment and I don't think they would be prepared to do that, of course. At least something there that can get the black box would be sensible.
WHITFIELD: Would it be your feeling that if it were intact it wouldn't be necessary to bring the whole fuselage up, the whole plane up if you have the black boxes and the black boxes tell the story? Do you need the rest of the plane to fill in the blanks of the story?
SOUCIE: You know, it depends on everything that you find. The purpose of an investigation is not only to find out what happened but why it happened. So you keep investigating and obtaining clues and evidence to the point which you can answer that reasonably for the families and to prevent it from happening again. So if the clues that are -- that we need to find out why are found within the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder after retrieval, there really is no reason to.
And then it's up to the matter of the families who will have a definite something to say about whether the bodies of the remains of the people would be left where they are in place or retrieved. So there's a lot of complications that go from that point forward but, again, back to just answering the question why, the only reason you would have to get the whole aircraft up is the clues we needed were not found in the evidence.
WHITFIELD: All right, David Soucie, Mary Schiavo, Alan Diehl, thank you. Appreciate it. We're going to continue to dig deep into angle of this search for the missing plane today. But next the dramatic moment made when the "Blade Runner," Oscar Pistorius, got on the stand in his own defense. He says he's not a murderer. Why the prosecutor says his story just doesn't add up next.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OSCAR PISTORIUS: I sat over Reeva and I cried. And I don't know how long. I don't know how long I was there for. She wasn't breathing.
JUDGE: We'll take an adjournment. Court will adjourn.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: It was indeed an emotional, dramatic week as Olympic star, Oscar Pistorius, took the stand in his murder trial. He broke down sobbing as he recalled the moment he realized that it was his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, who he shot in his home last year. Pistorius says he thought he was shooting at an intruder who was hiding in the bathroom and he didn't know it was his girlfriend instead behind the door.
But the prosecution says Pistorius shot Steenkamp after a heated argument and the courtroom got the tense as prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, grilled the "Blade Runner" during cross examination.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GERRIE NEL, PROSECUTOR: You said you were vulnerable, you felt vulnerable, am I right?
PISTORIUS: That's correct, my lady.
NEL: But you approached -- that doesn't make sense. In fact you knew that Reeva was behind the door and you shot at her. That is the only thing that makes sense. You shot at her knowing that she was behind that door. PISTORIUS: That's not true, my lady.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: All right, I am joined now by our brilliant legal guys. Avery Friedman in Cleveland and Richard Herman in Las Vegas. Good to see you, Gentlemen. It's been way too long since last we were all together. So here we are.
What a riveting case, this Oscar Pistorius case is filled with lots of emotion, still lots of questions. So, you know, after four it's on the stand do you think Oscar Pistorius' testimony is working for him or against him?
AVERY FRIEDMAN, CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY: I have to tell you, Fredricka, I always believed the story here. But this cross-examination by Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor, has been, and you used the word, riveting. This has been extraordinary. The idea of Pistorius being at the door in front of the bathroom 10 feet away shouting at the intruders and he said, well, wouldn't she have responded? N I mean, normally people would say, no, no, it's me. I'm in here.
WHITFIELD: He did testify and said that he was yelling out her name and asking her, are you OK? And get down but then there was no response before he started unloading his weapon.
FRIEDMAN: It just made no sense and I thought Nel did a tremendous job. He also really was successful in chipping away at Pistorius' credibility. There was an incident in a restaurant where he shot a Glock and he said, well, the gun just went off. Pistorius said the gun just went off. Fredricka, that's impossible. If you've ever fired a Glock, there's a trigger within a trigger. It doesn't just go off. These past two days have crescendoed leading up to what we're going to see on Monday, which will probably be the last day of the cross-examination.
WHITFIELD: OK. And, Richard, the prosecution said Pistorius was a temperamental gun loving hot head. Did the prosecution do a good job of establishing that?
RICHARD HERMAN, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: That's pretty well been established throughout the course of the trial. It's fascinating to watch the difference between our criminal justice system and our procedures and theirs because this prosecutor is basically doing a summation as he's cross-examining Pistorius, and he's commenting on him and he's calling him a liar and it's all over the place. It's just fascinating to me.
And it's just inconceivable that Pistorius would even take the stand because in a case like this probably in the U.S. no defendant would get up there and testify. It's amazing. And credibility and reliability are strong issues and that's what they're trying to attack, tripping up his version of events. And if he said to her, Reeva, I think someone is in the bathroom, go down and call the police. He supposedly whispered that to her, then he went to the bathroom door, started shooting, and it took four shots, Fred, it was the last shot that hit her in the head. There's testimony that there was screaming -- a woman screaming before that fourth shot. This guy is in trouble here, I would think. One other quick thing.
A dichotomy here, there is about 52 million people in South Africa and of the 52 million about 5 million are white and of the 5 million about 250,000 are ones who have been repressing blacks and women for many, many years. This judge, this female judge, is now going to make a decision on --
WHITFIELD: That is an incredible irony, I must say. That is remarkable irony.
HERMAN: Pistorius and his lawyer, very interesting. That's all I'm bringing up to show that.
WHITFIELD: It is interesting. You know what, Gentlemen, let's also listen to just one more clip of the cross-examination of Pistorius where apparently he's getting confused about the sequence of events. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PISTORIUS: My lady, I'm getting confused with this accidentally. When I try to explain myself I'm told to say whether it's an accident or not. I've said time and time again what I perceived and what I thought. I don't understand. If it was put to me yesterday that it was by accident and it wasn't by accident, I don't understand, my lady. I'm saying that I didn't intend to shoot. I was pointed at the door because that's where I believed somebody was. I heard a noise and I didn't have time to think. It was an accident.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: All right, so, Avery, he says he's confused, but is he also confusing the court?
FRIEDMAN: Well, actually the judge and, again, you have a black judge, two black assessors making the decision, I don't buy, by the way, the idea what the split in the country is. I think this is a renowned judge who will do the fair thing. The judge said to him, if you're tired, if you're confused, you need to tell me that. You notice in the clip he references my lady. He's talking to the judge.
WHITFIELD: While the prosecutor is asking him the question but, yes, he's referring to the judge.
HERMAN: But that's smart. That's a good thing, Fred. In cases like this, it's a rule of thumb, if the government witnesses make mistakes, jurors usually forgive them. But if a defendant gets up on the stand and you can trip up a defendant and catch them in a lie, usually the jurors are not sympathetic at all and they lose all credibility. Here that's what the prosecution is trying to do for this judge, trip him up, show that he's not credible, this was not an accident. He knew full well she was in there.
FRIEDMAN: On material and nonmaterial things.
HERMAN: Consistent the government's version they were in a fight, that she locked herself in there for fear of him and he went after her. That's their position.
FRIEDMAN: That's the story, right.
WHITFIELD: All right, it's a fascinating case. Still more to come on that. Avery, Richard, always good to see you. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Sorry we're not seeing you more, but we will see you again soon. Thanks so much. You can catch the legal guys every Saturday at about this time to give us the most intriguing cases, their take on the most intriguing cases, that is. All right, thanks so much, guys.
All right, straight ahead, how much longer will it take to get the black boxes from the missing Malaysian jet next?
Also, they've taken to the links in Georgia. It is Masters time, but Tiger and Phil are nowhere to be found. It's all about Bubba these days.
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WHITFIELD: All right, big weekend on the links. Tomorrow a new Masters champion will be crowned. Bubba Watson, in fact, today is on top of the leader board at the Masters. CNN's Rachel Nichols is live at the legendary Augusta National in Georgia. Rachel, no Tiger, no Phil, but we have Bubba.
RACHEL NICHOLS, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. And Bubba very popular here, of course, went to the University of Georgia and he won this tournament two years ago. What's interesting is when he came off the course yesterday, he was talking about how being that popular was a bit of a problem for him last year.
That he had all these responsibilities as a defending champion, responsibilities to sponsors and he just couldn't focus on his golf game. He said this time, this year, he feels so much more free and he's playing like it. He let off a string of five birdies yesterday and as he said overall, leading again he said not bad for a guy nicknamed Bubba whose mom had to work two jobs just to let him play golf. He said he's pretty happy.
WHITFIELD: People are happy for him and hopefully we'll see a little Bubba-licious stuff from him. Why no Tiger and Phil? Are we talking injuries again?
NICHOLS: Well, Phil Mickelson came this week and he said he felt that healthy as he went through the first two rounds, but he just did not make the cut. He wasn't sharp enough. He was funny afterward. As punishment to himself he was going to force himself to watch the rest of the tournament on television so he could see what he was missing. Tiger on the other hand is an injury issue. He withdrew from this tournament because of a back injury and it's one of the latest in a string of injuries that's been plaguing him for the past few years. He's still ranked number one, will probably lose that number one ranking by the time he gets back.
The question remains, is Tiger Woods going to ever be the Tiger Woods who won 14 majors? Are we going to see that Tiger again? It's been six years since he won a major. It's not going to happen again this weekend.
WHITFIELD: Wow, hard to believe it's been that long. Perhaps he already reached his peak but, you never know, right? All right, Rachel -- and you never know what could happen at Augusta. I mean, we're talking Bubba today, but everything could turn around tomorrow. So we'll be checking in with you periodically. Thanks so much, Rachel. Of course, you'll want to join Rachel at 2:30 Eastern today for "All Access At Augusta," a "Bleacher Report" special that's coming up.
And at the top of the hour, new developments in the hunt for the missing Malaysia airliner. Why is Australia's prime minister so confident that searchers are in the right area? We'll have a live report.
And don't forget to watch Morgan Spurlock "INSIDE MAN," the season premiers tomorrow at 10 p.m. Eastern Time. Morgan becomes a paparazzi right here on CNN.
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