State v. Li, A-1834-19

OK, let's check the evidence the State presented that Defendant poisoned her husband:

[A] contentious divorce between defendant Tianle Li and her husband, Xiaoye Wang; 

defendant's prior threats to poison her husband; 

defendant's access to thallium through her work at Bristol-Myers Squibb; her initial denial of access to thallium; records showing the thallium bottles ordered by defendant were returned to storage with less content than when defendant received them despite other records showing defendant never used any thallium in the chemical reactions she performed at work; 

articles about thallium found in defendant's laptop case; 

defendant's booking of one-way flights to China for her and her son; and 

defendant's admission to her cellmate that she had poisoned her husband with the thallium she obtained from work, 

[Paragraphination adjusted.]

 Several things struck me from this list:

1. Don't go around telling the intended victim, "I'm totally going to poison you." Because then, when the victim keels over, people totally think you poisoned him.
2. Please do not research your intended murder method on the internet. That is the sort of thing that cops check for. (This is not an endorsement of unresearched murder methods, either.)
3. The defendant knows chemistry and couldn't think of something better to use than thallium? This is what Wikipedia says about thallium: "Because of its historic popularity as a murder weapon, thallium has gained notoriety as "the poisoner's poison" and "inheritance powder" (alongside arsenic)." Yeah, no one doing an autopsy is ever going to check for that.

(I don't fault her for her alleged admission to her cellmate because that's the type of things that cellmates state whether or not it actually happened.)