Original subtitles

KELLY SIEGLER: On a quiet night in Houston, Texas,

an all-American family is ripped apart

when a former NFL player and his beautiful wife

are brutally murdered inside their own home.

[siren wailing]

As more and more details

of this grisly murder came to light,

this facade of the picture-perfect family

starts to come apart, and the family starts

to point fingers at each other.

It was a complicated case.

A number of prosecutors get involved,

including two that I helped train,

one now a defense lawyer,

who would battle it out against each other.

Just firing a weapon? You know what his intent is.

Whatever the story is, figure it out.

Neither of these lawyers is gonna back down

as they fight each other

and they fight for justice and truth in the courtroom.

[theme music playing]

[ominous music]

[clock ticking]

[phone ringing]

[sirens wailing]

As HPD arrives, AJ turns off the alarm system

as he meets them at the front door

with his little sister, Kayra.

[police dispatch]

At that point, the number one priority

is to get AJ and his little sister

outside of the house and to safety.

Their initial patrol officers swept the house

and discovered there was no sign of forced entry.

And as they were searching, officers did not find

anyone else in the home.

Then they enter the bedroom

of AJ Armstrong and Kayra's parents,

and they see Dawn and Antonio Senior,

who had been shot.

As soon as I pull up, an officer proceeds to tell me

we have two victims upstairs in bed with GSW to the head,

which is a gunshot wound to the head.

We enter the room.

Closest to the door is Mrs. Armstrong.

And I immediately go to her first.

I just go to checking pulses

and looking for a chest rise and fall.

Then once I didn't feel anything for about

15, 20 seconds, I realized that she's no longer with us.

Immediately after that, I'm walking around the bed

to Mr. Armstrong's side and he had a pillow over his head.

I take the pillow off and he's still alive.

And he's still breathing. He's still trying to live.

So we go into rescue mode.

He has blood everywhere, and you can see

the entry wound from his gunshot wound to the head.

Once we get Antonio onto the stretcher,

I have a young gentleman come up to me,

he looks me in my eyes

and he says, is he going to be okay?

And you can tell that he's worried.

He didn't say who he was at the time.

He looked like a family member and I just told him,

we're doing the best we can for him.

While the police are searching the house, AJ Armstrong

calls his brother Josh, who lives right down the street,

to tell him about what had just happened.

I had gotten woken up by Josh coming in, yelling.

I was half asleep still like, what is going on?

He said that his younger brother AJ had called him and told him

that someone was in his parents' house a couple streets away.

Josh told me to stay at the apartment,

and then he ran over there.

DISPATCHER: All units to the downtown core.

The homicide detectives secure the scene

and they look around, and they see

shell casings in the bedroom.

They also noticed that there was a bullet hole

in the ceiling right outside the parents' bedroom,

which was under AJ Armstrong's bedroom.

They notice as they sweep the kitchen that there is a gun

on the countertop that could be the murder weapon.

When HPB examined the gun they believed to be

the murder weapon, they didn't find any fingerprints,

but they were able to determine that that's

the same gun that belonged to Antonio Armstrong Sr.

and he normally kept it in a bedside table.

JORDAN: Also on the counter, there is a scratched-out note

that says, "We've been watching you for a long time."

It's like something out of a movie.

That only adds to the mystery,

because who would want Dawn and Antonio Sr. dead?

It was hard to live in Houston, Texas

and not know about the Armstrongs.

Antonio Sr. was an all-American

college football player who gets drafted in the NFL.

He parlays that into owning gyms in Houston.

His wife is beloved in the community,

and they send their kids to the most prestigious school

in Houston, the Kinkaid School.

They're the kind of folks you would want to be jealous of,

but nobody could be because they were so darn charismatic.

Antonio and Dawn were the greatest people,

really caring.

Josh and his mother had a great bond.

The family just seemed so happy, so close together.

JORDAN: After the attack,

Antonio Sr. was on life support for several hours,

and sadly, he passed that evening.

But he had never woken up.

He was never able to say what happened.

PILON: Josh was so confused.

People were very sad.

Antonio and Dawn were just all-around great people.

SIEGLER: The police interview AJ, his little sister Kayra,

and the older brother, Josh,

who arrives at the scene a little later.

Based on that interview and the evidence they retrieve

from the crime scene, the investigators are suspicious

about what happened that night.

So AJ Armstrong is taken down to HPD

and questioned into the early hours of the morning.

In a 16-minute 911 tape, he never mentions

that there is a masked man in the house.

Then hours later in his statement says, oh,

there was a masked man in the house and I saw him running.

Josh recently had found out that

he was not biological to Antonio Sr.

Antonio was his stepdad.

He felt like he was kind of the black sheep of the family.

Investigators noticed a burn mark at the top of the stair.

That was his first attempt to kill his parents.

While AJ Armstrong Jr. is at HPD,

being questioned about the murder of his parents,

AJ makes the surprising admission that

he saw the suspect leaving his parents' bedroom.

In a 16-minute 911 tape, he never mentions

that there is a masked man in the house.

Then hours later in his statement says, oh,

there was a masked man in the house and I saw him running.

That just doesn't add up.

HPD pays very close attention to the statement

and the details of what AJ Armstrong

tells them that night.

That, along with the 911 call

that AJ made that night, and all of the other things

that HPD saw with their own eyes at the scene,

AJ's story didn't add up.

On top of that, the gun that was recovered

at the crime scene that belonged to Antonio Sr.

was tested and they were able to identify that as being

the gun that fired the bullets into Antonio and Dawn's bodies.

Based on all that they learned, they arrested AJ Armstrong,

and he was subsequently indicted for capital murder.

The family was completely behind AJ

since day one. And Josh was very angry.

He said they have the wrong person.

He didn't do this.

SIEGLER: I remember when this case happened,

because the school where AJ went

is where my daughter Samantha went to school,

and my daughter Kelsey went to school with Josh at St. Francis.

So we all knew the kids, the boys.

We all knew of the parents.

Everybody knew somebody involved in this case,

whether it was the defendant or one of the victims.

At Antonio and Dawn's funeral, I could really see

how much so many people cared about them.

People were very sad.

It was really hard to see Josh like that.

I've never seen anybody that sad, that hurt.

I just remember he was crying for a long time,

and I didn't really know what to do,

other than just be there for him.

♪♪♪

I was brought in to represent AJ

when Chris Collings, my co-counsel in this case,

called me.

Chris Collings was

Antonio Sr.'s personal lawyer.

When I spoke with AJ's family members about AJ

and I learned about AJ, I was like,

there's no way this kid could have committed this crime.

It just doesn't make any sense.

SIEGLER: Rick Detoto is now

a very well-known defense attorney.

But before that, he worked at the D.A.'s office,

and that's where I first met him.

Just like this stud guy walking around,

real cocky, not intimidated by anyone.

When I heard that AJ Armstrong

hired Rick Detoto as his lawyer,

I thought, ooh, good move.

DETOTO: AJ's initially charged in juvenile court.

And one of the things that prosecutors

in juvenile court can do in Texas is determine

if they want to certify someone as an adult.

Prosecutors filed a petition to certify him.

We had a hearing.

The judge in the juvenile court certified him as an adult.

Because AJ Armstrong was only 16 years old,

he is able to be released on bond,

and he's placed in the custody

of his grandmother, Kay Winston.

Before the trial, there's still evidence

that can be gathered and collected to get the case

even tighter and cleaner and stronger.

In the weeks following the murder, HPD begins

putting together its case, along with the prosecutors,

which includes the evidence

they retrieved from the crime scene,

as well as the alarm records and cell phone data.

Text messages show that the family relationship,

from the outside, it's perceived as good,

but it was volatile from within.

TRASK: Through the text messages,

we learned that there were issues

between AJ and his parents.

There were events leading up to the night of the murders.

He was using money on drugs.

And more than anything, I think his mother was upset

by the constant lying.

It was a boiling pot from inside the four walls of that house.

But it's actually AJ Armstrong's actions

the days before this murder

that was one big piece of our puzzle

to point to one direction of who killed the Armstrongs.

TRASK: He fired a gun in his room,

threw out two pillows down to the second floor.

Also, investigators noticed a burn mark

at the top of the stair.

Well, it smells like gasoline on the carpet.

AJ said he had just dropped a match.

But when you look at it, clearly that is not

what would happen if somebody just dropped a match.

[eerie music]

They found a bottle in his room, they tested it,

and it came back to having gasoline inside the bottle.

JORDAN: If you look at where that burn mark is,

it's at the top of the staircase,

right outside his parents' bedroom.

And so if that lights up the house,

the parents can't get out.

And in fact, Dawn sends a text message

to her other son Josh, who lives down the street,

saying A .J. tried to burn the house down.

It's no surprise, when you put it all together,

that he ended up in that bedroom,

shooting both his parents.

REPORTER: Defense attorney Rick Detoto

says the 16-year-old is a victim in this case,

not the perpetrator.

He's a great kid from a good family,

and there's absolutely no motive why this happened.

It doesn't make sense.

It was really a brilliant, I believe,

move on the part of the defense attorney,

is to try this case out into the public

before it ever hit the courtroom.

That created a feeling in the community of,

is this kid being railroaded?

While AJ Armstrong has the support

of most everyone in his family,

especially his grandparents, that same family turns on,

surprisingly, another member of their very own family.

DETOTO: Josh recently had found out

that Antonio was his stepdad.

And when Josh found out

that he was not biological to Antonio Sr.,

it affected him.

According to the family, there was some jealousy

with Josh, the way they were treating AJ

and the way they were treating Kayra,

and how he felt like he was kind of

the black sheep of the family.

So we presented Josh Armstrong

as an alternative suspect in this case.

SIEGLER: In the months leading up to the trial,

AJ Armstrong's defense lawyer, Rick Detoto,

made all kinds of statements in the news

that AJ's half-brother,

Josh Armstrong, could be the true killer.

The defense's strategy was to present Josh as

the black sheep of the family, the half-brother

not even fully related to Antonio Armstrong Sr.,

not blood.

Before the murders, they spoke every single day.

They loved Josh. Josh loved them.

That was his real dad to him.

Josh and I had been together for

a little bit over a year before the murders.

We met in college. We just connected so well.

And probably within that month, we started dating.

But Josh's behavior after the murders completely changed.

At first, it was just depression.

But then a week or two later is when

I started seeing the paranoia come out.

He felt that if somebody went after the parents,

what's to stop them from going after him and I?

I don't think that Josh knew that his family

was saying that he's the one who did it.

SIEGLER: Despite all of the defense's theories

that Josh Armstrong was the true killer,

he was never truly considered a suspect by HPD,

because at the time of the murder,

Josh always had a hard, firm alibi,

that he was with his girlfriend, Hannah.

The lead prosecutor was John Brewer.

He was assisted by Farheen Ansari,

and also Lester Blizzard.

The prosecution leaned a lot into motive.

They were trying to get into the mind of AJ Armstrong.

They are presenting a lot of evidence

regarding grades and drug use

and the taking away of vehicles,

trying to pin basically the motive

in front of the jury as to why

AJ Armstrong killed both of his parents.

He had bailed out of the prestigious Kinkaid School.

His car was taken away from him,

and he couldn't see his girlfriend.

To a teenager, that's their entire world.

The people who took all these things away from him,

they ended up dead.

Other than motive, the strongest evidence the prosecution has

are his actions leading up to the murder.

The prosecution is also presenting

a lot of evidence regarding the alarm records.

JORDAN: The records said that the night of the murders,

the alarm was set, the door was locked,

there was no sign of forced entry.

DETOTO: So the prosecution was arguing,

because the alarm system was on

and the record showed that no one came in

or came out, that there was no way

anyone else could have done it except for AJ

What they didn't know was that Josh had access

to the house, and we had an alarm expert that could show

that the way the zones were set up in that house,

the door coming into the garage, if it was cracked,

we had testimony from the witnesses that that door

frequently wouldn't close all the way,

it would leave the front door open,

meaning that you could open and close the door

without the alarm going off.

And we were able to call that expert during the trial

to show that that's a problem with the alarm system,

in a way someone could get in and out

and not trigger the alarm.

Even though it's unlikely that two doors would have been

open at the same time so that the alarm wouldn't go off,

the defense was able to point out

that nobody had actually looked into that possibility,

because they said from the beginning,

HPD zeroed in on AJ as their only suspect.

In 11 minutes of going into that house,

before anything, they made up their mind, he did it.

There's no physical evidence that ties AJ

to the homicide. There's no DNA, there's no blood,

there's no hair fibers, there's nothing.

There's no blood on the gun, there's no blood in his room,

there's no blood on his clothes.

So there was no physical evidence

in a very bloody scene in the bedroom

that linked AJ to the crime,

except his presence in the house.

TRASK: The jury deliberates for several days,

and they're unable to reach a verdict.

Trial comes back as a mistrial.

There were eight jurors who believed he was guilty

beyond a reasonable doubt,

and there were four who didn't believe

the state proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

JORDAN: It was that trial team's belief that the jurors

were saying, it's not like we don't think he did it,

but there were people in the room

that knew the consequences,

that they were going to send someone to prison

for the rest of their life on a crime they did at 16,

and with the family supporting him

and people believing in him,

they just emotionally couldn't do it.

DETOTO: I was very relieved.

Anytime our clients get to go home is a good day,

but I also knew it was going to come back.

When a jury is hung and a mistrial is declared,

the usual answer is, we're going to try it again.

The difference in this case

is that you have the family of the victims,

who also happen to be the family of the defendant.

They do not believe the case should be tried again.

We can't move on with our lives,

and we can't forget what we've been through.

With all that pressure coming to bear

on the DA's office, what's going to happen next?

♪♪♪

When the trial against AJ Armstrong

for the murder of his parents was hung,

and a mistrial was declared,

the DA's office makes the decision

to try the case for a second time,

because when you have two people who are murdered

and the state of the evidence points to one suspect,

you're going to try that case again.

After that first trial, some of the trial team

had gone to other DAs' office,

and so they were looking for a new team to try the case.

I picked up the case in between trial one and trial two.

I knew that it was a very contested case,

and so I knew it was going to be an uphill battle

when I took over the case.

And Ryan asked me to join him

to try the case for the second trial.

This is already a very compelling case,

and it's captured all of our attention.

I'm especially paying attention to it,

because I know the lawyers so well.

Both John Jordan and Rick Detoto

worked at the DA's office, and I helped train them.

John Jordan's style is a little more dramatic.

He very much likes the whole

theater courtroom part of a trial.

And knowing those guys, they are both very ready

to duke it out against each other in the courtroom.

I have a great deal of respect for Rick Detoto.

He is a tremendous advocate.

Juries love him.

The problem is, we had the truth on our side.

We kind of went into the second trial,

even though we were kind of new.

We didn't know the case like

the defense team, who had had it since day one.

We're like, okay, well,

we just have to get a better jury,

and the evidence is great, and so we're going to try

the case somewhat similarly, and we trust the evidence enough

that we are confident that we're going to get

a guilty verdict.

It's now three years later since the first trial,

and in that time, AJ Armstrong has grown up.

He is now married to his longtime girlfriend Kate.

He has a son of his own.

He looks a lot older.

This is going to be a whole different

kind of appearance that he portrays

in front of a jury this time compared to last time.

In the opening statement, we recognize it's hard

for rational, non-sociopathic people

to get their head around the idea of

what seems like normal teenage problems can lead to homicide.

So what we did is we told the jury,

you may never know why he did it,

but you're going to be very confident

and know he did it, based on the evidence.

So we stuck to his actions,

his words, and the alarm records.

JORDAN: In the first trial, the defense claimed that

doors could be opened and the alarm not go off.

And it is the state's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt

that the night of the murders, that house was secure.

The alarm system is complex, and what we learned is

in the first trial, neither the state

nor the defense had the complete records.

They had records from ADT alarm system.

ADT is the hardware side of this case, but they contract

with a software company who monitors those records.

And that company is Alarm.com.

And so when we got Alarm.com's records

prior to trial two, we see now

that there is way more activity

that can be determined within the records,

showing that nobody went in and out of the house

and that the alarm system did not trigger,

did not go off the night of the murders.

JORDAN: So we have an expert from ADT to explain the alarm.

My co-counsel, Chris Collings, was able to determine

on cross-examination that there was a minimum

of like, 77 errors in the records of the alarm system.

Chris was able to go step by step with that alarm expert

and show to the jury that the records were accurate.

And it was difficult to argue

that no one could have gotten in,

and no one could have gotten out.

TRASK: The defense really leaned into Josh

in the second trial.

In the first trial, they throw him out as a possible suspect.

By the time trial two comes around,

they have put all their cards in the Josh Armstrong basket

as an alternate suspect.

What we brought to the second trial

that we didn't bring in the first trial

was we got additional records

regarding the alternative suspect's mental health history.

And these records were extremely detailed.

We needed to present them to show the jury

that the mental health issues occurred

before the murders, not just after.

This is the only case I've ever tried in my career

where we had to essentially be a prosecutor

and a defense attorney in the same trial.

We were fighting to convict somebody

we know is guilty, and at the same time,

fighting to exonerate somebody we know is innocent.

JORDAN: What we had to deal with in the second trial

that the first team didn't, is the court had ruled

that they could put forward

Josh Armstrong's mental illness

as an alternative suspect theory.

Not only did we have a very good expert witness

to rebut that, and a psychiatrist,

but we had the person who knew Josh the best,

his live-in girlfriend, Hannah Pilon.

Hannah Pilon testifies as to

where Josh was the night of the murders,

and she also provided a lot of--

correcting the things that

the family was trying to portray about Josh.

I testified at the trial because I felt like

I needed to be the one to say, this is all not right.

Josh was never like this before this happened,

before his parents were killed.

There was never any sign of mental illness.

There was no sign of depression.

He had a bright future.

He loved his family.

And what AJ's lawyers did up there was disgusting.

Watching how all this played out,

the way she brought it to life for the jury,

the way she defended the honor of Josh,

good for her, good for her.

I hope she's proud of herself, because we all are.

When the jury went out for deliberations

in the second trial, I was as confident as I always am.

And as the deliberations lingered,

and as it went on and on,

started getting worried, they came back.

They, too, could not reach a verdict.

And I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

But this time, it flipped.

It went from eight not guilty to four guilty.

So when they came back and there were more jurors

for not guilty than guilty,

that-- it was tough to recover from that.

It is. It's somewhat humiliating.

We're going in the wrong direction.

Well, what are we doing here? It was devastating.

SIEGLER: After that second trial ended in a hung jury,

you have two prosecutors

who've just lost trial number two,

and a decision has to be made,

do we try this case for a third time?

The elected DA is the person who makes that decision.

So when John Jordan and Ryan Trask made the commitment

that they wanted to try this case a third time,

and do it again because they knew

what the evidence was, that's the representation

they made to their boss, and that's the decision

that was made because they believed in this case.

DETOTO: But then there was a groundswell

of supporters for AJ

Things started gaining momentum where people were like,

enough is enough. Leave this kid alone.

You sent your best prosecutors. You sent all your evidence.

You sent hundreds of witnesses.

You spent millions of dollars

to go after this young man,

and you can't get him. Let him go.

♪♪♪

SIEGLER: After that second trial

ended in a hung jury,

John Jordan and Ryan Trask made the commitment

that they wanted to try this case a third time,

and do it again because they knew

what the evidence was, but in the first trial,

the split was 8-4 for guilty, and in the second trial,

the split was 8-4 for not guilty.

So the prosecutors knew they were facing

even more pressure from the court of public opinion

to try and make sure they got a verdict in the third trial.

We talked to some of the jurors, and sure enough,

they told us the same thing that first jury said.

That it's not that we don't believe in the evidence.

It's that they didn't want to convict him,

knowing the consequences of life imprisonment.

That started our strategy for that third trial.

We were going to do everything differently,

because a fool does the same thing over and over again.

So we were ready for the third trial,

and presenting our case in a very different way.

TRASK: We had been to

the Armstrong house several times,

and one thing that John said to me

the last time we went,

he said, do you ever notice how narrow

walking through this hall would be,

and how close the staircase is

to the doors to the Armstrongs' room?

And John had a brilliant idea.

When I was a young prosecutor, I happened to actually

be in the courtroom watching the Susan Wright trial,

where Kelly Siegler brought the bed

into the courtroom and demonstrated the crime.

SIEGLER: And I attack at the head area first...

When AJ Armstrong,

in his statement to law enforcement that night,

says he saw a masked man

coming from his parents' bedroom

as he was on the stairs,

you can see how close in proximity

he would have been to this alleged masked man

is very important.

So how do you do that? Well, you build a staircase.

We are taught at the DA's office

to make the crime come alive in front of the jury.

We all learn that.

When you do that, you put the jury there,

where they can't avoid seeing what happened.

JORDAN: When we were preparing for trial three,

we had solicited as one of the foremost experts,

in blood spatter as well as scene reconstruction,

Celli Rossi, from the Montgomery County

DA's office, who's helped me on cases before.

She spent hours to take measurements and pictures.

And she came in and she did all the measurements.

So that staircase is the exact same dimensions.

JORDAN: We placed the staircase

away from the end of the jury box,

so they would see how close in proximity

AJ Armstrong would have been,

if you believe his statement,

on the staircase to this alleged made up assailant

who had a mask on.

And so two things would have happened,

since it's so close,

literally three feet and three inches,

is one, being that close,

the assailant would have killed AJ Armstrong,

and not allowed a survivor in the home.

Or two.

The very first words out of your mouth

when you call 911 immediately afterwards was,

"There's a masked man in my house."

I can't run from it.

It was an excellent point by them.

JORDAN: In the very way that the first two juries

tried to avoid that cold reality of how horrible this crime was,

we were not going to let them do it.

They were going to have to see it.

They were going to have to confront it.

Well, now we're going to bring the bedroom into the courtroom.

So we set up a mock bedroom.

ROSSI: I thought it was important for the jury to see,

if there was an unknown intruder

that came into the home in the middle of the night

to retrieve Antonio Armstrong's firearm,

that they would have to come into the bedroom,

walk around the king-size bed over to the nightstand,

go into the bottom drawer, remove the firearm,

assume that it's loaded, come back around

to Dawn's side of the bed,

and fire four shots in the middle of the night.

I think that out of all of the assumptions

that it was an unknown masked intruder,

to do that was just ludicrous.

Reconstructing the bedroom was

straight out of the Kelly Siegler playbook.

It's effective, but it's like

show and lights and smoke and fog and mirrors.

I think it was just overdramatic.

When John Jordan started to build out the stairwell

and the bedroom, I heard all about it.

I got a lot of text messages and phone calls,

guess what Jordan's doing,

you know where he's getting it from.

So, you know, it makes me proud

that he thought to do that.

SIEGLER: I've been called dramatic and theatrical

a few times in my life,

but if it works and the jury understands

what we're trying to say, then that's what matters.

JORDAN: After we presented a reconstruction

of the crime scene, one of the things we decided

to do differently was how we presented the alarm records.

In the second trial, we had one representative,

an expert from ADT, to explain the alarm.

What we learned in trial two is that because the expert

from ADT did not understand the software from Alarm.com,

he did not have answers for some of the things

that were being asked of him

by the defense attorney on cross-examination.

So in trial three, we now bring the expert

that understands all of the alarm records,

Jason DaCosta, who was the VP for Alarm.com.

And we went through for hours, and we went through everything.

And he testified to a lot of the things

that the defense was trying to say,

too, were errors in the alarm records.

He could turn around and say, that's not an error.

That's how the alarm records should be reporting.

And so he was a great help to us

in trial three, bringing the truth to the jury

about what the alarm records really meant.

DETOTO: In closing, what I wanted the jury to feel

was everything that I've tried to get them

to feel in the first two trials.

Police did a horrible job. They narrowed in on AJ.

But I got really aggressive.

This is a reckless prosecution. Only you can stop it.

Only you can tell them, enough is enough!

TRASK: In closing argument, I used the alarm records.

I tied in how voluminous those records were.

And then I showed a text to the jury.

It was something that Dawn had sent

to her son AJ, months before her murder.

And it said, the alarm doesn't lie.

You lie.

After two hung juries and an exhausting third trial,

the prosecutors are making their final argument

to the jury in closing statements.

Because this defendant has the ability

to fool everybody, but he couldn't fool Mom.

Towards the end of my closing, since it became a decision

for the jury, was it Josh or was it AJ,

we ended it with what we truly believed.

I want to end this trial

attempting to give a voice to Dawn.

"You are the only people in our community

"who with your verdict,

"can exonerate my innocent son

"by holding my guilty one accountable."

You can see her saying that.

♪♪♪

It has been an emotional year and a half.

And I told John, if he's not convicted

on the evidence we just presented,

it will never be good enough.

We, the jury, find the defendant,

Antonio Armstrong Jr., guilty.

Our heart goes out to the family.

We understand they're going through a lot.

It's just their truth is not the truth.

But our heart goes out to them, because they are victims.

Because he was found guilty of capital murder,

is an automatic life sentence.

And because he was 16 at the time of the crime,

he'll be eligible for parole in 40 calendar years.

DETOTO: It's the worst moment of my career.

It's a complicated emotion in that

I know I fought my ass off for him.

I gave a lot for that young man,

but I still felt like I let him down.

SIEGLER: Obviously the work that

all these lawyers did is pretty impressive.

To be able to change their strategy

based on how it played out in the last trial,

and move forward and stay so invested in this case,

speaks a lot to what good lawyers they are.

PILON: I think Antonio and Dawn

would be proud of their son Josh.

I even think they would forgive AJ for what he did,

because that's the kind of people Antonio and Dawn were.

But I know Antonio and Dawn have to be proud

of the fact that we're getting the truth.

TRASK: I think Josh is

the ultimate victim of these murders.

And to be so compassionate for your family,

and believe that you are one of them,

only to see what played out in those trials,

I don't know how somebody recovers

from something like that.

I'm sure he's seeing the news,

and seeing how he's being portrayed.

Frankly, we think Dawn would have been appalled.

And yes, it's two people who never met her

who is going into that courtroom

giving her a voice,

and holding the truth accountable,

and exonerating one son by convicting the other.

Until the end of my career, I will be very proud

of what we did to do that.

SIEGLER: With AJ Armstrong

finally being found guilty in the courtroom,

I think the hope for all of us

is that Josh can walk away

knowing in his heart he didn't do anything wrong,

and he can go try and live his best life

without anybody in his family on his side.

And that's going to be really hard for him to do,

but I think that all of us

really hope that he's able to do that.

♪♪♪