But the prosecutors also manipulated the public opinion with that public conferences about that what Brendan and Steven supposedly made to the victim, only based in a doubtful and manipulated confession of Brendan.
If anything should be taken from this and from many other public cases is that we really need much more stricter ethical guidelines about how criminal and civil cases are handled by the media. When the media can be used as a tool to affect public opinion it can be used to affect potential outcome of trials and that's very bad place to be.
Heck even pre-trial coverage can change the outcome of many cases then the media reports that they caught a guy and builds a case that they are guilty people would put less effort into doing due diligence the police might not chase up on additional leads, people who might have had details are not less likely to come forward because they caught the guy so why should they bother and some of the witnesses that already came forward will start rehashing what they've seen on the news even if only unconsciously.
Heck at this point you might be able to actually get out of guilty verdict by getting some PR company to spam as much misinformation about the incident as possible poisoning all the witnesses it only takes a handful of inaccuracies between the initial statement and the trail deposition for the defense to rip the witnesses apart.