Ok, taking this by the numbers...

First, this is not a court of law.

No, it's not. I never said it was. But you'll note that as you quoted, I wasn't speaking about this as a court of law. I was speaking about jumping to conclusions and making assumptions on a man's motives without having anything that can be substantiated on which to draw those conclusions. After all, one doesn't go into a court of law hoping the jury will 'vilify' the bad guy, which is the word I used. You go in trying to convict.

I'm saying we should not be engaging in a campaign of spreading rumors and allegations we cannot back up with anything more than 'you see how this looks, right?' I'm saying that as human beings, our natural inclination - indeed, our biologically developed instinct - is to take incomplete information and find patterns in it that let us infer conclusions. Our natural inclination is also to trust our pre-existing biases, because they've gotten us this far without being eaten by a lion.

Those natural, biologically programmed inclinations serve us very well in a large number of pursuits. One place they do not, and have never done so, is in seeking truth. This is why the scientific method calls for rigorous testing of any hypothesis - not tests designed to prove, mind you, but designed to disprove the hypothesis - before it can properly be called a working theory. Our natural inclination to believe the ideas that fit with our pre-existing biases and beliefs must be cast aside. It can do nothing but lead us astray.

So besides these two motives can YOU suggest any plausible others? Even one?

It's right out there in the article. It's a powerful motive, and the one that, given the potential for this case to have been an anchor around his neck, seems to me to make the most sense:

Griffin's father knows a guy. He goes to his friend for help, because his friend has mentioned that his son-in-law's a lawyer. The friend then goes and talks to his son-in-law. He's not asking him to represent the guy, 'you don't have to go to trial for this guy, just, you know, see if you know somebody. His father thinks the court-appointed lawyer's crap.'

So he gets involved, mostly to get his father-in-law off his back. And maybe the court-appointed attorney really is an overworked guy with only slightly more experience than Scar in court. So he decides he's gonna try to find this guy a better option. Why? Because his wife wants him to do it. It'll get the guy's father off her dad's back about 'why hasn't your son-in-law found anyone yet?'

And there's your motive for putting his name on the paperwork and then spending a few weeks looking for another lawyer: to placate his wife and make his own life a little easier at family functions over the summer.

And for believability's sake - try making a motive up that also explains the big donations that followed shortly after Joe's help - and why Joe has never helped any other killers like this.

I would like to point out, before I address this, that this question not only goes far beyond Zach's framing - which was 'why did Scar get involved?' but conflates two things. This is like asking for a theory on the development of the universe that also - for believability's sake - explains why the universe should develop in a way that's just perfect for us. First, it's not perfect for us, 99.9999% of the universe would kill us instantly if we were there, and second, because we're a result of it, rather than it being tailored to us. Same basic thing here.

So, you're Joe Scarborough. A year ago, you had this stupid, time-consuming thing you had to do to avoid sleeping on the couch all summer long. Now you want to run for Congress. Who do you hit up for money?

That Scarborough, a year later, was able to use his involvement to get donations and favorable treatment from the evangelical anti-abortion crowd isn't in question. I don't think even he would hesitate to say that yes, he was able to turn this incident to his advantage in fundraising. But that proves nothing.

I have been fighting an encroachment of bamboo in my back yard. There's an adjacent property where they refuse to do anything about containing it, which means all of my efforts are ultimately futile. However, five years ago, I worked for a landscaping company. I didn't get the job at the landscaping company in order to kill bamboo. I got the job because I needed to pay the bills. That I learned quite a bit about how to remove bamboo, and used that knowledge to my advantage this spring, in no way affects - or indicates - my motivation in entering into that job situation.

Turning past experience to present advantage is something we all do, all the time. You drive a certain way because you know how traffic patterns flow. You take your car to a certain mechanic because the last time you had trouble, he treated you right.

Ultimately, what he did later can't be taken by itself as an indicator of his intentions when entering this situation. In order to be able to reasonably draw that conclusion, we need additional evidence that supports it - we need substantiation from something. Otherwise, it's just blue-sky speculating.

Especially since he later voted against Democratic & Republican bills protecting clinics.

So he does the bidding of the evangelical anti-abortion movement and shortly thereafter gets paid by them.

Turn this one around. He does something that could totally screw up his career - which this could have - and finds a way to turn it to his advantage. Except he's a Congressman, not a Senator. He's gotta get re-elected every 2 years, and he has to do it with a fairly small voter pool - one congessional district, not a whole state. That means he's got to go back to the people who donated to him last time. In effect, by taking their money in that first election, he's beholden to them. He's their little bitch from that point forward.

The scenario there is not that he did the bidding of the evangelical anti-abortion movement and then got paid. Rather, it's that he relied on their money, and after getting it, did their bidding. Which is pretty much the norm in politics, on both sides. Contributors aren't paying you for what you've done, they're paying for what you will do for them.

Your argument is that we can not legally (in a court of law) infer intent.

No. My argument is that as rational beings, we do not have enough evidence to draw reliable conclusions. Period. My argument has nothing to do with court or the law. It is simply thus:

In order to reliably draw conclusions which have a high likelihood of being correct, we need a sufficient set of observed data which supports those conclusions in real, substantive ways. The more corroborating data we have, the more confident we can be in our theories and conclusions. This is the scientific method, the primary method by which human beings have sought the truth for centuries, and the only methodology for seeking truth that has produced real, demonstrable, and consistently reliable results. Drawing conclusions prematurely has been shown to be unreliable, time and again.

This has nothing to do with the law, or the courts - beyond that our current legal paradigm for seeking the truth through evidence uses the scientific method, as well.