Friday, October 6, 2006

Sometimes the police get it wrong...

...and lest you think I will only tell you about what they have gotten right, allow me to tell you about something they apparently have really screwed up.

While John Karr is, like any other suspect, innocent until proven guilty - it does not mean his case should not have gone to trial once he was arrested on child pornography charges. I don't care whether or not he had nothing to do with the Jon Benet Ramsey case in this regard because these child porn charges were unrelated to that. As it turned out, when the police brought him back to the USA, even if his claims to have been involved with JBR's death were fabricated, the police did a good thing. He was, after all, a wanted suspect in a felony case involving child pornography.

Where the police went wrong was to have lost the evidence in that case. See this article http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,218108,00.html for more info. Where they apparently went badly wrong was to evidently have kept sloppy records of the evidence. Even though they had lost the computer evidence in this case, I believe it was a hard drive that was lost, the prosecution quite possibly still could have brought this case against Karr had the police kept clear records of how they made copies of the HD, how many copies they made, and so on. The copies could actually have been used as evidence against Karr. Granted not as good as the originals, but still good.

The police really messed up on this one, especially if Karr in fact did commit the child pornography offenses that were the base of the dropped charges. If so, if he really did these things, then the charges against a monster have been dropped, and who knows, this may allow him to be freed sooner than later to do it over again.

All the best,
Glenn B

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