Search For "Foolproof Suffocation" Missed In Casey Anthony Case 379
Hugh Pickens writes "The Orlando Sentinel reports that a google search was made for the term 'foolproof suffocation' on the Anthony family's computer the day Casey Anthony's 2-year-old daughter Caylee was last seen alive by her family — a search that did not surface at Casey Anthony's trial for first degree murder. In the notorious 31 days which followed, Casey Anthony repeatedly lied about her and her daughter's whereabouts and at Anthony's trial, her defense attorney argued that her daughter drowned accidentally in the family's pool. Anthony was acquitted on all major charges in her daughter's death, including murder. Though computer searches were a key issue at Anthony's murder trial, the term 'foolproof suffocation' never came up. 'Our investigation reveals the person most likely at the computer was Casey Anthony,' says investigative reporter Tony Pipitone. Lead sheriff's Investigator Yuri Melich sent prosecutors a spreadsheet that contained less than 2 percent of the computer's Internet activity that day and included only Internet data from the computer's Internet Explorer browser – one Casey Anthony apparently stopped using months earlier — and failed to list 1,247 entries recorded on the Mozilla Firefox browser that day — including the search for 'foolproof suffocation.' Prosecutor Jeff Ashton said in a statement to WKMG that it's 'a shame we didn't have it. (It would have) put the accidental death claim in serious question.'"
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:3, Informative)
There are plenty of states that have the sentence "life without parole" my state of Michigan being one of them.
It works pretty well. There is no parole, no getting out, end of story.
It is the automatic sentence required by law if one is convicted of pre meditated murder in Michigan, no exceptions.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Informative)
There's been no exonerations that I recall in the past 20 years. There has been a few executions where (IMO) there's a case for reasonable doubt.
For example, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the deaths of his three children in a fire. The justice system claimed the fire was due to arson. Five years after his execution, a state-ordered investigation concluded that "a finding a arson could not be sustained".
The trial was also notable for using Iron Maiden and Led Zepplin posters as evidence of Cameron's mental state.
I'm not sure if he was innocent or guilty. He appears to have had quite a few run-ins with the law. But the interpretation of the evidence and trial appears deeply flawed, and I am not comfortable executing people based on such evidence.
Maybe you are.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Informative)
The Penn and Teller: Bullshit! episode on the death penalty showed quite a lot of evidence that the concoction of chemicals used to euthanize pets is significantly less painful than the one used to execute death row inmates. I don't know if it's still true, or if P&T made it up for TV, but I remember being quite impressed with the evidence they had.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Informative)
But that isn't how the lethal injection works for humans. It's a much lengthier process involving three seperate drugs. It's supposed to be painless, but there's a lot of debate about that - certainly the final drug, potassium chloride, hurts like hell, but by that point the prisoner is supposed to be unconscious. The problem is that the first drug used is the anasthetic, and the second a paralytic: If the anasthetic doesn't work (equipment fault, unusually resistant prisoner, sheer bad luck) then it'd go unnoticed, as the paralysed prisoner would have no means to express the pain. And there would be pain: The reason for that paralytic is that without it, even an unconscious and heavily sedated prisoner would be writheing around just from reflexive responses to pain, much to the distress of the witnesses.
You may wonder why the method you saw on the pets isn't used on humans. That's because it's too unreliable. There's a chance the 'dead' prisoner won't be quite dead. There are completly reliable, painless methods - aspixiation with nitrogen is easy - but there face political opposition. The very fact that they are painless ensures they are resisted by the hardcore pro-death-penalty crowd, who feel that a painless death (Or even worse, aspixiation euphoria) does not serve justice properly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:4, Informative)
Legislation IS diverse, you're just making stuff up about it instead of looking at it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_country#Europe [wikipedia.org]
And last, but surely not least:
"the EU" - LOL! Europe motherfucker, do you speak it?