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.'"
First (Score:2, Interesting)
Why didn't she just put the kid up for adoption?
Are we still dragging this out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the assault on her character includes the fact that case was concieved out of rape, something that would have every major neo-liberal "feminist" group up in arms if it was someone the system was protecting.
I'll tell you something else. I'll contrast this to another femme fatale who got out of prison around the same time. "Amanda Knox"
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2011/10/21/seattle-pr-firm-reveals-efforts-to.html?page=all
Looks like the media industry wasted no time revealing if you got money to spend on a PR campaign they could fix your broken character flaws and get murder raps thrown out.
if its any more proof of just how biased the system is, and the system is run by hoardes of PR/advertising goons and lawyers, who seem to want nothing more than to shake you down for verbal and character protection money.
Of course the real enemies of this system are those who can't raise enough money to pay for their services.
Its sick, its real sick.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm against it because it gives the state too much power.
I will say it's odd how a lot of people who claim to be for more limited government tend to also be for giving government the ability to end a life.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:2, Interesting)
Japan has the death penalty.
Now, you can make arguments about how barbaric Japanese culture is after the war, yadda yadda, but I have a simple theory for this: if you're a European activist group, it's easy to extend your activism efforts to another country that is right next to you where it's easy to contact sympathizers and where you probably know someone who speaks the right language. It's hard to do so when the country is on the other side of the world and speaks a completely unrelated language.
In other words, you are implying each country in Europe just independently decided by themselves to not have capital punishment, so that you can imply it's a lot of decisions versus just one on the side of the US, and that's not true. It's more like one decision by European lobbyists versus the US.
Re:First (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. People like to play Jr. Detective and assign rational motives to people's action, and frequently it just won't work. I remember watching a round table news discussion show, and they were talking about a murder in which a pregnant woman opened the door to her home and she and the unborn baby were stabbed to death, but her 4-ish year old child who was right there was left unharmed. The estranged husband was the prime suspect, and one commentator said "ah, yes, stands to reason, since why else leave the other child alone?" And the other commentator said the thing I thought, "how can you assign rational motives to someone who stabs a pregnant to lady death?"
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:2, Interesting)
You just summed up everything that is wrong with the (in)justice system in your last paragraph. The conservatives in our society believe that the purpose of a justice system is to extract revenge, not punnishment and certainly not, in the name of all that's holy, rehabilitation for lesser crimes. Forgiveness, despite the tennets of their religion, is simply not their policy, no matter what the crime. Unless, of course, it is committed by one of their leaders.
Funny thing, and I suppose it's just a coincidence, that this mentatlity just happens to feed into the profit motivations of the for-profit prison industry, law enforcement and their hunger for expansion of power, and of course the need for more and more criminal judges, judicial programs and the hoardes of incompetent administrators those entail. I must simply be imagining that the interests of profit and religious conservatives just happen to coincide once again. Funny how that happens. Even when, for lesser crimes and certain kinds of people, rehabilitation and reintroduction to society has proven effective and much, much cheaper than other alternatives, the "small government" conservatives don't want to hear it.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:5, Interesting)
"the system is deeply flawed, and the emergence of DNA evidence just exposed some of those flaws." For most criminal cases DNA evidence plays no role, and there is no reason to believe those people are less likely to be innocent.
You are correct.
I heard a panel where Barry C. Scheck and some others from the Innocence Project spoke.
Scheck said that the important lesson of DNA testing was not that a few specific people were innocent, but that it demonstrates the error rate of the criminal justice system. The DNA cases are a sampling.
People were falsely convicted, most often by eyewitness testimony and confessions, and the Innocence Project could prove that they were innocent because they were fortunate enough to be involved in crimes that involved DNA evidence.
This demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness testimony and confessions are.
It also demonstrates that other people must have been convicted falsely by eyewitness testimony and confessions, but have no DNA evidence to exonerate them.
(This was actually demonstrated before DNA testing. Psychologists tested the accuracy of eyewitness testimony decades ago. People have been convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony in circumstances where the eyewitness couldn't possibly have recognized their face -- like being on the other side of the street, watching a crime being committed in dim light. Defense lawyers aren't allowed to have experts testify on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony.)
Significantly, it also demonstrates how flawed the criminal justice system is.
Some of these people were on death row. The advocates of the death penalty will often claim that we're so thorough and careful to protect the rights of defendants that it's impossible for an innocent person to be convicted. (Supreme Court Justice Scalia seems to have made that argument.) The sampling of cases that can be confirmed with DNA evidence demonstrates that they're wrong.
One good story about eyewitness testimony -- a young man was on trial for rape in New England. His defense lawyer was sitting in court, with a young man in a plaid shirt sitting next to him. He cross-examined the victim, asked her to describe the man who raped her, and then pulled the prosecutor's favorite line -- "Do you see that man in this court?" She pointed to the young man who had been sitting next to him. The lawyer asked the young man to identify himself. It wasn't the defendant. The lawyer had brought a decoy. The case collapsed, and his defendant was acquitted. But the judge sanctioned the lawyer. Apparently, they don't sanction the prosecution for bringing an witness who's so unreliable that she will testify that the wrong person did it. But they do sanction a defense lawyer who demonstrates how unreliable the witness is.
Re:No Death Penalty (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always thought that this was the simplest solution to it. Keep the death penalty, but remove the power of the judiciary to apply it. A judge can sentence a killer to life in prison, but the killer has the power to decide how long that will be. They can spend the rest of their lives in a cage, or they can request execution if they want the easy way out. If you want to remove the possibility of a decision made under duress, or want to enforce a mandatory minimum punishment, just stipulate that they can't request it for 10 years or so.
Re:First (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, the insecurity may be rational, but attributing any importance to it is not, it is pure animal brain. So even with this, the action does not stem from anything rational.
Brain chemistry is not an excuse. Unless it is extreme, any adult can reasonably be expected to have control of his/her emotions and control extreme impulses. Those that do not learn impulse control may not be directly responsible for what they do, but they are guilty of endangerment by not getting these impulses under control. All those "my brain did it" defenses are pretty meaningless unless some serious abnormality is present. If not, the person in question was just to lazy to do something about it and getting control. (Yes, I think dualism has it right, and that the brain/body is actually only a kind of "carrier system", although with its own impulses and emotions. The mind is responsible for getting control over the whole and otherwise responsible if bad things happen from not having control.)