Posted on 09/25/2006 7:13:58 PM PDT by SmithL
SANTA ROSA -- A Sonoma County judge handling the five-year-old child pornography case against suspect John Mark Karr threatened today to dismiss the charges and lashed into prosecutors for not telling her that key evidence -- a computer and hard drive containing sexually explicit images -- had been lost.
Superior Court Judge Cerena Wong said she will consider a motion from Karr's attorney, Robert Amparan, to dismiss the 2001 case on Wednesday, a move that if approved would set Karr free without his having to register as a sex offender in California. Wong also will consider whether to unseal evidence in the case.
Sheriff's officials admitted last week that they had lost the computer and hard drive that are the basis of the misdemeanor charges that Karr possessed child pornography when he lived and worked as a school teacher in the North Bay. They believe the computer was thrown out, along with 40,000 other pieces of evidence, when the sheriff's department moved to a new building in 2002.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Joan Risse said her office has printouts of 1,600 photographs from the computer, including the five that Karr is charged with having, but the original computer images are missing.
Wong castigated Risse for not informing her that the computer was lost even though she has known about it since Aug. 30. She said the sealing orders and other decisions were based on representations Risse made about continuing efforts to obtain more information from the computer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Lying to a Judge is a serious offense, and she should be sanctioned. Hopefully the printouts should suffice.
You can make a mistake in real life. But to make a huge jaw-dropping dumber-than-a-sack-of-rocks mistake, you need government "help".
Throwing away evidence is not conducive to building a strong case.
Thailand?
No, Santa Rosa, in Marin County.
They should have left him in Thailand. Now he's here, and soon free, and very creepy.
This story has a different take.
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060925/NEWS/60925020
Whose in charge there, Nifong?
Santa Rosa is in Sonoma County, one county north of Marin.
he is going to sue the Colorado DA for believing his confession? Better not have me on the jury. Or any other person with half a brain or more.
Dayum! I know better than that!
Heh. We all make mistakes--sometimes in cases where we can't even explain to ourselves how that could be :-)
He ended up pleading guilty based on the evidence. I have never seen a group of people who were that incompetent. (I mean the district attorney and the asst. district attorneys.
Well, I was willing to lay the blame at the feet of whoever authorized the destruction of evidence when they moved the storage facility a couple of years ago.
Surely they did an inventory and had someone rule on what was OK to destroy and what wasn't.
They have the printouts - but I guess there aren't any identifiers on them as there would be on an email, for example. They claimed that the computer was thrown out, but I was hoping that was just a mistake - that they really had the hard drive and had just been looking for the wrong thing - the case, instead.
It makes me absolutely ill to think this predator will be allowed to go free, after all the filth he has admitted to in writings and taped phone calls. Of course, we also know he lies.
Maybe that Wendy person who turned him in, in the first place, witnessed something to which she can testify - not that she's the world's best witness material.
Why Colorado? Karr sent a personal invitation for that and he got a nice first-class trip out of it too.
How stupid can you be and still be a prosecutor?
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