Paging Chief Moose. :)
Posted on 09/19/2015 2:41:26 PM PDT by ScottWalkerForPresident2016
A suspect in Phoenix's recent highway shootings denied Saturday he had anything to do with the case as a judge set his bail at $1 million.
Leslie Allen Merritt Jr., who was arrested Friday, shook his head as a prosecutor asked the judge to set bail at the $1 million mark at a court hearing Saturday morning, and the suspect took in a deep breath when the judge agreed.
"All I have to say is I'm the wrong guy," Merritt, 21, told the judge. "I tried to tell the detectives that. My gun's been in the pawn shop for the last two months. I haven't even had access to a weapon."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
He will have his day in court.
Why I would never sell a gun to someone I don’t know. Hell, I’ve never sold a gun. I know I’d regret it.
Seems like this should be a simple matter to clear up. If he’s lying, it’s a terrible lie as it should be easy to prove.
Won’t it look bad if he is correct.
I'm not too familiar with this case, but if true and it's the same gun linked to the shootings, that would seem to present an issue for prosecutors and the public at large. Time will tell. If he's innocent, they'll be paying him big league dollars.
Hmmm, If he has a pawn ticket showing that gun has been in the pawn shop for the past two months, that pawn shop owner has some ‘splainin to do.
Paging Chief Moose. :)
At the least they will look like keystone cops. Shoot first, aim second. If the weapon he owned was the assault weapon (still impossible to prove without ballistics), but it got used by someone else in the pawn shop, that person has now been warned to make himself scarce.
If he’s not in Argentina now
How/where was the gun recovered ?
Fixed it for you.
Sadly, the days when we just naively assumed suspects were lying in cases like this are long gone.
Richard Jewell. Good point.
Yesindeedee.
I was unaware of that. I take back my Richard Jewell reference.
Though I do not recall at the moment the exact news source I'm basing the following on; as I understand it, the police searched local area pawn shops, found a possible match (the right caliber, and maybe twist?) then went back to the pawnshop and retrieved that weapon for further testing.
Yet I don't trust the testing to be all that conclusive. It's more like a "this could be a possible match" than anything approaching a "this is the exact weapon, and could in no possible way be any other weapon of the same general make, or even similarity to weapons made by yet other manufacturers that use near identical tooling.
The reality is that the it's not like television detective shows in "tv drama" fashion, portray the truth to be, about how good ballistic forensics can be, when it comes to matching precise projectiles having been fired by an exactly specific weapon.
It can be worse than bad fingerprinting/identification -- which we also have a lot of in this nation.
I was unaware that they could tie a Glock to an individual owner. How do they do that, short of having physical possession of the gun and firing it?
I hope for his sake that if that is true, someone at the pawnshop could verify that, and not be the shooter themselves, borrowing inventory, then replacing it, then changing the pawn ticket.
If the guy is lying about that crucial part of his defense, say, as in he pawned it two months ago, got it out of hock, then pawned it again, yet is still not the actual shooter -- he's in big trouble now.
If it was a Glock -- how many other Glocks of the same make and model would produce similar markings on a projectile?
That sort of thing really does need to be repeatedly put to the test.
I don't think it has been.
You wanna' know why? It's because this is most usually left to law enforcement and prosecution. They "own" the evidence, and it's difficult and expensive to have it examined by experts not working for the prosecution, and not otherwise being paid by the State.
Since when do they (regularly, and without fail) go out of their way to make honest attempt to see if their own conclusions could be shown questionable?
No, they don't do that.
They leave it to defense attorneys to need to dig it all out, while the prosecutions practices skillful avoidance of this precise aspect of the issue, selling perceptions of exactitude on a bluff, if they can get away with it -- because that's what has long been working to their advantage.
CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics
"...Ballistics has similar flaws. A subsection of tool-mark analysis, ballistics matching is predicated on the theory that when a bullet is fired, unique marks are left on the slug by the barrel of the gun. Consequently, two bullets fired from the same gun should bear the identical marks. Yet there are no accepted standards for what constitutes a match between bullets. Juries are left to trust expert witnesses. "`I know it when I see it' is often an acceptable response," says Adina Schwartz, a law professor and ballistics expert with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.