Posted on 05/30/2005 11:26:48 AM PDT by wagglebee
That's certainly true in Massachusetts, where the state crime lab facilities are so limited that DNA testing is rationed - each of the 11 state DAs is limited to submitting only 4 DNA samples per month.
The most recent newsworthy case affected by this is the Christa Worthington murder on Cape Cod. It took months before the suspect's sample even got to the lab, then 9 months (instead of 30 days) for the results.
Mass. was the particular state we were talking about.
There was no "issue." The cops saw him throw it out the window and testified to that fact.
It's not enough to have cops testify that they personally saw him throw it out the window?
Besides, what does it cost to take some prints? Not much. A few minutes, and a few dollars' worth of materials.
In any case, I was addressing the topic in general, not any one specific case. If you've got the perp's prints on the object in question, you've got some rock-solid evidence. It takes away nagging doubts from the jury's mind, and that's a GOOD thing.
People can define themselves as to intelligence. Definitely those that can't separate fiction from reality have no business being on juries.
Not in any case I'm involved with.
The biggest problem with shows like CSI is not that time is telescoped by a factor of 100, sometimes. It's that certain things that seem to take a few minutes to resolve, find, whatever, are not possible at all... yet.
Of course, that reality has no effect whatsoever on the shallow end of the gene pool.
Well, I agree with the hamburger acquittal. They just assume the hamburger in the house is his? Not exactly compelling or even reasonable evidence. The others I am not sure about; there could be other reasons no DNA was found etc.
Exactly.
It should be obvious that you can't get good DNA evidence or CSI-quality stuff on most, or even many crimes.
But you should expect at least some level of basic competency on the part of the investigators to link the murder weapon etc. to the defendant.
Assuming a hamburger belongs to the defendant (it sounds like this was the only piece of evidence to tie him to the scene, so they just assumed it was his) does not cut it.
Did they see him eat the hamburger?
Then again, I'm feeling a little hungry.
You are expressing a very dangerous, almost early elitist Roman, point of view.
As one of the people trying to mitigate the Salem Witch Trials said roughly, "It is better for 100 witches to get away than for one innocent to be convicted."
It should be the same with today's murders etc. If people are not caught but one innocent is protected, so be it.
http://www.fija.org
Which is how most citizens feel, up until they become a victim of crime. Then the "rose-colored glasses" come off, and the attitude does a 180.
I would just lie and say no.
Many others would as well since they would actually be SMART enough to know what you were trying to pull.
Once you have been imprisoned unjustly and nobody believes you, YOUR attitude changes as well.
Good point. The "CSI Effect" should be screened for in voir dire and used to challenge jurors for cause. If a juror isn't going to believe three eyewitnesses to an overt act without lead-pipe-cinch physical evidence to back up the eyewitnesses, he should be excluded.
And we all know that no cop would ever dream about lying in a drug case.
Trouble is, when the releasees go out and kill 20 people, what have you done, in order to protect that one innocent (who you don't know is innocent)?
Houston had a bellyful of that crap in the 70's and 80's. Houston is the state's dumping-ground for releasees and parolees, because the state Board of Pardons and Paroles is stacked with Good Old Boys from Dallas-Fort Worth and other parts of the state, and they just use Houston as the community toilet.
Houston had so many murderers being arrested after reoffending, the voters elected wall-to-wall "hang-'em-high" Republican judges. Harris County (Houston) juries still lead Texas, and Texas leads the nation, in handing out death sentences, because Houstonians are fed up with the child-murderers and sex fiends and rapists and armed robbers who get dumped on the city when their state time is served or the prisons get loaded up with drug mules and the Board of Pardons and Paroles just starts turning them loose.
Tell you how bad it is.......the state legislature redefined house burglary and many theft offenses downward from felonies to misdemeanors, just so they could dump a lot of offenders from state prisons to satisfy liberal judge William Wayne Justice and his prisoner-lawsuit case edicts on overcrowding. The legislature turned thousands of felons out, some of them with violent histories, and sent the huge majority of them to Houston bus stations. That's what happened. True fact. And the 'Rat legislators who did that, thought Texans wouldn't notice what they did. Well, we did notice, and now Texas Democrats are on the official Endangered Species List.
And when one of these Democrat-client murderers kills somebody, we sentence his dying ass to death. No screwing around, no second chances, none of this "my daddy made me a sex fiend" stuff. They go down, they get death.
It's self-preservation, feller.
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