The evidence against John Mark Karr has been lost
Yet again, John Mark Karr catches a break.
When charges with regards to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey were dropped, I predicted that John Mark Karr would end up walking away from the remaining child pornography charges in California:
Expect Karr to fight the charges:
Karr pleaded not guilty to all counts and was jailed for six months, but he left the country before he could be tried. Prosecutors decided to pursue the charges after Karr surfaced last month as a suspect in the JonBenet killing.
During preliminary hearings in 2001, Karr's public defenders waived his right to a speedy trial as they tried to get a judge to invalidate the search warrant that allowed Sonoma sheriff's deputies to enter Karr's home and seize his computer.
So expect the fight over the legality of the original search. And on the integrity of the evidence after six years.
It turns out that's going to be a lot easier than anyone expected:
Sonoma County authorities say they've lost the computer that belonged to one-time JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr and allegedly held the child pornography images that he's charged with possessing.
Edmonds said authorities looked for the computer for the past two weeks, but have had no luck. It likely was lost when the sheriff's department moved into a new building in 2002.
But there is a copy:
But the missing computer, seized from Karr's home in 2001, was not expected to jeopardize the case against him because authorities had copied the entire hard drive contents and printed out the five illicit images, Sheriff's Department Lt. Dave Edmonds told The Press-Democrat of Santa Rosa on Tuesday.
A copy? Hah!
Of course it jeopardizes the case. You know what the defence lawyer will say? "You lost that computer? Just that computer? How convenient for you. But we are supposed to trust you when you say that this entirely different disk drive is evidence that my client's original disk drive contained child pornography. How do we know that you didn't make a copy of my client's disk drive that we maintain had no porn on it, then hooked it up to a computer last week, changed the system clock, copied some old kiddie porn files you have from other cases, disposed of my client's otherwise clean computer, and are now passing this off as a legitimate copy? The fact is that we can't know that, can we? We all know how much media attention is on this. We all know just how desperately you don't want to seem incompetent given what you've put my client through. But that's not my problem. I want to see my client's original computer, still sealed in the evidence bag, and the pictures on the original drive, or else we're walking out of here."
And you know what? He'd be right. Though there might be ways of determining just when a drive was accessed by studying the magnetic properties of the drive surface, independently of the timestamp on the files, no one is going to pay for that analysis, even assuming it can be done and assuming the technique meets the standards of evidence.
I'm not eager to see John Mark Karr walk free. He's a freak and quite possibly a pedophile. But at this point, we can't really be sure because of the bumbling of the authorities.
Yesterday I thought John Mark Karr was going to walk away, but on probation. Now I think he's just going to walk away.
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Comments
Send him back to Thailand. I hear it's nice lately.
Posted by: Dante at September 21, 2006 01:18 PM
It's not quite that bleak, Steve. There are procedures to maintain the chain of evidence, even when dealing with mere electrons. It is not as if the HD image was just sitting out there on a publicly shared drive that any old police officer could look through. There will be network and physical safeguards and so on to protect it from tampering.
Most businesses can manage to pull it off this sort of security without a giant hassle. Shouldn't be too hard for the police.
Posted by: Chris Taylor at September 21, 2006 03:38 PM
Actually, it shouldn't be *that* much of a problem. As Chris points out, for EVERY piece of evidence in a criminal trial, the D.A. must establish a chain of evidence, that can only be done by testimony of the police officers who handled the evidence and had it stored (unless the defence consents to evidence being admitted, which in cases like this is rare).
For example, if the computer wasn't missing, and it was properly seized, secured, dated, initialled and stored for trial, the defence lawyer can still raise many of the questions you have: "this is the computer seized? my client said it is not. how do we know that this hard drive did not have kiddie porn placed on it by the officers, etc"
In both scenarios, the defence's theory is based on a conspiracy by police to fabricate/tamper with evidence. But there is no evidence of such a conspiracy. If the judge/jury believes the police officers and there is some evidence to corroborate that child porn had been seized or located on the computer hard drive, it shouldn't be terminal to the DA's case.
But what do I know? I'm not a judge, just a citizen with commonsense.
Posted by: JW at September 21, 2006 04:55 PM
The other thing to keep in mind is that there's going to be more of an electronic trail there than just 5 bad images. Somehow the police got tipped to these images and it is unlikely that one of Karr's friends or neighbours saw these things on his screen from afar and decided to phone it in.
More than likely he downloaded it from somewhere, and more than likely that source got logged if not busted. The police will know both the source of the images and the receiver -- either of which will be Karr. Karr's own browser or e-mail history plus his ISP's logs will testify against him, proving that the computer in question did such and such activity on such and such a date, and guess whose internet account was using that IP at the time and date those pictures were transmitted?
So it's not as if the images are the only evidence. Some kind of activity tipped police to Karr's posession of those files, and that activity will have generated logs of its own, somewhere. And the smart policeman will have nabbed those too. So my guess is that Karr's going to the crossbar hotel even if his compter was lost.
I have had to provide testimony in these sorts of cases and it's rare for the evidence to get discounted. Electronic activity leaves a BIG evidence trail on multiple sources; clearing the paper trail is not as simple as wiping your browser cache and history.
Posted by: Chris Taylor at September 21, 2006 05:19 PM
I say he caught a well-deserved break. The only thing linking Karr to JonBenet was his admission of guilt, which was almost universally understood to be not on the level. They went through this huge expense and show to get him to Colorado to have the charges dismissed, and then "conveniently" extradited to California on porn charges. I suspect Thailand wouldn't even extradict him on those charges, but did on the murder. So this is looking like a classic bait and switch, and I had long figured that if the U.S. wanted Karr on a porno charge they should request permission from the Thai on that basis.
This looks like a well-deserved botch.
Posted by: Feynman and Coulter's Love Child at September 22, 2006 04:29 PM
 
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