Angry in the Great White North

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.