This board is not obsolete! You just need a VGA graphics card and the latest version of Netscape Navigator.
Are you sure it isn’t?
Bah. You techies and your new-fangled software. I’m still using Mosaic on a dial-up modem and it’s good enough for me.
Yeah, that flicker of hope was quickly snuffed.
Doesn’t the Scottish justice system have a verdict of Not Proven? Basically, yeah, he dunnit but the prosecution did a sorry job with their case. I sometimes wish we had that.
The trial being a matter of public record, how does one go about obtaining it and what are the costs involved? It’s a question I’ve not considered before.
I was once on a jury for a civil suit in California where a gentleman was suing Bank of America and K-Mart, two of the least favorite corporations in the state at the time (WalMart having not been invented yet). We reluctantly found in favor of the defendants and, since the stakes were a lot lower, there was no jurors crying but still . . .
Several of us stuck around after to talk to the plaintiff’s attorney (the defense scarpered immediately afterward) who said he knew pretty much he’d lost the case when he knew who the judge was; he was not allowed to put on the case he wanted. There were several bench conferences during the trial, and after both lunches the trial covered we had to cool our heels in the assembly for a while past the scheduled start time while things went on outside our knowledge. I have wondered from time to time what information the plaintiff would have presented had he been allowed.
LB smooth - can you give us the name and case number on Poveromo’s lawsuit? What was the outcome?
Also, can you point us to the judge’s rulings for excluding the evidence you say was withheld?
So far, in this thread, I’m the only person who’s provided any cites and none of them mention anything about withheld evidence.
The NY Post article had this to say from Poveromo’s Mother -
Well, clearly, that’s wrong, given the bite marks and the spit. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, Poveromo was brutal enough for rough sex with a woman who didn’t really like him. But - sure. His Mom probably didn’t know that.
Still, there’s nothing I can find in contemporary articles about Poveromo’s defense being anything other than the Mysterious Stranger.
LB smooth - you’re kind of a Mysterious Stranger, yourself. We’re not going to just take your word on it. Please post your evidence to back up your claims.
Except that the jury found him not guilty, which, we can assume, means there was more than that to the story.
Also, all the statements about Poveromo harassing Russo seem to come from her relatives, if I’m not mistaken. There’s no guarantee that they are an accurate description of the situation. Maybe the jury heard other, possibly contradictory, statement (like, say : “her family hated him, so she prefered to lie to them and tell them she wasn’t seeing him. Also, everybody at the club knew she was into rough sex. And her loony cousin had theatened her more than once about this old loan issue. And he was roaming around the house that morning”).
Otherwise, it seems highly unlikely they would have chosen to acquit, seeing how straightforward the case appears on the basis of what we heard so far. If, on top of it, the defendant actually won a civil case as the new poster says, there’s something else we aren’t aware of. Why would he have had a case against the city to begin with?
On the other hand, not posting would have meant leaving the last word to the OP, even though we have no way to know if she was in the right (in fact, it seems to me that she had herself no way to know and relied entirely on what people she knew had told her).
If I was finding some old thread I thought was smearing a friend of mine, I too would want to set the record straight. I’m not sure how it is unjust. Eve gave one side of the story, the new poster the other side of the story. Seems pretty equitable to me.
Regarding the drive-by : we sometimes had surprisingly interesting drive-by by people who had been directly involved in the issue discussed. IIRC, there was even a thread where two different direct witnesses of the case discussed chimed in later. I think a friend of the perpetrator and the daughter of the victim.
In this case, neither Eve nor the new poster helped much with clarifying the issue, I must admit. But generally speaking, I’m not adverse to late thread ressurection by people who have new infos to share.
They already said that the outcome was a settlement. It’s probably not true, but I wouldn’t expect a more straightforward answer.
I’ll direct you to earlier in the thread where I pointed out that one would be hard-pressed to come up with a civil suit related to withheld damages during a trial that ended in acquittal. He then “corrected” himself and said that the evidence that was supposedly withheld wouldn’t have led to a trial. When I pointed out that he explicitly used the phrase “during the trail [sic]”, he had nothing further to say on that topic.
If you read that exchange and don’t come away thinking that he’s full shit, there’s really nothing more that can be said.
They didn’t say he won–they said it was settled.
That doesn’t mean he had a case; based on the evidence presented here (“buy my movie” aside), I’d say he didn’t.
All a settlement would mean, assuming there actually was one, is that both parties decided it was in their best interest to end things without going to court.
It could be something as simple as this:
<scene>
City: We could get the case dismissed, but that’d cost us time & manpower that we can’t spare, so let’s just offer them $5 to get them to leave us alone so we can get back to work.
Plaintiff’s lawyer: You’ll pretty much assuredly lose this case, even if the city doesn’t get it dismissed outright, but they offered you $5 & I suggest you take it, as something is better than nothing.
Plaintiff: Deal.
</scene>
To break this down:
-
People can file a lawsuit for anything they want against anyone they want–it doesn’t mean they have a case.
-
People settle nuisance lawsuits all the time, because the cost/benefit analysis shows that it’s cheaper than fighting it–even if fighting it only means moving to dismiss it.
An acquittal doesn’t automatically mean that the city did anything wrong–and the city doing something wrong doesn’t automatically mean that they’re legally liable.
Isn’t there some way to search court cases by the name of the defendant or something? Can a person get trial transcripts this way?
Depends on the court system, and how old the case is.
This trial, according to the stories, was held in Brooklyn Supreme Court. I assume it’s the same as this one, the Kings County Supreme Court, Criminal Term. Kings County and Brooklyn are essentially the same place.
The FAQ page for the court says that, in order to get information about a case, you contact the Clerk’s Office. This is nearly always the first step in getting court records. Exactly what happens next depends on the particular court. Usually, getting the records involves paying a search and/or copying fee.
somehow i don’t think that you’re going to get any actual evidence from this person. I seriously doubt there is any such lawsuit, and i’d be surprised if there really were a “documentary” film about this case.
I have managed to find a little trove of news stories about the case, from the local Brooklyn papers. They are all in PDF format, but there’s some interesting stuff in them, although not enough to really come to any firm conclusions. I’d be very interested to read the trial transcript of this case.
Here are links to some of the files containing stories about the case. They’re all PDFs, and you’ll need to go to the pages i’ve indicated to find the stories.
NO DEAL: Accused Bath Beach killer rejects plea offer, setting stage for trial (August 5, 2002), pp. 1, 8.
Bath Beach murder ruling: Judge admits sex evidence, limits questions about ‘other suspects’ (August 19, 2002), pp. 1, 8.
Bath Beach murder trial opens (September 16, 2002), p. 4.
Bite marks in murder case (September 23, 2002), p. 4.
Bath Beach murder trial in hands of jury (September 30, 2002), p. 2.
Not guilty in B’Beach murder trial (October 7, 2002), p. 3.
There’s some interesting stuff in some of the stories. For example, the August 19 article notes:
The September 16 story summarizes the opening arguments of each side in the trial. The September 23 story deals mainly with the bite mark evidence, but doesn’t tell us too much. The September 30 story is probably the one that provides the most information about the overall state of the case, as it sums up the case and the closing arguments. It still doesn’t really give us enough to reach too many firm conclusions, although it does seem to contradict some of the “facts” that Lb smooth has provided:
First, he was not “proven innocent.” He was found “not guilty.” The jury never made an assertion that he didn’t do it, they never said he was proven not to have done it; their finding simply reflects the fact that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Second, it is not clear that they found a bloody footprint, or that there was a third set of DNA on her body. The story says:
Third, your timeline is wrong, according to the published stories, both in terms of its start and end points, and in terms of the total length of time. Even the defense attorneys conceded that Poveromo was still in the victim’s apartment when she got of a phone call with a friend at 10.29 p.m.
I have no idea how i would have voted as a juror in this case. It’s clear that the trial contained far more information and evidence than we get from any of the news stories. But, whatever happened, one thing i do know is that Lb smooth, with his shitty grammar and sentence construction, his half-baked and unsupported assertions, and his stupid arguments, has done nothing to clear up the issue either way.
Dude, men walk away from sexual violence all the time because they claim that it was consensual. It only takes one guy on the jury to insist - just like you’re doing - that hey, maybe she liked it. Maybe she wanted it. Maybe she led the guy on, inviting him to her apartment for dinner. Maybe all the times she turned him down she was just playing hard to get.
There’s not a shred of evidence presented to suggest that really - Russo really deep down wanted to date Poveromo, but was lying to her family about it - and yet you think that’s more likely than Poveromo was a creep who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Granted, most creeps who refuse to take no don’t end up raping and murdering the object of their obsession. But enough of them do. And when they do, you can always count on some people running in to make excuses for him. It’s so common it barely makes the news.
Yeah, that’s kind of the cornerstone of our justice system.
It’s up to the prosecution to prove that’s not what happened.
That one guy on the jury has an obligation to voice those doubts if he (or she) carries them. If you’re not convinced by the prosecution, you owe it to everyone to say so–not just keep it inside and vote with the tide.
It’s not a juror’s fault if the prosecution can’t do their job.
It’s the same thing with OJ & Casey Anthony & so on–if, when all is said and done, a juror can say those things & bring the other jurors to their side, it’s the prosecution, not the jury, who screwed up.
Thanks for finding this, mhendo! Good stuff in there. I’m not sure that it shakes my opinion that Povoromo was a creep who raped and killed Russo when she rejected him, but I can believe that the trial was more involved than that.
But either way - I agree with your assessment of LB smooth and his efforts in this thread.
One of the links provided by mhendo does at least give a clue about how the defense planned to fight the charge during pre-trial motions. It includes a claim that DNA evidence in a footprint didn’t match the victim or the accused as was suggested by LB.
As noted nobody is proven innocent but just not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The only thing we do know is the outcome of the trial so they must have created some reasonable doubt.
I think that LB may be the accused himself, trying to clean up the internet, or is actually someone with more first-hand information about the case than anyone else in this thread. It would have been interesting to hear what else he had to say. I guess we have to wait for the movie.
Don’t hold your breath.
You can’t be accused of rape if she’s dead.
There’s just something so much better about shilling for a movie that likely won’t ever exist than shilling for one that will.
Right - which is how, for example, the idiots who took over and vandalized the Wildlife Refuge in Oregon were excused even though a lot of their mopery was on video.
But just saying, “hey, that’s how the system works” doesn’t mean that the system is good or its results are right. Injustice doesn’t get solved by people shrugging and throwing up their hands.
I mean what I said up there. Every rapist in the world claims it was consensual. Every murderer says, “Hey - It wasn’t me! It was some other guy!”
Poveromo’s Phantom Killer defense is basically the Mumia Abu-Jamal defense. Abu-jamal says that he didn’t shoot the cop. He says that at the last second, a Mysterious Stranger ran up, shot Officer Faulkner, and then ran away, leaving no evidence except for the unusable bullet fragments in Officer Faulkner’s body.
Hey - it’s possible! It’s well within the bounds of possibility that the Mysterious Stranger really did commit the murders! There could have been any number of murders lurking around while Poveromo was having rough sex with Russo. Maybe the neighbors did it. Maybe the super did it. Maybe Russo’s mom did it before calling out that she’d found the body.
There’s no evidence for any of that, obviously. But it’s possible. It’s possible, in that it wouldn’t break the physical laws of the universe, that a Mysterious Stranger really did run on, shoot Daniel Faulkner, and exit Stage Left. It’s possible.
But - like I said in my first post - it’s pretty clear how Occam would slice all this.
SO you’re right, Debillw3. This is our system. And I’m not sure how I’d fix it. Between you and me, I’m not sure I trust juries or democracies any more. I don’t know. That’s a separate post.
I think the first step is to start being honest about the fact that our system doesn’t always provide good results and it’s not something we should just shrug off. Because right now, no one’s really trying to improve the system. We’re just shrugging and saying, hey - that’s our cornerstone. One prejudiced guy can gum up the whole process.
The modern jury system is founded on the idea that men of good will and good reason will stand up, weigh the evidence carefully and come to a rational agreement. Debillw3, you said that it’s on the prosecutor’s shoulders to make a convincing case and present the evidence. But I think - and again this is my personal cynicism, maybe, - I’m increasingly uncertain if it’s possible for anyone to overcome prejudice with facts.
Whoever the hold out was who insisted that the Bundy crowd was innocent, even though they were on camera threatening federal officials and shitting up the Refuge - he wasn’t making a judgement based on facts. What is there for a prosecutor to do with that jury member?
Prosecutor: Here is a tape showing the defendant threatening the Sheriff while waving a gun
Juror Holdout: Nope. Not convinced. Not guilty.
Of course, Mumia’s attempt at the Phantom Killer defense didn’t work. But he’s a black dude with dreds shooting a white cop. Prejudiced worked against him. Nicole Brown was killed by a black celebrity. Celebrities play by different rules, but if there’d been more white people on the jury, Simpson wouldn’t have been able to escape the prejudice of stereotypes about black men and white women.
Poveromo was a nice white Italian boy. Historically, white boys get the benefit of the doubt when their date turns up dead and brutalized. If Poveromo was black - does anyone think his Phantom Killer defense would have worked?
I think the willingness to excuse rape and sexual violence by grasping at any possible excuse is a failure of our system. Part of the solution is going to start with just getting people to be honest about how that’s what they’re doing. And part of that is going to have to be calling out everyone who would rather grasp at straws that lets them excuse violence against women by white men. We have to stop pretending that race and gender don’t influence how we pursue justice. That starts at the top, with the judges and legislators, but it also starts at the bottom, among the jury pool.
And I don’t think America wants to be honest about … well, anything, really, these days.
Anyway, that went on a lot longer than I meant to. Here’s my last word on the subject.