I comprehend what I read just fine, thank you. Whether or not you think it’s bullshit, you denied that it ever existed. Suddenly I find out from elsewhere that there was something. And your retort? Oh, well, that was bullshit.
You could have addressed that from the outset. Instead you chose to ignore it, casting doubt upon your comments when it was brought up. You, sir, are not being entirely forthright here.
“Liar” is far too strong a word, because I don’t believe that you are lying, and I certainly don’t doubt your sincerity, but c’mon. You can’t just say your side of the story and expect everyone to believe every word of what you say.
I still deny that any evidence exists. I haven’t changed my story. Yes some things were technically presented as “evidence” at trial, but those things are not real, probative physical connections between the defendants and the crime. They are mere suggestions- props- hat pegs designed to give a jury an excuse to convict.
I have no wish to get into a pissing contest with you, Airman. I have nothing against you and I’m sorry I was brusque. This case just pushes all my buttons.
Yes, but not overly so. Similar confessions are extracted all the time, all over the country. I am, as I’ve said elsewhere, much more disturbed at the poor quality of defense representation that permitted the confession to be used.
The knife was found in a lake behind one of the accused’s homes, which certainly would allow the jury to infer that the accused was responsible for it being there. While it can’t be said to a scientific certainty to BE the murder weapon, it’s completely consistent with the murder weapon. And it’s quite a coincidence that the only knife found in the lake behind the defendant’s house is exactly the same kind of blade that was used in the killing.
This is evidence. It is a set of information which tends to make the facts under dispute seem true. It is WEAK evidence. It is not non-existant evidence.
If the physical evidence had been the only evidence, then I agree that the case could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But that doesn’t make it “not evidence.” It just makes it WEAK evidence.
No, because I am not confident that they received a fair trial, one in which they were represented bya zealous advocate. Their defense was (figuratively) asleep at the table, and the result does not leave me with the confidence of a verdict following a fair trial.
Maybe. I’m not ready to proclaim actual innocence. But they didn’t get a fair trial.
Fallacy of equivocation. You’re changing the meaning of the word evidence in what seems like a desperate attempt to take your understandable hyperbole and defend it as literal.
Consider this: the fiber and knife evidence, along with the dead body, would CERTAINLY support a finding of probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant. Similar evidence is used every day all over the country to obtain warrants. Now, the standard for a warrant is “probable cause” - a relatively weak standard when compared to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” needed for a guilty verdict in a criminal case. “Probable cause” simply says that there is enough evidence to believe a crime was probably committed, and the area to be searched probably will yield evidence relevant to the case.
You can hardly claim that the fiber and knife information is evidence in a warrant application, but magically loses its status as evidence at trial.
All your arguments go to the WEIGHT of the evidence, not its existence.
I really think this would be a good issue on which to back off a bit, take a deep breath, and say, “Yeah, miscarriages of justice make me angry. OK, ok - it was VERY VERY WEAK evidence.”
Didn’t the step-father also have all of his teeth pulled within a relatively short period after the murders, making an eerie ‘coincidence’ (if it is one) with the bite wound evidence on the victims? Is that this case or is it another one that I saw?
Dave, you know that I like and respect you very much, but I’m with Diogenes on this one. Red fibers from a very common bathrobe sold at the local Wal-Mart is evidence of the fact that Echols’s mom shops at Wal-Mart. A knife in a lake in the same neighborhood as Jason Baldwin proves what? Where’s the link of the knife to Baldwin? The link of the knife to the murders? How many other people could’ve thrown a knife into that lake?
And they you have Mr. Creepy himself, Byers, recounting the murders in the Paradise Lost documentary as if he did it, and of course the knife that he produced that had human blood on it. DNA tests at the time were ‘inconclusive’, but what would they say now that DNA fingerprinting exists?
This is the kind of shit you read about, or that they make movies about, set in countries where people have no rights. Finding a retarded kid who will testify that himself and the town scapegoat committed some Satanic murder with a third person, has to be told what to say in his confession because he doesn’t know the facts of the crime he supposedly committed, and then they get thrown away for life while everyone who is supposed to care about the law and justice lets them rot.
I’d wonder how the prosecutors ever got the fiber and the knife into the trial as ‘evidence’ of anything, but I figure I already know. The judge was just as damned biased against those heavy-metal listening Satanic freaks as the rest of the town.
Whether you think they’re innocent or not, at the very least these three deserve the fair trial they never got.
Not really. The “home” in question was a large trailer park- several dozen people had access to the lake. Also, the fact that the serrations on the deceased matched this knife is not particularly compelling; in the first place this was a massed produced knife available at any number of stores in the WM area, and in the second place there were different styles of knife also consistent with the same serrations (one of which was the bloodstained knife John Mark Byers gave to the film crew).
Their defense wasn’t as incompetent as it was undefunded (in fact they didn’t even get paid for several months and their budget for research and scientific evidence was $1000). The judge refused to allow them to present the experts who volunteered their time and services yet allowed a self-published quack who received a “Ph.D.” from a correspondence school (that has since been closed by the federal government) to testify as “an expert on the occult” and to tell the jury that the presence of Stephen King novels in Echols’s house was evidence he was a devil worshiper (and, as we all know, devil worshipers kill little boys).
Thus demonstrating that you are, in fact, a liar. As if any further demonstration were necessary.
Most people, past the age of three or so, get past the stage where they think that temper tantrums change reality. Others join the Straight Dope and continue the screaming.
Oh well. If the DNA tests come back and give evidence of guilt, maybe you can close your eyes and wish on a star and the Evidence Fairy will make that go away too.
I think I will try out the Diogenes the Cynic line of argument.
Could the timing be that since her child in now 18, the threats they made no longer hold water for her, and she could recant without fear of CPS taking her son away?
You know the problem with this case? Advocates for the boys stretch the truth, either out of ignorance or out of a genuine desire to help the situation, and end up having all their claims, valid and otherwise, dismissed.
The admission of an expert is within the discretion of the trial court. The trial court noted that Dr. Griffis had testified as an expert witness in state courts in Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan; in federal court in Ohio; and in two foreign countries, as well as lecturing on the occult in twenty- eight states and two foreign countries. Dr. Griffis had much more than ordinary, layman’s knowledge of nontraditional groups, the occult, and satanism, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in allowing him to testify as an expert witness.
Now, your beef is with his CONCLUSIONS. That’s fine - experts disagree about conclusions all the time. Some expert credentials are better than others. But you cannot dismiss the guy as an out-an-out fraud, put on the stand with the connivance of a corrupt or ignorant judge – if that were that case, how do you explain the Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and federal judges who also let him get on the stand? A conspiracy that started years ago? Rank incompetence on the benches of many different tribunals?
How about just saying that the guy was wrong? Qualified as an expert, yes, properly testifying, yes, but simply wrong?
Rick
(And the failure of the defense to get their experts on the stand to refute Griffis was not “underfunding.” The experts were willing. The defense failed to foundationally qualify them.)
That is not demonstrated. The fact that he had appeared in other courts I never once disputed, but the man’s “expertise” I do- again, ALL of his books and articles are self-published, his degree is from an unaccredited-by-any-agency institution, and his “Satanic panic” theories have been discredited again and again and again by reputable experts (i.e. people whose Ph.D.s came from schools that actually have a campus in addition to a P.O. box) and by law enforcement personnel (particularly after the Wenatchee, Washington horrors).
Another man who has testified as an expert in numerous cases is Dr. Paul Cameron. He states that gay men are far more likely to molest children than straight men are, that gay men have an average life expectancy of 42, and that gay men orally severed the genitalia of a boy in a Nebraska shopping mall just prior to one of his lectures; all of these statements are demonstrably false. Unlike Griffis, his Ph.D. is from an actual accredited university (albeit one that denounced him), but like Griffis his publications are almost all self-published or published through vanity presses and the research he cites the most is his own. He has been expelled from the APA specifically for fraudulent research on the subject of gays and child molestation, is forbidden to practice psychology in some states, and he has been censured by every secular professional organization of which he was ever a part (and even by Focus on the Family and William Bennett), yet he still testifies on matters relating to gay parentage and foster children of gay couples have even been removed on his “expert” testimony. Would you consider him an “expert” based solely on the fact he has testified in other cases?
In principle, I’ve always believed that the death penalty is fitting punishment for some crimes. I still believe that to this day.
Cases like this one, however, make me seriously question the use of it in any legal system. There’s no way to give these guys back the lives they’ve lost if in fact, they are innocent of these awful crimes. Nothing on earth can give them back the last eleven years of their lives, yet at the very least, a living man can be freed. If Echols is executed, there will never be justice. Not for the family of the victim, not for the victim, and certainly not for Baldwin, Misskelley and Echols.
I wouldn’t go so far out onto the limb and say that I can tell for 100% certain that they are innocent, but I don’t have to either. It’s obvious as all hell that they didn’t get a fair trial. Reasonable doubt exists by the ton for all of them. I think the most stupefying part of all of this is that twelve people sat in the jury box and not a single one of them could muster a reasonable doubt. Of course, then there’s the judge who keeps denying every appeal. I don’t even understand why that is. Maybe it’s because I’m not a lawyer that I don’t understand it. Could somebody explain to me how the judge keeps denying appeals? Because right now, it looks like a total apathy for justice and a hard-on for executing Echols.
Was this the same guy who couldn’t remember the specifics of a single other case in which he testified, or was that another so-called expert with a Ph.D. from a mail-order school?
The guy was neither a doctor nor an expert. There is no such thing as an expert on “the occult.” It’s a field which does not exist. The fact that he was allowed to testify as an expert does not mean that he was an expert. A person can not have “expertise” in something which does not exist. You might as well call an expert on the Loch Ness Monster or Klingon anthropology.
BTW, I am personally more qualified, with an education more legitimate and more specific from a real university in the subjects of cults and Satanism (there is simply no such field of study as “the occult.” It’s an utterly meaningless word with no academic definition) than the “expert” who testified in the WM3 trial. Does that mean I could get qualified as an expert witness in a murder trial?
Specifically, Griffis was an “expert” on the subject of “occult murders”, which is a particularly rare specialty since the FBI and DOJ have never recorded a single instance of an “occult murder”.
Here comes Definition Man to head off a crisis!
ev·i·dence
Anyway, by this definition, evidence was presented during the trial, but it wasn’t evidence. The statement “There’s no evidence,” is true, because nothing that furnished proof, or even reasonable suspicion, was brought forth. Actually, even the statement “No evidence was presented,” is true, because things were submitted to a tribunal can be fairly easily shown to not have been done so to ascertain the truth of a matter.
Therefore, the knife and the fibers aren’t evidence.
Is it possible that to a lawyer, anything legally presented as evidence is, by definition, evidence? And that to a layman, really fucking weak and lame evidence is the same as no evidence?
But this claim is beginning to try my Job-like patience.
“Evidence was presented during the trial, but it wasn’t evidence.”
Uh huh.
Look, refute my probable cause argument, above. Are you saying the fiber and knife had absolutely ZERO probative value?
If so, I’m afraid you have shaken the very foundations of criminal procedure in this country. Similar evidence is used to support the issuance of search warrants EVERY SINGLE DAY somewhere in the United States. Are all those search warrants facially invalid?
Your argument seems to be - when it approaches coherence, that is - that the evidence was INSUFFICIENT, as a matter of law, to permit a finding of guilty. That’s a perfectly reasonable argument to make. But it’s not the same as claiming there was no evidence at all.
There are many standards of proof in the judicial system: reasonable suspicion, probable cause, preponderance, clear and convincing, beyond a reasonable doubt. You can attack the strength of evidence, and argue it does not meet the requisite standard of proof, without claiming that it has literally a zero value of probity.
But there is still vast chasm of difference between what constitutes probably cause for a serach warrant amd what constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt at a trial. The knife and fiber in the WM3 case would be exceptionally weak even as probable cause and does not even pass a basic laugh test as proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I agree that we are talking about semantics here. Technically this crap was presented as “evidence” in a trial but some of us are only talking about a real world, practical definition of “evidence,” not a technical. legal definition.