The lawyer spent 4 1/2 months under arrest for robbing a bank.
Someone else’s fingerprints were on the demand note.
His cell phone records and video from the bridge toll booth showed he was far away.
But he was suspected because he had used the ATM earlier that day - is that common? Do many bank robbers even have bank accounts?
But now they found the real robber who robbed the bank again. This time the fingerprints matched both notes.
So I’m thinking, and I’m asking you to think, What if it were me? Would I be able to prove an alibi? What if I didn’t call or cross the bridge? What if the teller, who spotted me on their ATM camera, became locked on my image and stuck to accusing me through the trial? I’d be toast is what would happen. Unless you were right behind me at the ATM, then you might be toast.
Something somewhat similar happened to me in high school. I was accused of destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property at a construction site. This supposed construction site was many miles away and I had no idea where it was even when the police gave me the location. Apparently, an “eyewitness” identified the perpetrator as me. I had never seen any of these people before in my life. Luckily, I was at my part-time job at the local supermarket when it happened and had my time card to prove it. Even then, the manager had to vouch for me. That apparently wasn’t enough for the police. They still got a search warrant and seized all of the guns in our house to do ballistics testing on them. Thankfully, I hadn’t shot any of them in a few months so that came back clean. The accusation was 100%, flat-out, made-up and I could have been charged if I wasn’t at work that day or if I went target shooting that week. It can easily happen. Innocent until proven guilty my ass.
This is one of the reasons I keep my Tom Tom on even just tooling aorund town. I understand they can be used to show your whereabouts. I also make an effort to smile at people and converse with neighbors/waiters/check staff, etc.
But mos tof hte time I’m at home alone with my daughter, so I’d be SOL.
Still, it sounds like he proved where he was and got held anyway. . . bizarre.
As a side note, it is really hard to defend yourself against a made-up accusation. You have to answer every question with “I don’t know” or “I have no idea where this is coming from”. The police tend to interpret this as stonewalling. They could have accused me of being a serial killer and I would have had to answer the same way.
Reminds me of the guy arrested for murder who had an alibi but wasn’t believed until a comedy on HBO managed to save the day.
As for the OP–it took the real criminal committing another crime before the police dropped the charges. “Reviewing the evidence”? Uh-huh, right. :rolleyes: I hear that and I think “sit and spin”.
I don’t know what I’d do except try to retrace every step, think of every possible surveillance area I’d been in (gracias, Big Brother!), and try my very hardest not to come across as a raging psycho for being so furious at the false accusations.
I hope he gets a bunch of punitive damages for his time in purgatory!
There is a movie about a guy who did time for a murder and was so pararnoid about being falsely accused that he constantly videotapes himself … so of course someone sneaks in and steals a few tapes and gets him accused of murder again … cant remember the name of it but it gets played on cable now and then …
Just goes to show you that even if there is evidence exhonerating you, you have to get it seen in court!
Let’s be fair to the police, he was suspected because he was on a surveillance tape earlier that day, matched the description of the robber, was wearing similar clothes to the robber, drove the same kind of car as the robber, and was identified by bank employees as the robber.
Right or wrong, if this is the situation you face, there’s a good chance you’re going to be totally boned, he was lucky that he had a solid alibi and the real robber got caught.
AFAIK, ballistics test have nothing to do with whether or not a gun has been shot recently. They’re to check for the gun’s “fingerprints.” (Every gun’s barrel mars the surface of a bullet in a unique way, so if you can get your hands on a gun to test-fire some bullets, you can see if the scratch pattern on them matches the scratch pattern of the bullets fired in the crime.)
One of the most notorious and egrarious case in the UK was that of Colin Stagg.
Police had no forensic, and this is despite the horrific nature of the stabbing and sexual offense(indeed it was later the same forensic evidence that fully cleared Stagg following advances in DNA profiling technology), and a description so general as to exclude only half the population - ie Women, and probably not all of those.
They built up a case that was 90% profiling, and 10% entrapment using illegal methods.
The case was eventually thrown out of court by the judge, and how the media howled that he had done so.
I live alone and spend most of my nights alone. The car is typically in the garage, I talk infrequently on the phone. The TV is usually on but I rarely watch it close enough to tell you what really was on TV.
I often think about how I could prove my whereabouts if there is a case of mistaken identity
I remember an interview with one of the people from “The Innocence Project”, which works to free prisoners based on DNA evidence, which typically wasn’t available at the time of the crime and conviction. He said something which was really rather chilling.
They found that about one third of the prisoners who asked for their help in getting blood evidence retested turned out to be innocent. The other two thirds either supported the conviction, or provided no meaningful evidence. But the real chiller was what he said about all the OTHER criminal convictions, without blood evidence. There is no reason to believe that the rate of false convictions in other crimes is any different from the cases the Project involves itself in. And in fact there is a good possibility that the rate of false convictions is even higher in cases where there was no biologic evidence available.
These assumptions cannot really be proved, but the logic is pretty unassailable. Amid the prejudices and competences of judges, juries and attorneys, the actual truth of the matter is very often lost.
Which is why I decided that if I’m ever charged with a serious crime, I will sell my soul to get the very best lawyer possible. Really good lawyers get even the guilty people off.
AFAIK, ballistics test have nothing to do with whether or not a gun has been shot recently. They’re to check for the gun’s “fingerprints.” (Every gun’s barrel mars the surface of a bullet in a unique way, so if you can get your hands on a gun to test-fire some bullets, you can see if the scratch pattern on them matches the scratch pattern of the bullets fired in the crime.)