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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Aug 15, 2016 - 11:22am PT
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Coach, you are make an all too common and unfortunate fallacy--namely, that the legal presumption of innocence that defendants receive in connection with the criminal justice system means that we must assume that everyone who hasn't been convicted of a crime (or whose conviction has been overturned) is in fact innocent.
We're free to draw whatever conclusions we see fit depending on the circumstances.
To give an example from out legal system, OJ was found not guilty of murdering Nicole and Goldman. He was, however, found liable in a civil suit. This is generally explained as happening because of the different standards of proof in civil and criminal cases. That's a big part of it, but even that is a bit of a legal fiction--it's entirely possible that some or all of the civil jury members believed that OJ was in fact guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The two jury verdicts could be reconciled by believing that the evidence showed OJ was guilty by a preponderance of evidence but was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But you're free to believe the OJ was guilty as hell or clearly innocent or anything in between, as you will. (The evidence in the two trials was not the same, but that doesn't change the point I'm making.)
Your comment also raises some fallacies. For example, a conviction may be overturned because an admission (or other evidence) was ruled inadmissible even if there does appear to be any doubt as the actual guilt of the defendant. This is often described as a conviction being overturned on a "technicality"--people don't have to accept that description, but the point is that appeals courts are not necessarily making judgments about the actual guilt or innocence of the defendant (although of course that can be an important and even necessary part of the process, depending on the circumstances).
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John M
climber
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Aug 15, 2016 - 11:47am PT
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While Avery's guilt seems clear to me unless you believe he was framed by numerous people who had no clear motivation to do so,
This case is such a mess.
There was motivation to frame him. He was suing the county for 36 million dollars for wrongful conviction. He spent 18 years in prison for a rape and murder that he did not commit. DNA evidence cleared him. There was evidence of the actual person who did the crime, but the county chose to ignore it. He had a good case.
Once he was incriminated in this new case, he settled the old one and it never went to court.
If he didn't do the murder, then I believe the cops framed him. They needed him to be guilty so no one would look at how bad they messed up his first conviction.
Two of the main pieces of evidence against him were found by a local cop/detective after the investigators from the next county over had done their investigation. Crime scene techs had gone over the garage for 4 days and found nothing, including no blood evidence, though the theory was that Avery shot her in the garage. Then the local cop walks in, though he wasn't suppose to be there because the county had given the investigation over to the next door county because of the lawsuit. So after four days of going over the crime scene, this cop walks in and after 20 minutes he finds the bullet just laying on the floor of the garage.
If that doesn't baffle the mind enough, then he did the same thing inside Avery's mobile home. Crime scene techs and detectives go over that place for days and find no evidence. They tore the place apart. The boy had given testimony that the girl was murdered and raped in the bedroom and that Her throat had been slashed numerous times. His testimony has now been found by a judge to have been coerced. He is very low IQ, borderline severe mental retardation. No blood was found, nor any other evidence. Then this local cop walks in and in a few minutes finds the keys to the murdered girls car behind a night stand. He said it was wedged behind the night stand, as though the night stand had not been moved by other crime scene techs, though the room had been torn apart.
The same cop found two crucial pieces of evidence just minutes after starting searching, after multiple teams of crime scene techs and detectives had combed the places for days. A detective who wasn't supposed to be at the scene.
If you add in that that same cop's girlfriend had had trouble with Casey.. well, it sure looks hinky.
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