> Then, last month, Collin County District Attorney John
> Roach dropped all charges. He said that in 16 of the
> cases, he had no jurisdiction, since neither the
> suspects nor the decoys were in the county during the
> online chats.
>
> As for the rest of the cases, he said neither police
> nor NBC could guarantee the chat logs were authentic
> and complete.
This case raises additional legal issues from the ones andie's already addressed.
First, it appears that more than half the dismissals (24 people arrested during the sting and a few more arrested as a result of evidence gathered pursuant to the sting) were based on jurisdiction. It's an iron-clad rule that a DA can't prosecute a crime s/he has no jurisdiction over.
Second, the integrity of the evidence was questionable since neither the cops nor the show could guarantee the integrity of the chat transcripts. This would be highly problematic for the prosecution because it raises questions about whether the transcripts are even genuine or whether the transcripts reflect the true context in which the conversation occurred. Think about it this way: let's say a tv show coordinates a sting (not using standard police procedure) to bust a drug dealer and evidence of unlawful activity (drugs, cash, guns) are seized. Then it comes out that neither the police nor the show can guarantee that the drugs, guns and cash they'd like to have presented to a jury as evidence of the defendant's guilt were actually the drugs, guns and cash seized from the defendant. Sounds like reasonable doubt to me, and good DA's don't prosecute cases where they can't show that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Finally, there's the fact that the community (from which potential jurors would be pulled) was upset about the way the show and the police conducted the stings:
> "They can chase predators all they want, but they
> shouldn't do it in a populated area with children, two
> blocks from an elementary school," said Lisa Watson,
> 33, who lives down the road from the sting house and
> has three children and another on the way.
>
> Bryan Whorton, who lives with his wife and baby across
> the street from the house, said his neighborhood was
> put in danger. Cars sped up and down the street and
> police sprinted from hiding spots, guns drawn, to
> arrest suspects, he said. One suspect dropped a bag of
> crack, Whorton said.
>
> "This is a family community. It didn't look kosher at
> all," he said.
This DA sounds like a stand-up guy, and I can tell you from personal experience that that's a relatively rare quality for DAs. In my job, I work on lot of child sex cases and I am constantly astounded by how little evidence it takes for a jury to convict someone and send him away for 20 to 30 years. Juries just think the crime is so horrible, and how could a child make something that horrible up, and so the defendant must have done _something_ and there you have it. Scary.
-WD
__________________________ thevanitywebsite.blogspot.com