Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [326]
* Ron Brambila also came to court to give moral support to Danny Arevelo, who was convicted of felony child abuse in the death of Elizabeth Manning’s son, Michael, and sentenced to ten years.
* A removable computer disk, similar to a floppy disk, with the capacity to hold information that would fill a hundred floppies.
* This is not Colorado law. The successful prosecution of an accessory does not require the charging of a principal. Howard v. People, 51 P.2d 594(1935); Britto v. People, 497 P 2d 325 (1972).
* The floor plans to the Ramsey house appear in Appendix A.
* Cement floors unprotected from an underlying earthen foundation will “dust”—that is, the unsealed concrete will start to disintegrate, and a powdery substance will appear on the surface. Cement floors in a low-traffic or poorly ventilated location are particularly prone to this phenomenon.
* An attorney who accepts a case without payment, to fill a perceived social need to offer legal representation to the poor, is said to be working pro bono publico (literally, “for the public good”), or more commonly, pro bono.
* Fred Goldman is the father of Ronald Goldman, the second victim in the O. J. Simpson double-murder case.
* Cellulose is a carbohydrate of high molecular weight that is the chief constituent of the cell walls of plants. Raw cotton is 91 percent cellulose. Other important natural sources are flax, hemp, jute, straw, and wood.
* Narcotics officers’ lingo: to sacrifice one person for another.
* Terms used by police officers: A grazer is someone who has come up through the ranks in the Boulder system. A meat eater is an officer who came from outside Boulder and had learned a tougher approach to crime.
* At this point, the Ramseys had not been explicitly advised by the police of their right to silence. In such a case, if they were later to offer some explanation of events that seemed to be the sort of thing one would naturally bring up early on (for example, that one of them had heard noises in the night indicating an intruder), the prosecution could prove that they had not offered the explanation during their long months of “lawyered-up” silence. This proof would be entirely proper and possibly persuasive. The question is a subtle one, and Beckner’s inquiry might have prompted a more nuanced reaction in a less gun-shy prosecutor.
* The common term indictment is an abbreviation of the document’s formal name, a bill of indictment. Ordinarily, a bill of indictment is prepared for the signature of the foreperson by the prosecutor working with the grand jury. If the grand jury votes to indict, the foreperson and the prosecutor must both sign what is called a true bill of indictment.
* A decade and a half ago, expert testimony about handwriting comparisons was almost universally accepted, but DNA evidence was viewed with suspicion. In the intervening years, some judges (notably Judge Richard Matsch, from the Oklahoma City bombing trials) had expressed skepticism about the scientific validity of handwriting analysis, while during the same period DNA evidence became overwhelmingly acceptable. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1993 made an effort to clarify the standards for the validity of scientific evidence but succeeded only in emphasizing the discretion of the trial judge to allow or disallow it. There was no way to predict whether a judge would find that a convincing scientific basis could be laid down for the kind of linguistic analysis Foster performed, and so no way to be sure that his testimony could, or could not, be used at a trial.
* Koby’s faith in the power of the grand jury to preserve testimony is questionable. In Colorado, there is little difference in admissibility between a witness’s signed statement and that same witness’s grand jury testimony under oath. Either one would be admissible if the witness later testified at trial and said something different. Most likely, neither one would be admissible if the witness disappeared before trial or refused to testify.
* Use immunity