Karr--what to say? Karr's Lawyers: Porn Case Can't Go on - No Evidence

Just saw on TV ... KARR ORDERED RELEASED!!!


...YumYum

 

Hello, chickens. I understand you've come home to roost?

 

Karmic Payback

Karr child porn charges dismissed (Associated Press Writer)

"A judge dismissed child pornography charges Thursday against former JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr after prosecutors said they didn't have enough evidence to take the case to trial.

Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Rene Chouteau ordered Karr released immediately, bringing an end to his two-month odyssey in the U.S. criminal justice system after he was extradited from Thailand on suspicion of killing the 6-year-old beauty queen.

Karr, 41, was returned to California last month to face the five-year-old pornography case after DNA evidence cleared him of killing the girl in her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996.

The misdemeanor pornography case fell apart almost as quickly, as investigators admitted losing vital computer evidence that was seized from Karr in April 2001 when he was working as a substitute teacher in Sonoma and Napa counties.

Defense lawyers tried twice unsuccessfully to get the charges dismissed and were seeking to have evidence barred from trial when prosecutors gave up.

"The impression that we've had all along is that the prosecution had every intention of getting this case to trial, regardless of the evidence," said defense lawyer Robert Amparan. "I am pleasantly surprised by them having done the right thing."

Prosecutors acknowledged that if Karr were convicted he would not have served any additional time in jail, because he spent several months behind bars awaiting trial in 2001. They said they were seeking to have him register as a sex offender.

Karr fled the state after being released from jail and had been on the lam until his arrest in Bangkok, which caused a sensation when he told reporters he was with JonBenet when she died.

Karr, who moved to California from Alabama with his wife and three sons, first came to the attention of Sonoma County officials after an informant told authorities about alarming e-mails he had been sending her.

Investigators looked at Karr in connection with the unsolved 1997 murder of 12-year-old Georgia Moses, whose body was found dumped along a highway in Sonoma County, Karr's lawyers said.

The sexually explicit pictures of children were later found during a search of his home, authorities said.

His arrest led school officials to strip him of his teaching credential, and his marriage ended in divorce later that year."

 

The story is evolving...

He was ordered to be released immediately.

Heymom :sponge:

 

Well, now that the justice system seems to have survived Lacy and Sonoma Co., it will be interesting to see what Karr does.

Should we call our bookies and bet?

John Karr will:

* leave the country again, with UNINDICTED CHILD ABUSER Foley to join the Michael Jackson VICTORY tour

*sue a number of TV news organizations, Tracey, Lacy, etc.

*write a book and get a movie deal

*go on a rampage...oh...wait, that's already been done twice in the last month

I hope someone is watching Karr.

 

The attorneys are getting in line to file law suits for him. I understand Lin Wood is almost suicidal because he wound up on the wrong side of the money tree.

Additionally, the rumour is that Karr is headed for Hollywood to star in a TV movie called "Murdering JonBenet".

 

Yep, Karr gets dragged back to the US on Mary's dime, gets out of a murder rap he wanted to be convicted of and then go free from a charge he was running from for five years.

So, Okay, here's the new top ten for the David Letterman show.

How can you tell John Mark Karr is free man?

10. Sonoma County prosecutors are beating their heads against the wall.

09. Sonoma County LE are all taking early vacations.

08. Unlike Lou Smit, Karr's defense team really are carving new knotches in their belts.

07. Mary Lacy is wallpapering the OUTSIDE of her house with pictures of John Mark Karr.

06. Lou Smit and Ollie Gray are sitting at the Toad waiting for Tracey.

05. Todd Hartman is still trying to figure out what to do wth 118,000 ballons.

04. Michael Tracey really is taking that trip to the mountains this time.

03. Wendy Hutchens is e-mailing Tracey if she can go with him.

02. Every libel attorney BUT Lin Wood is sending Karr their business cards.

01. John Karr is standing outside of Sonoma jail saying, "Who would have thunk it!"

Wow, what a trip this has been !!

 

Lori A. Carter deserves an honorary membership to FFJ for her Best in Class reporting on the Karr-Sonoma sage. Here is her latest peice (my comments in BLUE):

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http://www.pressdemo.com/EarlyEdition/article_view.cfm?recordID=5162&publishdate=10/06/2006


Karr case trail of errors

By LORI A. CARTER and JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Friday, October 6, 2006

Sonoma County's case against John Mark Karr was rife with problems dating to 2001, when authorities learned about the onetime Petaluma substitute teacher's bizarre fascination with slain girls.


Conversations were taped, with copies kept surreptitiously by an informant.

Evidence was seized without a warrant.

Computer evidence was taken and lost, and then some of it was found five years later.

Some evidence apparently seized in 2001 was never cataloged, including a high-capacity disk with more potentially illegal photos.

The case sat idle for five years as Karr fled, traveled to Thailand and reportedly began sex-change procedures.

In August, he burst back onto the radar with his statements about the slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, Colo., in 1996.

Sheriff's deputies aborted their first trip to extradite Karr as federal prosecutors were considering whether they could charge him.

Once Karr was back in Sonoma County, misunderstandings among investigators, prosecutors and a judge sparked tense testimony about exactly what computer evidence existed and when it was lost.

Sheriff's officials said they knew for two weeks that the key hard drive was missing before prosecutors were told. The judge said she learned it from the newspaper.

A copy of the crucial hard drive was found just last week, but it proved to be the unraveling of the Karr prosecution.

The Sonoma County case against Karr collapsed much like Boulder's did - amid intense public criticism and media scrutiny.

After saying for weeks they were prepared for trial, prosecutors announced Thursday they couldn't prove the case and asked a judge to dismiss the charges.

District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua defended his handling of a case that, at every step - from Karr's emergence in Thailand to his release in Boulder, from his extradition to Sonoma County to his release Thursday - Karr's veracity and the legal judgment of the authorities who pursued him have been questioned.

"I'm very proud of the way we handled this case," Passalacqua said Thursday. "We did everything we could to hold him accountable."

In an interview about an hour after Karr walked free, the district attorney was asked to respond to criticisms that, as the county's chief law enforcement officer, he erred in extraditing Karr in August without a stronger case in hand.

"Irrespective of any computer issues, we felt up until today that we could present this case to a jury with sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction," he said. "Those who say we should not have brought Mr. Karr back to Sonoma County, they do not recognize the dangers of child pornography."

Sheriff Bill Cogbill declined an interview request but issued a statement acknowledging problems with the investigation and saying an internal inquiry is under way.

Neither Cogbill nor Passalacqua held office in 2001 when Karr was arrested.

Joan Risse, the chief deputy district attorney who formally asked that charges against Karr be dismissed, said he had "benefited from running away" from Sonoma County and escaping a trial on the child pornography charges five years ago.

"If it were back in 2001, we would have been fine," she said, because the original hard drive containing the images would have been available as evidence. (YY: That's ASSUMING that the data from the drive actually indicated that the 5 images had been accessed within the statute of Limitations ... which looks doubtful. Without such access within the SOL, there is no prosecutable crime. Also, they would have had to have PROVED that it was Mark Karr who had accessed the images ... as opposed to his wife or others)

The intervening years have seen "lots of computer technology improvements," and those advances have led to stricter standards by which computer-related evidence can be admitted in such cases, she said. (YY: This suggests to moi that the DA would have been happy to have convicted a possibly innocent man on a technicality.)

She said that despite the problems that surfaced with the loss of the original hard drive, prosecutors believed they could revive the case by relying on the same technological advances that had led to stricter evidence standards.

"We felt we were going to be able to overcome that burden because of the improved technology," she said.

The case was doomed, Risse said, when it became clear Thursday that software experts who had been analyzing a copy of the original hard drive - since Aug. 28 when Karr was ordered extradited to Sonoma County - couldn't establish precisely when the images were downloaded or accessed. (YY: This sounds like the FBI analysis. What is NOT mentioned was whether or not the FBI were able to confirm that the images were IN FACT images of people under the age of 18 years old. Without confirmation of that issue, there simply never was a valid case, and Karr may NOT have ever possessed child porn. I hope that Lori Carter follows-up on this issue. I suggest that we ALL email her to that effect ... see contact info at bottom of article)

Authorities first were alerted to Karr by an informant who had worked previously with sheriff's detectives - and who herself had an unusual interest in killers.

Detectives thought Karr was a potential suspect in the still unsolved 1997 slaying of Georgia Moses, a 12-year-old Santa Rosa girl whose body was found in Petaluma.

Though that turned out to be false, since the Karr family moved to Petaluma in 2000, detectives began building a case against Karr that resulted in five misdemeanor child porn charges' being filed in 2001.

In taped conversations and e-mails with the informant, Karr spoke of his "psychic connection" with Ramsey and Polly Klaas, a child murder victim in Petaluma.

Sheriff's detectives said they called Boulder authorities in 2001 about Karr, but Boulder police say they have no record of communications from Sonoma County detectives.

As Karr sat in Sonoma County Jail for nearly six months in 2001, a stream of defense lawyers advocated for his release - first a private attorney, then when he couldn't afford her any longer, public defenders.

While a series of other legal issues were battled out in 2001, no one challenged the validity of the deleted data on the computer hard drive, instead arguing that the search of Karr's house was invalid because detectives didn't have a warrant.

You can reach Staff Writers Lori A. Carter at 568-5312 or lcarter@pressdemocrat.com, and Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jhay@pressdemocrat.com.

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...YumYum

 

:rotfl:

 

Yum, you're right on the money with your comments. These were 5 questionable DELETED images. And I doubt any jury would convict a man who gets on the stand and says "some jerk emailed me some inappropriate photos, so I simply deleted them...". Or are all of us now going to be held responsible for the crap emailed us by the spammers out there?

The real story here is how severely flawed the justice system is.

 

Number 7 is too funny. I wonder if she'll lose her job now? Wait, she's still in Boulder, her job is safe.

 

Dim, the fact that they offered him a plea deal the end of last month told me then that would have convicted him knowing full well they didn't have enough evidence. If Karr had accepted that deal then they would have been off the hook and nobody would have known they were rolling the dice.

Now the question is, how can I get copies of all the original public documents for the Sonoma case? I want to see that original arrest warrant as well as the search warrants and whatever else is available.

And now, what happens that he lost everything in the process of this whole charade? I have a feeling LE panicked his wife when they first arrested him and that's probably why she filed for divorce while he was in jail back in 2001. So he lost his wife, his three sons, his home, his job, everything that meant anything to him in this world. And he did care about his three sons as he wrote about them several times in his e-mails to Tracey.

So does he get anything back? Can Sonoma just keep everything they took out of his houses? Does he just wander off into the sunset a MARKED man? And what about his emotional issues, is that just a moat issue now?

This below was on http://www.pier5law.com/robert-amparan.htm

October 2006 November 2006
Press Conference Regarding
John Mark Karr

October 6, 2006
1:00 p.m. at Pier 5 Law Offices
506 Broadway, at Kearney
San Francisco

Mr. Karr will not be present
=================================
From a .PDF file on that site:

Press Release
October 5,2006

On October 5, 2006, the Sonoma County District Attorney moved to dismiss the misdemeanor charges against John Mark Karr, citing insufficient evidence to prove the case. Mr. Karr had been charged with five misdemeanor counts of possession of illegal pornographic images on his computer in 2001. The Honorable Rene Chouteau granted the prosecution's motion. This dismissal came on the eve of jury selection, which was slated to begin Tuesday, October 10,2006.

Attorneys for Mr. Karr, Robert Amparan, Gayle Gutekunst, and Benjamin Price, brought to light during the extensive pre-trial litigation, that the computer hard drive on which the allegedly illegal images were located had been lost by the Sonoma County Sheriffs Department, along with the working copy of the computer's contents. This made it impossible to determine how the images got on the computer, or when they were last accessed. What was known was that the images were in the unallocated space of the hard drive.

Mr. Karr, a former school teacher with no criminal record, was released from jail after the judge dismissed the case. He was in custody for a total of seven months before obtaining the dismissal.
=================================

ACR

 

Well, if this Sonoma DA is going to keep CONVICTING Karr in the press for the alledged crimes WHEN THE DA COULDN'T MAKE THE CASE AND HAS HAD IT DISMISSED...no wonder Wood is crying on his horse's shoulder.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's called SLANDER. Even if the DA says it.

Yeah, I can honestly say that I think that Karr's six month incarceration, well, make that 7 MONTHS, now, seems a bit old style Soviet Union. I will repeat that I think they held Karr because they wanted to investigate him for that murder. That's backward. I also can say that Karr must have felt that he was being railroaded the whole time he was in jail, IF HE KNEW THAT HE DID NOT HAVE ANY KNOWLEDGE OF ILLEGAL CHILD PORN ON HIS COMPUTER. Think about that. Six months sitting in a cell knowing he's being railroaded.

Don't get me wrong. John Mark Karr's language and writing about molesting little girls makes me SICK. But I think Tracey SET HIM UP. Nobody forced Karr, but if Tracey spent 4 years PRIMING Karr, and Tracey READ IT ALL and KEPT IT GOING, that says THE SAME THING ABOUT TRACEY, IMO. That Tracey wanted to trap Karr for the Ramsey Bus is no excuse to me. Tracey is NOT LE and he has no more business than WE do trying to TRAP bus victims for the Ramsey delusional spin team. And during ALL THOSE YEARS, Tracey KNEW that KARR WAS TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN OVERSEAS. Why didn't he do something about it THEN, with Karr talking ALL THAT TRASH ABOUT MOLESTING LITTLE GIRLS?

Tracey and Lacy are responsible that John Mark Karr ISN'T IN A THAI JAIL. Karr threatened that he was about to molest a child in Thailand. If Lacy and Tracey weren't so HOT to catch a NON-EXISTENT INTRUDER, then Lacy would have alerted the Thai authorities once Karr's DNA DIDN'T MATCH IN THAILAND. She could even have had those DNA samples sent back to the US to test, and if her DNA technician said he couldn't do that test, Cellmark sure would have. But no. Bring Karr back HERE, because they want to do their PIMP WALK in front of the cameras and tell the world THEY NOT ONLY SOLVED THE MURDER, but MOST important, CLEARED THE SAINTED RAMSEYS.

Lacy does NOT know the JB case evidence, WHICH IS IRONIC SINCE SHE'S THE ONE WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE INVESTIGATING IT FOR THE LAST 4 YEARS. So she's STILL listening to THE RST. Went to Patsy's FUNERAL. All because LACY IS NOT OBJECTIVE. HER DETECTIVE COULDN'T INVESTIGATE THE RAMSEY MURDER ADEQUATELY IF HE LIVED TO BE A 100 because it's too complicated now. And I'd bet MONEY that Lacy won't let ANY INVESTIGATOR WORKING FOR HER INVESTIGATE THE RAMSEYS. If EITHER Lacy or Tom Bennett knew ANYTHING about this case, they'd have known Karr BLEW his "confession" with the details of "the murder." They'd also know that PATSY WROTE THE NOTE, BOUGHT THE TOO LARGE UNDERWEAR STRANGELY FOUND ON THE BODY, AND LIED TO LE OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER. They'd also know that THE JB MURDER CASE IS BLOWN FOR EVER CONVICTING ANYONE.

So instead of turning Karr's perverted words over the Thai LE, where he could have been investigated to see if he WAS molesting children there, Lacy drags him back here and voila! NOW HE'S OUR PROBLEM. Is he dangerous, as Marc Klaas says? He very well could be. Or is he just a wimp who will write anything for attention from these CHILD MURDER CASE WHORES LIKE TRACEY AND HUDGENS? Could be. Guess we'll never know.

Unless Karr sues and/or goes on TV to tell us. Then we'll get HIS VERSION of events. How could he explain his sick imagination? I dont' think he's ever going to get any sympathy from any jury if his sick writing gets into it, and seems to me it would in any suit against Boulder. So we may never hear from Karr on this. Unless some freak in Hollywood hands him a deal, which could happen. But they'd never get to put in the awful language Karr used, and with that in the public record, I don't see how Karr can benefit from any more publicity.

So thinking about it this way, Karr may just quietly board a plane to Never Never Land and then whatever he does, it's up to another country's police force to catch him. I just hope no child ends up in his hands being abused.

 

But you know what? And I'm putting this here, because IT'S THE SAME THING, only ex-Congressman FOLEY from Florida contacted MINORS with the same disgusting language, was seen outside their DORM while they were working for CONGRESS, drunk and trying to seduce them. He proposed ILLEGAL SEXUAL ACTIVITY WITH THEM. ONLINE.

WHEN IS SOMEONE GOING TO ARREST FOLEY? CHILD SEX ABUSER?

If John Karr can be dragged from Thailand and held for two months in jails with no more evidence than they had against him on the charges he was arrested and held for, WHY ISN'T FOLEY IN JAIL?

Oh, wait. FOLEY'S got money. HE'S GOT FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES. HE'S BEING SWEPT UNDER THE RUG FOR POLITICAL REASONS.

Hello, John and Patsy Ramsey.

 

That is EXACTLY why Lacy brought Karr back to the US. She was convinced she had finally exhonerated her beloved Ramseys. And she knew that even if the case somehow fell apart because of technicalities, at least enough reasonable doubt might help further the impending canonzation of St. Patsy of Our Pillbox Hat.

I can't tell you how much it infuriates me to know that Lacy has publicly admitted to ignorance of the Ramsey case files yet continues to be in charge of its investigation!!! :banghead:

Why is this travesty allowed to go on? And you're darn right Lacy isn't going to let anyone investigate anything but an "intruder did it" scenario. She's so blatently biased in favor of the Ramseys, she doesn't even bother to hide it. She announces she agrees with Carnes' half-baked conclusion, meets with John and Patsy privately in Boulder without telling Kolar they're in town, attends Patsy's wedding, calls John for advice on Karr, and then informs John that Karr's DNA doesn't match a full 24 hours before notifying Karr's own attorney!


WHY DOESN'T THE MEDIA GO AFTER THIS STORY!

WHY CAN'T WE GET ANYTHING DONE ABOUT THE CORRUPTION IN BOULDER!!!

 

Cherokee, I'm sure Paradox is going to give us an analysis of your typo saying "Patsy's wedding," but I think it's funny. She sure isn't a bride of Christ, is she? I guess she married the Devil in the end. :floor:

Heymom

 

LOL ... you're right ... I meant funeral. But her wedding looked like a fashion funeral, so I guess I have trouble keeping them straight.

 

That is funny Chero!!!

 

I would be devastated if I was an American right now. I don't mean this as an insult my American friends. I just mean that I would feel so helpless at the way things are going between Mary Lacy and this Karr scenario, and nothing being done about it. I'm sick inside about all of it, honest! Just wishing I could do something, but what?