A Very Cold Case: The Vampire Master

I remember this case well as I lived in Springfield, Missouri, at the time. Here is the crime scene:

Mr. Feeney, 36, had said he was at a teacher's conference 90 miles away when his wife, Cheryl, their 6-year-old-son and their year-old daughter were killed early on the morning of Feb. 26, 1995. The three were found face down in their beds. Mrs. Feeney and the son, Tyler, had been beaten to death; the daughter, Jennifer, had been strangled with a drapery cord.

Prosecutors, who had no witnesses or physical evidence, contended that the crime scene was staged and that Mr. Feeney had the motive to kill. Four women testified they had had affairs with Mr. Feeney, and evidence indicated that he stood to gain $500,000 in life insurance and other property from the death of his wife and children. 

This was the extent of the evidence against him. The reason that Feeney was the prime suspect was statistics. The perception is that most women that are murdered are murdered by their husband. I myself had thought this was true until I wrote this entry in the blog. While such statistics are hard to come by, the correct percentage seems to be 28 percent.  Famed attorney F. Lee Bailey says 30%, but to come to that figure he had to include ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends.

It is only natural that a husband as odd as Feeney would be a suspect. For example, as a High School teacher he was known to play a game called Vampire The Masquerade with his students. While the insurance motive was possible, in a dual income household such policies are common. Mrs. Feeney was a nurse.

But police, once they had their "murderer," did not do much with some of the other oddities of the case:

There was also evidence that others may have been involved. Unidentified hairs were found on Cheryl Feeney's bloodstained nightgown. And the boy was found to have a sexually transmitted case of hepatitis B that did not come from his parents, raising the possibility that someone who had infected the boy also killed him and his family.

There was even a semen stain on the marital bed that did not belong to the husband. 

At the time I wondered why prosecutors bring such weak cases. Then an eye witness came forward. While there was proof that Feeney had been at the convention, key to the prosecution’s case was that a 90 mile drive from the teacher’s conference in the middle of the night was not out of the question. The eye witness was a convenience store clerk who remembered Feeney buying gas in the middle of the night in Springfield. I remember thinking, "He must have done it then." But when the employment records were examined it was discovered that the "eye witness" was not working the night of the murder. Whoops.

It is not clear what the motivation of the clerk was. It could be similar to the problem of police perjury called testilying, where the police lie to convict a suspect they "know" is guilty.  Or the clerk could have been sincerely mistaken. Eye witness identification is not as reliable as most people think.

The point of these series of blog posts is to highlight the need for us to think about the templates we use to evaluate the criminal cases in the news. We need to abandon our preconceptions that if someone is arrested they must be guilty. It ain't necessarily so.

After 5 hours of deliberation Jon Feeney was acquitted.

Update on Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 4:22AM by [Positive Dennis]

Vampire Master was changed to Vampire The Masquerade. 

You Know Its' Got To Be Bad When They Use Your Initials

In keeping with my theme of the Justice System this week I thought that I would write about the strange case of "DSK"—Dominique Strauss-Kahn .  

Strauss-Kahn had everything going for him. He was head of a very important international agency—the IMF (International Monetary Fund). He is married to a very wealthy woman. He was the odds-on favorite to be the Socialist Party candidate for president of France next year. Yet here is what happened to him:

But there was also outrage about the photos of Mr. Strauss-Kahn cuffed in custody. While the so-called “perp walk” (“perp” is short for “perpetrator”) is a New York police tradition, allowing the press to get photographs of a suspect, it is not a tradition in France. In fact, it is against the law. A 2000 French law tries to reinforce the principle of the presumption of innocence by criminalizing the publication of photos of an identifiable person in handcuffs who has not yet been convicted.

The former French justice minister whose name is on the law, Élisabeth Guigou, said she found the photos of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in cuffs indicative of “a brutality, a violence, of an incredible cruelty, and I’m happy that we don’t have the same judiciary system.”

Wikipedia describes a Perp Walk this way:

A perp walk, or walking the perp, is a common custom of American law enforcement, the practice of taking an arrested suspect through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb. Within the United States the perp walk is most closely associated with New York City. Originally only those accused of violent street crimes were subjected to it, but since Rudolph Giuliani had accused white-collar criminals perp-walked in the 1980s it has been extended to almost every defendant. 

It is the way that the media and the prosecutors tell us who is guilty. As Mayor Bloomberg once said “If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime.”

This sets on its head the traditional presumption of innocence for accused people. The perp walk is designed to corrupt and influence the jury pool to make conviction more likely. What matters to our adversarial legal system is not the truth, but winning at all costs. The truth is an early casualty of many trials. Another way you can tell who is guilty is if the media uses the person's middle name. If they do, then they must be guilty!

I do not want to understate the seriousness of the crime on which Strauss-Kahn is accused—rape; but the presumption of guilt is what I am discussing. “He is rich, white, and French—he must be guilty.” The Australian online newspaper had an interesting take on the case:

In their eyes, Dominique Strauss-Kahn had become the grotesque symbol of all that was rotten in the state of patriarchy (and especially in "sexist" France) and therefore not worthy of the minimum presumption of innocence before proved guilty. Willing accomplices to his crime, French women in their entirety were also put in the dock. Who could forget Katha Pollitt in US left-wing bible The Nation scorning "pathetic" French women "rising in defence of their right to be pawed by their bosses" and dismissing French feminism as a "small and conflicted" movement that effectively condones sexual predators. DSK's wife, Anne Sinclair, was a special target of the woman-hating feminist brigade.

Of course you can be a feminist and not go along with this. I was alerted to this link by Wendy McElroy, a feminist. 

Putin and Sarkozy thanks to PhotoshopConspiracy theorists had a field day! Since Vladimir Putin and Sarkozy get along well, immediately it was assumed that Putin had arranged to eliminate a potential rival of Sarkozy from next year's French presidential election. I am amazed by the supposed power of Putin. He is the key figure in a number of supposed conspiracies. In my view Strauss did not help his case by advancing this theory:

Strauss – Kahn announced to his friends that Russia is behind the occurred events, reports Ohtuleht. This was done by the Prime Minister Putin! He is a good friend of Sarkozy and put me behind the bars, forcing me to resign from the IMF, in order to strengthen this friendship, Strauss – Kahn declared.

This seems unlikely. If he is innocent of rape, it is far more likely that a women saw an opportunity to get some money and seized it. With the various inconsistencies in her story, the fact she spoke French and would have more likely to have known who Strauss was, and the mystery of the large cash deposits made to her account by her alleged drug dealing boyfriend make her an unreliable witness. Was she raped? Did she set up Strauss? We do not know. I found it difficult from the beginning to think that a man like Strauss would be so stupid. Then an allegation surfaced that there was an earlier incident years ago and I began to wonder.

An unreliable witness can be raped. Did the arrogance of power make Strauss think he was immune and that the laws only applied to ordinary people? It seems likely that the case will be dropped and Strauss might even still run for President of France. Such accusations did not prevent Bill Clinton from success in politics.

Click here for the latest on the case.

Justice?

As I have been discussing the justice system, it seems appropriate to talk about the Casey Anthony case and her acquittal. While most people were convinced of her guilt, there was never a lot of evidence. What should be done in such a case? As Judge Andrew Napolitano said in his Facebook feed: “Our system of justice is set up in such a way that sometimes the guilty go free, but the innocent will not be punished and no one will be punished, even the guilty—without  the government satisfying a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So with this important point in mind, maybe this is the best possible verdict of the charges laid against Ms. Anthony, given the lack of evidence. Let there be no doubt, I am as unhappy with this as anyone, but we live in an imperfect world where perfect knowledge does not exist.

Often the issue is not justice, but winning the case and the prosecutor's future political career. If the prosecutor had instead charged Casey with reckless endangerment, the conviction would have been assured. In fact there might not have even been a trial, as she would have been a fool not to have accepted such a plea bargain. Even innocent people sometimes accept a plea bargain because the consequences of a conviction are so devastating.

It is very clear that Ms. Anthony is guilty of something. Her defense attorney as much as admitted it by saying that her daughter Caylee drowned. Leaving a two year old unattended around a pool is reckless. Since Ms. Anthony cannot be tried again for the death of her daughter, she can never be charged with the crime she unambiguously committed. While this is a needed protection from a rogue prosecutor trying the same person over and over, in this case it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

For a complete discussion of the verdict, if you have not had enough already, click here.

When A Child Dies

When a child dies there is a great desire to find the guilty party, even if there isn't one. From ProPublica, in collaboration with NBR and Frontline on PBS:

We analyzed nearly two dozen cases in the United States and Canada in which people have been accused of killing children based on flawed or biased work by forensic pathologists, and then later cleared.

Some spent years in prison before courts overturned their convictions. In 2004, San Diego prosecutors moved to dismiss charges against a man who'd been imprisoned for two decades for murdering his girlfriend's son.

Others were freed more swiftly but endured hardships nonetheless. An El Paso, Texas, jury acquitted a woman of killing her child in 2010, but after spending 22 months in the county jail, she still had to wage a legal battle to regain custody of her other children.

After writing about Conrad Black, I ran across this article. No one is a villain here, just mistakes being made from the best of intentions. 

An Innocent Man?

I have been highlighting Conrad Black in recent weeks. Here is the latest news on him personally from the BBC:

A US judge has resentenced former media tycoon Conrad Black to 42 months in prison for fraud and obstruction.

The Canadian-born British peer is likely to serve just 13 months because of time already served.

He was convicted in 2007 of defrauding shareholders in media holding company Hollinger of $6.1m (£3.8m) but freed in 2010 after the US Supreme Court court found an anti-corruption law unconstitutional.

I have no idea if he is innocent or guilty. (Here is Black's version of the events in question.) I used to be able to decide this, in my own mind anyway, based on if a conviction occurred. I an no longer so confident in the legal system. Mark Steyn at National Review Online comments:

The federal justice system is a bit like one of those unmanned drones President Obama is so fond of using on the unfortunate villagers of Waziristan. Once it’s locked on to you and your coordinates are in the system, it’s hard to get it called off. Three years ago, during his trial in Chicago, I suggested to the defendant he’d be better off saving his gazillions in legal fees and instead climbing under the tarp in the bed of my truck and letting me drive him over the minimally enforced Pittsburg-La Patrie border crossing to Quebec and thence by fishing boat to a remote landing strip on Miquelon where a waiting plane could spirit him somewhere beyond the reach of the U.S. Attorney. Estimated cost: about a thousandth of what he’d spent on lawyers to date. P’shaw, scoffed Conrad, or ejaculations to that effect. He was not a fugitive but an innocent man, and eventually he would be vindicated by the justice system of this great republic.

Being skeptical of government is a good thing. But the distrust of government today, while deserved to a degree, is very dangerous. If we can not trust our court system, then nothing is trustworthy.