Search For "Foolproof Suffocation" Missed In Casey Anthony Case

Hugh Pickens writes "The Orlando Sentinel reports that a google search was made for the term 'foolproof suffocation' on the Anthony family's computer the day Casey Anthony's 2-year-old daughter Caylee was last seen alive by her family — a search that did not surface at Casey Anthony's trial for first degree murder. In the notorious 31 days which followed, Casey Anthony repeatedly lied about her and her daughter's whereabouts and at Anthony's trial, her defense attorney argued that her daughter drowned accidentally in the family's pool. Anthony was acquitted on all major charges in her daughter's death, including murder. Though computer searches were a key issue at Anthony's murder trial, the term 'foolproof suffocation' never came up. 'Our investigation reveals the person most likely at the computer was Casey Anthony,' says investigative reporter Tony Pipitone. Lead sheriff's Investigator Yuri Melich sent prosecutors a spreadsheet that contained less than 2 percent of the computer's Internet activity that day and included only Internet data from the computer's Internet Explorer browser – one Casey Anthony apparently stopped using months earlier — and failed to list 1,247 entries recorded on the Mozilla Firefox browser that day — including the search for 'foolproof suffocation.' Prosecutor Jeff Ashton said in a statement to WKMG that it's 'a shame we didn't have it. (It would have) put the accidental death claim in serious question.'"

Comments

No Death Penalty

[Doc Ruby]

In this case the prosecutors and justice system were incompetent to prove this person was the killer.

In other cases they're incompetent to tell that the prosecutors and justice system have failed to prove the person was the killer.

When we execute convicted people there is no chance to catch the errors that are executing people who are not guilty. Not guilty people are killed because the system isn't adequate to execute only the guilty.

We shouldn't execute people, because we're not really sure that we're killing someone who's guilty.

Re:No Death Penalty

[Anonymous Coward]

is google too hard for you, moron? http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/yes-america-we-have-executed-an-innocent-man/257106/

Re:No Death Penalty

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to answer. Cases are closed after execution and cannot be opened again, so no person is exonerated after execution.

However, the fact that 130 people have been exonerated while awaiting their death should give you a good estimate.

Re:No Death Penalty

[ShanghaiBill]

Could you please link to a single person who was exonerated after being executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years or so (when DNA evidence became popular)? Thanks!

This is not a fair request. When DNA analysis of evidence first became available, many executed people were posthumously exonerated. This doesn't happen anymore because, obviously, we do the DNA analysis before their conviction. So you are implying that "now the system is perfect and we don't execute innocent people anymore", but I think a better interpretation is that "the system is deeply flawed, and the emergence of DNA evidence just exposed some of those flaws." For most criminal cases DNA evidence plays no role, and there is no reason to believe those people are less likely to be innocent.

Re:No Death Penalty

[SternisheFan]

Actually Life in prison without parole is less costly to taxpayers. Each individual death penalty case automatically gets appealed to the Supreme Court, at a cost of over $2,000,000 per. Here's one link: http://www.fnsa.org/v1n1/dieter1.html

And a google page of links: http://www.google.com/search?q=real+cost+of+death+penalty+cases&hl=en&safe=off&tbo=d&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=_FeyULTuO7K00AGu-oG4BA&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAA&biw=480&bih=295

Re:No Death Penalty

[flimflammer]

But that would be taking the argument too far. The world isn't black and white. Death is the ultimate punishment. You can't make up for taking someone's life once they're already dead.

Re:No Death Penalty

[swillden]

You could have just said "No, I can't name a single person who has been wrongfully executed recently."

The statement is meaningless.

Lack of knowledge of error says nothing about lack of error -- it just means we don't know we're screwing up. More precisely, we do know we're screwing up... we just don't know which verdicts are wrong. Perhaps new technologies will edge us a little closer, but it's likely there will always be room for mistakes.

FWIW, I'm not particularly bothered by the death penalty. I think there are people who are beyond any hope of rehabilitation, who should never be allowed to be free, and I don't see the point in paying to keep them locked up for decades, so we might as well kill them. But the existence of errors in the process is inevitable, and the fact that there is no possibility of recourse after execution is a valid point, as is the fact that, at least the way we do it, it's arguably cheaper to lock them up until they die of natural causes than it is to kill them.

Re:No Death Penalty

[BLKMGK]

DNA isn't the be all end all for a conviction either. It's quite possible to find DNA at a crime scene and NOT have it belong to a killer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

We have to be very careful about being lazy when a new tool is introduced as it very well may NOT prove what we think it does. Investigation still has to be done by investigators that have a clue. Sadly it looks like they used an amateur for this investigation.

Frankly, the fact that they failed to recognize more than one browser was on this machine and in use is criminal in and of itself. Whoever did the forensic examination of this machine was an idiot and ought to be fired! they could easily have imaged the workstation, run the image, and explored it to figure out what was and wasn't in use. This could just as easily have been evidence to exonerate someone that was missed, this is disgusting!

Re:No Death Penalty

[spire3661]

So the sanctity of life rests on COST??????? Fuck you.

Re:No Death Penalty

[Rhywden]

Right. Let's get rid of those "due process" shenanigans while we're at it. Death penalty is heavily biased anyway, so might as well admit to it and summarily execute people regardless of their actual guilt!

Re:No Death Penalty

[dasunt]

Maybe we shouldn't execute people because it's wrong.

I'm against it because it gives the state too much power.

I will say it's odd how a lot of people who claim to be for more limited government tend to also be for giving government the ability to end a life.

Re:No Death Penalty

[dasunt]

Could you please link to a single person who was exonerated after being executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years or so (when DNA evidence became popular)? Thanks!

There's been no exonerations that I recall in the past 20 years. There has been a few executions where (IMO) there's a case for reasonable doubt.

For example, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the deaths of his three children in a fire. The justice system claimed the fire was due to arson. Five years after his execution, a state-ordered investigation concluded that "a finding a arson could not be sustained".

The trial was also notable for using Iron Maiden and Led Zepplin posters as evidence of Cameron's mental state.

I'm not sure if he was innocent or guilty. He appears to have had quite a few run-ins with the law. But the interpretation of the evidence and trial appears deeply flawed, and I am not comfortable executing people based on such evidence.

Maybe you are.

Re:No Death Penalty

[GofG]

The Penn and Teller: Bullshit! episode on the death penalty showed quite a lot of evidence that the concoction of chemicals used to euthanize pets is significantly less painful than the one used to execute death row inmates. I don't know if it's still true, or if P&T made it up for TV, but I remember being quite impressed with the evidence they had.

Re:No Death Penalty

[SuricouRaven]

But that isn't how the lethal injection works for humans. It's a much lengthier process involving three seperate drugs. It's supposed to be painless, but there's a lot of debate about that - certainly the final drug, potassium chloride, hurts like hell, but by that point the prisoner is supposed to be unconscious. The problem is that the first drug used is the anasthetic, and the second a paralytic: If the anasthetic doesn't work (equipment fault, unusually resistant prisoner, sheer bad luck) then it'd go unnoticed, as the paralysed prisoner would have no means to express the pain. And there would be pain: The reason for that paralytic is that without it, even an unconscious and heavily sedated prisoner would be writheing around just from reflexive responses to pain, much to the distress of the witnesses.

You may wonder why the method you saw on the pets isn't used on humans. That's because it's too unreliable. There's a chance the 'dead' prisoner won't be quite dead. There are completly reliable, painless methods - aspixiation with nitrogen is easy - but there face political opposition. The very fact that they are painless ensures they are resisted by the hardcore pro-death-penalty crowd, who feel that a painless death (Or even worse, aspixiation euphoria) does not serve justice properly.

Re:No Death Penalty

[ShanghaiBill]

We're talking about people who've given up their right to life.

Some of us believe that no one ever gives up that right. Governments should never, ever, be given the authority to kill their citizens.

Re:No Death Penalty

[nbauman]

"the system is deeply flawed, and the emergence of DNA evidence just exposed some of those flaws." For most criminal cases DNA evidence plays no role, and there is no reason to believe those people are less likely to be innocent.

You are correct.

I heard a panel where Barry C. Scheck and some others from the Innocence Project spoke.

Scheck said that the important lesson of DNA testing was not that a few specific people were innocent, but that it demonstrates the error rate of the criminal justice system. The DNA cases are a sampling.

People were falsely convicted, most often by eyewitness testimony and confessions, and the Innocence Project could prove that they were innocent because they were fortunate enough to be involved in crimes that involved DNA evidence.

This demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness testimony and confessions are.

It also demonstrates that other people must have been convicted falsely by eyewitness testimony and confessions, but have no DNA evidence to exonerate them.

(This was actually demonstrated before DNA testing. Psychologists tested the accuracy of eyewitness testimony decades ago. People have been convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony in circumstances where the eyewitness couldn't possibly have recognized their face -- like being on the other side of the street, watching a crime being committed in dim light. Defense lawyers aren't allowed to have experts testify on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony.)

Significantly, it also demonstrates how flawed the criminal justice system is.

Some of these people were on death row. The advocates of the death penalty will often claim that we're so thorough and careful to protect the rights of defendants that it's impossible for an innocent person to be convicted. (Supreme Court Justice Scalia seems to have made that argument.) The sampling of cases that can be confirmed with DNA evidence demonstrates that they're wrong.

One good story about eyewitness testimony -- a young man was on trial for rape in New England. His defense lawyer was sitting in court, with a young man in a plaid shirt sitting next to him. He cross-examined the victim, asked her to describe the man who raped her, and then pulled the prosecutor's favorite line -- "Do you see that man in this court?" She pointed to the young man who had been sitting next to him. The lawyer asked the young man to identify himself. It wasn't the defendant. The lawyer had brought a decoy. The case collapsed, and his defendant was acquitted. But the judge sanctioned the lawyer. Apparently, they don't sanction the prosecution for bringing an witness who's so unreliable that she will testify that the wrong person did it. But they do sanction a defense lawyer who demonstrates how unreliable the witness is.

Are we still dragging this out?

[davydagger]

She was found innocent, and a bunch of big media dipshits, and powerful figures are still trying to lynch her. Why? She's poor, and in all this rubble, they want one big poor villian to crucify, so they can shift the focus away.

Part of the assault on her character includes the fact that case was concieved out of rape, something that would have every major neo-liberal "feminist" group up in arms if it was someone the system was protecting.

I'll tell you something else. I'll contrast this to another femme fatale who got out of prison around the same time. "Amanda Knox"

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2011/10/21/seattle-pr-firm-reveals-efforts-to.html?page=all

Looks like the media industry wasted no time revealing if you got money to spend on a PR campaign they could fix your broken character flaws and get murder raps thrown out.

if its any more proof of just how biased the system is, and the system is run by hoardes of PR/advertising goons and lawyers, who seem to want nothing more than to shake you down for verbal and character protection money.

Of course the real enemies of this system are those who can't raise enough money to pay for their services.

Its sick, its real sick.

Re:Are we still dragging this out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your guilt or innocence is a matter of fact, not opinion. You either killed someone or you didn't. No arbitrary number of people sitting on a stand can change reality.

Re:Are we still dragging this out?

[swillden]

She may actually be guilty.

No, she's innocent. She wasn't proven guilty. Why is this so hard to understand?

Acquittal != innocence.

Similarly, conviction != guilt.

The goal of the system is to approximate accuracy, with a strong bias towards acquittal where the situation is in doubt. Hopefully, you can assume that a conviction is a very strong indicator of guilt, but you can't assume that an acquittal indicates innocence.

Re:Are we still dragging this out?

[Samantha Wright]

Tut-tut. The law says she wasn't found guilty. The law can't say whether or not she really is guilty. I assume you haven't taken any statistics courses.

Shades of OJ

[stevegee58]

"If the search didn't hit, then you must acquit."

Re:Why is this Nancy Grace bait posted on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because apparently using Firefox over Internet Explorer will help you keep your criminal searches hidden. If only Hans Reiser knew this, he could be finishing up ReiserFS5.

Shadetree forensics

[cdrguru]

Back before cars had emission controls there was a class of people known as "shadetree mechanics" that could actually fix a car without knowing much about what they were doing. No formal or even informal training, but they got by because of simplicity of the engines at the time. I know of someone in the computer forensics business that rails against "shadetree forensics" because it will be the downfall of computer forensic examination as a whole.

Someone I know in the FBI has rather strong words about pushbutton forensics where if you click the right button you get an answer. Maybe not the right answer, but something to put in a report. In some ways, computer forensics tools are moving in that direction with more and more automation and less and less understanding. When it takes several weeks of intensive training to understand a tool it does in some ways open the doors to this sort of use.

What we have here is very simply a case of pushbutton forensics. The examiner failed to conduct a proper examination of the computer and was misled by getting some easy results. These easy results were put in a report and passed on. Nobody ever questioned the examiner about what he or she might have missed - like the simple and obvious question of "What about alternative browsers?"

This is altogether too common today. Yes, there is a lot of training out there for people and there are various certifications, but none of it means the person doing the examination is actually performing an examinations or just pushing buttons to see what pops out. No, the certifications are not a joke and it takes a lot of effort to get certified. Unfortunately, there is little followup once someone is certified it is just assumed that they know what they are doing and how to perform a correct examination.

In defense of examiners I must say they all have huge backlogs and the pressure to deliver a report quickly is incredible. But that doesn't excuse being sloppy and at its core pushbutton forensics is just being sloppy.

Re:First

[meta-monkey]

Exactly. People like to play Jr. Detective and assign rational motives to people's action, and frequently it just won't work. I remember watching a round table news discussion show, and they were talking about a murder in which a pregnant woman opened the door to her home and she and the unborn baby were stabbed to death, but her 4-ish year old child who was right there was left unharmed. The estranged husband was the prime suspect, and one commentator said "ah, yes, stands to reason, since why else leave the other child alone?" And the other commentator said the thing I thought, "how can you assign rational motives to someone who stabs a pregnant to lady death?"

Re:First

[hairyfeet]

Its because so few have had to deal with the truly batshit and frankly don't LIKE the thought that death can come for no damned reason from somebody you have never done a damned thing to that its easier for them to try to come up with "motives" that frankly often may only exist in the mind of the killer, hell if there ever was one.

Spending most of my life near the strip known as "the meth highway" and hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks i can tell you there ARE plenty of truly batshit crazy people out there, hell many of them manage to even hold jobs and live like normal people...until they snap like a twig. Down the street was an old home that had been in the family 5 generations, its gone now because the grandson killed everybody in the house and torched the place...why? Nobody knows, even he don't know, all he said at his trial is "somebody there must have made me mad or something". Hell he wasn't even on drugs at the time so he can't be written off as having a freak out, he just went total batshit one day.

So maybe she had a reason, maybe she didn't, hell maybe grandpa did it and the daughter covered it up, who the fuck knows, that is why she got not guilty. Watching the trial it was obvious there was reason to believe it could be EITHER the mom (didn't want the kid) or grandpa (molestation) and the cops simply couldn't ever pin down one way or another who did it beyond a reasonable doubt. But to try to pin complex motives to most of these cases simply won't work, because frankly there are a LOT of truly right on the edge of rubber room batshit crazy people out there and frankly if they go off? The only "motive' might be as simple as "I didn't like his shirt".