Saturday - October 20, 2012

good cop fair bust undone by dumb rules as cop faces inquiry but killer’s ‘rights’ protected

It’s things like this that drive me nuts.
Yes. I recognize there are rules in place regarding police procedure that are meant to protect us.  No, I don’t want a police state even if I often appear to favor the opposite. I just get very frustrated at the insanity and blow off steam but to tell the honest truth, I always tend to believe and trust the cops. Even when I know better from personal experience.  I suppose it could be my generation or I’m just stupid. Or both.

Shouldn’t there be exceptions made when the circumstances are exceptional?

If I commit a crime in full view of a 100 people, or take the police to where I buried the latest missing body, isn’t the fact that I robbed that bank or knew where the body was incriminating enough?  So what if the cop didn’t read me the rights.  That’s BS anyway as far as I am concerned.  Is there anyone anywhere in the UK or the USA who is unaware of that card cops must read?  And if I killed someone and brought the police to where the body has been for ten freeking years, why aren’t “rights” suspended? 

That’s what happened in this latest story.  Maddening.

In the last day or so I exchanged an email or two with Drew.  In which I said that I was born into the wrong time period. Or words to mean that.  I said I was so sick of this pc driven world, that I should have been born in time to enjoy the Jazz Age, be in the audience for the Goodman Carnegie Hall concert in 1938, and be gone and forgotten by 1950. 
Don’t take me too liberally but you get the feeling I hope.  Nothing seems to follow logic anymore.  There are a million (it feels like it) agencies or govt. bodies that cater to a million different ethnic or religious or lifestyle choices.  And everyone must toe a pc line or else be branded with some new word that ends in either ‘phobia’ or else ‘ism.’ Sometimes both.

This miserable excuse for a human murdered a young woman.
Cops had a suspect, a taxi driver, who showed up on a security camera.  Yeah. One of things that people seem to resent as they see so many as intrusions.  Big deal.  But for that camera and there are other examples of their advantage, the cops might still be looking for a body.  He took the lead detective to where the body was. He didn’t even bury her. Just dumped her body like a sack of rubbish.
Well, as long as he was talking, the perp asked the cop if he could confess something.
He then took the police to where he’d hidden the body of a young woman, TEN YEARS AGO.  And for 10 years believe it or not, nobody knew she was dead. How’s this for a case?  One paper says 10 yrs another says 8 years. Take your pick. The girl is still dead.

OK, enough of that.  Here’s what happened, and here’s one of the many headlines that greeted us this morning.

I fail to see any disgrace attached to the officer.  The full unedited version of this is at the link below.

DETECTIVE’S BID TO CRACK CASE LED TO A BODY-AND DISGRACE

Close surveillance, set up in the hope that he would lead the Wiltshire police team to where she had been hidden, had proved fruitless. So the last hope for Det Supt Fulcher was that Halliwell would talk after his arrest in a supermarket car park. When he snatched up the phone to speak to his colleagues, he learned that he had refused to comment.

Those were the facts facing Det Supt Fulcher when he took the remarkable decision to order Halliwell to be taken to an isolated hilltop where he took personal charge of his questioning.

Over four extraordinary hours, the experienced policeman and the suspect embarked on a tour of rural southwest England. Halliwell first led the detective to the site where he had dumped Ms O’Callaghan’s body.

And then in a remarkable unburdening of past wrongs, he took him to a field where he had dumped another body some eight years earlier. Until then, nobody had even known that Rebecca Godden-Edwards was dead.
But the detective’s unconventional tactics were “serious and irretrievable” breaches of the rules surrounding police questioning and meant that Halliwell could not stand trial for Ms Godden-Edwards murder. And it ensured that Det Supt Fulcher now faces an independent police watchdog inquiry into his actions.

Accompanied only by a civilian note-taker, Det Supt Fulcher led Halliwell 50 yards from the police cars and conducted a nine-minute interview. With the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol still fresh in the memory, the detective warned the suspect that he would be vilified if he did not tell him where she was.

According to the notes, Halliwell first told the detective: “I don’t know anything” and repeatedly asked to see a solicitor. “You think I did it,” he told the detective. “I know you did it,” came the response. By the end of the interview, Halliwell told the officer: “Have you got a car – we’ll go.”
They continued to speak in the back of a police car for 45 minutes until they reached Uffington, the site of the medieval horse etched into the hillside. Halliwell gave enough information for specialist search teams to find the body later that afternoon.

It was at this point, when Det Supt Fulcher prepared to have him charged with murder, that Halliwell told him: “We need to have a chat.”
They drove a short distance, sat down together on the grass and had a cigarette. Halliwell became more candid, saying that he was a “sick f***er” and asking the detective if he wanted “another one”.

They drove 30 miles into south Gloucestershire where Halliwell pointed to an area in a 40-acre field where he said he had buried another woman between 2003 and 2005.

The story emerged in February but can only now be made public. Halliwell’s team insisted the way the evidence was gathered breached the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which gives any suspect the right to legal advice and to be questioned without oppression. It was “an assault on the integrity of the legal system,” said Ian Latham QC, for Halliwell.

When asked to justify his tactics, Det Supt Fulcher told the court: “I did think it was utterly ridiculous that someone who took me, 12 people and a surveillance helicopter to the deposition sites of two bodies would then seek to find some loophole or quirk in the law to get away from the fact that he was a multiple murderer.”

He was backed by senior colleagues including the deputy chief constable, Patrick Geenty, who called it a “gutsy decision”. However, the trial judge, Mrs Justice Cox, ruled that none of the evidence gathered during the four-hour period could be used in a trial. With no other evidence linking Halliwell to the murder, prosecutors were forced to drop the charge.
So now, he has been given life with 25 years minimum.  He could conceivably be out at some point.  Probably not but hey, there’s always a chance. Isn’t there? But he could only be charged with one killing due to the actions of the head officer.

The trial judge, Mrs Justice Cox, ruled that none of the evidence gathered during the four-hour period could be used in a trial. With no other evidence linking Halliwell to the murder, prosecutors were forced to drop the charge.

No evidence?  He knew where the body was cos he buried it.  Why isn’t that evidence?
Cos the law and regulations and even the judge, are as fucked up as a soup sandwich.

What a screwed up world.

SEE ALL OF THE ARTICLE HERE

Posted by peiper     on 10/20/2012 at 05:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Judges-Courts-Lawyers • Justice - LACK OF •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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