Watson Murder Case - Discussion

[ItsBruce]

It was argued in court a couple of weeks ago. Decision has not yet been rendered.

Article came out this last week from the family still upset about the plea. Only thing new in the article is that Alabama Attorney General Troy King said the following:

"In Alabama this would be a capital case, and if we don't get justice in Australia we're going to pursue the death penalty here," Mr King told US television recently.."

Source: Dive victim Tina Watson&squo;s family warns on plea deals | The Courier-Mail

First, I am against the death penalty, but second, that was a completely stupid thing to even think about and to say. Australia could offer Gabe Watson asylum rather than return him to the U.S. to face the death penalty. The U.S. needs to get with most of the rest of the civilized world in terms of the death penalty. It's extremely expensive and the only purpose is for retribution and it has never been proven to be a deterrent.

I'm not even sure that the Gabe Watson case would meet the criteria of the death penalty in Alabama.

"Alabama - Intentional murder with 18 aggravating factors (Ala. Stat. Ann. 13A-5-40(a)(1)-(18)).."

Source: Crimes Punishable by the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center

I'm not sure what would qualify as "aggravating factors," but 18 of them?

I've been away and am catching up on the threads I follow. Sorry if I'm late on this or the thread has gone in another direction.

Unless Mr. King has a source of information that the rest of us don't have and if he really made the statement attributed to him, then he is a disgrace to the legal profession. Unless he has information the rest of us don't, then he is just grandstanding; which is unbecoming. It reminds me of former Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong. Let Mr. King perform a proper investigation before making such a grandiose statement.

Note: unless Mr. King has a source of information that the rest of us don't have and if he really made the statement attributed to him, what he is doing is no better than the defense attorneys who tell the media they know that their client is innocent. How can they possibly know? They may hope. They may think they can prove the client is not guilty. They may even be confident of proving the client is not guilty. But, unless the attorney was the perpetrator, thus making it impossible for the client to have been, the attorney can't know.

 

[ItsBruce]

Circumstantial evidence does not always meet the criteria of "beyond a resonable doubt". Prosecuters do not like to rely on this type of "so called" evidence because juries do not always see it the way they want them to. Ask Marsha Clarke from the OJ case. She had direct and circumstantial, and look what happened! A good defense attorney would attack the evidence to put doubt in the jurers minds. And then the jurers themselves come into play. If they have any predisposed notions, this is going to affect the case.

Personally, I think the prosecution made a good move and the defense a poor one. After reading what evidence they had and how they intended to use it, it is my opinion they would have dropped the ball and he would have been set free. And this with my thinking that he did it!

Circumstantial evidence does not always meet the criteria of "beyond a resonable doubt." But, then neither does percipient evidence because it is subject to the witness' bias, perception, recollection, etc. The first OJ case was unique for reasons apart from circumstantial versus percipient evidence.

I completely agree that the prosecution made a good move.

 

[ItsBruce]

More food for thought:

Mass. court OKs $102M wrongful-conviction award | General News | Comcast.net

Thanks for the heads-up.

1. If FBI agents intentionally withheld evidence of the men's innocence, they should be identified and imprisoned. IMHO, given the oaths taken by FBI agents, i.e. "protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic," what they did is on par with treason.

2. While the four men who had been convicted may not have been guilty of the particular crime, my guess, based on at least some experience, is that they were not model citizens.

Edit:

A little work with Google has revealed that at least one of the FBI agents was convicted on a racketeering charge and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was then convicted on a murder charge and sentenced to 30 more. While these were not directly related to the matter referenced above, they were peripherally related.

Also, the 4 men who were convicted were not model citizens even though they did not commit the specific murder.

 

[livinoz]

Thanks for the heads-up.

1. If FBI agents intentionally withheld evidence of the men's innocence, they should be identified and imprisoned. IMHO, given the oaths taken by FBI agents, i.e. "protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic," what they did is on par with treason.

2. While the four men who had been convicted may not have been guilty of the particular crime, my guess, based on at least some experience, is that they were not model citizens.

Edit:

A little work with Google has revealed that at least one of the FBI agents was convicted on a racketeering charge and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was then convicted on a murder charge and sentenced to 30 more. While these were not directly related to the matter referenced above, they were peripherally related.

Also, the 4 men who were convicted were not model citizens even though they did not commit the specific murder.

While I totally agree with your first point above, can I ask are you suggesting that those four men deserved their decades in gaol for a murder they didn't commit, especially as two of them died in custody? If we used the premise that people who are not "model citizens" deserve to be in gaol, I think our gaols would be overflowing.

I have no idea what their criminal history is or was, but they certainly didn't deserve to do the time for that particular crime.

 

[ItsBruce]

I hope you did not take my comment as implying that they deserved to be in prison for a crime they did not commit. Clearly, they didn't. However, it was not as if they were prosecuted because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time as in the movies "Con Air" or "An Innocent Man." According to what I found on the internet, they were mafia gangsters who were implicated in a murder and there was evidence that it was actually someone else in their gang who did the killing.

 

[livinoz]

I hope you did not take my comment as implying that they deserved to be in prison for a crime they did not commit. Clearly, they didn't. However, it was not as if they were prosecuted because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time as in the movies "Con Air" or "An Innocent Man." According to what I found on the internet, they were mafia gangsters who were implicated in a murder and there was evidence that it was actually someone else in their gang who did the killing.

Okay, glad to have that clarified! Thanks Bruce.

 

[SNorman]

Yes, even with those who were innocent.

Remember that a few years ago the Illinois governor suspended the death penalty after DNA results revealed that 50% of the inmates awaiting execution were totally innocent. Read John Grisham's The Innocent Man, which details the true story of an Oklahoma man who escaped execution by hours when a clerk working on the weekend saw his final appeal (which he would have otherwise not seen until Monday, after the execution) and told a judge that he thought the appeal had merit. DNA proved that the man was totally innocent, and a review of the process that led to his conviction showed that the DA and police had totally railroaded him and should have known he was innocent from the start. It also showed that they had convicted others through the same screwed process. Those convicted that way but without the DNA evidence to prove their innocence are still in prison today.

At first glance, statistics like this would make any person severely doubt the capability of our justice system. The truth is that the majority of cases where convicts are released years later due to "DNA evidence" are technicalities, and the convict was not actually *proven* innocent, it was just proved that it could not be proven that he did it, based on DNA evidence. These stats are routinely used by anti-death penalty groups. There are some false convictions, but nowhere near 50%.

 

[boulderjohn]

At first glance, statistics like this would make any person severely doubt the capability of our justice system. The truth is that the majority of cases where convicts are released years later due to "DNA evidence" are technicalities, and the convict was not actually *proven* innocent, it was just proved that it could not be proven that he did it, based on DNA evidence. These stats are routinely used by anti-death penalty groups. There are some false convictions, but nowhere near 50%.

That's not the way I understand it. For a conviction to be overturned, the evidence has to be pretty overwhelming. In fact, DAs have argued that a conviction should not be overturned even when the evidence is overwhelming. After all, they won the case fair and square the first time.

It seems to me that if the DNA in a rape/murder case turns out to be someone other than you, your release is not a technicality.

I am not an attorney, so perhaps some of those who have so ably participated in this thread can speak to this better than I.

I was having a discussion with someone recently when someone was released from death row when DNA proved he was not the killer. It was a particularly gruesome crime, and my friend was bothered by the fact that the person convicted of the crime was not going to be put to death. He felt the release was wrong because the victim was not going to get the appropriate vengeance for the crime. I asked him if he wanted to volunteer to be executed so that she could get that vengeance, since it didn't seem to matter to him whether the person executed had anything to do with the crime. He had an amazed look on his face as it finally dawned on him what he had wanted. He thought about it and realized that in his attitude toward these crimes throughout his life, he had had a subconscious belief that it did not matter if someone was guilty, as long as someone was made to pay. Yes, the victim of a gruesome crime deserves justice, but justice entails getting the right criminal.

 

[K_girl]

IF the Watson case ever goes to trial, the case will have nothing to do with DNA. If he is convicted through a trial, it will be his own statements, which were videotaped, that have the potential to convict him. There is little-to-nothing for prosecutorial misconduct here. There is no DNA. There are no jail-house snitches being coerced into false testimony. There is no opportunity to create phony evidence. The bulk of the investigation was conducted in a more liberal country who will have to turn that information over to the Alabama prosecutor. So, no tainted lab work that has plagued some U.S. cities. Therefore, I don't see the relationship with "The Innocent Man" or the "Innocence Project" with regard to this case - that just keep coming up over and over again.

However, I have to question Troy King's pandering to a conservative pro-death penalty crowd in Alabama and as a result, I think he drastically lowered the prospects of having any trial at all. I discovered through some other forums that the TV show he made the comments about going for the death penalty was made on FOX News. 'Nuff said.

 

[boulderjohn]

IF the Watson case ever goes to trial, the case will have nothing to do with DNA. If he is convicted through a trial, it will be his own statements, which were videotaped, that have the potential to convict him. There is little-to-nothing for prosecutorial misconduct here. There is no DNA. There are no jail-house snitches being coerced into false testimony. There is no opportunity to create phony evidence. The bulk of the investigation was conducted in a more liberal country who will have to turn that information over to the Alabama prosecutor. So, no tainted lab work that has plagued some U.S. cities. Therefore, I don't see the relationship with "The Innocent Man" or the "Innocence Project" with regard to this case - that just keep coming up over and over again.

However, I have to question Troy King's pandering to a conservative pro-death penalty crowd in Alabama and as a result, I think he drastically lowered the prospects of having any trial at all. I discovered through some other forums that the TV show he made the comments about going for the death penalty was made on FOX News. 'Nuff said.

No one is suggesting that DNA will solve the case. What people are saying is that the justice system is not infallible. People have pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit. People have been convicted of crimes of which they are innocent because of prosecutorial misconduct. We have a tendency to assume anyone accused of a crime is guilty. All of these are true in any event. The cases above are merely examples to prove those points.