Saturday, January 10, 2009

Prosecutors knew about sex-assault videotapes

The San Jose Mercury News reports:
As hundreds of child-sex-assault convictions hang in the balance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office is backing away from its previous insistence that its prosecutors had no idea the medical examinations of suspected victims were routinely videotaped.

But the district attorney's evolving position only deepens the central mystery surrounding the tapes, which were made by a nurse working in conjunction with prosecutors to build child-sex-assault cases: Why did the district attorney fail to turn over this potentially critical evidence to defense attorneys, as the law requires?
Why? Because the kind of people who are in the business of taking kids away have no sense of fairness. They have no interest in presenting objective evidence to the court. They want to eliminate due process and bully the parents.

Videotapes should be routine in all these cases. If the judges were doing their jobs right, they would dismiss cases with no videotapes. There is just no excuse for not recording the evidence in a way that allows it to be examined later.

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