Re: recent L & O episode "Inconvenient Truth" 4/18/2024 MAJOR SPOILER

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

On Apr 23, 2024 at 9:53:50 AM PDT, Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

. . .

We also saw Price using his personal cell phone at Rikers. Uh, basic
jail procedure requires the visitor to absolutely not, under any
circumstances, bring a cell phone into the jail. I'm sure he'd put it in
a locker before entering the part of the jail to get to the interview
room.

I would always have to engage in a lot of grief and negotiations with the
prison officials whenever I interviewed a threat case up at the state prison
in Lancaster. Our policy is to always obtain a contemporaneous photo of the
subject with the interview and around 2013 or so, they took back all our
digital cameras and replaced them with iPhones. So the only camera I had to
use was the one in my phone and the prison wouldn't let anyone bring phones
into the facility.

That policy of your bosses is mind boggling, given that they knew about
jail and prison restrictions. Bring a film camera? Even if you lost it,
a prisoner cannot use that for outside communication (without creating
microdots or something).

We developed a form that we would require the prison's shift commander to sign
acknowledging that he was denying the request of the United Secret Service to
photograph an individual who had made threats against the president of the
United States. Nine times out of ten, the idea of putting his signature to
that form, irrevocably tying him to whatever that inmate might possibly do in
the future, was enough for him to grant exception to the prison's no-phone
policy.

Hahahahahaha

. . .

You forgot the part where the defense attorney basically argued that
eyewitness testimony as a concept should be globally excluded from all
criminal trials because some witnesses have been found unreliable in the
past.

Didn't he argue that both in front of the judge and during cross for one
witness? Yet everything he introduced about the fights that the victim
had gotten into in prison came from witnesses.