Defrosting Cold Cases

Rick Green had an interview today with Richard Lapointe. On Monday, a Superior Court judge in Rockville — in response to a ruling in Lapointe’s favor from the state Appellate Court — will take yet another look at this endlessly appealed saga of what is either a wrongful conviction or a very crafty mentally disabled [...]

One of the strangest cases that I worked on is the unsolved homicide of Mr. McHenry Biggers. Nothing in the file makes sense. The people we spoke to did not make sense. What we found out did not make sense either. That is, what we were able to find. This is, alas, one of those [...]

A pre-trial hearing has been set for next week for Darrell Lee Kastel, the second defendant in the 1979 slaying of supermarket supervisor Julius Schnoll. Kastel was scheduled to go to trial this Monday, but the prosecution gave additional discovery evidence to the defense attorney and the trial was adjourned. At a hearing today, Kastel was [...]

One of my last posts was about Florida changing its Hate Crime Laws to include the homeless in the categories of people deserving special protection. Many of you emailed and asked why to add another category, and, is the situation for homeless people that bad? In answer to the latter, just look at what the BBC posted about [...]

The post-mortem has confirmed the death of Alexander Spence was not suspicious. The Humberside Police said a file would now be prepared for the coroner ahead of an inquest. Alex Spence disappeared April 10, 2010. His family and friends frantically tried to find him. They reached out to the city, distributed pictures, launched websites, and reached [...]

This is how I feel when I review wrongful conviction files finding all kinds of gaps in timelines and dubious witnesses whose shady characters make my skin crawl. Add to that a spoon-fed jury or one that like the Queen, just wants to skip the trial to get to the execution part. Justice sits in the room just [...]

Tom Casady has been the chief of a 425 member police force in Lincoln (population 252,000), Nebraska, since 1994. He has been blogging  since April 2007. This post “Not in the stamp kit” dated April 12, 2010, is great. Please follow this link to his blog!

Details from law enforcement officials are sketchy about the body found at an undisclosed location in eastern Gillespie County. Sheriff Buddy Mills reported that the deceased male has been identified by the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office as Trey Allen Noah, 20, of Kendall County, Texas. Noah had been reported missing in November 2009, from Kendall County, said Mills [...]

Humberside Police said a body found in the River Hull was believed to be that of Mr Spence. The death is not being treated as suspicious. A force spokeswoman said: “Humberside Police received a call at 11.40am from a member of the public reporting a body in the River Hull on Bankside, Hull. A man’s [...]

The Florida House voted overwhelmingly to protect the homeless under the hate crimes law. This measure will add homeless people  as a category in hate crimes law that protect people against attacks because of a person’s race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, mental or physical disability, or advanced age. Some people say too [...]