OpEd by EPONYMOUS ROX
In the tawdry trial of Jodi Arias for the murder of Travis Alexander there was nothing sacred or secret, but this: The true identity of the killer.
No, I'm not suggesting Arias has been wrongly convicted -- she definitely hatched a plot to kill and her plan was horrifically successful.
It's simply to point out that, whatever dislike she's justifiably earned through her years of pathological lying and posing, all that collective contempt is clouding everybody's commonsense and good judgment.
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the police practice of taking DNA samples from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime, ruling that it amounts to the 21st century version of fingerprinting.
The ruling was 5-4. Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, joined three of the court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in dissenting.
The five justices in the majority ruled that DNA sampling, after an arrest “for a serious offense” and when officers “bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody,” does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.
Under those specifications, the court said, “taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Joran Van der Sloot
On June 3, 2010, Joran van der Sloot, is arrested in Chile in connection with the slaying of 21-year-old Stephany Flores. He was a longtime suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of American teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
Leonard Lake
On June 2, 1985, Leonard Lake is arrested near San Francisco, California, ending one of the rare cases of serial killers working together. Lake and Ng are believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with at Lake's ranch in Calaveras County, California during the mid-1980s.
John Wesley Hardin
On June 1, 1871, John Wesley Hardin, one of the deadliest men in the history of the Old West, arrives in Abilene, Kansas, where he briefly becomes friends with Marshal Wild Bill Hickok. Hardin revealed a tendency toward violent rages at an early age. When he was 14, he nearly killed another boy in a fight over a girl, stabbing his victim twice with a knife.
Charles Schmid
On May 31, 1964, fifteen-year-old Alleen Rowe is killed by Charles Schmid in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. Earlier in the night, Schmid allegedly had said to his friends, "I want to kill a girl! I want to do it tonight. I think I can get away with it!" Schmid dubbed “The Pied Piper of Tucson” went on to kill three other teenage girls before being caught by police.
Christopher Marlowe
On May 30, 1593, English playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed in a brawl over a bar tab.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
