To draw the photo taken by his attorney into question relies on assuming his guilt, his attorney's misconduct and the prosecutor taking that misconduct without putting up a fight. Occam's razor and all that.

I actually haven't drawn any conclusion, particularly on the person involved. This is basically standing on the sidelines and saying damn, they have a good case. It'll be impressive to see the defense.

You've drawn the conclusion and assumed I have. I'm merely remarking that the case is extraordinarily strong and the evidence, as circumstantial as it is, is compelling, unless you feel that the evidence is fabricated. And a lawyer can't rip all of what I read to shreds, though I understand what you're saying.

The crime he was convicted of requires proof he falsified documents to attempt to commit those other crimes, not that he succeeded. He doesn't have to be guilty of another crime to be guilty of felony record falsification in attempt to commit another crime.

And the statute doesn't require the jury to agree on what crime was attempted. That's a finding of fact left to the jury, but each juror may choose which scenario is most likely; you can't play the scenarios off each other as reasonable doubt if at least one of them is what happened in each juror's individual best judgment.

Yes. But to be fair it wouldn't be out of character for Russel, if you actually know who he is, so maybe that's why the internet finds it so easy to ignore silly things like "evidence" and "proof".

Why? That's just another of those legal protections, like the 4th Amendment, which you don't seem to care much about.

In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it?

If a fact is claimed by the cops when they are trying to convince someone based on nothing but a few deleted files, I sure as hell don't take it as a matter of faith. Cops and prosecutors lie all the time, especially to the press.

In fact, notice how they don't claim the girls in the phone pictures are underaged? For all we know, the guy simply likes to download perfectly legal pictures of nude 18+ girls for some file sharing sites, and happened to mistakenly also download a few illegal pictures, which he deleted.

But regardless of facts, his life is now ruined, because many people will have prejudge him based on almost nothing, and he'll probably never be able to practice again even if he's acquitted.

For the feds, that's just Monday, of course.

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In any case, my real point isn't whether you should think he's guilty, but that we shouldn't take away his legal protections just because we think he's guilty, because the whole point is that they must be universal. Cases against unsympathetic defendants are exactly what prosecutors use to further the erosion of legal rights. For everyone's sake, don't play their game.

How many excuses do people have? It seems to be widely acknowledged that prosecutors widely railroad and use unethical and even illegal tactics against defendants and that this is a problem. It also seems to be the idea that black defendants tend to be disproportionately on the receiving end of this behavior and that is a problem. And yet there's astounding difficulty connecting these things. A lot of people I've seen here and all other social media platforms seem to be hoping Kyle gets convicted and the prosecutors are not held to account because he is white and they think a black boy would have been convicted.

This is called (racist, but also) cutting off your nose to spite your face. Kyle being sent to jail by unethical prosecutors will not help the next black boy who is unethically prosecuted or wrongfully convicted.

Hold them to a high standard. Do not find excuses for them, they must be made to justify their own actions. If they are going to use technology to prosecute somebody and they don't know how the technology works, that is not an excuse it is incompetence and highly unethical at best.

Do you know more about this case than was written in the article? Because as far as I know, shaking remains a possible explanation for our observations -- what was "junk" about the science was that it jumped to conclusions too hastily.

>If you don't have evidence a crime exists its pretty meaningless to speak to someone's motivation to commit it.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We don't know if a crime exists, because there are multiple possible explanations for our observations, but that certainly doesn't imply that a crime did not occur. Motivation is important here. (Based on other comments, the defence claimed the partner is unreliable, which is also important here, if true. But the point remains that if a credible witness made such a claim about him, that would be important in determining the likelihood that a crime took place.)

I don't think this case is good evidence of that. The problem was that they really believed he was guilty, not that they were unconcerned with whether he was guilty so long as they had someone to jail.

"It would be like doctors prescribing the nearest drug to hand without bothering to find out what was wrong with the patient."

No, it would be like doctors jumping to a conclusion too early and then prescribing based on that conclusion. That does happen fairly frequently, though, if I understand correctly.

You are 100% wrong on this, but you're going to have to trust me. I realize that for a 'facts and gory detais' hungry world that is not an easy thing to do but in this particular case I'm going to have to ask you to do just that.

> 2OEH8eoCRo0:

> My experience was that people did not look at the evidence- they jumped to a conclusion.

You didn't look at the evidence, you jumped to a conclusion which is not based in fact, and broadcasted that you did this in your message. Thus proving 2OHEH8eoCRo0's point: people assume things about the case without looking at the facts.

> I didn't say I think he's guilty of transporting a weapon

You 100% did claim this when you said "the fact is that he took a gun across state lines".

That is the entire point, none of us know with any degree of certainty what has happened, the evidence does not suggest anything concrete for or against the validity of the charges, so to immediately dismiss one way or dismiss the other way is flawed.

What the fuck, man. I haven't decided anything. I don't know enough about the case to even speculate. Go take your preconceived notions elsewhere, and stop criticizing me for things I haven't even said.

This means the standard to investigate and gather evidence. The standard for conviction is beyond a shadow of a doubt. The question was never ever can we reverse the burden of proof and prove that he is innocent. The point is we never proved his guilt because we initially met that standard based on pseudoscience.

> This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We don't know if a crime exists, because there are multiple possible explanations for our observations, but that certainly doesn't imply that a crime did not occur.

Again this is the standard to investigate a crime and you are affirming my claim that we don't know that a crime occured.

>if a credible witness made such a claim about him, that would be important in determining the likelihood that a crime took place.

Again no this is completely backwards. It WOULD be relevant if and only if the child has a cause of death wherein we had to decide if he could have done it. If the question was did the child fell or did he push her it would be extremely relevant but if we can't convince ourselves that something happened it is meaningless to ask why something happened.

They are properly independent questions. Lets make it simpler if we weren't sure he was actually in Texas would you say a witness to his character was relevant to the question of his location like his motivation could go back in time and teleport him in space to another locale?

I'm not asking for your fuzzy judgement where we just stack positives and negatives on either side and user our gut to figure out which side is heavier I'm asking for you to exercise logical reasoning. Logical reasoning is that we never met our burden of proof in the first place and covered over that lack with prejudice and pseudoscience.

As a matter of fact, I do know more than the jury. The judge suppressed key evidence in the case. There were photos of the cops abusing her that were never presented, and a slam-dunk photo of the cop grabbing her from behind that the jury was not permitted see, as well as more video that made it very clear how out aggressive and out of line the police behavior was.

I qualify what I say since I don't have a perfect view, only the bits and pieces of evidence that exist. Based on those I am assuming what is most likely, and you are doing just the same, as that's all any of us can do.

How can we know what specific pieces of evidence led to his conviction? I would assume the jury took into account the victim's testimony and the testimony of the onlookers who stopped him. What makes you say he was "convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny"?