doesn't sound good,hope all the court rooms will be able to authenticate the tape,I mean a very good editing tool and a CG expert working on it may come out with real frightening stuff. Who would say that the dinasours of jurrasic park didn't look real :) Sarath. --- "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
<http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=84540>
The Orange County Register
Monday, March 8, 2004
Evidence is clear: Videos convict And sometimes it's the accused themselves who provide the taped version of the smoking gun.
By LARRY WELBORN The Orange County Register
Twelve jurors and two alternates sat almost unblinkingly in a 10th-floor courtroom and watched a 21-minute videotape on two television monitors.
Some squirmed in the swivel seats in the jury box but their eyes remained riveted on the screens, watching images of two men having sex with an apparently unconscious woman in a Newport Beach apartment as techno music droned in the background.
The trial of Allen Ward Crocker provided jurors with a rare chance to see exactly what happened in a case of alleged sexual assault.
Most of the time, jurors must decide guilt or innocence based on witness memories, documents or expert testimony. But with the inexpensive but still-sharp video cameras in existence these days, videotaped evidence is becoming more and more common in criminal courtrooms, veteran lawyers say.
The Crocker case has similarities to the pending prosecution of Gregory Haidl, the son of an assistant sheriff, and two of his teenage friends.
They face trial next month in the alleged rape of an unconscious 16-year-old girl in July 2002.
Haidl, 18, videotaped the encounter in Newport Beach, and now prosecutors are using those images against him.
The accused aren't the only ones providing police with videotape to show jurors.
In Los Angeles, an amateur photographer recorded the notorious videotape of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers. And in Orange County, a surveillance camera at a convenience store captured images of a former mental patient murdering sheriff's Deputy Brad Riches.
"I call it the proliferation of Little Brother," said Costa Mesa defense attorney Paul S. Meyer, who has prosecuted and defended in criminal cases in Orange County for more than 30 years. "You know, just about everyone has a video camera these days. It's only common sense that these videotapes are showing up in trials."
In the Crocker case, it took the eight-man, four-woman jury just 90 minutes to reach a verdict: guilty of rape.
Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy argued that the videotape clearly depicted a crime-in-progress: The woman was unconscious after an evening of bar-hopping in Newport Beach and unable to give consent.
Defense attorney Robert Chatterton insisted that the videotape showed that if the woman was unconscious, then Crocker, 36, of Tustin, was unaware of it. Crocker had a good-faith belief that the woman consented to sex, Chatterton argued.
"We were able to witness it ourselves," said juror Kristina Durbin, 27, a health-care worker who lives in Mission Viejo. "Without the videotape, I wouldn't have been able to reach the decision because he would have been able to put doubt in my mind. But with the videotape, the crime he was charged with was right in front of me."
The rape was caught on tape because Crocker's friend and alleged accomplice, Tim Marino, 41, started his video camera rolling after the victim passed out.
The victim testified that she didn't know what was happening to her and didn't know that the episode had been videotaped.
A $500,000 arrest warrant has been issued for Marino, who never kept an appointment with a Newport Beach police detective after an investigation of the Sept. 14, 2003, encounter was launched.
Prominent Orange County defense attorney Jennifer Keller, a former deputy public defender and a former president of the Orange County Bar Association, said videotaped crimes won't be so rare in the future.
"It seems everything we do now is recorded or videotaped," Keller said. "To our children, video cameras are second nature."
Assistant District Attorney Roseanne Froeberg, head of the office's sex-crimes unit, said there have been sporadic cases in the past in which rapes or other sex crimes were memorialized on videotape. But she said she is seeing more of them lately.
"It does make it easier for us to prosecute when criminals videotape themselves in the act," she said. "But to me, it is a sad commentary on our society. Videotaping their perversions for sport takes things to different level. An incredibly ugly level, in my opinion."
Said Meyer: "I call these ego crimes, where the criminals memorialize their deeds on videotape." And yes, he added, "we will be seeing more and more of these."
-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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