Kent Crispin wrote:
A major nail in the coffin of Justice for any accused in the U.S. was when the justice system promoted the concept of guilt by virtue of "circumstantial" evidence to the point where people can now be convicted as a result of speculation rather than evidence. Prosecutors now seem to need only to convince the sheeple that it was "possible" for the defendant to have commited the crime and that circumstantial evidence points *only* to the accused.
I don't understand the animus against circumstantial evidence, frankly. Some circumstantial evidence is extremely good evidence.
The problem is the addition of a mountain of bullshit which is presented as "evidence" in most prosecutions in order to throw enough crap at the defendant to ensure that some of it will stick. For example, do we really need to have a forensic expert tell us that a paramilitaristic individual (McVeigh) has traces of things such as gunpowder, etc., in his clothing? This has about as much meaning as producing "evidence" that McVeigh took a crap while he was in custody to "prove" that he ate the food delivered to the motel room in question. Do we need a series of people to bend over backwards to produce evidence that a telephone calling card PIN number that could have been used by anybody *might* have been used to place certain calls? Perhaps the above examples couldn't be used to support *real* evidence of McVeigh's guilt, but there seems to be precious little of that. In contrast, there is even stronger evidence that precludes McVeigh having been driving the truck used in the bombing. And what kind of "evidence" is a mountain of horrific examples of dead bodies, etc? It is "evidence" that "somebody has to pay" for the bombing. Would McVeigh be "innocent" if the prosecution showed only *one* picture of dead bodies? What we see in the justice system today is reflective of the same mentality that pervades legal and social issues surrounding the development, implementation and use of technologies which relate to our privacy and freedom. The government "encryption prosecutors" use the same techniques as criminal prosecutors to plead their case. They smear you and I with the same brush used on drug dealers and child pornographers so that use of cryptography is now "circumstantial evidence" of our being guilty of "something." We are being prosecuted for use of encryption on the basis of circumstantial evidence that someone, somewhere is using cryptography and commiting crimes. I don't have any evidence that places Kent Crispin at the scene of the OKC bombing, but we do know that use of PGP was involved in the crime. Combined with Michael Fortier's testimony about Kent's involvement, I think we can get a guilty verdict. As I said previously, the problem with circumstantial evidence is that it is increasingly being combined with emotional rhetoric to convict people who "could have" commited a certain crime, instead of those "proven" to have commited the crime. I have no doubt that the government could replicate much of the evidence against Jim Bell in a similar case against more than a few cypherpunks, as well as producing even stronger evidence of a similar nature in a full investigation of us. Anonymous and Nobody would be in big, big trouble. In McVeigh's case, I wonder how many others the government could find similar or stronger evidence against in the OKC crime? Regardless of the answer to that question, it is McVeigh who is the one prosecutors are pointing at when they put up yet another picture of dead bodies and say that "somebody has to pay" for the crime. TruthMonger {Who has been proven to be Kent Crispin, by a plethora of circumstantial evidence.}