Quote:
Originally Posted by fraleyight
I have no doubt that both Laura and Moira believe SA is innocent.
Really? I mean, it's the only way you can make money in that field, and they were only in it to make money. (They weren't salaried reporters for some major news outlet, and they weren't aristocrats or rentiers with private incomes who were just being noble.)
'Cops arrest right people, jury duly convicts' isn't a story. To have a story, you have to argue wrongful conviction, so that's what that type scavenger animal always does.
And they're generally wrong. In Britain the late Paul Foot gained a great journalistic reputation for arguing the 'innocence' of one James Hanratty, hanged in the early 1960s for what was known as the 'A6 murder'. (It wasn't just a murder, it was also a rape and attempted murder of a second victim, by the side of the main road known as the A6.) Until quite a late stage, the media were cheering Foot on.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wr...t-1285402.html
Then the DNA evidence came in, and the Court of Appeal duly had the last word.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...ond-doubt.html
Foot never accepted this, and died still denying it.
The other case Foot made a career out of was the Bridgewater Four. Their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1997, but not -- despite what the media and politicians and grandstanding lawyers claimed -- because the men were 'found innocent'. It was simply because the police broke Judges' Rules during questioning. As the court noted, there were obvious factual grounds on which the men could be considered guilty, and, while some of the most cogent evidence was technically inadmissable, there was nevertheless enough evidence to allow a jury rightly directed to convict one of the men, which would have implications for the others under the joint-enterprise rule.
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/1997/2028.html
Innocence fraud is an industry and people make money out of it.