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Jonbennet Ramsey

jiggeryqua said:
You're right, a lynch mob is under no obligation to follow any of the rules of any authorative body in its society.
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Do not insinuate false meaning into my posts. Lynch mobs are illegal. A lynch mob is a group of people taking the law into their own hands by executing a person through hanging. There are no lynch mobs going after Mr Ramsey, only people expressing their doubt over his alleged innocence.

In these United States, the media and the general public are free to speculate at will, and to any length over the alleged guilt or alleged innocence of Mr. Ramsey, and to the alleged degree of his alleged involvement in his daughter's death.

The "Presumption of Innocence" maxim applies only to legal proceedings in a court of criminal law. And though it would seem to be a nice idea, it does not apply, nor should it apply, to speculation in the media or the general public. Otherwise, there would be no civil court, no actions therein for redress of damages, and no fifth estate to expose fraud, waste, abuse and other forms of criminal corruption in governmental activities.

Speculation on the matter of a person's guilt or innocence is not a lynching. Thus, those engaged in such speculation are not a "Lynch Mob" and are therefor not engaged in a criminal act. A civil act, but not a criminal one.
 
Segnosaur said:
Hmmm... something seems a bit, well, strange... O'Sullivan teaches Psychology, but many of the references in that list are for Cancer research. I know its certainly not impossible that someone is an expert in more than one field, but is it possible that there is more than one "Maureen O'Sullivan" and that this list has mixed the 2 of them up?
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Having looked a bit more closely, I believe you are correct. The medical papers seem to be by a Maureen O'Sullivan in Dublin Ireland. My apologies for not catching that when I first posted the list of papers credited to Maureen O'Sullivan.

But while the San Francisco Maureen O'Sullivan is not the author of all those papers, she does seem to be a legitimate (and respected) academic. Here is a link to a tribute paid to her at the 2005 Association for Psychological Science annual convention.

There is not a wikipedia entry for O'Sullivan, but there is for her colleague on the study, Paul Ekman. He, too, seems to be a legitimate and respected academic.

There's an interesting item about their work in Smithsonian magazine. (It's a five page article, but the part about them is on page 4.)

There's more about their work (and the work of others in the field) in this page about the CBC documentary "The Truth About Liars".

That doesn't mean that their findings are necessarily correct, but I think it does give them a fair amount of credibility.
 
Rolfe said:
Reed Richards?

This sounds almost as mad as accusing the McCanns of being responsible for Madeleine's death, quite honestly.

Grieving parents can come across in different ways. I was completely taken in by Shannon Matthews's mother's little act on camera, and it turned out she'd conspired to abduct the child herself. I always felt there was something false about Kate McCann, but the facts tell me this impression is simply wrong. And so on.

Rolfe.
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I, like many people, initially suspected the McCanns over Maddies death but I haven't read much about the case in a while. What are the facts that tell you your impression is wrong?
 
Rolfe said:
The apparent total absence of any evidence or motive, despite quite a lot of people trying real hard to find something.

Rolfe.
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So there aren't any actual facts that convince you of their innocence, just an absence of evidence of their guilt. I agree there is no evidence of their guilt, therefore they are innocent, but on the flip side, is there any strong evidence backing up the abduction (or any other) scenario?
 
KarlG said:
I, like many people, initially suspected the McCanns over Maddies death but I haven't read much about the case in a while.
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I didn't follow the case, but I got the impression that the parents used the disappearance of their little girl to gain celebrity status. I found that so distasteful that I wanted them to be guilty, but that's somewhat different from suspicion.
 
Question, does anyone here think these 2 samples of the letter E were written by the same person?

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Gee, two "e"s that kind of look maybe like they could have been made by the same person, but maybe not. No context, no idea of if there was different paper, pens or anything. Gee, let me take a stab here and say "absolutely, they were!", even though I know nothing about handwriting analysis.
That is, unless you wanted everyone to go "No way!", in which case I'll say that.
 
KarlG said:
So there aren't any actual facts that convince you of their innocence, just an absence of evidence of their guilt. I agree there is no evidence of their guilt, therefore they are innocent, but on the flip side, is there any strong evidence backing up the abduction (or any other) scenario?
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I'm quite persuaded by the evidence of a break-in at the apartment, and the witness who says she saw what might be a stranger carrying off a little girl answering to Madeleine's description. Also, having thought through various possibilities from the poiont of view of the parents (being intelligent medical professionals), I couldn't come up with any plausible scenario.

timhau said:
I didn't follow the case, but I got the impression that the parents used the disappearance of their little girl to gain celebrity status. I found that so distasteful that I wanted them to be guilty, but that's somewhat different from suspicion.
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I didn't get that impression at all. Both parents are doctors - he's a hospital consultant and she's a GP. I don't believe they had any interest in personal celebrity status. I think they made the decision to use the media to maximise the publicity of their daughter's disappearance, which they thought might help find her.

I did spend some time earlier in the case trying to run a conspiracy theory where they knew more than they were saying and may have disposed of her body (which was what was alleged in some reports), but I couldn't make it fly in any plausible way.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I didn't get that impression at all. Both parents are doctors - he's a hospital consultant and she's a GP. I don't believe they had any interest in personal celebrity status. I think they made the decision to use the media to maximise the publicity of their daughter's disappearance, which they thought might help find her.
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It's certainly possible that I got the wrong impression. As I said, I didn't follow the case; I also found the ensuing international grief fest highly distasteful, so I may have been unfavorably disposed towards them for no good reason.
 
I didn't find myself loving them on sight either. There was something about the hurt glances from behind the well-mascaraed eyelashes the felt manipulative to me. However, following the case (which was pretty compulsory for anyone with a television) I finally came to the conclusion there was nothing sinister behind it.

I did try to find a rational scenario to make them guilty. (Parents both doctors, decide to leave children while they dine and slip them half a Temazepam each before going to dinner. One comes back to find Madeleine dead. Knowing that a competent post mortem examination will find the Temazepam and get them in serious trouble - probably struck off the medical register - they decide to dress it up as an abduction.)

It didn't seem to fly to me. And there was a bevy of Portuguese police and investigative journalists all with the same idea trying to find evidence for that, and they came up with zilch.

There was indeed evidence of someone entering the apartment from outside, and of course the sighting by the friend of a stranger carrying a girl in pyjamas away from the location. I think it was suspected that this last was a fabrication by the friend, to shield the McCanns, but it seems to have held up fairly well.

Rolfe.
 
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KarlG said:
I agree there is no evidence of their guilt, therefore they are innocent,
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This is a complete non-sequitur, as has been discussed in this and other threads.

People commit crimes for which they leave little or no actionable evidence. It doesn't follow that they are therefore innocent.

Indeed, people are sometimes proclaimed innocent by the courts even though there is plenty of evidence of their guilt. Prosecutorial incompetence, legal technicalities, juror quibbles, etc. all allow guilty men to go free after their trial. This doesn't mean they are innocent, and it doesn't mean anybody is under any obligation to consider them innocent, or treat them as innocent.

Of course, we are always obliged to treat people within the boundaries of the law, regardless of our opinions. But the courts are not so infallible, nor so powerful, that their findings must become our opinions. Even less do the courts have the power to alter reality, simply by declaring someone "not guilty".
 
Fnord said:
Do not insinuate false meaning into my posts. Lynch mobs are illegal. A lynch mob is a group of people taking the law into their own hands by executing a person through hanging. There are no lynch mobs going after Mr Ramsey, only people expressing their doubt over his alleged innocence.

In these United States, the media and the general public are free to speculate at will, and to any length over the alleged guilt or alleged innocence of Mr. Ramsey, and to the alleged degree of his alleged involvement in his daughter's death.

The "Presumption of Innocence" maxim applies only to legal proceedings in a court of criminal law. And though it would seem to be a nice idea, it does not apply, nor should it apply, to speculation in the media or the general public. Otherwise, there would be no civil court, no actions therein for redress of damages, and no fifth estate to expose fraud, waste, abuse and other forms of criminal corruption in governmental activities.

Speculation on the matter of a person's guilt or innocence is not a lynching. Thus, those engaged in such speculation are not a "Lynch Mob" and are therefor not engaged in a criminal act. A civil act, but not a criminal one.
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I was merely making the point that the court's presumption of innocence ought to influence society - the individuals that make up juries, for example, would serve society better if they embodied the values of the authorative institutions of the society that serves them.

Your recourse to a definition restricting the meaning of presumption of innocence was not, I think, originally put forward in defence of free speech - at any rate, there are many ways in which the law and social conventions restrict freedoms, of speech and otherwise.

I certainly hadn't intended to imply that you were whipping up a lynch mob - though the suspicious death of a child, with implications of possible sexual molestation, is one of those events that fires up the atavistic urges of those that form such mobs. Your post did serve to remind me, however, of your calls elsewhere for citizen violence to be directed at paedophiles.


NewtonTrino said:
I think we are going to have to accept that we'll never know.
Fnord said:
I think that pretty well sums it all up.
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But I will fight to the death for your right to speculate about it endlessly!
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
And it appears the dad got impatient waiting for the police to discover the body. That was suspicious. The note was suspicious. The murder weapon was suspicious. Murdering the child in the house was suspicious.

And while it may not be a perfect science, the parents bizarre emotional facies during interviews matched guilty parents. The only one who really fooled me in news interviews was Susan Smith. It's hard for parents to be good actors under the kind of stress of losing a child.
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After losing a child..though not in any circumstances like that, I can tell you it was easier to be an actor than to be myself!
You cannot judge peoples reactions under duress. Not unless youre psychic and psichics are real!
 
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