Posted on 08/14/2007 4:27:34 AM PDT by Dudoight
The show was an instant success. It lured would-be child-sex predators to a public shaming, delivered by a handsome host. Ratings, awards and even praise from members of Congress followed. But now Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series is taking heat. And so is the police chief of the Collin County town that hosted it eight months ago. The troubles stem from the show's visit to Murphy, where more than 20 people were arrested but escaped prosecution because of evidence problems. Also a former district attorney ensnared in the sting shot himself.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
According to some folk, < BANG! > constitutes a full confession!
It would be very hard to prove that a 12 year old could force a 40 year old to do something against his will, and even so NBC and Preverted Justice require the perp to make the contact and ask about sex first.
First of all, Conradt (the dead guy) never did that. Conradt never showed up at the house.
Second of all, the state has to maintain the presumption of innocence even when you have been arrested.
Good point. The Esquire article suggests that the police were coerced by nbc to hurry the warrants. I don’t know if was recorded audio of the former DA and the decoy but according to the article the two men did talk over the phone. The article aslo notes that the office who wrote the warrants did so after not having slept for a couple of days and that the warrants contained several errors including the name of the city, county, and date.
Read the transcript. He did enough.
http://www.esquire.com/features/predator0907-3
I think the DA suspected a trap and cut it off. By then, it was too late though. He had already arranged the meeting (which the DA dogged). Remember, they are talking via phone as well as chat.
Question:
If the DA had lived, could he have beaten the rap? Probably. Clinton beat off (doh!) the Gennifer Flowers tapes in 2000. But the phone tapes would make him a pariah. He really screwed himself when he went vocal.
The real issue is his line of work. My God, what would make a man in that position do what he did?
Why not?
Wouldn’t a better solution be for parents to monitor their children’s internet activities just like they watch them in a public park or at a mall?
That would be an additional solution. However, parents can't monitor their children 100% of the time. Some parents are negligent, and the children shouldn't suffer because of that. Even if the parents are not negligent, some children do very foolish things, and unless you lock your children up, they are going to be unsupervised some of the time.
Suggesting that a campaign to encourage parents to monitor their children better will address the problem is extremely naive.
What is wrong with private individuals using their own resources, to take positive and legal steps to identify pedophiles and collect evidence that can put them in jail?
So, where is the testimony where an expert witness states conclusively that the voice on the tape is the voice of Conradt?
And where are the chain-of-custody records that demonstrates that the transcripts are complete?
How about the stenographer's sworn affidavit that the transcript is complete and accurate?
And where is the forensic analysis of the e-mails to demonstrate that the offending chat came from Conradt's computer?
Where is any of this stuff?
Even if we take everything Dateline NBC says at face value (which is a dubious proposition, given their history of lying), all you have is somebody chatting with Conradt's e-mail address and talking from his telephone.
Suppose somebody else was staying at Conradt's house and using his computer and telephone? How would the "evidence" collected by Dateline NBC differentiate between that person and Conradt?
And, of course, you have to deal with the fact that the folks at Dateline NBC are confirmed and repeated liars, who will fudge evidence and disregard anything that gets in the way of a story.
Now, I'm not saying that Conradt is probably innocent. In fact, I would say that he is probably guilty. But our system demands a higher standard than "probably" prior to punishment.
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No, that isn't really what you meant. You meant what you said.
Predators cant help themselves. But they couldn't wait. And of course, DATELINE had a show to produce!! On with the show !! 200 posted on 08/14/2007 11:44:19 AM EDT by Nonstatist [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 193 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]
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And just as bad, that we should wait until more children are molested. Feel free to use those crayons while you're sitting in the corner during your time-out.
That's not what Dateline NBC was doing in Texas. If that is what they were trying to do, they failed miserably. They are Zero-for-Twenty on prosecutions, let alone convictions. All they have to show for it is one dead guy.
but I don't think its right to show them on tv when they haven't actually done anything yet....I believe that men as a rule are impulsive and some if not many of these guys wouldn't do this thing that openly if they just thought about....
its a shameful explotation.....
Most of what you asked for is noted in the Esquire article.
You’re dense, Trisham, and you misrepresent. But I’m sure youre a nice person.
Gonna be hard to find that out because he is dead. No one cares whether he is guilty. Mostly I think because everyone knows he was guilty. It will come out in the civil trial. His sister is going to have a tough road to go. My guess is that they have a copy of everything that proves it was him. She is going to have to get all of that stuff thrown out.
Remember, he killed himself. They didn’t kill him. That doesn’t help the “he was innocent” track. She better go for the “he was guilty but metally ill” route.
Pathetic.
They gathered enough evidence to get a warrant to search his house.
This was entrapment, period...and abuse of police power.
Entrapment requires that the police pressure someone into committing illegal activity that they wouldn't have otherwise committed.
In this case the police (or the private individuals in this case) didn't induce the man into committing a crime. They merely were able to gather enough evidence that a crime had been committed to have probably cause to search his home. That isn't entrapment. It doesn't come anywhere close to the definition of entrapment.
Thsy busted into his house! For what.....hate thought?
They executed a search warrant granted by a judge based on the information they gathered from his own actions.
He was the one that chose to take his own life when they came to search his home.
Can anyone imagine them doing this to a female or African American?
They went after him based on his actions, not based on his race or gender. Your accusations of some kind of discrimination are complete and utter B. S.
They overreached in their typical misandrist way and they ought to be punished.
How did they overreach? Are you suggesting that they provided false information to the Judge to attain the warrant? Are you suggesting that the evidence provided to attain the warrant was illegally obtained? What is your justification for your allegations?
Plus , the police were stupid pawns; stupid rural hicks and greedy morons.
Stupid pawns because they took evidence of a crime to a judge and got a search warrant?
Stupid rural hicks? So what is your justification for that comment?
Greedy morons? So how did they benefit monetarily from this?
Can you justify any of your comments.
It's hard to believe that someone who joined this forum nearly nine years ago is posting something like this.
Where in hell did you get the idea that I condone that??
I hope that is not what you’re implying.
As to the other guys, if one of them shows up at the house and admits to writing the stuff that's in the online transcript, that's a confession. Also, the STATE may have to 'maintain a presumption of innocence', but YOU don't. Are YOU the state? If you're not the state, then you're allowed to have your own thoughts independent of the state. Any defending of a pedophile makes you look very bad.
If you read the article, the police wanted to back off but NBC was salivating over the “big catch”. The police were probably aware the case wasn’t strong enough to go against someone politically connected.
It was a marriage between public perception and the law. Public perception won. The law probably could not hold someone like a DA. The DA would have the advantage that a commoner like me would not have. In the end, justice was served by the perp’s own hand.
C'mon, Appy, this is a bit weak. . Personally, I dont think its an accident that Dateline picked some little town to play their cat and mouse games at. Nothing like famous celebrities to make ordinary people forget what standards should be followed.
Not to get too anecdotal, but theres a guy I know of in my business that got snared by the Feds for being a sexual predator, and it took them 1 1/2 years to get him. The first time he agreed to meet the (12 yr old) girl, he got cold feet when he was within 100 yards of the restaurant they were supposed to meet at, and then it took them 6 months for them to get him to finally meet with her. He pled guilty and is serving 5 yrs in the pen; a perfectly nice guy, with a clean record, otherwise, as far as I could tell ( I knew him fairly well). That, by the way, is how you do it.
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