Learning from the Del Taco Murders

Illinois Review ^ | June 20, 2010 A.D. | John F. Di Leo

[jfd1776]

On Memorial Day, 2010, Joran Van der Sloot murdered a young woman in a Peru hotel (no “alleged” needed in this case; he confessed). And as the whole world knows, the grisly crime occurred exactly five years after he killed the even younger Natalee Holloway on a beach in Aruba.

Anchormen, commentators, and regular folks at the water cooler are talking about how avoidable this all was. If only the Aruba police and prosecutors had done their jobs better, five years ago… or if only the many private investigators and researchers had dug up some hard evidence in the intervening time to arrest him and make it stick…

Yes, it’s all true, of course. There was doubt before, but there’s no doubt that he did it now. Still, what lesson can we take from this double nightmare?

Not that you should prosecute when you don’t have evidence; you just lose at trial. Not that suspicious types always turn out to be guilty; it often does in fact turn out to be somebody else. Truth be told, there isn’t much about police work or prosecutorial procedure that we can learn from this case; there are always going to be some cases you just can’t solve. Even if you are sure, there are plenty of times when you just don’t have a case, so the guy gets away with it.

But that’s not to say there isn’t a lesson to learn. We just have to expand the horizon… perhaps to include the case of the Del Taco murders on June 19, 2010, in which Jimmy Schlager murdered several members of his own family at a fast food restaurant in cold blood, before turning the gun on himself and finally doing the job that the criminal justice system probably should have done...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Crazy budgetary reasons often play a role: politicians will think we can’t afford the $30K to $75K annual cost of jail time for keeping a criminal locked up

End the war on drugs and spend the money saved locking up violent criminals. Almost all "drug related" violence is a by-product of prohibition.

[FrdmLvr]

(no “alleged” needed in this case; he confessed)

Have you heard the latest? He wants to recant the confession...claims the confession was coerced in prison by the police. It was on either Fox or ABC news on the radio over night.