A collossal waste of taxpayer's money ... Would-Be Ped-O-phile bilks USA taxpayers out of ten thousand dollars, King Crab dinner, free air flight back to USA, etc, etc, ad-naseum. And now it appears, State of California not in a position to try him either. PAT
Case dismissed against ex-JonBenet suspect
Updated 10/6/2006 4:50 AM ET
By John Ritter, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly two months after his arrest as a suspect in one of the USA's most lurid unsolved slayings, John Mark Karr was freed Thursday after prosecutors said they don't have enough evidence to try him on child pornography charges.
Judge Rene Chouteau ordered Karr to be immediately released from jail. He was not in the court for the hearing.
Karr was briefly held in the 1996 death of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey but was cleared when Boulder, Colo., authorities said in August that DNA tests failed to link him to the crime.
He was extradited to Sonoma County, Calif., last month to face 5-year-old misdemeanor charges of possessing illicit computer images and had been in jail awaiting trial. The sheriff's department admitted it lost original computer evidence, leading to Thursday's dismissal.
The 41-year-old former schoolteacher, who jumped bail in 2001, ended up in Thailand, where he was arrested Aug. 16.
"Hasn't this been a colossal waste of the taxpayers' money," said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Levenson says Karr now becomes "a headache" for law enforcement. "What I think everyone recognizes is that this guy on some level is a threat," she says. "He's a threat, but he's not yet a criminal."
The apparent mishandling of evidence between Karr's 2001 arrest and his return to California "probably happens more often than people think," Levenson says. "It's an embarrassment, but it usually doesn't happen in a case under the limelight."
Karr's lawyers had tried to get the charges thrown out and were asking the judge to bar evidence when prosecutors said they couldn't establish when the child porn images had been downloaded on Karr's computer.
"The impression that we've had all along is that the prosecution had every intention of getting this case to trial, regardless of the evidence," said defense lawyer Robert Amparan. "I am pleasantly surprised by them having done the right thing."
Even if Karr had been convicted of the charges, he likely wouldn't have served any additional time. Prosecutors admitted as much. Karr had spent six months in jail after his 2001 arrest before fleeing.
"We probably will hear from him again in some way or another," Levenson says. "Either the criminal justice system will initiate it or he will."
Thai authorities took him into custody after he wrote e-mails and made telephone calls describing how he was with JonBenet in her home when she died.
"Here's a guy who thrived at the world's attention," Levenson says. "It's very hard for me to believe that he's just going to go back to obscurity."
Contributing: Wire reports
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