Audrie and Daisy: was there police misconduct?
In Marysville, Missouri during a labor day party a 14 year old Daisy Coleman was sexually assaulted by Matthew Barnett, to make matters worse Jordan Zech had taken a video of it. Jordan and Matthew were Daisy's older brothers friends from wrestling and baseball. After the assault Daisy was dumped in her driveway, half frozen. Matthew and Jordan were arrested within hours of the attack because Daisy's brother was able to find "Matty B" on Daisy's phone. Just so happened that Matthew's family had a strong political background in Missouri starting with his grandfather. During the investigation I say some signs that the police may have done some misconduct. Starting with the fact that during the interrogation of Jordan he handed his phone back to him during the investigation. To make matters worse he said that the video was "deleted", I find that hard to believe because in many other cases people have deleted videos, destroyed devices and the evidence has still been recovered. For example in the Aaron Hernandez, he hired a "destruction squad" and destroyed his home security system and his two iPhones. Aaron's text messages with the victim and his video with a gun was still recovered. By the way Daisy's case happened in the middle of 2012 just like the Aaron Hernandez case, not only that but both involved iPhones. In the end the sheriff called the people who claimed there was a video "liars" despite the fact that both Jordan and Matthew confessed to it. I suspect that there was police misconduct especially on part of the sheriff. In the end the community ended up harassing Daisy to the point of vandalizing her house. She was forced to move to Albany. According to her Instagram page she still to this day receives nasty emails that victim shame her till today. Daisy is currently a tattoo artist in Colorado.
I agree with your statement and I think there was definitely a police misconduct especially on the sheriff who claimed there was no video or that it was deleted but although they claim its "deleted" it cant just possibly be deleted and " gone forever." I think that the police could've done better at searching for that video because the one that turned in his phone couldn't possibly be the only one who had the video. Maybe one of his other friends had it but the sheriff didn't seem to look deeper into that.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea that there was police misconduct in this case. The evidence you described in your post clearly points to this fact in my opinion. I personally also think that if the videos were truly deleted, the perpetrators wouldn't have confessed to the crime. I think they both knew that the evidence of their crime was still there, and that if they didn't confess, the police would uncover it eventually. The major plot twist for me was when the sheriff said that everyone who said they had seen the video were "liars." In my mind, this is unacceptable on the part of the sheriff, because he is in a position to be responsible for uncovering evidence and bringing the perpetrators of this heinous crime to justice.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this statement. Do you think that the cop should be fired after what he said in the interview? Personally, I felt that he gave his whole city a bad name because of his words. When he called the people who saw the video liars, it showed how bad he was at his job and made it seem like he was blaming the victims for what had happened even though it was not their fault.
ReplyDeleteI think laziness why the police never felt moved to try and solve this case. This is just my opinion on how things happened. From the get go, they decided this case wasn't real and never put much effort into it. Because these sort of high profile cases rarely happen. Heck, there have been no murders in Los Altos for 25 years. Raping cases aren't as high profile as murders but they're up there. Therefore, I feel like the police didn't consider the case to possibly be real. But when the media started to pay attention to the case, the situation got even worse because the police couldn't be caught being lazy and humiliated in front of the whole country! The police cared more about their reputation than the lives of two women and therefore tried to cover the case up. Would it be right to do so? No way at all! But self-preservation is a very powerful instinct. That is what I think happened.
ReplyDeleteI am in total agreement with you about how their may have been some obstruction of justice in this case. It seems kind of fishy that the police department (or any Department of Justice) was unable to go through the phone and find any video of the sexual harassment, especially since Matthew's family has a heavy foothold in the politics in the state. Despite this conspiracy, I do not find it weird that the police department was unable to find any video. I recall in the documentary that the sheriff said that the device was an Apple device. After the San Bernandino shooting, the FBI and DOJ subpoenaed Apple to unlock the shooter's device. The tech company denied the requests, and the justice departments were unable to have the device unlocked, even after efforts to do so.
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