When Prosecutors Believe the Unbelievable

[KamaAina]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/07/mark_weiner_conviction_vacated_chelsea_steiniger_text_case_finally_overturned.single.html

Three years ago, one of the strangest criminal cases in recent memory began in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live, when a young woman sent a series of text messages telling her boyfriend that a man had abducted her, followed by a series of texts, allegedly from her captor, taunting her boyfriend with threats of sexual violence. Her story was strange, and the case was fraught with complications from the get-go, but the accused ended up in prison long after the doubts outweighed the evidence.

This story is bizarre, but it’s not all that unusual: Prosecutors can prosecute even the weakest, most clearly flawed cases relentlessly, and innocent people can end up in jail.

This week, after two and a half years in prison, Mark Weiner saw his conviction vacated. It finally ended a saga in which Weiner was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to eight years in jail on charges of abducting a woman with the intent to sexually harm her....

This was the basis of a massive trial in the spring of 2013. The most vigilant reporting on the entire Mark Weiner prosecution has been done by Lisa Provence, who has covered the case for more than two years, showing growing doubts about the strength of the case against Weiner and deepening concern about the state’s persistence in going after him, even in the face of a growing mountain of exculpatory evidence. Her accounts of Weiner’s trial and subsequent hearings are worth reading in full. The fact that there was a trial at all is remarkable.

[FLPanhandle]

1. People do what their incentives tell them to do.

Prosecutors are rewarded for convictions, not investigating, not insuring justice.

Until someone changes the reward system, this will continue.

[kcr]

2. What is so unbelievable about this?

I have a feeing the author of the article is biased by her personal connection with the accused, because there is nothing outrageous about this case being prosecuted. Her friend had a history, for one. She snuck a bit about that but left out a whole lot more.

[TexasMommaWithAHat]

3. So unbelievable?

I guess that would be the fact that he was prosecuted and convicted despite exculpatory evidence.

That's my guess. I don't really know the case.

[kcr]

4. The tone of the article suggests he shouldn't have been prosecuted in the first place

Which is utter nonsense. And it's hardly exculpatory evidence. In fact, it's bogus. The cell tower data says nothing about where those texts were sent from.

[kcr]

5. Gee. Why did they believe it.

This could be why:

• At 2:30 a.m. April 7, 2005, a woman called 911 and told authorities in Culpeper that a man in a van followed her as she walked along the road and stopped alongside her. Police saw the van at a motel and questioned Weiner, who said the woman had waved to him and he stopped to see if she wanted to talk.
• On Dec. 9, 2009, a woman got off a bus in Charlotesville around 10:30 p.m. and a man in a white van followed her to her home. After the same thing happened on Dec. 10 and Dec. 11 she called police. On April 21, 2010, she reported to police that the van had returned, and the license plate came back as Weiner’s.
• At 1:30 a.m. on June 23, 2010, Charlottesville police saw a woman believed to have been arrested previously for prostitution get into a van. An officer approached the van and discovered Weiner with his clothes in disarray. Weiner said there had been some heavy petting but no money exhanged hands. He said he was giving her a ride home.

http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/article_7a6ea23d-8e37-5a0c-a838-83758bd7dfa8.html

The author of the article herself at Slate linked to this. I'm not sure why she's having such a tough time.