Hooray for Double Jeopardy!

The conviction of William Dunlop for murder fifteen years after he was acquitted must be a bit embarrassing for Cleveland Police. They searched the victim's house for five days only for her mother to be the one to find the body stashed inside the bath panel. (Just goes to support my notion that we should give the responsibility for fighting crime back to the community.)

They then failed to put together a convincing case file, with the result that Dunlop was originally acquitted in 1991. Maybe the arresting officer did not show up because he was only given two days' notice of the court case. Or more likely, the judge threw it out because the victim did not support proceedings.

This time around, Dunlop has pled guilty. The police finally trapped him with that most powerful of investigative tools: someone heard him bragging about the murder while in prison for something else. Oops.

Apparently the Double Jeopardy rule will "give the police two bites at the cherry. As a consequence the investigation might not be as thorough and there are likely to be injustices." (Suresh Grover, chair of the National Civil Rights Movement). I am interested to hear that the "cherry" seems to mean convicting an innocent man. Oh how we police officers all yearn to do that!

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