The trouble is the confession can't be used against the man in a charge for murder. And absent the statement there isn't enough evidence to charge him let alone convict him. So apart from perjury he runs no risk if he lies. And in so lying he may save his ex-girl friend.
But how can you find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt if someone else confesses in front of you? Difficult case:
Ex-boyfriend confesses to child's murder
November 5, 2009
Peter Small
Courts Bureau
In a scene worthy of movie-of-the-week witness box confessions, the former boyfriend of a woman charged with fatally beating her 2-year-old daughter testified Wednesday he was the killer.
"Who is responsible for the death of Emmily?" Bob Richardson, lawyer for Erika Mendieta, asked her former live-in partner, Johnny Bermudez.
"I am," Bermudez told a packed University Ave. courtroom.
...
Emmily died on Nov. 23, 2003, 10 days after her mother called 911 from her home on Flax Gardenway, near Steeles Ave. W. and Jane St.
The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Emmily had bruises and marks all over her body.
...
Police did not arrest her immediately, but tapped her phone and bugged her home, eventually recording her saying to Bermudez: "I killed her myself."
They charged her with second-degree murder on March 5, 2005.
Bermudez testified that about 3:25 p.m. Nov. 13, Mendieta left him with their baby, Maximuz, 20 months, and Emmily – fathered by another man – while she went to pick up her four other children from school.
The two toddlers wouldn't stop crying, Bermudez said. "I couldn't take them crying any more."
He slapped his son twice in the face and threw him on the couch. The boy fell to the floor, he said.
Still crying, Emmily approached him, and he slapped her face several times and pushed her, he said. She approached him a second time and he pushed her again, he said.
"You lost it," Richardson said.
"Yes," Bermudez agreed.
Suddenly the little girl stopped crying. "She was lying down on the carpet," Bermudez testified. "I went toward Emmily and I realized she wasn't moving at all. She was breathing and she had a pulse but it was very, very faint."
But, in a voice choked with emotion, Bermudez denied being responsible for Emmily's severe, head-to-toe injuries. "I'm not the type of guy that would beat up a baby, man," he said, claiming that was the only time he has hit a child.
"Why didn't you call 911?" Richardson asked.
"I was scared," he said.
"Did you think she was going to die?" Richardson asked.
"I didn't think that she would come back," Bermudez admitted.
But prosecutor Allison MacPherson suggested Bermudez was lying about being the killer, and that his previous evidence, in which he disavowed any role in Emmily's death, was more accurate. "Each time you testify you give a slightly different version of events," she said.
"Everything I said prior to today is a lie," he said.
But MacPherson suggested that "big chunks" of his previous evidence were true.
He agreed.
The trial continues
James Morton
1100-5255 Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario
M2N 6P4
416 225 2777
2 comments:
Why can't we live in a society where people like this are dragged out into the street and butchered like hogs?
Why is it the people who are least likely to care for their children, have so many of them?
Both of these scum deserve to die. period, end of story.
hang em high
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