Some of you will not see anything remarkable about this story. It seems justice was served and it was the correct decision for the circumstances. But it does illustrate something notable about the law. The law often doesn't work like people think it works. Rather the law works how those wielding the law make it work (or want to make it work). And that is the important point being illustrated here. It's not the outcome, or whether justice was done, but the legal principles involved which I would like you to look at. A man was sentenced to 4 years prison because his DNA was found in a car. Of course the car had been stolen from a woman who was murdered. The car apparently was stolen for only a very short length of time before being abandoned nearby the house where the owner of the car had been murdered. After being charged with murder, the man did not say anything to authorities for some time but eventually claimed that another man had sold him the car. So it was believed that this man could have been the murderer, but they could not know for sure. Presumably, at the very least, this man had knowingly bought a stolen car. The fact that his DNA was found inside it, and the fact that this man had a long history of committing crimes, and then the fact that car was found abandoned suggesting that the man did not pay very much money for it or was concerned about getting caught, strongly indicated that this man must have had strong reason to believe the car was stolen. But that is not even what he ended up finally pleading guilty to. The single charge he was eventually charged with and pled guilty to was "misprision of a felony", which means a person knows a crime which is classified as a felony has been committed but fails to inform the authorities about it. People often believe that a defendant is punished for the crime they are actually convicted of, punished based on the law they actually broke, but I think it is obvious that is not the case here. Presumably the legal logic would be that this man failed to inform authorities about the car having been stolen, when based on the circumstances, he had very strong reason to believe the car had been stolen by the person he was buying it from. Allegedly breaking this law is the excuse they used to punish him. I think we can see that the punishment was actually for buying a car he had reason to believe was stolen, and then the possibility that he might have been the murderer. There was also a possibility he might have been a partner in a home burglary that police believe took place that led to the murder and knew that the murder had taken place but didn't report it. So if this possibility were true, then the law he was convicted of would be appropriate. (The criminal charge does not say whether the crime he did not report to authorities was theft or murder) Otherwise, four years is kind of a long time to be punishing someone for briefly stealing a car but then quickly abandoning it nearby where it was stolen. Which I would say is the only "real crime" for which there is substantial evidence for. So when we look at this, the legal logic behind the punishment is actually a little bit complex. Many of the strange laws that exist, like "misprision of a felony" just make it easier for prosecutors to have a way to charge someone when the evidence that they may have committed other crimes is not the most solid. This story illustrates that the law does not always work in the simple way which most people imagine it to work. The path of logic behind convicting persons of crimes is not always the most simple. In this case the amount of punishment probably was appropriate, given the circumstances, but the fact that a law was used in a strange sort of way can help give a look at how laws could be abused, if a prosecutor wanted to try to use laws in way that was not in furtherance of justice. Another little interesting fact of this story was that the DNA test was not done until 30 years after the murder. The man's name is Brian Munns. The victim, an 80-year-old woman named Alice Haynsworth Ryan, was stabbed to death inside her mansion in 1988 in Greenville, South Carolina. Police believe another man, Lamar Green, who had a record of committing burglaries, may have been the murderer, but he died only a few months after the murder (after being shot by his mother-in-law while he was pointing a gun at other members of his family). Brian Munns and Lamar Green were both seen together on the same day as the murder.
Well he also had a criminal history of criminal sexual conduct, strong armed robbery, and larceny. Now had he reported what he knew at the time, the murderer could have been arrested instead of being shot by relatives a few months after the initial killing.
Under normal circumstances, wouldn't you say it would be ridiculous to convict a man of the crime of not reporting a car theft, 30 years after the fact, and essentially based only on a single piece of DNA evidence, and then sentence him to 4 years in prison for that? Imagine you are involved in all sorts of crimes (like burglaries, stealing cars, and robberies through intimidation but without a weapon) in your 20s, and you spend a few years in prison, but then you turn your life around and go 20 years without doing any crime. Then, they find DNA in a car from an event that happened 30 years ago and put you back in prison for 4 years. I don't know, doesn't that seem a little harsh or excessive to you, if this had been a normal situation and a murder had not taken place? That's what makes this an interesting situation. What this man was really punished for was being a suspect in another crime that police did not really have the evidence for.
So if a person buys property they have strong reason to believe was probably stolen, you are saying they should report it to police because the person who originally owned that property might have been murdered? And thus the person who fails to report the probably stolen property could in some way be responsible for the murderer not being caught? That is an interesting line of thinking.
link to the original story 'This All Made Sense': Police Finally Unravel Mysterious 1988 Cold Case Murder of S.C. Socialite and Legal Scion Who Was Stabbed 37 Times in Her Mansion’s Kitchen - Law & Crime - a Dan Abrams Production, Colin Kalmbacher, December 16, 2021
No I am saying that if you are riding around in a high-profile murder victim's car a half hour after the murder 1) don't leave a cigarette butt behind and 2) you need to report it to the police so they can solve the murder in 30 minutes instead of 30 years.
A person who buys or takes a stolen car from someone else does not necessarily know that there has been a murder.
The article I googled on this man's case indicated that he was riding around in the victim's car with the eventually suspected murderer right after the murder. This was not days or weeks later.
Sorry, that may be useless information if you don't provide a link with specifics. (What you say might not even actually be exactly true)
