| | | Hi bentway; Re: "Maybe Zim just shot Martin, then beat himself up some to justify it? I don't know how else to square that Martin had no Zim on his hands or elsewhere."
It's not known whether or not "Martin had no Zim[sic] on his hands", but in fact, there was Zimmerman DNA elsewhere on Martin. What's known is that the State claimed that they didn't find evidence of Zimmerman's DNA on Martin's fingernails/hands. The fingernails are preferred because they're hard to clean. The rest of the hands often lose DNA evidence. So Zimmerman could have had Martin's DNA at one time, but it could have not been found for any of a large number of reasons, including of course, incompetence on the part of the prosecution witness. And in the US we do not put people in jail just because the people paid by the state are not competent. We require competency by the State to put people in jail, not incompetency. This is the principle of "innocent until proven guilty". We require the State to find incriminating evidence, not simply claim that they weren't able to find exculpating evidence. You're not supposed to be put in jail because of evidence that the State was unable to find. Similarly, just because you can't find your electric bill doesn't mean that you don't have to pay it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
This is especially true of DNA evidence. For example, women are indisputably raped by men but with no detected DNA evidence. Here, read the facts from the government report on DNA testing itself, no DNA found does not prove the absence of rape:
Principles of DNA Testing for Officers of the Court
The Significance of DNA Results as Evidence
Therefore, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
National Forensic Science Technology Center
projects.nfstc.org
For the principle that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" in US law, see:
Commonwealth v. Heilman,
COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellee, v. Michael S. HEILMAN, Appellant.
In mounting his argument, after observing that “[t]he killer obviously beat the victim about her face and then shot her at close range” and “obviously had sex with her · before he killed her,” Heilman insists that if he had murdered the victim, “his DNA would have been all over that crime scene (including the victim's body and her clothing).”
In DNA as in other areas, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Furthermore, a murder suspect may be convicted on wholly circumstantial evidence, of which there was plenty in this case.
caselaw.findlaw.com
Also see:
Defendant sought post-conviction DNA testing after he was convicted of criminal homicide. Defendant argued that there was a lack of his DNA at the crime scene or on the victim, which would show that he did not commit the crime. However, Pennsylvania law requires that a defendant must show that favorable results from the DNA testing would establish his actual innocence. The court denied defendant's motion. It found that even if DNA testing proved that the defendant's DNA was not at the crime scene, the "absence of evidence was not evidence of absence."
ncstl.org
If you can be convicted despite an absence of DNA evidence against you, then you can certainly be acquitted despite an absence of DNA evidence in your favor. The simple rule is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
If science used the principle of "absence of evidence is evidence of absence", then the theory that man descended from apes would have been rejected as there are so many intermediate species that are not (yet?) found in the fossil evidence.
-- Carl |
|
