Robert Pickton: online ‘trial’ to begin?
p2pnet news view | Crime:- Before the Net came along, the story of Emily Sander, also known online as Zoey Zane, wouldn’t have merited more than one paragraph at the bottom of the back page, if that.
After all, she was only a solo model – a young woman who took her clothes off in front of the camera.
She was murdered by a person or persons unknown, although police want to question Israel Mireles about the crime.
He’s on the run with his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend and given the huge amount of publicity about her generated online, the chances of her killer escaping are massively reduced.
In Canada serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was yesterday found guilty of the murder of six women who’d walked the streets of Vancouver’s notorious downtown Eastside.
It took decades to find it him and months to convict him.
His story is almost over, to all intents and purposes, but it’s a better than even bet the ‘trial’ of the people responsible for the unconscionable delay in getting the investigation started is just about to begin, and that most of it will be conducted online in full public view.
Planned and deliberate?
Pickton, a former pig farmer, was accused of killing and dismembering the women. He was found guilty of second-degree murder, meaning he’ll be sentenced to ‘life’ —- a minimum of ten years in jail.
First degree murder, “is a murder which is … planned and deliberate,” says the Wikipedia, and it carries an automatic ‘life’ sentence of 25 years.
“Second degree murder is all murder which is not first degree murder,” says the Wikipedia.
How the murder of not one, but six women, could possibly be anything other than planned and deliberate defies the imagination.
Be that as it may, second degree, decided the jury, and Pickton still has to answer for another 20 missing women.
One way or another, Pickton will probably be off the streets for ever and it may look as though justice has been done.
But has it?
Police started a serious investigation into the murders in 2002, but women had been disappearing off the streets of Vancouver for 20 years, at the least.
Would it have taken so very long for the police to get things moving had the missing women been ‘ordinary’ wives, mothers and girl-friends instead of streetwalkers?
The mainstream print and electronic media will soon lose interest. But online citizen journalists won’t.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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December 10th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Trisha Baptie, a former sex trade worker who covered the trial as a citizen journalist, told Canada AM … “We had reduced them to a bunch of nouns and adjectives … They were daughters, they were nieces, they were cousins, they were mothers, they were victims. They were friends. They laughed. They cried. They were people — and it is so unfortunate they met their ends in such a violent way,” she said, sobbing.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071210/pikton_rx_0712110/20071210?hub=Canada