Prisons on both sides of the Atlantic and the world over are full of men and women who claim they shouldn’t be there. While the overwhelming majority of such claims of innocence are spurious or even ludicrous, there are some that pass the litmus test.
Eyewitness testimony can be both compelling and honest yet wrong. Forensic evidence can be misleading, misinterpreted or on rare occasions fabricated. The case of Amanda Knox is still in the news and being touted as a miscarriage of justice, but as legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, there are thousands of people in American prisons who have been convicted of serious crimes up to and including murder on less evidence than was used to convict Foxy Knoxy and her Harry Potter lookalike former lover.
One of those people might just be a young woman named Kirstin Lobato. Like Amanda Knox, she is said to have confessed to the crime, and this confession is disputed. Unlike Knox she was not a student with a rosy future swotting and screwing in sunny Italy, rather she was a young woman who although still attractive had fallen through the cracks due to her drug addiction, an addiction that has robbed many a woman of her honour, her looks, and eventually her life.
Kirstin Lobato either confessed or didn’t confess to an horrendous murder, a murder she is said to have committed without leaving a single trace of incriminating DNA at the scene, a crime that appears to have required in total considerable physical strength, one that might have been perpetrated by a female bodybuilder or athlete, but probably not by a woman of her unprepossessing stature.
Confession evidence is usually regarded by juries as more damning than anything short of CCTV evidence, including DNA, even though innocent people confess to serious crimes, including murder, with surprising frequency. The rule of thumb appears to be the authorities will believe it when it suits their purpose and laugh it out of court when it doesn’t. This is known as the theory of blanket dismissal. In England, Michael Stone has twice been convicted of the Chillenden Murders on such self-serving confession evidence, “evidence” that in his case was not made on tape to a police officer but shouted through a prison wall to another inmate.
Whether or not Kirstin Blaise Lobato confessed to the police and/or a prison snitch, there appears to be compelling evidence that she was 170 miles away at the time the homeless Duran Bailey was murdered. In addition to that, the legal authorities are blocking further testing of crime scene DNA evidence. If they have nothing to fear, why should they refuse?
Kirstin Lobato has now been behind bars for over a decade; a petition for DNA testing has to date garnered over two hundred and twenty-two thousand signatures. If you believe she is entitled to the same due process as Amanda Knox, you are invited to sign it.
[The above article was published originally March 13, 2014.]
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