#691 - I hate to be that guy...

[Sully]

but Cheryl is wrong. At least in the United States and Canada the exclusionary rule only excludes evidence gathered illegally by state agents, not by anyone else, so any evidence Jamie gathered would be admissible.

[Truec]

I'm running with the assumption that she's lying in an effort to stop Jamie from doing something monumentally stupid... to stop Jamie from continuing to do something monumentally stupid.

[wartickler]

Long time lurker here... Loving this comic. It's so sensible and satisfying. A lot of the other comics I've been visiting lately go for the usual quippy quip in each installment. But I actually care about the characters in this comic. It's a bug difference and I'll be a long time reader of this one.

Just wanted to say thanks for the high quality entertainment!

[Horizon]

On the theme of "reluctantly being that guy", I'm wondering why Jaime is a popular and consistent misspelling of Jamie. Do some of us just watch too much Game of Thrones?

[crayzz]

I like to think they've all somehow internalized some French. Freudian style, their subconscious maps "Jamie" to "J'aime."

[Singularity]

Hi!

Also a lurker, this storyline has finally made me register.

I agree that Cheryla's statement, as told, is incorrect. However, her caution is largely valid. The problem, as has been pointed out already, is not so much with the admissibility of the evidence. It has a lot more to do with the usefulness of any evidence Jamie may gather.

Judges don't like their evidence to be collected by proper, procedure-abiding law enforcement officers just because they have a positive bias towards the uniform. It has a lot to do with the fact that they're professional, and (ideally) impartial evidence gatherers.

Let's say suspect X has a bloody chainsaw in his garage with the victim's blood on it. That would be pretty damning in the context of this case. (let's ignore the part where a suicide-by-chainsaw should leave the thing right next to the victim because I can feel my credibility failing just discussing how this could even be a remotely sane cause of death) Let's say the police get a warrant, arrest suspect X in his house and find the chainsaw, I think we can all say Suspect X's in trouble. His lawyer is going to have to be pretty creative, at the very least.

Now let's say Jamie, skulking around, finds the chainsaw in suspect X's garage. What's he going to do? His testimony is worth beans considering just how much of a bone he has to pick in this case - sure, the charges have been dropped, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a very obvious self-disculpatory motive for wanting the police to find another culprit. So he can't just say he saw the chainsaw and expect a judge to believe him. Already we can see how much harder he has it compared to your run-of-the-mill police officer.

He could take a photograph of the chainsaw, but who's to say he didn't put it there himself?

He could always nab the chainsaw and bring it to a police station in hope Suspect X's prints are on it. He'd probably better do it anonymously, because anything he gets involved in is going to be viewed with suspicion (not that a chainsaw dropping out of nowhere will not be viewed with MASSIVE suspicion anyhow, mind you). He also better hope he didn't smudge those prints or put any evidence of his own on the chainsaw. Even so, he just compromised some of the best evidence in the case - the fact that the chainsaw was in suspect X's garage AND that no third party had ready access to it. The second Jamie gets involved, a third party HAS to have had access to it, or else Jamie wouldn't have any evidence, would he?

This is not to say that Jamie could not get anything useful. He could, say, elicit a taped confession from the culprit - that's probably his best bet, in fact. Problem is, he's anything but a professional at making people talk - he was lucky to get out of the meeting with the drug dealer with his skin intact. Such an operation is crazy risky even for trained professionals with backup, and he is none of these things.

If he could count on the police to be halfway competent, he might be able to simply gather enough circumstancial evidence to point them in the right direction, and let the investigation run its course, but I think we've established that he'll have no such luck in this case. He has to get something ironclad, but it's nearly impossible for him do demonstrate a solid chain of evidence on his own without involving the professional, not-nearly-impartial-enough evidence gatherers whose incompetence he's trying to compensate.

So he's in a pickle, and Ceryla is right to remind him that he's likely to do more harm than good. Of course, if he'd listen to common sense and leave well enough alone, this wouldn't be much of a storyline. And so I'm eager to see exactly where this is going...

[sethtriggs]

Heh I think there's one other thing - and that Jamie doesn't think far enough head to make it so any evidence is admissible in court. So in a roundabout way, Cheryl is right...there'd be no way for penal justice to accrue to the druglord. Instead it'd have to be the usual messy 'street justice.'

That said, Jamie doesn't think far enough head to do that right. So...yeah...

Though he is pretty good with hand-to-hand combat at least!

-Seth

[redscarf]

So far, the only viable end scenario I can envision seems to go like this:
1) Jamie confronts Suspect X.
2) Suspect X attacks Jamie intending to murder him
3) Jamie kills Suspect X
4) Jamie aka Benjamin Halliganiv is now standing over a corpse
4a) Halliganiv is considered a violent racist
4b) there is only Jamie's word that Suspect X is guilty of anything
5) ??????
6) Happy ending!
The only way a scenario even vaguely like this turns out well is if someone Jamie knows can produce a deus ex machina. This being the case it behooves Jamie to contact as many people as he can about this and to keep them all as fully informed as possible to maximize the chances that one of his friends will save him with some super useful skill. That's why it so reassuring that Jamie has been keeping all his friends fully in the loo...wait, he hasn't told anyone except for Cheryl? In fact he grabbed Ellen's glasses without even informing her of where he was going or what he was doing? Yeah, this is gonna turn out great.

[Raptorian]

As Stan Lee taught us, "with great power comes great responsibility"- but it goes the other way around, too. If you choose to bear a responsibility, you should also have the means to do something about it. Jamie does not. Anything Jamie does in this situation, besides leaving well enough alone, will just make things worse. I certainly understand that he feels strongly about this and wants to do something about it, but he needs to realize there's nothing he CAN do that won't get him killed.

[Horizon]

I feel like his proficiency with the Halligan Bar will become important at some point.

...am I really the only one who remembers that?