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From: Jasper
Date: 3/19/03
Time: 11:55:58 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.56.19
Prien,
Maybe you should have given this one a little more thought before you posted it….
“This nis where you are again entirely wrong. The coroner made a huge fuss about this, an issue that was discussed at sidebar. The notification process had alos recently been changed because the coroner again made a huge fuss about the police faiolure to follow it.”
This case focused national attention on a problem that the coroner suffered with ineffectually for years. The national exposure gave it political capital that it had to use or lose. The recent change in the legal notification process was because the LAPD ignored the old one. The new one was supposed to bring them into compliance. It didn’t.
The only pressure it took to shut the coroner up was frustration. How long does it take an organization to bash its head against a brick wall before it decides that the wall is not going to move? Besides, Phillips threw the coroner a bone with his admission that the process did not work as well as it should and the police were trying to make it better. What more could they argue about without being accused of petty tendentiousness? They could have argued until the cow jumped over the moon. The courts were not listening.
Philips DID exactly what you said he would have done if I were right about his announcement being setup. He just gave the short answer (Hey, don’t blame me for breaking the law. My boss ordered me to.) The rest of it was implicit in the facts that had already been established. He made his announcement at 10:50, which covered his ass nicely for notification responsibly. It was now RHD’s case.
Here is another one you might want to give a little more thought to….
“As to why he waited until 2:50 when he arrived at 2:10, that could certainly be accounted for by them having to go on a walk through, and spanlger arrived just as they ended it (well, according to some accounts). Phillips then briefed Spangler, and it was in that time frame that the coroner notification came up.”
Prien, Phillips could have made the call before the walk-though and he could walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. He had a cell phone. He made a lot of calls, none of them to the coroner’s office. Every minute he wasted put the coroner’s ability to fix the time of death farther out of reach. By his own account, he wasted at least 40 minutes, more time than that if you consider the fact that he went to the police station to wait for Fuhrman rather than going to the murder scene first. He had to be on the scene to make the call. What the coroner could accomplish after 2:50 was really a moot point.
Of course Spangler knew the law. He also knew that it was toothless. A radical departure from normal procedure in a high profile case would have been a huge responsibility. According to the police manual as well as normal practice a detective was obliged to make the call. The detectives in charge weren’t there yet. --Jasper