For those with an interest in the Kenzi Snider case, ABC Primetime Thursday ran a long report on it (via AFN) today at 3:00 p.m. (Korea time), in which they interviewed Brendon Carr — the man behind Goldbrick in Seoul. Unfortunately (fortunately, actually), we don’t get AFN in Kwangju, so I couldn’t watch the program myself (and I just got Mr. Carr’s e-mail, so I couldn’t put up a post on it earlier), but I hope some of you were able to catch it.
Anyway, here’s the online report, courtesy the Web site of ABC News.
UPDATE: The comments section is what you want to go through here.
9 Comments
It’s too bad we don’t hear from the FBI or the US military authorities who investigated the case, but instead in all the articles I’ve seen so far, we get a steady diet of what the accused has to say but then again, her story is so odd it does its part to make you think she did it. I would like to know what inconsistencies and other things led to her being questioned as a suspect. For a long time after the murder, the US military and Korean police looked hard at the idea a US soldier did it. What made them change their minds??? And to me, by far, the most bizzare thing about the case has nothing to do with Snider what about the other girl who was the victim’s roomate? You almost don’t hear a single peep out of her in all the stories, but she is supposed to have slept through a very violent beating, but in one early article, she says she seems to remember waking up and hearing the door close……Maybe one day when the last court case is finished, somebody in the USFK police will talk about the case or if we are lucky the FBI….but probably not….
Anybody interested in seeing the video, we have posted a copy on the FastTrack file-sharing network, keywords “Kenzi Snider”.
It was an interesting report, although pretty clearly it was chopped down from its original length this week, after Howard Dean’s “Yarrgh!” hit the dance charts.
The story is definitely odd. There are a lot of questions hanging out there. But the Korean law is pretty clear: There is no way to convict Kenzi Snider of this crime. First, there’s the Code of Criminal Procedure’s requirement that the confession be made before a KOREAN prosecutor; it wasn’t. Additionally, the Korean Constitution forbids conviction of an accused where the only evidence is the accused’s own confession. Even if the confession were not to be excluded, there still is no other evidence tying Kenzi to the crime. And several pieces of evidence pointing in OTHER directions.
FastTrack is the KaZaA file-sharing network, in case anyone’s wondering.
Interesting note about the confession thing… especially since, near as I can tell, the law is rather unforgiving when it comes to someone ratting you out.
Get nabbed by the police on a drug charge (or alleged or whatever), and you get much more lenient treatment if you spill the beans on 20 people or so. The police then round up those 20 people and the prosecutor presses charges based solely on that informant.
Similarly, if the cops pick up some underaged kids drinking, the kids say who served them and that bar gets summarily shut down.
I wonder if the courts, prosecutors and police take liberties with their own laws when there is not a strong defense team, or if there is some other legal thinking going on I am unaware of…
Someone ratting you out, that’s evidence — witness statements. So even without a confession, a party who is fingered by eyewitnesses is in trouble. One of the problems in the Korean system — indeed, the whole society — is a reluctance to make value judgments (i.e. is the so-called witness credible?).
The Constitutional issue germane to the Kenzi Snider case is what happens when there are NO eyewitnesses, and NO forensic evidence tying someone to a crime. In that case, under Korean law that party really cannot be convicted on the basis of his own confession — what the accused needs to do, if he wants to be punished, is lead the investigation to additional evidence.
Remember the context of Korea’s repressive regimes: Police have a known history of enthusiastically beating confessions out of people, some of whom would be sure to be innocent in fact.
I have a proceedural question about the case and the points you bring up — how does this work in the extradition treaty and cases? If confessions are out unless taken with/by a Korean prosecutor, what about other evidence collected by another nation? And if this evidence isn’t admissable in Korea (or just in the confession case if that is the only evidence) how can the law claim enough cause to ship someone to Korea? If the Korean law is as it is, why was Snider sent to Korea to begin with? In an extradition treaty, do you mostly go by the law of the host nation as to who deserves to be sent for trial in another country or do you look more at the law of the land where the person will be tried?
Well, in my own personal opinion, this comparative-law issue is at the heart of the case. Most lawyers in any country, although they profess to respect foreign legal systems, basically assume “It works there like it works here.” And so they view the world through their own little prism. That can lead to mistakes.
If we’re going to play “what if”, then here are two things that could have changed the outcome of the confession issue:
- If the FBI & CID had applied to the Korean prosecutors for a formal authority to assist in gathering evidence under a judicial cooperation request (there’s a treaty on this issue), it could then be argued that had taken Kenzi’s first confession under a mantle of authority from the prosecutors. It might have been difficult then for her lawyers to point up the very real procedural difference between police & prosecutors. Instead, the FBI/CID agents charged off without attention to the different legal system and the existence of treaty rights.
- If the Korean prosecutors had gotten off their duffs and come to the United States (again under the Judicial Cooperation Treaty) to interrogate Kenzi themselves before she realized that she had been talked into confessing to something she hadn’t done, then again we would not have been able to argue that the confession could not be admitted. The treaty would allow them to travel to the States to gather evidence; they didn’t do it.
These two things would have made it harder or impossible to exclude the confession in a Korean trial. But still, we believe that she could not have been convicted on the basis of just that confession — remember, THERE IS NO OTHER EVIDENCE IN THE CASE. And Korea’s Constitution requires some other evidence.
An extradition hearing in the United States has a much lower standard of proof than a criminal trial. The prosecution doesn’t have to PROVE guilt, or even (I suppose) that the evidence is sufficient to allow a reasonable person to conclude on guilt. What the prosecution has to show is “probable cause” to stand trial and let the foreign court sort out the facts later.
That’s a good question, actually, and although I don’t intend to stay up all weekend researching, I think it’s something I should look at for future reference.
Known bloggers can get the video from me by FTP — send e-mail and get the secret URL.
I was in Itaewon early the next morning of the nurder right across the street from the yogwan standing with a group of onlookers. I remember being surprised by the Military presence (US) in front of the hotel. As a long-term resident of this hood, nothing regarding this case would surprise me—-
Al Quaeda offing a MiGookSaram, Lesbian love triangle, a tragic result of scorned Nigerian sexual advances, enraged drunken Canadian ESL teacher, an Alabaman GI unable to perform…..
it’s all right there, and as an Itaewonian (five plus years), my gut instinct is that it was not Snider……it was probably just too much liqui-itaewonia-saint-patricka
A 19-year-old (non-military) American woman crashing in a flea-bag motel at the foot of hooker hill on the ancient Irish drink-up day is bad, bad dangerous news.
We will probably never know what happened to her.