A week or so ago, I was doing a search for "hit man" and another for "arsenic poisoning". My reasons were simple, I write detective fiction (nothing published, or eve submitted but maybe some day)
If my wife turns up dead next week, this does not mean I put arsenic in her food or hired a hit man to kill her.
Excellent points and dovetailing.
Putting forth the computer search, imo, was the weakest part of the prosecutions case. For a number of reasons. The least of which involves presuming motive for the search and attempting to prop up their presumed motive by relying upon cache deletion. The worst which involves the fact that computer was shared by all household members and that their so-called "
smoking gun" was found in the browser cache area as opposed to, for example, being explicitly downloaded or printed out.
For example and wrt the search, the guy said it was "
typed in." Please. He could not know that unless he had a camera recording said typing or was sitting next to the individual typing. And why might that be? Simple, most search engines, and in fact, even browsers, utilize intelligent algorithms which presents users with a drop down selection for form fields (
in this case, the search form field) "
as they are typing" in the words.
As for deletion of cache? Again, so what? All browsers have default settings to include max cache used, how often to clear it, or for that matter, what to save (
i.e., content, cookies, etc). Moreover, if browser sessions are acting up, its been hammered into people's heads to clear their cache to see if that helps. And some, for that matter have their browser set to clear the cache when they close the browser. And some of these very same people may very well leave their browser running for extended periods. For example, until they reboot.
As for the shared cache bit. That the prosecution was attempting to tie the searches to KC indicates the computer was not set up with separate and individual accounts. Which further indicates the family was likely computer illiterate. That is, outside of knowing how to surf the web, read their email, set up facebook/myspace accounts, watch youtube vids, or maybe even use MS Office products. Even so, we're talking about people who did not set up separate login accounts, and importantly, shared a single computer. Otherwise put, the degree of computer literacy the prosecution was trying to put forth (
i.e., that KC explicitly deleted the cache relating specifically to that period to cover it up), was... well, in a word, ludicrous.