Reply #146: It is hard to say.

[one-eyed fat man]

In far too many cases, the very people who are responsible for ensuring truth and justice – law enforcement officials and prosecutors – lose sight of these obligations and instead focus solely on securing convictions. Prosecutorial misconduct plagues Illinois.

Goverment Misconduct

Common forms of misconduct by law enforcement officials include:

• Employing suggestion when conducting identification procedures
• Coercing false confessions
• Lying or intentionally misleading jurors about their observations
• Failing to turn over exculpatory evidence to prosecutors
• Providing incentives to secure unreliable evidence from informants

Common forms of misconduct by prosecutors include:

• Withholding exculpatory evidence from defense
• Deliberately mishandling, mistreating or destroying evidence
• Allowing witnesses they know or should know are not truthful to testify
• Pressuring defense witnesses not to testify
• Relying on fraudulent forensic experts
• Making misleading arguments that overstate the probative value of testimony

The police are generally looking to put someone away. Prosecutors are as well. The police may or may not have any interest in looking for exculpatory evidence. In the hacking case the victim's status as an attorney and the resources of his employer played a role in determining the truth. Had he been of a lower social status, or worse an ex-con how much incentive would there have been for the FBI to go further than the victim's ISP? The threatening e-mails were sent from his Yahoo account, and traced to his IP address. Slam dunk.

After Kostolnik explained to his law office superiors that he had no idea what was happening, his bosses hired a firm that examined his network and discovered that an “unknown” device had access to it. With Kostolnik’s permission, they installed a packet sniffer on his network to try and get to the bottom of the incidents.

A forensics computer investigator working for Kostolnik’s law firm examined the packet logs, and found the e-mail sessions sending the threats. In the data surrounding the threatening traffic, they found traffic containing Ardolf’s name and Comcast account.

It seems that had not his employer believed him and taken steps to monitor his network the incriminating packets that pointed to the true culprit might never have been intercepted. Would the FBI invested the time and resources looking for evidence that Mr. Kostolnik was NOT GUILTY as his employer had? One would like to hope so. The FBI executed searches of the malefactor's computers and premises AFTER he had been identified by the law firm;s experts. Doubtless, it was his information that provided the "probable cause" need for the FBI to obtain the warrants.

He could just as easily been dragged off to Leavenworth screaming, "I've been framed" with the guard saying, "Yeah, right! They all say that."


Oh and by the way, "My personal opinion is that any unattended firearm is not safely stored, period."

Sound at all familiar?