Addendum to Ramsey column

I’ve received a ton of responses to Thursday’s column which focused on the despicable behavior of Boulder DA Mary Lacy and her dubious “clearing” and apology to the Ramseys. Around 75 percent of the emails and calls I received were supportive.

In a world crawling with batty conspiracy theorists, I ran across a particularly mind-numbing post by a fringy blowhard named “Dr. Sammy“. It’s a nearly unreadable tirade full of ad hominem attacks and baseless assertions.

The only reason I mention “Dr. Sammy” is that he, like others who are emotionally invested in seeing the Ramseys cleared, have held up the work of Professor Michael Tracey as the exemplar of fairness and professionalism in the Ramsey case. Yes, the same Michael Tracey brought us the mentally unstable John Mark Karr as the fall guy on his never-ending crusade to exonerate the Ramseys. For more on Tracey, read Alan Prendergast and Michael Roberts in Westword.

I don’t know Tracey personally, though I may have met him at some point, and he may be the finest professor in Colorado. What I do know, however, is that his actions during the Karr fiasco disqualify him from being the go-to guy on the topic.

To be frank, the rehashing of the JonBenet case is, for the most part, a worthless endeavor. (One commenter on the DPO claims that I have, like radio talk show host Peter Boyles, been “harping” on this topic for years. I’m not sure what Peter has done; I wasn’t here. But in approximately 400+ columns I’ve written for the Post since 2004, I’ve editorialized on the case twice. Once when Karr was brought in and once on Thursday.)

The focus here is Mary Lacy’s irresponsible, unprofessional and hypocritical behavior. For anyone who still doubts Lacy’s breathtaking incompetence, peruse these quotes from a piece by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, who was an investigative reporter on the case. (Yes, I realize Shapiro has his own bias, but the Lacy quotes speak for themselves.)

In 2006, after Lacy extradited John Mark Karr, an otherwise innocent man, from Thailand, to erroneously charge him with the murder, she announced: “The DNA could be an artifact. It isn’t necessarily the killer’s. There’s a probability that it’s the killer’s. But it could be something else.

And …

In fact, during the Karr debacle, Lacy also said that “no one is really cleared of a homicide until there’s a conviction in court, beyond a reasonable doubt. And I don’t think you will get any prosecutor, unless they were present with the person at the time of the crime, to clear someone.

What has changed for Lacy? If she didn’t know then that the DNA was the killer’s, how does she know it now? If DNA was there, finding a trace amount in another spot doesn’t change any facts. Nor does it “clear” the Ramseys.

(Cross-posted on Post-Ed Notes.)