[ Home | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Junot
Date: 9/26/00
Time: 10:15:50 PM
Jasper wrote:
"...Killing Time is a terrific book. Yes, it has errors. So does Iago..."
Well, good grief, Jasper! If that is the case, why are you posting messages to this board. Get the lead out of your ass and go correct those errors in your book, dammit!
"...So does If O.J. Didn't…. So does A Problem of Evidence. When you write about anything this complex some errors are going to creep in no matter what you do. But the errors in our books are nowhere near as numerous or significant as the ones in Evidence Dismissed, The Run of His Life, O.J. A to Z, American Tragedy, etc… ..."
The most error-prone work I know of, after 'Killing Time' is Petrocelli's book, aka "Triumph of Justice". It says, among other things, that one of Goldman's ears was cut off. I haven't read "iago", though I have tried. Sorry, Jasper, but I found your prose so turgid that I just could not stick with it. "Problem of Evidence" is so good, I put it in a class by itself. "American Tragedy" is the next best, and the source of some information you can't get anywhere else, except perhaps the trials transcripts and deposition, which are actually really bad sources because you almost always have to sift through ten tons of court procedure bullshit and irrelevant chit-chat in order to discover one gold nugget of really valuable information. Toobin's work is cursed with his biases. "Evidence Dismissed" is not all that bad, but the reader must make allowances for the bias. And no one interested in the OJ case can be complete in his reading without "Kato kaelin: the Whole Truth" -- perhaps the most ironic title in American literature.
"...What Makes Killing Time so important is that it uses the "clock" approach for the first time ever as a tool for scientific investigation and rational analysis...."
Except for all the other times in history that this technique has been used.
"...I used the hell out of it in Iago.
"...The clock analysis system holds that anything you can use as a standard measure of duration is a clock. The barking Akita is a great example..."
A barking dog is an example for the lousiest possible chaice of something to use as a clock since you can not use it as a 'standard measure of duration'. I have yet to see any kind of table that tells how often a given breed of dog barks in a given period of time. Jasper would seem to believe this is as regular a natural process as water dripping or a candle burning.
"... All of the people who heard a dog bark incessantly on the night of Jun 12th were doing something before during and afterwards..."
Yes, and all of them disagree about what time they heard the barking start and stop.
"... By correlating their actions with the presence or absence of the barking to a universal standard of time like a telephone record, you can take much of the guesswork out of various estimates of time..."
Unfortunately, Japser's conclusion about the usefulness of the barking could be used that way he says it can ONLY IF YOU **FIRST** 'TOOK THE GUESSWORK' OUT OF THE TIMING OF THE BARKING, which was never done.
Burther complications arise out of the acoustics of the neighborhood. that is, it's entirely conceivable that someone a block away from the condo could have heard the dog clearly, while someone, say, across the alley, due to intervening bushes or whatever, would not have heard a thing. The evidence is that the dog barked in several spurts of various length, and there can be no way to know which particualr spurt any given witness heard.
"...You can then test theories of who might have done the killing with various scenarios against the known times..."
Only if you could have some reasonable certainty about which "times" were "known", which you could not in this case.
"...and determine whether or not there was enough time for that scenario to have played out.
In the brief phone conversation I had last week with Donald Freed, the author of Killing Time, I could tell that he was as open as most of is here are to finding mistakes and correcting them whoever made them...."
How in the hell is he supposed to do THAT? Recall all existing copies and write in corrrections? Make changes in future editions -- ecept that that aren't going to be any?
"...That's the style with which he approaches Killing Time and one of the things that makes it such a valuable asset...."
The book is a LIABILITY AND IMPEDIMENT AND A CONFUSION to anyone wanting to do their own researh and theorizing.