True Crime Stories

This is an odd case for me. It is one of those cases that ran cold for twenty years. It is also a case in which prosecutors arrested and charged a suspect some five years after the crime only to drop the charges saying there was insufficient evidence. When this happens it makes the job of the prosecutor that much harder because the defense has a “fall guy.” They do not always have to say that the previous suspect is the actual perpetrator, but they can simply argue that the prosecutor and law enforcement had been so convinced that person was the suspect that they had gone as far as to arrest someone and charge them, only to decide the person was either innocent or as this case stated, there was not enough evidence to move forward. Jason Tibbs was convicted in the murder of Rayna Rison, twenty-one years after her murder. He had been an early suspect when Rayna first disappeared March 26, 1993 after his class ring was found in her car. At the time authorities believed T...

This crime is one of the most heinous that I have come across, not necessarily because of the crime itself, but because of the relationship between the victims and the perpetrator. Even still one of the things that shocks me is how the justice system handled things inside the court. For over two decades many states have required those convicted of sex offenses to register with the local police department upon their release from prison and have restrictions they must follow. In 2006 the federal government it mandated that states have a registry, which all did, but by their rules. There are still arguments on whether the federal rules are the “right ones,” just as there are still arguments on whether the registry itself is legal. Initially these registries were enacted to warn law enforcement and the public of the “worse of the worse” when it came to sexual crimes, especially those against children. Over the years the states have added more and more offenses to the ...