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Posted by: kwflatbed

By KIM CURTIS, Associated Press Writer


AP Photo: Sonoma County Sheriff deputies escort John Mark Karr into Sonoma County Superior court on Monday,...

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - A judge dismissed child pornography charges Thursday against former JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr after prosecutors said they didn't have enough evidence to take the case to trial.

Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Rene Chouteau ordered Karr released immediately, bringing an end to his two-month odyssey in the U.S. criminal justice system after he was extradited from Thailand on suspicion of killing the 6-year-old beauty queen.
Karr, 41, was returned to California last month to face the five-year-old pornography case after DNA evidence cleared him of killing the girl in her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996.
The misdemeanor pornography case fell apart almost as quickly, as investigators admitted losing vital computer evidence that was seized from Karr in April 2001 when he was working as a substitute teacher in Sonoma and Napa counties.
Defense lawyers tried twice unsuccessfully to get the charges dismissed and were seeking to have evidence barred from trial when prosecutors gave up. They said they couldn't establish when the child porn images had been downloaded on Karr's computer.
"The impression that we've had all along is that the prosecution had every intention of getting this case to trial, regardless of the evidence," said defense lawyer Robert Amparan. "I am pleasantly surprised by them having done the right thing."
Prosecutors acknowledged that if Karr were convicted he would not have served any additional time in jail, because he spent several months behind bars awaiting trial in 2001. They said they were seeking to have him register as a sex offender.
Karr was not in court for the hearing. He was expected to be released from jail later in the day. It was not immediately clear where Karr would go or what he might do.
Karr had fled the state after being released from jail in 2001 and had been on the lam until his arrest in Bangkok, which caused a sensation when he told reporters he was with JonBenet when she died.
Karr, who moved to California from Alabama with his wife and three sons, first came to the attention of Sonoma County officials after an informant told authorities about alarming e-mails he had been sending her.
Investigators looked at Karr in connection with the unsolved 1997 murder of 12-year-old Georgia Moses, whose body was found dumped along a highway in Sonoma County, Karr's lawyers said.
The sexually explicit pictures of children were later found during a search of his home, authorities said.
His arrest led school officials to strip him of his teaching credential, and his marriage ended in divorce later that year.
In hearings over the past two weeks, the defense accused prosecutors of misconduct for failing to alert the judge sooner that evidence was missing, and they questioned the strength of the evidence that remained. The defense also said the search warrants were based on an unreliable witness with a history of mental illness.
Sheriff Bill Cogbill said he accepted the prosecutor's decision to drop the charges.
"We do acknowledge that there were some performance issues five years ago when we worked this case," Cogbill said in a statement. "We're conducting an internal affairs investigation into these issues, and we're continuing an audit of our evidence handling procedures."

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Posted by: kwflatbed

How long befor this scum strikes again ????

John Mark Karr, TV producers stopped after Karr seen near school

Saturday October 07, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) John Mark Karr, a one-time suspect in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, was briefly stopped by police on Friday when the former schoolteacher was spotted wandering near the classrooms of a school where he briefly worked years ago.
Sgt. Steve Mannina said a limousine carrying Karr, 41, and two producers from ABC's ``Good Morning America'' show was stopped shortly after the reported sighting. Police took the names of Karr and the producers but no one was arrested because no laws were broken.
Police said an employee of the Convent of the Sacred Heart school in San Francisco, where Karr worked briefly as a teacher's aide in 2000, called police when she spotted Karr near the school.
``He stepped out of the limo and stood (outside the school) for two or three minutes, walked down the sidewalk, went up to the door and looked in the window,'' Mannina said of Karr.
Karr was giving the ABC producers a tour of the neighborhood where he used to live and work when he suddenly exited the limo and approached the school, said Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News.
``His behavior gave us serious pause and ABC decided not to proceed with the interview,'' Schneider said.
Karr was released from jail Thursday after Sonoma County authorities lost critical evidence in a 5-year-old child pornography case. He was released a little more than a month after DNA evidence cleared him of suspicion in the slaying of child beauty queen JonBenet, whom he claimed to have been with when she died in Colorado.



(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

In the interest of timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain occasional typographical errors.

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