If the LAPD eventually find this guy, or if he’s handed to them on a silver platter say from a surrounding suburban police department, they will loathe having to prosecute him because it will be all over the papers every day and due to the public outcry very expensive to manage all the way from arrest through trial.

An example of a classic, textbook LAPD cover up, one needs only to read John Chritian’s book on the Bobby Kennedy assassination. There’s both irrefutable documented evidence that proves that at least two guns were used in the murder AND that Sirhan Sirhan couldn’t possibly have fired the fatal bullet (there were 12 bullets fired of which 11 were recovered and Sirhan’s gun fired 8 shots from 3′ feet away; the fatal shot per the coroners report was fired behind Kennedy’s ear at a range of only 1″-2″‘s).

Then LA Mayor Yorty though didn’t want any of it to come out in the press and ordered the LAPD to stonewall the case (because he didn’t want to risk exposing his department to the same level of scrutiny that the Dallas PD went through after the JFK assassination and Yorty was a hard right winger who despised the Kennedy’s), and they did until things finally died down (no pun intended), to where people stopped asking questions that the LAPD couldn’t credibly answer.

A classic case of LAPD bungling a case was the OJ Simpson murder trial. Due to intense hatred and a bitter rivalry between different district detectives, when Van Etter took over the murder scene from Furman, he didn’t even bother to follow standard police procedure to review Furman’s initial observation notes of the crime scene.

In Furman’s notes (which are public record), he clearly writes that blood droplets were found on the back gate leading to the alley, but Van Etter never followed up until three weeks had passed, and by then the chain of evidence had been broken and Prosecutor Marsha Clark couldn’t use it.

What did that evidence reveal? All three blood types intermingled of both victims and OJ were found just above the latch to the gate on the gate, along with enough of a blood trail to show where his getaway vehicle (the infamous white Ford Bronco), was parked. This was proof that the murderer was intimately familiar with the property and the surrounding streets that he used to plan his getaway.

The LAPD has always been a puppet tied to the mayor’s offices strings and nothing has changed in that regard over the years, but to his credit Police Chief Branton did a fantastic job of cleaning up a lot of the corruption that he inherited, but it’s no small wonder that there’s the high level of mistrust among the public towards the LAPD.

That said, I’m not quite sure how the above would play out in CA in your scenario of an attempted murder conviction followed by death. This is one of the benefits (*cough cough) of the ever slow moving wheels of justice, there’s plenty of time for the victim to die before a conviction is secured. Maybe some west-coaster could provide more insight on the matter.

Your bill will be forthcoming…

Craig might be able to shed some sort of light—though not necessarily in California—on the plausibility of trying the guys for murder after being convicted of attempted murder. I know Philly at least arrested and charged a guy who was convicted and served his sentence for attempted murder of a police officer, after that officer died 40(?) years later of complications from the incident.

But presumably once the parades are over, we go right back to the situation before the Stow beating, where years passed with only minor crimes and minor brawls, where people who committed drunken acts of violence were generally caught and prosecuted as appropriate, and that was fine. Egregious acts like the Stow beating should not, I think (and I feel confident citing Schneier in this) drive our allocation of resources to security problems. Concentrate on the 99%, not the 1%.