Thursday, August 05, 2004

crimes of criminology

From a CNN.com story on the Hacking murder case:
Mark Hacking volunteered the alias "Jonathan Long" when a jailer asked him, "Have you ever used another name -- that could be for anything?" He did not say why he adopted the name or how he used it and authorities did not ask, Salt Lake County Sgt. Rosie Rivera said. [...]

The jail has booked other Jonathan Longs in the past, but none are believed to have been Mark Hacking, she said. "We book 30,000 people a year, so the odds of people having the same name are pretty good," she said.

She said the other Jonathan Longs used various middle initials and had different dates of birth than Mark Hacking's, who was born April 24, 1976. [...]

Jailers determined there was no criminal record under the name Jonathan Long and Hacking's date of birth, Rivera said. Hacking has no criminal history in Salt Lake County, she added.
Not to say that one of the Jonathan Longs who was arrested was Mark Hacking, but doesn't it seem like the grounds given here for concluding otherwise here are astonishingly weak? I mean, I'm no whiz at spelunking into the criminal mind, but doesn't it seem like if you already are going to the trouble of using a different first and last night, might you not choose a different middle initial as well? And, while you're at it, lie about your birthday?

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