blog post fingers murderer

This story is real, and it's creepy.

Here is the post.

Here is the rest of the story.

One Virginia blogger has been pondering whether the post would be admissible as evidence under Virginia law.

Well, what about Washington law?

It's not a statement under belief of impending death. That's what makes the post so creepy, like the Zapruder film: there is no consciousness of impending death in anyone but the onlooker. That sense of foreshadowing is probably responsible for most sales of true crime books in this country, which means, frankly, that foreshadowing has a lot to answer for.

I've been vacillating between considering the post an excited utterance and a present sense impression, with a slight bias towards the latter. The future victim's tone is somewhat exasperated at the intruder, but not really frightened. Certainly if he thought he was in danger he would be doing something other than blogging. At least in the blogosphere, the more excited you are, the less likely there is to be an utterance.

I also think that the authentication problem regarding the post would be most easily solved by a comparison of that last post to known examples of the victim's writing style from other sources.

This is definitely the most interesting application of fairly basic technology to solve a legal problem that I have come across this week.