The prosecution’s case against the two men the state accused of killing Albert Rosso 18 years ago never looked like it stood much chance of success. The victim’s body was never found. The evidence against the accused was scant, barely circumstantial, and connected them poorly to the events the prosecution argued occurred before the disappearance of Mr Rosso.
No one seriously expected a conviction to occur.
And yet we went through 18 years of wait for a trial that drew a blank. We cleared the courts’ schedule holding back trials with greater chance of success. We spent a small fortune summoning and selecting jurors and going through the motions because no one, with the responsibility and authority to do so, would take the decision that there just wasn’t enough evidence to go to court. In case that was too subtle the decision belonged to the attorney general.
Doing the trial anyway, knowing it would get nowhere, was the easy, expensive, irresponsible way out. I will not go into the reasonableness of the state’s suspicion in the guilt of the accused not least because I don’t know enough about the case. I am inclined to assume the suspicion was eminently reasonable.
Sometimes you know but you don’t have enough to prove it. That is a painful reality that need not be made worse by drawn out processes stretched over a short lifetime.
Certainly, the victim’s relatives deserve closure but a pointless trial that goes nowhere is nothing like closure at all. And it needs to be said: this is eighteen years after the fact. Eighteen years.
It’s just a waste of time and resources and the infliction of unnecessary pain on top of the madness of being related to a man who left his office one day and was never heard from again.