American Libraries |
||
Site Navigation
Left Sidebar ItemsOnline Features
Follow American Libraries news stories, videos, and blog posts on Twitter.
|
||
Confession Accuracy at Issue in University of Georgia Arson TrialThe attorney for a man accused of setting a $12-million fire at the University of Georgia’s main library in Athens in 2003 claims that his videotaped confession was obtained by coercion and that the results of a forensic test do not corroborate it.Jason Allen Nelms, 20, faces two charges of first-degree arson in the trial, which began April 19. According to the April 22 Athens Banner-Herald, Nelms became a suspect when witnesses reported seeing him lighting fires in garbage and pine straw in College Square, which is across the street from the campus. In a police interview, Nelms claimed he took a break from using the computers on the library’s ground floor to look for a restroom that had a shower. While on the second floor, he said he lit a cigarette and accidentally started the fire by dropping the match. When he couldn’t put the fire out, Nelms returned to the computer and left the building when the fire alarm sounded. Nelms’s attorney Gerald Brown said that fire investigators had conducted a test burn, and that the results did not corroborate Nelms’s confession. “The only thing we can say for sure is, no, that’s not how the fire got started,” he said in an April 21 Associated Press report. He also argued that police coerced Nelms into making the confession by threatening him with arrest for obstruction and by claiming to have evidence they didn’t have. In the Banner-Herald report, University of Georgia Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said the law allows officers to lie in order to obtain confessions. Brown requested a mistrial April 21, claiming that Williamson introduced evidence about Nelms’s shoes that had not been disclosed before the trial. Clarke County Superior Court Judge David Sweat found that the evidence had been disclosed at a pretrial hearing and denied the request. According to the Red and Black campus newspaper, the university has filed $12 million in insurance claims, and could eventually file up to $17 million. Posted April 22, 2005. |
Right Sidebar
|
|
