JUSTICE POWELL'S PUZZLING, POORLY WRITTEN, ILL LOGICAL DECISION

In the “Facts and Proceedings,” Virginia Supreme Court Justice Powell ends with the sentence “Police also learned that the female’s boyfriend was a gun enthusiast.” Justice Powell makes no further comment. I would ask Judge Powell to consider that probably more than half of the male students on the Virginia Tech campus are gun enthusiasts. So what is the point, Justice Powell? If being a gun enthusiast was enough cause to place a person suspicion, then definitely the campus should have been locked down and warned, and all those young men rounded up and questioned.

Paragraph six consists of two puzzling sentences. “Police subsequently executed a search warrant of the home of the boyfriend of the female victim found in West Ambler Johnston Hall. They found nothing.” The reader is not told that the search of the boyfriend’s townhouse took place some six hours after Cho was dead. No one has ever explained that fact. The police already knew who the killer was and that the killer was dead. Furthermore, the police violated the law by entering the house without showing the Thornhills the search warrant. What is the point of this paragraph in Justice Powell’s written decision? Reference to the search of Thornhill’s townhouse is not logical, makes no sense and draws attention to the police violating the law. It is actually counter-productive unless by leaving out the timing of the search, Justice Powell was trying to play up the idea that the police were conducting an intensive investigation, when in fact they were harassing a grieving young man and his family. (To be continued)