Hard Law

From: Jim Rhodes, Assistant District Attorney, State of New York
To: Arthur Bloomsbury, Chief Prosecutor, State of New York

Hi Arthur,

The ballistics results came back this morning, and the fact that they’re so damn convincing makes what we have to face all the more aggravating. The rounds perfectly match up with the weapon recovered from the crime scene, and our CSI man in Atlanta says that the pattern of the blood spray on the sofa even suggests that your theory of the distance the perps stood from the victims is correct. Plus we have two more witnesses ready to come forward about how the victims were involved for years in two separate crime rings involved in illegal media distribution and widespread copyright violations---the rumors of a music piracy “mill” are more than just rumors after all. When all these things are taken into consideration, it’s a total slam dunk case against the defendants….but we’re left with the incontrovertible fact that although they had a strong motive to kill and there’s a mountain of crime scene evidence and eyewitness testimony stacked against them, the Monkees have repeatedly stated in their theme song that they are simply too busy singing to bring anybody down. This takes away opportunity and establishes too strong an alibi to go up against; those lyrics are sung before each and every episode of the show, so a jury will simply never believe otherwise. The long and the short of it is, they may be monkeying around, but in the face of their repeated insistence that they just couldn’t possibly have time to commit these heinous murders, I see no choice but to recommend we drop the case against them. I'm sorry.

The good news is, I hear that the new thing in law enforcement is to charge some impoverished black dude with any unsolved crime on the books, so how about we give that a whirl?

See you Monday!
Jim