In any event, even if I assume that the respondent's mother's version is correct, and that the findings of the reliability of the trial court should not be interfered with, and even if I proceed from a strict assumption that the failure to seize the diary amounts to negligence – and I am very far from this conclusion – I do not share the sweeping conclusion of the trial court, according to which the police did not present the diary to the respondent at the outset. It was she who ultimately led to his arrest and the filing of the indictment.
- and the diary itself. The following is a scanned copy of the diary page in which the fourteen days between 11 April 1999 and 24 April 1999 appear (as may be recalled, the incident took place on 18 April 1999).
It can be seen that on April 18, 1999, all that appears in the diary is the words "long meeting." Five days earlier, in the rubric of April 13, 1999, it was written: "Problems to be treated" and under it in three separate lines: "National Insurance – Claim"; "Daddy - What's Happening About Pelephone Debt"; "Completion of studies". In addition, on the left margin of the rubric there appears a deleted word with two lines that appear as "rent" and at the bottom the deleted words "work ads".
As stated, the trial court held that if the respondent had looked at his diary and saw that on the day the minor was attacked he had a "long meeting", and had looked at the days preceding the day the offense was committed and discovered that five days earlier he should have taken care of the cell phone debt and the rent, then he would probably have remembered that it was his father's rent and that the treatment was done exactly at the time the minor was attacked – which would have led to the dismissal of the suspicions against him.
- I am not convinced of this at all. Even assuming that the diary was not presented to the respondent during the entire period of his detention – and as noted, there was no impediment to his mother or his defense attorney showing him the diary – I am not persuaded that it would probably have refreshed his memory in the way that he would have suddenly remembered that he had been in the camper's home until 9:30 p.m. As stated, under the date of the day the offense was committed, the diary contains the words "long meeting", which correspond to the respondent's first version that he was at the camper's home until 19:30. The trial court's conclusion is that if the respondent had examined his notes five days earlier, where the matter of the cell phone debt and the rent was mentioned, it would have led to the fact that he would have remembered that he had arranged the payment of his father's rent Exactly On the day the offense was committed And exactly At the time of the offense five days later, this may be a possible conclusion, but the determination that it reaches the level of Most likely It's far-reaching.
Thus, it can be seen that the respondent's diary included many additional entries. Thus, for example, we see the following page in his diary, in which the dates 8.5.99-25.4.99 appear: