This is the factual description of the course of the investigation, as it emerges from the material. The question before us is whether prior seizure of the diary, or earlier disclosure of the call outputs and location, could have shortened the duration of the respondent's detention. I will now turn to this question.
- As stated, in the investigation file a call output was found from the telephone in the respondent's apartment. The District Court ruled that this output was already in the possession of the police on or about July 20, 1999. At the same time, the District Court refrained from determining whether the police obtained the output by means of a court order, or whether the output was proactively delivered to it by the respondent's family members. In any event, as explained, the output showed that at 5:23 p.m., a call went to the camper's home. This information was available to the police in real time, and is not retrospective wisdom. Officer Sweid, in his testimony in the trial court, claimed that the output acted in accordance with the plaintiff's obligation, because he pointed out that the plaintiff was not at the camper's home during the hours he claimed he was there (as may be recalled, Perach's hours report stated that the respondent was at the camper's home between 15:30 and 19:30). On the contrary, however, the output shows that the respondent apparently arrived at the camper's house at the earliest around 5:40 p.m. – later than the usual time when he used to arrive. This fact, together with the details provided by the respondent's mother the day before (that the respondent usually meets with the camper for about three hours) should have raised a real doubt as to the possibility that the respondent had arrived at his home as early as 20:00 and there he committed the rape.
Later, in September, two more pieces of evidence were discovered: the output of cell phone calls and the location of the device. The evidence revealed that at 20:22 the respondent called the owner of the boarding house from his cellphone, and that the call was made from the area of the camper's home and not from the area of the respondent's home (where, as stated, the rape took place). As a result, the investigation took a different turn, until it became clear that the respondent was indeed in possession of Alibi as required, and that at the relevant time he was not in the area where the rape was committed. As explained above, the cellular output that set in motion this direction of investigation was not required by the police, but was given to it by the respondent's counsel. Only as a result of this was the location order issued so that it was possible to identify the sectors from which the conversation was made.