
Charges dropped because federal servers can't store 2 Terabytes of evidence - MarlonPro
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/federal-charges-dropped-against-fugitive-doctor-because-too-184830159.html
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csense
A 2TB hard drive costs $200 [1]. Why can't they just buy one and plug it in
somewhere? This is a federal agency, not a small town's local PD.

There should be an investigation into why they can't afford it, because their
purchasing processes are either corrupt or utterly incompetent if they're
spending budget-breaking amounts for 2TB. Or the lack of space could be a
justification, while there were other, real reasons that the case was dropped,
maybe political, maybe national security, maybe because the fugitive's friends
bribed somebody. In any case, it sounds like there's dirty laundry to be
aired.

[1]
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236187)

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pavel_lishin
There's probably a whole process for purchasing anything of the sort. First,
it has to go through IT, who then has to justify it to their manager, etc.,
etc. Buying a drive could take months.

And I would imagine that if you're a sysadmin at the DEA, buying a hard drive
with your own money from Best Buy and hooking it into their storage system is
probably extremely frowned upon.

Furthermore, they may just have decided that it's not worth pursuing. He's not
in the country, so chasing him down is difficult and expensive. The manpower
could be used on other things. And he is wanted on other charges, too, so it's
not like he can just stroll back into the U.S. and drop in for a friendly chat
with his local DEA office.

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jeffool
This is just silly. Can you imagine them saying they couldn't prosecute a
cocaine kingpin because the evidence took up too much room in storage? "We
couldn't prosecute them. Their lab was too big. They were too successful."

This has to either be an excuse for an otherwise weak case, or a severe
misunderstanding how rampant prescription drug abuse is.

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pavel_lishin
If the cocaine kingpin was out of the country, anyway, and the case had been
ongoing for over five years, and you could prosecute him based on other
crimes... maybe.

I mean, if your evidence storage room is literally so full that you cannot
store any other evidence, do you stubbornly go after the one guy who you're
not likely to even bring to a trial, or do you give up and go for the easier
target?

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jeffool
Fair enough, but in this case, storage is very cheap.

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pavel_lishin
I imagine there's a process in place that makes it expensive and difficult. I
would imagine that you can't just buy a random hard drive and plug it into the
DEA network.

