Karr to stand trial

A Sonoma County judge rejected a defense request to dismiss the child pornography charges against John Mark Karr, setting the stage for a trial to begin Monday.

The decision came hours after Sonoma County sheriff’s detectives testified that they had recovered a hard drive containing copies of images believed to have been on a computer seized five years ago from John Mark Karr.

Detectives said the hard drive, a memory storage device, is a copy made by investigators from a computer seized from Karr in 2001.

The discovery was the latest strange twist for Karr, who was missing for five years before his arrest last month in Thailand in connection with the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

“We’re pleased with the judge’s ruling,” District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua said Friday.

The original hard drive is believed to have been lost — perhaps when the Sheriff’s Department moved buildings in 2002 — and the copy, called a mirror image, also went missing until Thursday, detectives testified Friday.

Prosecutor Joan Risse handed a copy of the mirror-image hard drive to Karr’s attorneys in court Friday morning.

Detective Wade Eubanks and Lt. Rob Giordano testified that computer data from at least two other cases had been rewritten onto the same hard drive and it had reformatted at least once before detectives discovered the alleged Karr images this week.

It was the Sheriff's Department policy in 2001 to copy a defendant’s hard drive onto another drive, from which they examined potential evidence.

Because of the expense of hard drives at the time, the department then reformatted and reused the mirror-image hard drives for other cases.

Karr, briefly a substitute teacher in Petaluma and Napa, was arrested in 2001 after detectives said they found five images of children in sexual situations on one of his computers.

After serving nearly six months in jail, he was released without bail but failed to show up for a hearing and an arrest warrant was issued.

He was arrested in Thailand at the request of Colorado authorities investigating the 1996 slaying of JonBenet Ramsey. After those charges were dropped, Karr was extradited to Sonoma County to face the 2001 case.