Karr Stands By Not-Guilty Pleas in Child Porn Case
SANTA ROSA — The man who confessed to murdering JonBenet Ramsey only to be exonerated plans to fight the 5-year-old misdemeanor child pornography charges he faces in California, his defense lawyer said today.
Appearing in a Sonoma County courtroom for the first time since he fled the state in 2001 and then resurfaced as a suspect in the unsolved Ramsey slaying, John Mark Karr, 41, did not enter a new plea in the outstanding child porn case during his scheduled arraignment.
His lawyer, Robert Amparan, said Karr stood by the not guilty pleas he entered when he was arrested in April 2001 after police found images of children on his computer. Judge Cerena Wong set a trial date of Oct. 2.
A clean-shaven and unshackled Karr sat in court wearing a blue jail jumpsuit and seemed to follow the proceedings attentively, exchanging written notes and whispering with his team of three lawyers. He did not speak directly to the judge.
Since he was returned to California from Colorado on Monday, Karr has been held without bail at the Sonoma County jail. Amparan said he would seek to have bail set and argue for Karr’s release during a hearing scheduled for Tuesday.
Amparan said the circumstances of Karr’s life now are different from when he fled Sonoma County while awaiting trial on the child porn charges after serving six months in jail. His wife filed for divorce after his arrest and obtained a restraining order preventing him from contacting her or their three sons.
"He was probably in a very depressed state where he thought nothing was going to go right," Amparan said.
Karr, a former schoolteacher, was arrested in Thailand on Aug. 16 after he made phone calls and wrote e-mails in which he claimed to have killed 6-year-old child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in her Boulder, Colo. home in December 1996.
But DNA tests failed to connect Karr to the Ramsey case, and investigators had no evidence he was even in Boulder at the time of the slaying.
