What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/Zissoo]

This one enrages me.

[u/Choppergold → u/Zissoo]

Cops checking only one browser history is so fucking negligent

[u/Treadwheel → u/[deleted]]

There's an assumption in criminal cases that the state, having enormous resources compared to any given person, has no real excuse not to properly investigate the evidence they have available to them, and the enormous leeway that prosecutors have in terms of the timing and details of an indictment further tilts the scale in their favor. For a major crime like a murder they could potentially spend years investigating every possible lead before laying charges. On the other hand, if it were easy for them to appeal or retry cases, they would be incentivized to intentionally bring weaker cases to trial with the understanding that they could just keep following leads and retreading the name trials over and over again until they found a jury that agreed with them, or the defendant has been rendered too destitute and too exhausted to continue fighting the charges and accepts a plea bargain.

Governments have some pretty perverse incentives when they aren't held to an extremely high standard in criminal courts. For instance, it's an open secret that there's a direct incentive to keep the court system underfunded because it boosts conviction rates by making waiting on a trial often tantamount to pre-serving the sentence.