According to new court papers released on Friday, a 1999 Colorado grand jury decided to indict John and Patricia Ramsey, the parents of murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. A district attorney overruled the grand jury and decided not to file charges. The grand jury found that the parents “did … render assistance to a person, with intent to hinder, delay and prevent the discovery, detention, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime, knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death.”
The court papers did not spell out whom the parents supposedly helped. JonBenet Ramsey was murdered the day after Christmas 1996, in the basement of her family. The Boulder police department maintains that the case is considered cold. A 2008 analysis of DNA in the case showed that DNA on her body was not that of her parents.
Judge J. Robert Lowenbach, who released the documents, wrote, “It appears that the district attorney, presumably acting at the direction of the grand jury, prepared a series of possible charges regarding John Ramsey and Patricia Ramsey based on the fact that the child had died and that there was evidence that a sexual assault of the child occurred.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). Follow Ben on Twitter @benshapiro.