So you made a mistake, now what?

Here we are wrapping up another week in our story, so in light of the fact that its Friday, let's keep it short.  We all make mistakes now and again, don't we?

Imagine for a moment that you're busy writing about whatever and you make a mistake, whether you've misinterpreted something, was told something that wasn't true or you just simply made a mistake while you were writing whatever you were writing.  What are you to do?  If you're writing by hand using a pencil, you go ahead and use one of these...

Simply apply the eraser to whatever you wrote, move it back and forth over whatever you're trying to erase and start over again.  Simple isn't it?  Now what if you've used a pen?  Perhaps if you're lucky you've used an erasable pen...

Nifty huh?  The permanence of a pen with the erasablity of a pencil!  Fantastic!  Moving on, say you're above actually handwriting what ever it is that you have to write and instead you're using a computer, what do you do now if you've made a mistake?  Take a look at the upper right hand side of your keyboard and you'll find one of these...

Simply depress the "back space" key and whatever you wrote in error will disappear!  I think you get the idea, worst case scenario you can just throw whatever you had written incorrectly in the trash and start from scratch, so simple it's not even worth mentioning right?  Perhaps this concept of correcting a mistake in something you've written is so simple that some may say it's "common sense"?  So where are we going with this?

I think by know anyone whose read at least a couple of pages of our blog is well aware that "common sense" isn't one of Detective Baluja's strong suits.  Consider for a moment that Detective Baluja was the lead detective in the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud investigation, not only is the ability to correct a mistake made in a written statement of the utmost importance but 100% accuracy in his investigation is ESSENTIAL!  Imagine if the good detective were to make a mistake in one of his written statements and present something to the prosecutor that wasn't accurate, god only knows what kind of trouble that could create for everyone involved.  Now that we've established how important it is for the detective to produce accurate written statements in his investigation, what if he didn't know how to correct a mistake that was made in the writing of a statement?  Surely the police department took such a possibility into consideration, perhaps there was some part of the detectives training in the police academy that dealt with such situations?  Well, wonder no longer, let's ask the Detective himself!  From his second deposition...

WOW!  WTF?!  Surely there was some part of the detectives training in the police academy that dealt with written statements, yet they didn't cover fixing inaccurate written statements?!  Oh boy.  Did anyone expect any different from our favorite detective?

Have a great weekend!