Richard Allen: Why the State Keeps Calling Everything Harmless Error

The Indiana Attorney General's response to Richard Allen's appeal uses harmless error the way a contractor uses spackle — applied to every crack in the wall and meant to convince you the structure is sound. Defense attorney Bob Motta reads the ninety-four-page brief as a document designed not to defend the evidence, but to prevent the appeals court from ever reaching it.

The procedural strategy is waiver — arguing that the defense failed to properly preserve its objections at trial, which would shut down most of the appeal before substance is addressed. Where the AG does engage on substance, the framework is consistent: even if the trial court was wrong, it did not matter. The eyewitness sketch excluded from the jury — harmless. The firearms expert who would have challenged whether a bullet could be linked to Allen's weapon — harmless. The phone calls where Allen questioned his own sanity minutes before and after confessing — harmless. The confessions themselves — in which Allen told his prison psychiatrist he shot the girls, when they were killed with a blade — apparently reliable enough to sustain a 130-year sentence.

Motta examines what the AG does not address. The van timeline — surveillance footage and FBI cell phone data obtained by the defense suggesting the van arrived after Libby German's phone stopped moving. The State's response is not that the data is inaccurate. It is that the paperwork was not filed correctly. Motta explains what that distinction means for the appeals court and why a procedural dodge on a factual question is itself a signal.

There is no DNA linking Allen to the crime scene. No murder weapon was recovered. No direct eyewitness identification placed him with the victims. The confessions were the case. And the confessions contain a cause of death that did not happen.

Motta walks through what comes next — the defense reply brief, the motion for oral arguments, what a partial reversal would mean, and what this process means for the families of Abby Williams and Libby German who were told a verdict meant resolution. He gives an honest answer about the reversal rate and what it actually measures — because the families watching this deserve honesty, not false reassurance in either direction.

Allen is serving 130 years. Three judges will decide what happens next.

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