"I guess, in a perfect world, they would not have had to arrest him right away... They could have checked the evidence and everything."

"But I guess they figured they had to get him off the plane. It changed the circumstances quite a bit."

They could have checked the evidence and everything. So says "a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn."

The case exposes the “punish first, figure out what happened later” state of American justice that is usually visited upon “ordinary schnooks,” said Eugene J. O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan....

“I think that any high-profile case exposes routine police work, and when you get into the guts of routine police work it is often not a pretty picture,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “Not all the ends tie up neatly, and when you are racing that clock, that is even more possible.”

Also in the linked article: the report that the hotel housekeeper, telling her "life story" caused "senior people... in each of the agencies" to cry. I'd like to know a lot more about why those "senior people" were so vulnerable to what was, apparently, a phony story. What was it about this particular woman that lowered their usual defenses? Why was it possible to play them?