Overreaching judge bans autopsy report on subject of police restraint Cause of Death

Posted on April 1, 2017 by csidds

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Here’s a rather strange ruling that short-stops criminal investigators looking into the manner (homicide, accidental or natural?) of an adult females’s death while in police custody. I’m assuming the legal theory on excluding a medical examiner’s report is that it is a form of ‘self-incriminating’ evidence as it includes statements from first responders to the death scene. One wonders how coroners and ME’s are supposed to perform their duties towards a decedent’s family if these documents are now considered inadmissible? The judge in this case tilted his ruling in favor of other parties. On the other end of the spectrum, police statements about crime scenes and suspect behaviors are consistently allowed into evidence as a form of reliable testimony. Apparently the Fifth Amendment can be invoked when they talk about each others actions.

https://durangoherald.com/articles/147489

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These 8 serial executions in Arkansas are sickening.

Posted on March 31, 2017 by csidds

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The death penalty is broken, but that isn’t stopping Arkansas. The state plans to execute 8 people in 10 days so it can use up nearly-expired – and dangerous – execution drugs.

Arkansas’s planned assembly line of executions is irresponsible, risky, and out of step, at a time when most states are turning away from the death penalty. Take action to stop the Governor’s reckless execution plan.

Sign the Petition

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Progressive DAs get backlash from their “lock-em-up” peers like Michael Ramos

Posted on March 31, 2017 by csidds

District Attorney Aramis D. Ayala of Orlando, FL is getting targeted for realizing that the death penalty is only in play in 0.01% of her criminal cases and is much too expensive to pursue.

Elected Senior Prosecutors and police chiefs are harping on their younger colleagues who want some change to occur in the US Criminal Justice machinery. Changes as in reduction of charges in some non violent acts ( as in shoplifting not being a felony), not charging minors as adults, and eliminating the grossly over arching discriminatory use of the death penalty. Read this article about rumblings and threats within the US political criminal justice system are rising up when the idea of ‘reform’ goes into effect somewhere in their criminal eco-system. All claim various forms of societal “Armageddon” to be imminent. It really means a reduction in their pocket-books for them and their government and privatized prison corps lobbyists.

Meet one of the worst resisters to clear thinking on various aspects of forensics and criminal justice progress.

This smiling and happy DA in California is Michael Ramos. In his run for CA Attorney General in 2018, Ramos is doubling-down on the death penalty ( after 52% voted for it in CA; 48% against; sound familiar?) and repetitively champions crime victims and families ‘rights’ as if they all demand executions, the DP is a crime deterrent, crime labs are sacrosanct from scientific advances and crime is rising at epidemic levels. All which are expressly not true. Maybe he should move to Arkansas, where that state wants to execute 8 inmates  over a short period in 9 days. Studies of these 8 indicate that their cases are riddled with bad lawyering, racial inequities, mental health disablement and poverty.

He is the President of the National DA Association and from that perch has uttered an imbecilic proclamation that bitemarks are a key part fighting for his ‘tough on crime anthems. Read this if you dare: (Don’t worry it is not very long and not very scientific).

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Leading Australian state DNA analyst seems to be in a bit of a pickle

Posted on March 31, 2017 by csidds

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This one article ( from a large collection) about a very senior Western Australia DNA prosecutorial lab DNA scientist raises a bunch of questions on his decades long case work. Here are some key comments:

  • State’s leading DNA expert sacked.
  • Some of the state’s highest profile murder cases and others based heavily on DNA evidence have been thrown into doubt
  • was sacked for “cutting corners” during testing.
  • senior DNA analyst Laurance Webb was “the man” at state-run pathology centre
  • the sacking and breaches against Mr Webb were “unprecedented in Western Australia’s criminal justice history”
  • State Department of Public Prosecution informed all prisoners and attorneys about Webb being guilty of “four serious charges.”

WAToday

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-31/sacking-of-was-leading-dna-scientist-27-criminal-cases-in-doubt/8403618

2014 article interviewing Dr. Webb about Forensics method validated for sexual assualt cases. 

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Forensics: Archaic and scientifically bogus TX mental disability statute ruled unconstitutional

Posted on March 30, 2017 by csidds

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SCOTUS Rejects Texas’s Death Penalty Standards for Disabled Inmates –

This could be huge for other states to follow suit regarding mental competence and the death penalty.

Texas’s standards for evaluating mentally disabled death row inmates are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

Until Tuesday, when asked to determine if an inmate was too mentally disabled to execute, Texas relied on a medical definition from 1992, since superseded, and a set of nonclinical factors known as the “Lennie standard.” That’s Lennie as in Lennie Small, the sweet-natured but simple-minded character from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

– See more at: http://blogs.findlaw.com/supreme_court/2017/03/scotus-rejects-texass-death-penalty-standards-for-disabled-inmates.html?DCMP=NWL-pro_scotus#sthash.yZFpcYkU.dpuf

 

 

 

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Proactive DA takes on issue of 600 cases involving chemist with drug addiction

Posted on March 30, 2017 by csidds

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This DA doing the right thing quickly.

“From various parts of the country over the years have come stories about prosecutors and courts reluctant to overturn convictions even when defendants’ rights have been violated or when key evidence subsequently proved to be tainted. When the justice system becomes overly invested in itself, an individual’s rights can fall by the wayside. Poor, minority and unsophisticated defendants are particularly vulnerable.”

Pittsburgh 

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Genetic ‘Stop and Frisk’ not such of a magic bullet after all – Familial DNA issues

Posted on March 30, 2017 by csidds

 

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It seems that most police sciences get validated (at least some do) AFTER the cops start using it. While DNA profiling is considered the ‘gold standard’ for identification (not DNA mixtures, however),  this run-up to its use as a screening tool for suspects or ‘POI’ (persons of interest) has got some strong similarities with the FBI’s hair microscopy, bitemark comparisons without DNA, bullet lead matching and misleading police interrogation protocols. All of these got into swing by means of  the police practitioners themselves going into courts throughout the land. Here is Erin Murphy’s comments to the NY Forensic Science Commission.

Following is a March 23, 2009 newspaper piece getting out more details on how NY legislators are swallowing this familial DNA thing all at once. But, after all, they are mostly lawyers, right?

SideBar: Remember, asset forfeiture (works without a conviction) got the DEA almost $3 billion since 2007. Merely on  ‘suspicion’ of being a criminal.  To finish these analogies, here’s a link to ‘stop and frisk’ problems from New York.

Excerpt

If you think the government wouldn’t target you as a suspect because of who is in your family, you might soon be proven wrong. A New York forensic oversight agency wants to unilaterally expand the use of the offender DNA database to convert relatives of those on file into default suspects.

This is familial searching, and the state Commission on Forensic Science wants to allow its use — though it is not clear it has the legal authority. Some states have outlawed it, some use it without legislative authority, and more have taken no action.

Full article

Thanks to New York Legal Aid Society @LegalAidNYC

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Bitemark pattern used to overturn case against New Orleans defendant

Posted on March 29, 2017 by csidds

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Once again, an ABFO dentist uses bitemark patterns to persuade a judge that there is  ‘science’ behind skin injuries and tooth comparisons. This time is to say the defendant’s teeth “didn’t match.” A new trial was ordered.

http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/courts/article_49cb7944-13fe-11e7-8dc6-9fe2d1aa4f30.html

 

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Florida ‘dog sniffing’ police ‘science’ cases ignored by DAs and CJ system

Posted on March 29, 2017 by csidds

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Nothing seems more outlandish than dogs being use to track down criminals and being used as eye witnesses to a defendant’s guilt. Read this story about multiple cases of conviction added by another police ‘science.’

I would add another example in Texas, where a hypnotist brought forth ‘new evidence’ from two witnesses in the vicinity of a murder. That defendant is now scheduled for execution later this year. The case also has a bitemarker taking his  ‘junk’ identification to a ‘certainty beyond a doubt’ after looking at the defendant’s (any only the defendant’s) lower front teeth.

Florida article 

The Texas hypnotist Texas Ranger and the bitemarker.

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Netherlands custody death brings out the ‘perfect’ expert for the cops defence

Posted on March 29, 2017 by csidds

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This is what courts commonly see when expert wits are qualified as keepers of specialized knowledge regarding in-custody deaths. He is a government employee in Amsterdam.

http://nltimes.nl/2017/03/29/expert-forensics-witness-history-backing-cops-violence-cases-report

Here is a journal article with this same expert, Kees Das, showing up as third author. The study talks about ’cause of death’ un-reliability in forensic medicine.

http://www.jflmjournal.org/article/S1752-928X(16)30073-7/abstract

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