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.
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).
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:
2014 article interviewing Dr. Webb about Forensics method validated for sexual assualt cases.
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.”
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.”
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.
Thanks to New York Legal Aid Society @LegalAidNYC
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
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.
The Texas hypnotist Texas Ranger and the bitemarker.
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
Familial testing means that, depending on what the police decide on the necessary number of alleles that “match,” law enforcement will look into cousins, siblings, parents and unknown relatives who are in databases that are largely unregulated.
Law Prof Erin Murphy and others spoke their concerns yesterday in Albany NY.
Among other things, she said:
The law professor went on to say, “I can only hope that the members of the Committee have all volunteered their own DNA to law enforcement databases, given that they seem so convinced that crime solving should outweigh the genetic privacy of innocent people.”
Here is concise article giving a more in-depth look at familial DNA concerns. #1 fact: It only works for men. #2 Look at the databases.
