Once convicted, the state of Nevada tries to ignore or deny evidence and even the inmate from public scrutiny.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/12/murderinvegas/
Nothing speaks louder than the blind eye of politicians who care little to nothing about men and woman needing financial assistance after being exonerated after years of incarcerated.
NC Governor McCrory takes all the credit for using his pardon powers yet ignores two mens’ need for pardoning before they can receive compensation. They have been waiting for 6 years.
[Excerpt]
McCollum and Brown, you’ll recall, are the half brothers who were found innocent last year of crimes for which they were imprisoned for more than 30 years. In other words, they didn’t commit a terrible crime and then later get their lives together; they were wrongfully and horrifically railroaded into prison and served decades for crimes they didn’t commit. McCollum was sentenced to death!
Meanwhile, tomorrow marks the six-month anniversary of the pardon requests the men submitted — a period during which the men have received no compensation for the terrible injustice inflicted upon them by the state of North Carolina. As Raleigh’s News & Observer reported last month:
“The men, who are half-brothers and who are intellectually disabled, were each given $45 in cash when they left prison in September – the sum total of help they have received from the state. They live in Fayetteville with their sister, who struggles to pay the rent and keep the light and water bills paid. They have depended on the kindness of supporters for all their money.
A Superior Court judge declared them innocent in September. North Carolina law authorizes payment of $50,000 a year, up to a maximum of $750,000, to incarcerated individuals later proven innocent. But the brothers first need to obtain a pardon of innocence from the governor.”
Update on DC Crime Lab. Now there are 3 separate panels reviewing DNA statistics. The DA, the DC government, and the lab itself. Max Houck, the lab director, reemphasizes the amount of stat disagreement amongst equally qualified experts. Im sure this scenario is not an isolated event.
DNA mixtures (multiple person DNA blood samples) interpretation disagreement raises DC prosecutors to backlash against respected DC crime lab director Max Houck and his $200 million facility. He says different statistical methods produces varying opinions and he has setup a 4 member review panel. “Nothing is broken” he says in response. These agendized prosecutors want to make a big deal about this mixture issue but blithely ignore the fact it is well known within the appropriate scientific community and already is under extensive scrutiny and ongoing adjustment. They would rather make the entire lab suspect. Obviously, there are backroom politics in play. Somebody in the media should dig into this one.
Lets include the forensic experts who should also tell the WHOLE truth. Not just the lawyers. Altho we all get sworn in before testifying, I would suggest this needs serious emphasis in the laissez-faire world of expert “free speech’ tailored to support just one side.
The genesis of this post was the recent action by the US 9th Circuit in California, in which the court recommended perjury charges against a prosecutor who had lied to the court. Please see our previous post on this case here.
When I first saw this, my initial reaction was “holy smoke!” This is precedent shattering. But when you read the details, the potential perjury charges were recommended because the prosecutor in question had lied while testifying. This situation does not cover a prosecutor’s lying in court when not officially sworn in and under oath.
That’s when I had the epiphany. Here’s my idea. Let’s have all trial counsel, prosecutors and defense attorneys, sworn in at the beginning of each trial. It’s so SIMPLE, and would COST NOTHING. At most, this would take 60 seconds of the bailiff’s time at the beginning of a trial, and then it’s…
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Todd Willingham in 2004
“I lied on the man (Willingham) because I was being forced by John Jackson to do so,” Webb said, according to the Marshall Project. “I succumbed to pressure when I shouldn’t have. In the end, I was told, ‘You’re either going to get a life sentence or you’re going to testify.’ He coerced me to do it,” Webb said in the interview.
Read the full Washington Post article by @MauricePossley.
Then, of course, the ex-prosecutor John H. Jackson makes a headline saying everything he did was proper. Side-stepping the debunked fire non-science used against Willingham, Jackson takes the high prosecutor’s road saying that it had no affect on the trial’s outcome. “His guilt was overwhelming.” He also has a few things to say about the jail house snitch he used.
The writer calls Willingham, a “pawn” of those investigating wrongful convictions and executions versus contra prosecutorial objections. As if we haven’t heard that one before. The Registry of Exonerations registers over 1500 such “pawns.”.
All contribs by bad forensic science are “fictional,” according to naysayers. Maybe these examples of injustice are just collateral damage to otherwise splendid science and jurisprudence?
Following with my previous blog’s theme of prosecutorial misconduct, here is a recent standout in the NYC courts’ process of determining science-affirmed expert testimony versus ‘forensic’ claptrap of a baser kind. This story exposes how lawyers bend facts to suit their own purposes.
No doubt any court within this jurisdiction could call the following ‘legal advocacy’ on the part of a DA doing her job. I call it reverse logic bias (eg. predispositional bias) which starts with a conclusion, then works back through evidence and opposition concepts to ‘reconstruct the truth’ as a means of prosecutorial attack.
The scenario of this battle involves US courts continuing to accept bitemark probabilities as relevant and reliable evidence. One court in Texas opined that it is “soft science’ subject to acceptance via its believers believing in it. Much like phrenologists (those who profiled criminals from bumps on their skulls) and so on.
This is an excerpt from the fourth article on forensic misconduct and errors published three weeks ago in the Washington Posts’s The Watch. Journalist Radley Balko is talking about portions of DA Mourges’ brief before Judge Wiley. She is pleading for the admissibility of bitemark evidence in the DEAN case.
Mourges’ opposition was composed of research based experts in odontology and statistics. If you read the full 4th article, Mourges is in favor of the phrenologists dentists extolling their own virtues of science as “working men and women,” (??)
“In another portion of the brief, Mourges selectively quotes part of the report, cutting out some critical language. She writes:
When Dr. Kafadar and her NAS committee created the NAS report, they wrote a summary assessment of forensic odontology. In it they said that “the majority of forensic odontologists are satisfied that bite marks can demonstrate sufficient detail or positive identification …
That ellipsis is important, as is the word that comes before the quote. Here’s the passage quoted in full:
Although the majority of forensic odontologists are satisfied that bite marks can demonstrate sufficient detail for positive identification, no scientific studies support this assessment, and no large population studies have been conducted. In numerous instances, experts diverge widely in their evaluations of the same bite mark evidence, which has led to questioning of the value and scientific objectivity of such evidence.
Bite mark testimony has been criticized basically on the same grounds as testimony by questioned document examiners and microscopic hair examiners. The committee received no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.
The report only acknowledges the near consensus within the community of bite mark analysts for the purpose of criticizing them. Mourges’s selective quotation implies that the report says the relevant scientific community accepts bite mark matching. The full passage reveals that the report is essentially pointing out just the opposite: The insular community of bite mark analysts may believe in what they do, but the larger scientific community is far more skeptical.”
Maybe a 5th article is in order about some recent research that throws these “working men and women” further into the dustbin regarding reliability.
It never fails, that when prosecutors get into trouble they get promoted and make more money. A safety net surely does exist in California for some lawyers. This seems to come from the top of the food chain, as the state’s Attorney General Kamala Harris generally takes the side of prosecutors when a trial court judge tries to knock heads with a wandering prosecutor. Read this latest on Kamala’s considering a prosecutor’s cooking the books, transcripts and testimony in a specific case as a mere infraction rather than compelling misconduct.
Someone in the healthcare business would have been investigated from top to bottom for such alleged conduct (three times ) according to the article on an ex-prosecutor’s new job (linked below). Many if not all pros misconduct findings or assertions never leave the courtroom let alone ever lead to any sanctions. Read about this ‘trainer’ for the Bar.
An excerpt:
“It’s a bizarre choice. He’s like the poster boy of misconduct,” said Kathleen M. Ridolfi, the [NorCal Innocence] project’s former director, who teaches at Santa Clara University’s law school. “It’s a very sad statement about the Bar in California.”
But Giannini vigorously defended his record in an interview with this newspaper, offering detailed explanations for each problematic case and criticizing the Innocence Project’s research in annual reports about prosecutorial misconduct as incomplete. The reports, which cover a period from 2009 through 2011, document the failure of the justice system, including judges and the State Bar itself, to hold prosecutors accountable for putting innocent people in prison.”
Plus more from the Wrongfulconviction blog‘s Quick Clicks.
Strange but true: When non science forensics nonsense shows up in the media.
Use this as a counter-point to the recent Associated Press investigation on the failure of bite mark comparisons as a reliable forensic science. Over at the Bite Marks Evidence blog, David Averill posts this incredible video used in a 2011 CNN report and commented by Radley Balko at the Agitator in which bite mark specialist Lowell Levine defends bite mark testimony as “important and viable.” But when asked if there’s a way it can be validated with the scientific method, he responds, “I sure can’t think of it.” .
More recent comments from the small cadre of “elite” bite mark experts of the American Board of Forensic Odontology will be the focus of future articles here at CSIDDS.com
Radley writes:
It’s telling that Levine would be considered one of the country’s most respected bite mark witnesses. He too nearly helped convict an innocent man. From a 2004 article on…
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DNA mixtures (multiple person DNA blood samples) interpretation disagreement raises DC prosecutors to backlash against respected DC crime lab director Max Houck and his $200 million facility. He says different statistical methods produces varying opinions and he has setup a 4 member review panel. “Nothing is broken” he says in response. These agendized prosecutors want to make a big deal about this mixture issue but blithely ignore the fact it is well known within the appropriate scientific community and already is under extensive scrutiny and ongoing adjustment. They would rather make the entire lab suspect. Obviously, there are backroom politics in play. Somebody in the media should dig into this one.
The original source of this NIST information is here.
Other than originally mis-spelling ODONTOLOGY, this NIST subcommittee (OSAC) on Forensic Dentistry should do well dealing with dental identification of unknown human remains, but in the bitemark arena, everyone should realize the bitemark identification group and certain of its allies compose the 63% of this panel. You can clearly exclude MARY BUSH from Buffalo as she has debunked the ABFO “bitemark science” in her ground-breaking research (partially funded by a forensic dental grant) since 2007. She has also been publicly harassed by a bunch of the same ABFO members who are on this panel. The ABFOers will likely use their recently developed flow chart to assure their scientific certainties for bitemark IDs continue in US courts.
Politics is an amazing thing. I will highlight the panel members affiliated with the bitemark believers in the following list. A smattering of them have been involved/or associated as prosecution experts in cases where defendants have been exonerated despite bitemark opinions supporting conviction. A larger subgroup has criticized the National Academy of Sciences report on bitemarks as being irrelevant for their particular area of expertise.
The NIST/OSAC/Odontology preamble about their task at hand says:
“The Subcommittee on Ondontology (sic) will focus on standards and guidelines related to application of dental science to the identification of unknown human remains and bite marks, using both physical and biological dental evidence. Initial members, appointed in October 2014, are:
Robert Barsley, D.D.S., Subcommittee Chair, Louisiana State University Health Science Center
Mary Bush, D.D.S., State University of New York at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine
Mary Cimrmancic, D.D.S., Marquette University
Lawrence Dobrin, D.D.S., Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York City
Carla Evans, D.D.S/Ph.D./D.M.Sc., University of Illinois at Chicago
Adam Freeman, D.D.S., Self Employed
James Lewis, D.M.D., Self Employed
Peter Loomis, D.D.S., New Mexico Office of the Medical Examiner
James McGivney, D.M.D., Self Employed
Roger Metcalf, D.D.S., Tarrant County (Texas) Medical Examiner’s District
Haskell Pitluck, retired circuit court judge, State of Illinois
David Senn, D.D.S., University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Bexar County (Texas) Medical Examiner’s Office
Calvin Shirona, D.M.D., U.S. Department of Defense Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command
Sharon Stanford, American Dental Association
Brad Wing, U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology
Franklin Wright, D.M.D., Self Employed
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