Pioneers of the civil rights lunch counter sit-in’s in South Carolina, known as the Friendship Nine, have had their convictions vacated and their names cleared.
See the CNN story here.
Exonerations of U.S. criminals hit record in 2014: study
(Reuters) – The number of U.S. criminals exonerated in 2014 climbed to a record high of 125, in part because of efforts by prosecutors willing to admit their offices made mistakes, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The states with the most exonerations last year were Texas, New York and Illinois, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School.
Full report from the National Registry of Exonerations.
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations_in_2014_report.pdf
Article from Reuters News service.
More from US News on this topic.
Judge blasts crime lab, postpones ‘cold case’ homicide trial
comment: Here is a DA going to a murder trial without completing evidence analysis and discovery. The judge puts on the brakes as a result. There must be some story behind the DA’s hurry-up and ignore the rules strategy. Probably maneuvering for a plea.
PORTAGE, WI — With stern words about the practices of the Wisconsin Crime Lab, Columbia County Circuit Court Judge Alan White on Monday delayed the trial of a 39-year-old Beaver Dam woman accused of killing her boyfriend nearly 14 years ago.
For example, fingerprint evidence in several cases, including the Waldhart case, had been held for review by the crime lab to assess the performance of a particular investigator, she said.
Also, Kohlwey said, the crime lab has not completed analysis of some DNA evidence related to the case.
[Judge] ……said he had read several recent national news stories about convicted defendants — some of whom had served decades in prison — who were exonerated based on evidence such as DNA that had turned up years after the trial.
“We can’t proceed in cases if we don’t have all the evidence,” he said.
Fears for forensic quality in England and Wales
The article at the end quotes the defense attorney saying “the criminal justice system works.” Thats one side of the coin, and it may be a bit of a stretch, but is not the entire story. It has taken forensic science decades (on a State-by State basis in their courts) to revamp its research and courtroom testimony to debunk entrenched resistance to modernizing into fire science-based methods. This has largely been accomplished by one man, John Lentini. His colleagues have given him considerable support.
Juxtapose this with the American Academy of Sciences long acceptance of bitemark pattern identification as a science with all the trappings of DNA. This prosyletizing will continue to appear at next month’s AAFS meeting in Orlando Florida. AAFS members will still run their “Bitemark Workshop” at the end of this annual meeting.
I caution any new people attending the AAFS bitemark activities (aka “odontology”) to listen to the “ipse dixit” approach in use by the bitemark adherents.
This bodes ill for those of us who argue in criminal courts and at meetings in support of the NAS 2009 report on bitemark evidence stating bitemarks by themselves (i.e. in no DNA collection cases) is prejudicial to a fair trial. The NAS expected empirical research to be done by this small group of dentist experts. So far they only have come up with “The Tree.”
If I may, I’d like to compare myself and much-valued colleagues in forensic reform to Mr. Lentini in one respect, We have gotten nothing but appalling flak rhttp://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723
from the bitemark believers and their AAFS supporters.
This case is reminiscent of first use of DNA profiling tech by Sir Alec Jeffreys in the mid 1980s. Via Nora Rudin.
The Ninth Circuit’s recent affirmation of punishment for prosecutorial perjury may have a chilling effect on DAs who use lies and lying witnesses to support their prosecutions. Ths is not limited to lawyers. Forensic science has its own history of liars and cheats. Some come with long pedigrees. Others just hide in plain sight. The criminal justice system pays dearly in the end with delayed scientific progress, damaged public safety and conviction of the innocent.
The attributes of a good liar (pdf).
Previous CSIDDS posts on prosecution misconduct. Here, here, and here.
Nothing is ever over in exoneration litigation, be it from exonerees’ difficulties in re-entering society, or when some DAs and police, with help from their lawyers, continue to chase after the men and women who have wrongfully endured imprisonment from acts of public officials.
This flies sideways to overoptimistic opinions that DAs are have a true bead on conviction integrity investigations and “more accepting” of exonerations these days.
There is a really odd tactic rising in recent headlines giving us examples of “innocence nullification” being posed in two separate venues of Justice in the state of Illinois.
One is in civil court.
The other is in criminal court.
One is in Lake County and the other in Cook County. (just a few miles apart).
Avoidance of the costs for wrongful convictions and loss of status certainly may be involved in both cases.
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The first is under civil litigation in federal court against…
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This ex crime lab “scientist” took a very strange road much to the detriment of defendants’ rights of fairness and due process in court.
Well written exposes about the human experiences within succesful exoneration litigation. Anger, joy, and racial divides with a tinge of prosecutorial misconduct.
Interview with Joseph Sledge after his release.
We’ve been following the Debra Milke case on this blog. See here, here, andhere.
Here is a recent update from TV5 KPHO in Phoenix, AZ.
This story is about how overly aggressive conclusions of guilt (the province of the jury) in forensic science presentations in criminal can make one look like a biased “forensic expert.”
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/23/powerpoint-justice
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