wrongful convictions
Witnessing bullshit
Nov 22nd
That eyewitness identification is a troublesome area of the criminal justice system is well known to regular readers of this blog. That the movement toward long overdue reform is lethargic and a source of much consternation to me is well known to the readers of this blog. So, it presented a bittersweet moment when I learned that the Connecticut-centric NPR show “Where We Live” was going to do an episode on the problems of eyewitness identification and the enacted legislative reforms. That the complexities of this issue cannot be given – heh – justice in a one hour time slot goes without saying, but there is something to be said about this seeping into the collective general consciousness. So, all for the better, I suppose.
Until a caller called in with a comment toward the end of the show (which you can listen to in its entirety here). The caller “Wayne” offered a personal anecdote, which I paraphrase below:
I’m a cab driver in New Haven and back in 1979, I had transported an individual, who it turned out had just committed a murder. So, as a witness, I was called to testify at the trial and identify him. Now, when I had transported him, he was a thin fellow, riddled with a drug addiction, unkempt, mousy and had that lean and hungry look. After getting 3 squares a day, regular sleep and no sunlight for a year at the taxpayer’s expense, he looked like a different man. He’d put on weight, had grown hair and was looking well-fed. I couldn’t recognize him at all. I couldn’t see the person I had transported a year earlier, so when asked to identify the passenger, I figured, heck, it has to be that guy sitting next to the defense attorney, looking quite out of place in a suit. So I pointed in that direction. Luckily, there was other evidence and he was convicted.
Read it again if you’re sitting here thinking “well, what’s the problem?”. The problem is that this witness admitted that he had no idea whether the defendant was indeed the same person who he had transported a year ago, but pointed at the guy sitting in the courtroom anyway, thereby making an in-court identification that jurors could – and would – rely upon to convict him.
Putting aside the desire that witnesses be honest and forthcoming about their inability to recall the defendant as the perpetrator – they rarely are – this highlights a recurring problem for which there may be no solution. In most criminal trials, there is one person sitting across from the jury who just doesn’t belong to the scene. There is one person who best resembles a Microsoft photoshop faux pas: the defendant. Either he isn’t wearing a suit, or wearing one that’s ill-fitting or is wearing the same shirt that the juror saw him wear during voir dire, or he’s just…sitting there. Looking out of place. Uncomfortable.
And everyone can see it. Even the witness. And that makes identifications in court essentially meaningless. Because, when asked to identify the perpetrator, who else is the witness going to pick out? The prosecutor who’s just been asking him questions? The defense attorney who’s been objecting? The judge? Don’t be silly.
I’ve been thinking about this all day and I’m not sure that there’s a solution. But there is a problem. And the problem is that it turns bad memories into good ones. It turns hunches into convictions. It’s the same problem with juries: the defendant’s here, he’s arrested, he must be guilty. Innocent people don’t just end up in trial for no reason. If the system has got him, it’s got the right guy.
We can control this to some extent during pretrial hearings on the suppression of identifications, but in trial, there’s no apparent remedy. It’s yet another failing that we have to live with and work to overcome.
State forensic lab under scrutiny
Aug 10th
The Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory, once considered among the best, most independent and most efficient in the country, is now facing some serious scrutiny by the NIJ, an arm of the Feds. Norm Pattis wrote about this two days ago and it got picked up by the Courant yesterday. Some of the problems facing the lab are well known to those dealing with them on a regular basis: they are severely understaffed, have an astronomical backlog of cases and even had to deal with some expired DNA kits over the last two years, which, while they did not lead to false positives, surely took up some time with re-testing.
But this is much worse. Apparently there’s a 160 page report of the audit done by the NIJ which criticizes several aspects of the lab’s operations, including the qualifications of the supervisors and the ability to adequately and accurately process and examine the evidence:
The audits focused on the sections of the lab that deal with convicted-offender databases and DNA testing. State crime labs must adhere to federal standards for DNA testing.
The DNA audit team raised questions about supervision, reporting of case results, evidence control, data security, quality assurance, adherence to standard operating procedures for DNA analyses, and validation techniques for DNA test results, among other issues.
These are significant questions that undermine the reliability of DNA results, which are often used by juries as the be-all and end-all of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. DNA evidence is the gold standard, considered fool-proof and error proof, in the minds of the layperson. To have a report that calls into question basic things like evidence control, quality assurance and even SOP for analyses is troubling, to say the least.
How accurate are the results reported by the lab over the last few years? How many cases did this affect? How many convictions were obtained on the strength of these criticized standards and procedures? The implications are staggering.
The state lab didn’t provide the Courant a copy of the report of the NIJ, but every criminal defense lawyer must send a letter to the lab requesting that unedited copy. What exactly does it say? We need to know that, unfiltered, without the alterations and suggestions of the state.
I know several of the people who work at the state lab and I like most of them. I don’t envy them right now, because it seems that a lot of these problems are brought about by severe underfunding. But whatever the reason, the credibility of the lab and its results is now in question and that’s not a good thing – either for the lab itself – or for the people who have been convicted or are awaiting trial as a result of the lab’s testing.
And if you’re waiting for DNA results in your case, you may have to wait a long, long time. From this graphic in today’s paper edition of the Courant, the backlog for DNA testing and analysis is now 4 years!
Last March, a state police official briefed the Criminal Justice Policy Advisory Board, made up of police, prosecutors and a cross-section of members of the public.
The facts were alarming, [chief of criminal justice planning for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Mike] Lawlor said: 3,900 “unstarted” forensic cases; 1,800 backlogged firearms cases as of March, up from fewer than 800 in January 2009; statutory deadlines looming in more than 160 felony cases.
“There have been outrageous backlogs with the processing of evidence – DNA, fingerprints, computer hard drives, everything,” Lawlor said. “Police in some cases have had to wait months, sometimes a year or more, for results, and that has affected decisions on arrest and identifying suspects. It’s also delayed trials. It’s been a problem for police and prosecutors statewide.”
Lawlor, ever the prosecutor, forgets one important demographic: the criminal defendant. He who is innocent until proven guilty, but more often than not cannot afford to post bail and thus sits in pre-trial incarceration for months and years pending the outcome of DNA testing. This is as much about solving cold cases and identifying suspects through DNA analysis as it is about the speedy resolution of those cases where people are deprived of their liberty based on questionable policies and procedures at the state lab. If nothing else, we should all start filing motions for bond reduction in cases where DNA analysis is outstanding and will take forever.
CA: Snitching requires corroboration
Aug 2nd
In a long overdue move, Gov. Jerry Brown of California just signed into law SB 687, which bans judges and juries from convicting defendants based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of jailhouse informants. From the bill itself:
This bill would additionally provide that a judge or jury may not enter a judgment of conviction upon a criminal defendant, find a special circumstance true, or use a fact in aggravation based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an in-custody informant, as defined. The bill would provide that corroboration shall not be deemed sufficient if it merely shows the commission of the offense, the special circumstance, or the circumstance in aggravation. The bill would provide that the corroboration of an in-custody informant shall not be provided by the testimony of another in-custody informant.
This is a major step forward in the fight against unreliable and wrongful convictions. Jailhouse snitch testimony has obvious problems, which have been chronicled here before, and in fact, this bill is identical to one passed by the California legislature in 2008, only to be subsequently vetoed by the Governator. Despite opposition from some prosecutors offices, Gov. Brown made this requirement the law of California and for good reason. This survey [PDF] from the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School found that fully 48% of wrongful convictions were brought about by jailhouse testimony. The Innocence Project states that 15% of DNA exonerations were in cases of convictions that featured snitch testimony. Here’s a Pew Trust report [PDF] on the problems with this kind of testimony.
Surprisingly, California now becomes only the 18th state to enforce this kind of prohibition. Most other states take a half-hearted approach, like Connecticut, providing only for a “special” jury instruction warning juries to consider this kind of testimony skeptically. From the model jury instructions:
Generally, the court should not instruct the jury on the credibility of a particular witness, but the Supreme Court has recognized three exceptions: the complaining witness, an accomplice, and an informant. See State v. Patterson, 276 Conn. 452, 470 (2005); State v. Ortiz, 252 Conn. 533, 561-62 (2000).
The exception for informant testimony was first recognized in State v. Patterson, 276 Conn. 452 (2005). “Because the testimony of an informant who expects to receive a benefit from the state in exchange for his or her cooperation is no less suspect than the testimony of an accomplice who expects leniency from the state, we conclude that the defendant was entitled to an instruction substantially in accord with the one that he had sought.” Id., 470. Though originally limited, in Patterson, to informants who had actually been promised a benefit in return for his or her testimony, in State v. Arroyo, 292 Conn. 558 (2009), the Court expanded it to any informant. “[T]he trial court should give a special credibility instruction to the jury whenever [jailhouse informant] testimony is given, regardless of whether the informant has received an express promise of a benefit.” Id., 569.
If the testimony is so inherently unreliable, then courts and juries should be prohibited from relying solely on such testimony to convict people. But that, I suppose, is a matter for the legislature and not the courts.
What do we want from our system?
Jul 10th
see end of post for info on this picture
I feel compelled to start, once again, with one of my favorite quotes:
Ammianus Marcellinus relates an anecdote of the Emperor Julian which illustrates the enforcement of this principle in the Roman law. Numerius, the governor of Narbonensis, was on trial before the Emperor, and, contrary to the usage in criminal cases, the trial was public. Numerius contented himself with denying his guilt, and there was not sufficient proof against him. His adversary, Delphidius, “a passionate man,” seeing that the failure of the accusation was inevitable, could not restrain himself, and exclaimed, “Oh, illustrious Cæsar! if it is sufficient to deny, what hereafter will become of the guilty?” to which Julian replied, “If it suffices to accuse, what will become of the innocent?” Rerum Gestarum, L. XVIII, c. 1.
Coffin v. United States. And yet, in these days, I look around and see more of Delphidius than of Caesar. Surely, you have heard of Casey Anthony and the verdict of not guilty rendered in her capital trial, that has sent a million heads spinning and the veins of nearly half the population of the country pumping with boiling blood calling for vengeance and murder.
The appreciation of a system which presumes an individual innocent unless the State can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seems to be shrinking to a select few who make their living in that system. For the rest, the pure exhilaration of having a pre-determined verdict of guilt (and isn’t it always guilt?) announced, confirming their increasingly myopic and monochromatic view of the world is the only expectation.
Do we want a system that protects the individual or do we want a system that confirms our view of the guilt of those arrested? Do we want a system that lifts the substance of the accusation up to the light – and upon finding it wanting – discards it? Or do we want a system that goes by the smell test? Do we want a system where no one who is arrested is not guilty? Do we want so much to believe in the infallibility of our so-called protectors? Do we want a system that allows us to so easily and hypocritically create an artificial divide between the mob and the mobbed?
Does the system only work when the guilty are convicted and the innocent are acquitted, or does it work when some who may be guilty are nonetheless set free? Does the system work when some who are likely innocent are not?
we are mindful that it may seem unjust to allow a conviction to stand when the evidence on which the conviction rested has been discredited. It must be remembered, however, that, once properly convicted, the petitioners no longer are cloaked in the mantle of the presumption of innocence.
Gould v. Commissioner of Correction, while doing just that. Gould is a case I wrote about some time ago, where a habeas court reversed Gould’s (and his co-defendant Taylor’s) conviction for murder on the grounds that they were actually innocent. From that decision:
“A senseless, cold-blooded, execution style murder was committed in the early morning hours of July 4th, 1993,” Fuger begins. Eugenio Deleon Vega went to his small Fair Haven bodega, La Casa Green, to open shop at 5:08 a.m. “Before the hour of six AM, before he could even arrange the morning newspapers, he was dead. He had been executed, shot once in the left temple with a projectile from a .38 caliber semiautomatic pistol. These are indisputable facts.”
Fuger sets the scene for his sharp reproof with a blazing sub-header on Page One.
“This case rises and falls on the testimony of Doreen Stiles,” the sub-header reads, quoting New Haven’s Senior Assistant State Attorney James Clark’s words during Taylor and Gould’s 1995 Superior Court trial.
“No truer statement has ever been spoken,” Fuger wrote.
Stiles, a drug-addicted police informant, was the only supposed eyewitness who placed the defendants at the murder scene. DNA evidence found at the murder scene did not match Gould or Taylor. The state’s case rested on Stiles’ testimony, as Clark openly admitted during the trial. Stiles came forward and recanted her statement in 2006, allowing the defendants to open a joint habeas corpus claim of actual innocence, based on new evidence.
It is “crystal clear,” wrote Fuger, “that the sole piece of evidence, the only thread that links George Gould and Ronald Taylor to this senseless murder is the testimony of Doreen Stiles. If this tether breaks, then there is absolutely nothing that implicates these two men.”
“At the trial of the case in 1995, the case rose because Doreen Stiles made that linkage; at the trial of the habeas petition in 2009, the case must fall, once again, based upon the testimony of Doreen Stiles,” Fuger wrote.
The Supreme Court in its desire to so respectfully uphold the notion of finality, trips over itself to make absolutely clear that they seems somewhat squeamish about writing this decision, but in the end, they really have to. They don’t, really. I know it, they know and you should know it too. The verbal gymnastics are impressive:
In sum, the recantations by Stiles and Boyd may demonstrate that there no longer is any credible evidence that the petitioners did commit the crimes of which they were convicted. What the habeas court’s decision lacks is any discussion of affirmative evidence that would prove by clear and convincing evidence that the petitioners did not commit the crimes. We therefore conclude that the habeas court’s judgments must be reversed…
Emphasis added by me to point out the subtle use of words to support their conclusion.
So, if the only testimony which links the defendants to the murder is now discredited, and that’s not enough, then what must someone do to convince a court of their innocence? I’m glad you asked:
First, taking into account both the evidence produced in the original criminal trial and the evidence produced in the habeas hearing, the petitioner must persuade the habeas court by clear and convincing evidence, as that standard is properly understood and applied in the context of such a claim, that the petitioner is actually innocent of the crime of which he stands convicted. Second, the petitioner must establish that, after considering all of that evidence and the inferences drawn therefrom, as the habeas court did, no reasonable fact finder would find the petitioner guilty.
Not only does one have to prove to the system that they affirmatively did not commit this crime, but they also have to prove that a jury would not find them guilty. It isn’t enough, here, that one presents evidence proving that they did not commit the crime – although how that is to be applied as a universal standard is beyond me.
Are we to decide on the innocence of individuals who are caught up in our system based on their their sheer luck that there exists some physical evidence such as DNA that proves they did not commit the crime? Must we require such a circumstance beyond their control? And what do we say to those who are lucky enough to completely undermine the State’s case against them, yet unlucky enough to have no independent corroborative evidence of their “alleged” innocence? Finality trumps innocence? Form over substance? Perhaps.
It really doesn’t come as any surprise, though, to me – and perhaps to you as well – that our rules are such. That there is a bias toward convicting and keeping people convicted. I sit here, day after day, reading as cases and reports of cases come flooding across my line of sight – and every day it’s the same: we love pronouncing judgment on others and love our moral indignation and our self-assumed superiority. We are better. They are guilty. And how dare anyone disagree with us:
A red-haired woman in her 60s who moved to Florida from Michigan, she told the court she worked at a Publix Grocery when she was questioned as a potential juror.
Now, she’s in hiding.
Juror number 12 left Florida. Her husband, fighting back tears, tells NBC News he’s not sure when she’ll return to her home in Florida.
Why? He says she fears half of her co-workers want her head on a platter.
The other may understand what she did, but she didn’t want to face them.
She was due to retire in the fall, but Juror number 12, after being released from sequestration, chose to call her boss to announce she couldn’t come to work. She didn’t feel safe.
She retired over the phone.
The husband, who sat with two NBC News producers, glanced repeatedly at his blood pressure monitor on the coffee table and the Bible next to it.
One day they’ll come for you and there’ll be no one left to speak up for you.
What do we want from our system? A rubber stamp, apparently.
[For an interesting local connection to the image above, see here.]
Best lineup ever
Nov 11th
And by that I mean worst lineup ever. Is it any wonder that people get wrongfully convicted because of police tactics like this?
can you spot the perp? hint: he's the one who's not smiling
Yes, that is the defendant in a headlock in a police lineup full of other police officers who are smiling. This is not a recreation or a photoshop job. This. Actually. Happened. And as a result, Ivan Henry spent 27 years in a British Columbia prison for 8 rapes he did not commit. The culprit once again? Eyewitness identification:
Henry was convicted solely on identification by the victims.
The appeal court found the identification was weak and the trial judge erred by instructing the jurors that they could infer consciousness of guilt from the resistance of Henry to participation in the line-up conducted by police on May 12, 1982.
The appeal court considered a shocking photo of the police line-up, which showed three police officers, dressed in civilian clothes, restraining Henry, who was in a head lock.
The other people in the line-up were believed to be police officers, who were all smiling.
“If this had been disclosed, it would have been a gold mine for a defence lawyer,” Appeal Court Justice Richard Low said of the photo during Henry’s appeal hearing last June, when the court reserved judgment.
It’s a wonder that courts across the country still refuse to accept that eyewitness identification as the sole basis for a conviction is not very reliable. The study of and the science behind eyewitness misidentifications is so well developed and is entering the mainstream consciousness to such an extent that courts will be unable to ignore its realities much longer. Connecticut came close in recent months, without actually taking that big step.
Henry’s case highlights another common problem with wrongful convictions. It is often said that the 250+ exonerations touted by the Innocence Project is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many. many more innocent people behind bars who cannot be helped, because in most cases, there is no physical evidence to test. DNA retention policies are terrible and in some cases there is willful destruction of the testable material. Henry may have been released sooner, but for the same problem:
Another state police lab under scrutiny
Aug 9th
North Carolina, step right up:
This series [by the newspaper Newsobserver], the product of months of reporting, reveals problems far beyond blood analysis. It shows an agency that teaches its agents and laboratory analysts to line up with prosecutors’ case theories. In some cases, they ignore or twist key pieces of evidence. In others, rogue agents range far beyond the rules, sometimes with devastating results.
The newspaper plans to “reveal” new stories every few days or so. This should be fun.
Deterrent? Not Actually
Jul 14th
all your DNA are belong to us
The story of the role of DNA in the criminal justice system is quite interesting. Heralded as the ultimate in crime solving, DNA has slowly infiltrated the collective consciousness of the entire nation and infected our lawyers, judges and jurors. It’s a double-edged sword, to be sure: DNA can accurately (or maybe not) identify an individual who leaves behind some trace materials at or in a crime scene, thereby implicating or exculpating a suspect. Fueled by DNA based shows like CSI, jurors became more demanding and mistakenly over reliant on the science, producing the “CSI effect”, DNA, on the other hand, has drawbacks that defense lawyers try to highlight – which I’m not sure have sunk in yet – like the fact that you it can’t tell you when it was deposited. DNA is most famous for high-profile exonerations of people already convicted of crimes and serving lengthy prison sentences.
But DNA is much more than that. As the science grows, the uses and implications of the genetic markers grows by leaps and bounds (see here and for the future, see here).
Which is why DNA, and the collection of DNA, is so attractive to law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the evolution of science and technology and the desired application of these new uses conflicts to some degree with the core protections of the Constitution.
Just yesterday, a 3 judge panel of the 9th Circuit heard an appeal in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU challenging the legality of California’s DNA-collection-upon-arrest law. That’s essentially all there is to the law: collect the DNA of everyone ever arrested. (Connecticut tried to pass a similar bill two years ago and it was ultimately rejected.) Under some circumstances, the DNA may never be deleted from their database:
Conviction: the movie
Jul 2nd
Someone turned me on to the trailer for this upcoming movie: Conviction. Based on the true life story of Betty Anne Waters‘ 17 year fight to exonerate her brother, the movie stars Hillary Swank as Waters and Minnie Driver as her best friend Abra Rice.
Abra, incidentally, is now a Connecticut public defender.
Paying for injustice
May 18th
Meet Manuel Hidalgo Rodriguez, arrested and convicted in 1995 for child sexual assault that he did not commit. Hidalgo spent 5 years out of a 5 1/2 year sentence before his conviction was reversed and the charges dismissed.
Meet Thomas White, also convicted for child sexual assault and who also spent 5 years in prison before a third jury finally acquitted him in 2005.
But Hidalgo and White have more in common that merely being falsely accused of terrible crimes for which they both spent long years in harsh conditions in prison. Both convictions were obtained by a failure of the system: in Hidalgo’s case, aided by the complete inexperience of his defense attorney in what amounted to a constructive denial of counsel; in White’s, horrifying misconduct by the police and prosecutors to hide exculpatory evidence.
From the ass’s mouth
Dec 2nd
Or: Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to speak ill of the dead, David Martin? David Martin, of course, is the man who “represented” Cameron Todd Willingham, the possibly innocent man executed by Texas on the basis some rather dubious arson evidence.
Willingham is dead, there is a controversy over his innocence and David Martin was apparently missing the limelight. So he decided to give an interview to the press in which he said the following:
The veteran defense attorney represented Willingham at trial. He looked at all the evidence. And he has no doubt that his client deserved to die.
“I never think about him, but I do think about those year-old babies crawling around in an inferno with their flesh melting off their bodies,” Martin said. “I think that he was guilty, that he deserved death and that he got death.”
This is a man that, at least in name, represented Willingham. A lawyer, a member of the bar and a capital criminal defense attorney. I use the quotes around the word represented because:
Martin’s case was brief, with just two witnesses. The first was the family baby sitter, who testified there was an oil lamp in the hallway, suggesting it might have spilled and spread flammable liquid. The second was a jail inmate, who was going to dispute the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who claimed Willingham had confessed. But the judge forbid most of his testimony as hearsay.
But of course, one cannot keep a champion fool like Martin quiet. This is not the first time he’s opened his mouth about Willingham and his belief in Willingham’s guilt. A mere few months ago, when the arson story broke, he gave an interview on Anderson Cooper:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE[/youtube]
I must’ve missed it, but my good friends over at Defending People and Simple Justice didn’t (see Mark’s post for links to other posts on Martin’s stupidity).
As Scott summed it up:
While no one can make a criminal defense lawyer believe in the innocence of his client, or chose to argue it after his representation has ended, he can be taken to task for doing the unthinkable, the outrageous and the facially wrong. David Martin’s comments are a disgrace of the lowest order. And, for good measure, just as criminal defense lawyers aren’t expected to believe in the innocence of every client, they similarly aren’t endowed with the superhuman ability to know when a person who professes innocence is in fact guilty.
I may lack an explanation for what drove David Martin to condemn his own client publicly, particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence of innocence, but I have no doubt that his statements on Anderson Cooper 360 are some of the most despicable I’ve ever heard from the mouth of a lawyer. Never, but never, smear your own client.
I’m glad to say that no one I know would act like Martin did (although one has come close).
Another conviction reversed: Exhibit n for no prosecutorial immunity
Nov 15th
In what is becoming routine, another conviction was reversed this past week in New York, this one too based on the eyewitness testimony of 5 individuals. This, though, isn’t the usual case of mistaken ID nor is it a DNA exoneration.
Convicted of murder in 1992, Fernando Bermudez has wrongly been in jail for 17 years. Interestingly, it took only a year from his conviction for the eyewitnesses to recant citing police and prosecutorial pressure and manipulation:
A year after Mr. Bermudez’s 1992 conviction, five witnesses who had identified him as the killer at trial recanted, saying in sworn affidavits that, they were coerced or manipulated by the police and prosecutors to identify Mr. Bermudez as the killer. Several of those witnesses reiterated their recantations in September at a hearing before Justice Cataldo.
Not only that, but all 5 testified at the most recent hearing that they viewed his mugshot as a group and discussed his likeness to the killer: a big no-no in photo array identifications. All the science in this field shows that we have a tendency to compare pictures to each other and to what we think the suspect looks like and pick the one that most closely resembles the person sought to be identified, instead of picking the person who actually is. If you don’t believe me, try this simple test from expert Gary Wells‘ website.
In his 79-page decision, Justice Cataldo wrote that Mr. Bermudez’s rights were violated because the police had allowed prosecution witnesses to view Mr. Bermudez’s mug shot as a group and to discuss his resemblance to the killer. Justice Cataldo also found that the prosecution should have known before sentencing that one of its cooperating witnesses, Efraim Lopez — a teenager whom Mr. Blount had punched at the club — had given false testimony.
But that doesn’t deter prosecutors. In fact, they’re so wedded to the notion that once a conviction is obtained it must be defended at all costs – and certainly one where the reversal is based in part on misbehavior by one of their own – that they utter nonsense like the following:
Texas kills…..an innocent man? (updated)
Aug 25th
The first half of the title of this post (shamelessly plagiarized from our good friends at CapDefWeekly) should come as no surprise to anyone. Texas is a powerhouse when it comes to executions, rapidly putting people to death.
The second half of the title should also come as no surprise, though. And there’s a new report to back it up [here's a link to the actual report]. The man in question is Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted of setting fire to his house that killed his children in 1991. The new report states that Texas fire marshals had no basis to conclude that the fire was set intentionally and in all likelihood was an accident. Willingham was executed in 2004, maintaining his innocence to the end.
Among [Craig] Beyler’s key findings: that investigators failed to examine all of the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willinghams’ house in the small Texas town of Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded Willingham’s injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.
The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had “limited understanding” of fire science. The fire marshal “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created,” he wrote.
The marshal’s findings, he added, “are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation.”
And it isn’t Beyler alone. Nine of the nation’s top fire scientists reviewed the Willingham case and concluded that “the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.”
And that’s not all. There was some other evidence of his guilt: jailhouse snitch testimony. That doyen of reliable information. To paraphrase Radley Balko, junk science and a jailhouse snitch do not a reliable conviction make.
Good job Texas. Good job death penalty advocates.
If only they’d used such caution the first time
Jan 4th
As often happens, I lollygag when it comes to writing posts. Then, all of a sudden, in a span of a day of day or two, several stories appear that tie together the strands in my head. Today is such a day.
Percolating in the back of my head was some chagrin directed toward the prosecutors in the Clarence Elkins case (aka #92), the subject of Friday night’s Dateline. Elkins, in a case with some parallels to Miguel Roman, was convicted of raping his niece and raping and murdering his mother-in-law based on one single dubious eyewitness: his niece, who told cops that the killer looked like her uncle. Clarence, meanwhile had an alibi: he had been drinking heavily at a bar and then came home to his wife, who was awake. They went for a walk.
The police, however, got their blinders on because of the statement of the niece, despite the fact that rudimentary DNA testing excluded Elkins. Elkins’ wife, convinced of his innocence, began investigating on her own:
DNA Exoneration FTW
Dec 19th
Following up on the DNA exoneration story from two weeks ago, I can happily point you to this report that Miguel Roman has been granted a new trial and was released from custody today, in time for the holidays.
Judge David P. Gold agreed after a brief hearing today to release Roman, 52, on a promise to appear in court. Roman’s lawyers, citing evidence that appears to exonerate Roman in the 1988 killing of 17-year-old Carmen Lopez, petitioned for a new trial for Roman.
Gold granted that motion today.
Prosecutor David Zagaja noted that the petition for a new trial stems from newly discovered evidence stemming from a technology that “simply didn’t exist” in 1988. It was not immediately clear whether the prosecution will proceed to a new trial or move for a dismissal of the case.
It would be remarkable if the State decided to prosecute him again, so I don’t think that will happen. More likely than not, the charges will be dismissed.
The saddest part of this story is the 20 years of his life that Roman lost.
Close to another DNA exoneration
Dec 6th
The Great State of Seacrest Connecticut might be close to its second DNA exoneration ever. (You know, it’s strange how these things play out. A few weeks ago I remarked to someone that I hadn’t heard anything about the Innocence Project lately and I wondered if they were working on anything.)
Nearly 30 years ago, three women either disappeared or were found murdered. One person linked all three investigations: Pedro Miranda. The police could never get enough to charge him and eventually another man – Miguel Roman – was convicted of the murder of one of them and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
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