During last night's Republican presidential debate, former Vice President Mike Pence had a startling answer to a question about what he would do to reduce gun violence.
"I am sick and tired of these mass shootings happening in the United States of America," said Pence. "And if I'm president of the United States, I'm going to go to the Congress of the United States, and we're going to pass a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting so that they will meet their fate in months, not years. It is unconscionable that the Parkland shooter…is actually going to spend the rest of his life behind bars in Florida. That's not justice. We have to mete out justice and send a message to these would-be killers that you are not going to live out your days behind bars. You're going to meet justice."
This plan is not just unlikely to reduce mass shootings; it would leave lots of accused criminals without important procedural protections. While "mass shooting" doesn't have a set legal definition, one common definition puts it as any shooting with at least four victims, including people who were injured rather than killed. By that metric, over 3,500 mass shootings occurred from 2015 to 2022. Roughly 95 percent of these shootings resulted in fewer than four deaths, according to Everytown for Gun Safety's data. That includes a lot of crimes that do not look like Parkland—crimes in which there could be serious doubts about whether the accused is in fact guilty.
Pence is presumably thinking of those who commit the worst deliberate mass shootings But trying to exact even harsher punishments for the very few who commit such terrible violence will primarily end up affecting those accused of, say, drive-by shootings where the perpetrator isn't obvious.
For this reason, expediting the execution process would massively increase the risk that the state executes a wrongfully convicted person. Pence complained that it takes decades to actually execute someone after a conviction, but that time is typically spent exhausting legal appeal or clemency options. Sometimes, these decades of legal appeals help overturn wrongful convictions, such as in 192 cases of death-row exonerations recorded by the Death Penalty Information Center. In total, one 2014 study estimated that as many as 4 percent of those sentenced to death in America are innocent.
In addition to the increased risk of wrongful execution, making it easier to execute someone sentenced to death would likely not affect the number of people killed by gun violence—or even the number of people killed by mass shootings. There's considerable debate over whether harsher sentences can deter crime in some circumstances. However, it's difficult to see how a swifter death penalty will deter those who plan to commit the worst and rarest mass shootings, considering just how often these shootings end in suicide or the shooter being killed by police or bystanders.
So while Pence and one other Republican presidential candidate are all too excited to make it easier for the state to execute people, expediting the death penalty would be anything but just.
The post No, Mike Pence, We Should Not Make It Easier To Execute Mass Shooters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>People deserve a presumption of innocence, but they don't always get it in Minnesota. When Ifrah Yassin applied for government permission to work at a group home for adults with intellectual disabilities near Minneapolis, the state Department of Human Services told her no.
Not now. Not ever.
Despite persistent staffing shortages at facilities like these nationwide, a mandatory background check resulted in a lifetime ban for Yassin. No matter how long she lives or where she goes in Minnesota, her name will remain in a do-not-hire database that works like a no-fly list for health care professionals.
The reason? Regulators determined by their own "preponderance of the evidence" that Yassin had committed aggravated robbery in her youth. Fact-finders satisfy this burden of proof when they establish that someone is guilty with more than 50 percent likelihood—essentially a coin toss. Yet these determinations are normally made in courthouses, not administrative offices.
How the Department of Human Services reached its conclusion is unclear. Regulators have refused to give Yassin any original evidence. The police briefly arrested her and her friends on suspicion of robbery in 2013, but officers promptly released the young women after realizing their accuser had provided a false name. The case went nowhere.
No charges. No trial. No conviction.
Normally in the United States, this means innocence. The fact is not lost on Yassin, a refugee drawn to the constitutional promises of due process and equal protection. "I came to America from Somalia in search of a better life," she says. "I never thought that I'd end up being punished for the rest of my life for something I didn't do."
The injustice is not the first Yassin has endured. In 2011, when she was just 20 years old, she faced false allegations of witness tampering from a St. Paul police sergeant who led a yearslong investigation that has since been discredited. One federal appeals court accused the sergeant of "lies and manipulation," and another federal appeals court accused the sergeant of pushing a "fictitious story."
The 8th Circuit describes Yassin as "perhaps the most accidental of participants" in this bogus investigation. Her only involvement was getting assaulted during a chance encounter with the sergeant's star witness, which was spun as witness tampering.
A jury acquitted Yassin, but not until she spent two years in federal custody awaiting trial. Yassin tried to hold the sergeant responsible, but the courts have blocked her efforts to sue, citing immunity doctrines that shield government officials. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately refused to intervene, leaving Yassin with nothing.
No day in court. No police accountability. No remedy for the violation of her rights.
While the sergeant who framed Yassin has faced no consequences for what she did, Minnesota regulators are imposing consequences on Yassin for something she didn't do. And while that sergeant is still employed as a St. Paul officer, Minnesota is blocking Yassin's ability to earn an honest living.
The state's refusal to sign off on the background check highlights a nationwide problem with collateral consequences, which refers to any civil penalty not imposed by a judge or jury. Examples include restrictions on international travel, access to subsidized housing, and voting.
Many states also block ex-offenders from working in their chosen occupations. But few jurisdictions extend this type of collateral consequence to people never convicted. Minnesota takes this step, flipping the rules of justice upside down. Instead of requiring the state to prove guilt, Minnesota requires people like Yassin to prove innocence.
Besides the challenge of proving a negative, Yassin must refute information the state refuses to share, which means she must resort to mind reading. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, lays out the constitutional problems in a July 12 letter to regulators.
Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017, have repeatedly rejected procedural schemes that require ensnared individuals to prove their innocence. Yet this is what Minnesota does.
Even if background check applicants are guilty of wrongdoing, imposing lifetime bans on gainful employment is rarely a good policy. People deserve a fresh start.
Blackballing Yassin for a crime not even police or prosecutors believe she committed is doubly absurd. She deserves immediate approval to work.
The post Minnesota Caretaker Gets Lifetime Ban for Crime She Didn't Commit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In an unusual move, the U.S. Supreme Court has halted the execution of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma inmate whose execution had been scheduled for next week even though the state's own attorney general has said he deserves a new trial.
Glossip was convicted in 1998 of the murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese. Prosecutors claimed that Glossip instructed then-19-year Justin Sneed—a maintenance man at the motel where Glossip worked—to kill Van Treese as part of a complex murder-for-hire scheme. Sneed's testimony was central to the prosecution's case, and Sneed himself agreed to testify as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty.
Soon after his conviction, problems with the case against Glossip—and particularly with Sneed's testimony—began to show. Glossip's conviction was overturned in 2001, and then he was re-convicted and re-sentenced to death three years later.
In the years following his second conviction, Glossip has narrowly escaped execution several times, coming so close as to have received three separate "last" meals before being spared by last-minute stays.
Over the past several years, there have been increasing calls to reexamine his case. In 2022, a probe sought by a group of bipartisan legislators concluded that the state's investigation was severely flawed.
"Considering the facts we uncovered, and that there exists no physical forensic evidence or credible corroborating testimony linking Glossip to the crime, our conclusion is that no reasonable juror hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder," said investigator Stan Perry in a June 2022 press release.
When a separate investigation reached similar conclusions last month, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he had formally filed for Glossip to have his conviction overturned and for him to receive a new trial.
"After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip," Drummond explained in an April 6th statement. "This is not to say I believe he is innocent. However, it is critical that Oklahomans have absolute faith that the death penalty is administered fairly and with certainty."
It didn't seem to work. On April 20, an appeals court denied Drummond's motion. Less than a week later, a parole board also declined to grant Glossip clemency.
But then, last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. The Court has stayed Glossip's upcoming execution, pending a future decision as to whether the Court will formally take up the case. While it is rare for the Supreme Court to consider death penalty cases, it is also rare for a state attorney general to admit that a death-row prisoner did not receive a fair trial.
"There has never been an execution in the history of this country where the state and the defense agreed that the defendant was not afforded a fair trial," state Rep. Kevin McDugle (R–Broken Arrow) said on Thursday. "Oklahoma cannot become the first."
The post The Supreme Court Has Halted Richard Glossip's Execution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Richard Glossip has been on Oklahoma's death row for almost 25 years. In that time, considerable doubt has been raised about the state's case against him—including two damning investigations that lead even the state's attorney general to advocate for a new trial. But none of that has been enough to stop the state's plan to execute Glossip later this month.
Richard Glossip was convicted for the 1997 murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese. However, no one claims Glossip himself actually killed him. Instead, the state asserts that Glossip, who had been working as the manager of a motel owned by Van Treese, convinced 19-year-old maintenance man Justin Sneed to beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat as part of an elaborate murder-for-hire scheme. While Glossip claims he was not at all involved in the murder, Sneed—as part of a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty—testified during Glossip's trial that Glossip had masterminded the crime.
Soon after Glossip's conviction, the weaknesses of the case began to show. In 2001, Glossip's conviction was overturned, and he was granted a new trial after an appeals court found that "the evidence at trial tending to corroborate Sneed's testimony was extremely weak." However, in 2004, he was reconvicted and resentenced to death. In the following years, Glossip has narrowly avoided death several times—coming so close that he has received three last meals.
However, in the past two years, a spate of new inquiries into Glossip's case has sparked hope that he may receive a new trial. In 2021, a bipartisan group of legislators requested an independent investigation into the case. When it was finished in July 2022, it revealed staggering misconduct on behalf of the state, including that a county district attorney's office had directed police to destroy physical evidence favorable to Glossip.
The investigation also "uncovered police contamination of the state's star witness, Justin Sneed, the actual killer, who implicated Glossip only after the detectives mentioned Glossip's name to Sneed six times during his interrogation," wrote investigators in a 2022 press release. "Likewise, the investigation uncovered additional evidence, never presented to the jury or to any court, that would likely have led to a different outcome in the case."
Last month, after the results of a second investigation into the case, Oklahoma's Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he was requesting that Glossip's conviction be overturned and that he be granted a new trial.
"After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip," said Drummond in an April 6 statement. "Considering everything I know about this case, I do not believe that justice is served by executing a man based on the testimony of a compromised witness."
However, the attorney general's intervention hasn't been enough to stop the state's plans to execute Glossip. Last month, an appeals court declined to vacate Glossip's conviction, concluding that Glossip "has not provided this Court with sufficient information that would convince this Court to overturn the jury's determination that he is guilty."
Making matters worse, last week, an Oklahoma parole board seemed to put to rest all hope that Glossip may finally escape death row. On April 26, the board declined to grant Glossip clemency and cleared the way for his execution, now set for May 18.
Drummond himself made the unusual step to testify before the parole board to argue for clemency. "I want to acknowledge how unusual it is for the state to support a clemency application of a death row inmate," Drummond said during the parole board's hearing. "I'm not aware of anytime in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I'm also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it. Ultimately that is why we are here."
But even this wasn't enough, and the board narrowly voted to deny Glossip clemency.
"The public support for Mr. Glossip is diverse, widespread, and growing, including at least 45 death penalty supporting Republicans in the Legislature who also reached the conclusion that there is too much doubt to execute Mr. Glossip," said Don Knight, Glossip's attorney. "It would be a travesty for Oklahoma to move forward with the execution of an innocent man."
The state made grave errors in its prosecution of Richard Glossip—errors that several investigations have argued could have caused his conviction. But since those errors were discovered, it has proved nearly impossible to correct them—and nearly impossible to stop the ever-ticking execution countdown.
As the Los Angeles Times editorial board noted yesterday, "The bureaucracy of death has a schedule to keep….Those impatient to keep the state's killing on track correctly note that Glossip's case has gummed up the works for decades." Rather than granting Glossip a new trial once the state's errors had been revealed, "the execution bureaucracy" decided that "it's better, in this cruel and bloodthirsty nation of equal justice under the law, to kill people now. We can always sort out the truth later."
The post As Oklahoma's Attorney General Calls for Clemency, the State Keeps Planning To Execute Richard Glossip appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma death-row inmate Richard Glossip is facing another setback in his 25-year effort to prove his innocence. On Thursday, an Oklahoma appeals court upheld Glossip's murder conviction, despite a request from the state's attorney general filed earlier this month seeking to vacate Glossip's conviction and retry the case.
Richard Glossip was convicted for the 1997 murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese. However, no one asserts that Glossip killed Van Treese himself. Prosecutors asserted that Glossip, who had been working as the manager of a motel owned by Van Treese, had paid Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old maintenance man, to kill Van Treese.
The only direct evidence linking Glossip to the murder came from Sneed's testimony—testimony that he only agreed to give as part of a plea deal that allowed him to escape the death penalty for murdering Van Treese.
Glossip's conviction was overturned in 2001 when an appeals court thought "the evidence at trial tending to corroborate Sneed's testimony was extremely weak." But he was reconvicted and resentenced to death for the crime in 2004.
Giving more reason to doubt Sneed's testimony, in the years since Glossip's conviction, Sneed has left cryptic messages hinting that he possibly wished to recant his testimony against Glossip. In 2007, Sneed wrote to his lawyer about Glossip's case, "There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me. Somethings [sic] I need to clean up," adding that he was "going to try to contact the indigent defense over [Glossip's] case or the D.A.'s."
In the years since his conviction, Glossip has narrowly escaped execution several times, receiving four separate stays of execution and even being served three last meals. However, things started to look up for Glossip following the release of an independent investigation into his case in 2022. The report concluded that the state had deliberately destroyed evidence in Glossip's case, with investigators stating that they "uncovered additional evidence, never presented to the jury or to any court, that would likely have led to a different outcome in the case."
Following the release of this report and the conclusion of a separate independent investigation earlier this month, Oklahoma's Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he had filed a motion requesting an appeals court to overturn Glossip's conviction and seeking a new trial in the case.
"After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip," Drummond said in a statement on April 6. "I do not believe that justice is served by executing a man based on the testimony of a compromised witness."
However, this wasn't enough for Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals. On Thursday, the court concluded that Glossip hadn't provided enough new evidence showing that he needed a new trial.
"This case has been thoroughly investigated and reviewed in numerous appeals. Glossip has been given unprecedented access to the prosecution files, including work product, yet he has not provided this Court with sufficient information that would convince this Court to overturn the jury's determination that he is guilty," wrote Judge David B. Lewis.
"For over 20 years, the facts, evidence, and law relating to this case have been reviewed in detail by judges and their staffs through every stage of appeal allowed under our Constitution," concurred Judge Gary L. Lumpkin. "At no level of review has a court determined error in the trial proceeding of this Petitioner nor has there been a showing of actual innocence."
Despite the ruling, Drummond quickly announced that he would nonetheless refuse to allow Glossip's execution—which is currently planned for May 18—to go forward. "While I respect the Court of Criminal Appeals' opinion, I am not willing to allow an execution to proceed despite so many doubts. Ensuring the integrity of the death penalty demands complete certainty," he wrote on Thursday. "I will thoroughly review the ruling and consider what steps should be taken to ensure justice."
While the case against Richard Glossip has always been deeply flawed, his decades of failed attempts to overturn his conviction—and his narrow brushes with death—show just how hard it can be to prove your innocence, even when your own state concludes that it has little evidence against you.
"It is unconscionable for the court to attempt to force the State to move forward with his execution," said Don Knight, Glossip's attorney, in a Thursday statement. "We cannot permit this longstanding injustice to go unchallenged and will be filing for review of this manifestly unjust ruling in the United States Supreme Court."
The post Oklahoma Says Richard Glossip Was Denied a Fair Trial. An Appeals Court Still Won't Overturn His Conviction. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma's attorney general has filed a motion to overturn the capital murder conviction of Richard Glossip, who has spent almost 26 years on death row. The move comes after the release of a new report detailing considerable issues in the state's case against Glossip, concluding that he was "deprived of a fair trial."
Richard Glossip was convicted in 1998 for the murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese, the year prior. Another man, Justin Sneed, had confessed to the murder, but testified during Glossip's trial that he killed Van Treese in a murder-for-hire scheme set up by Glossip. In exchange for his testimony against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and received a life sentence.
Cracks in the case against Glossip—who has long claimed innocence—began to show soon after his conviction. In particular, Sneed's testimony against him was the only direct evidence tying Glossip to the murder.
In 2001, an Oklahoma court overturned Glossip's conviction, writing that "the evidence at trial tending to corroborate Sneed's testimony was extremely weak." However, in 2004, another jury yet again convicted Glossip of murder, sentencing him to death. Over the years, Glossip has received four separate stays of execution.
In 2021, a group of over 30 lawmakers requested an independent investigation into Glossip's case. When the 343-page report was released in 2022, it revealed that the state had intentionally destroyed evidence before Glossip's trial and "uncovered police contamination of the state's star witness, Justin Sneed, the actual killer, who implicated Glossip only after the detectives mentioned Glossip's name to Sneed six times during his interrogation." Most damning of all, the investigation "uncovered additional evidence, never presented to the jury or to any court, that would likely have led to a different outcome in the case in the estimation of the Reed Smith team."
On Thursday, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he had filed a motion to vacate Glossip's conviction. The development comes just three days after the conclusion of another independent investigation into Glossip's case—this one ordered by Drummond himself in January.
"After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip," Drummond said in a Thursday press release. "This is not to say I believe he is innocent. However, it is critical that Oklahomans have absolute faith that the death penalty is administered fairly and with certainty. Considering everything I know about this case, I do not believe that justice is served by executing a man based on the testimony of a compromised witness."
The attorney general "confirms in his report what we have long known: Richard Glossip's conviction is unreliable and granting him a new trial is required," wrote Don Knight, Glossip's attorney, in a statement.
While this is a major victory for Glossip, his case should serve as a reminder of how often death row inmates are executed before their cases get the reexaminations they deserve.
The post Oklahoma Almost Killed Him 3 Times. Now, the State Is Trying To Vacate His Conviction. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Maryland man was exonerated in 2021 after serving nearly two decades in prison for the murder of his infant son. Now, he's attempting to get compensation for the 18 years he wrongfully spent imprisoned. However, the state is trying to stop him, arguing that he's still guilty—despite growing doubt in the medical diagnosis used to convict him.
According to The Daily Record, a Baltimore-based newspaper, Clarence Jones was imprisoned for second-degree murder following the death of his 9-week-old son Collin in 1998. According to Jones, he and Collin had been napping when he awoke to hear the infant aspirating formula, leading Jones to rush him to the hospital, where the baby became unresponsive and later died.
At the hospital, doctors found blood on the surface of Collin's brain and in his eyes and began suspecting that Collin's symptoms had been caused by "shaken baby syndrome," a medical condition that many doctors at the time believed was caused by a caregiver violently shaking a baby. The condition allegedly resulted in a "constellation of symptoms"—bleeding on the brain's surface, blood in the eyes, and brain swelling or a loss of consciousness—which matched Collin's condition. Doctors contacted the police, suspecting Collin died from abuse by Jones. Just minutes after Collin's death, police arrested Jones at the hospital.
"I was paralyzed," Jones told The Daily Record about his arrest. "My legs almost went out from beneath me and my brain just froze."
Despite Jones protesting that he was innocent, he was convicted of his son's murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison, after a trial where the prosecution relied heavily on expert witnesses who claimed that nothing other than violent shaking could have caused Collin's death. According to The Daily Record, one expert witness did testify in Jones' defense, noting that Collin's litany of other health issues—like lingering pneumonia symptoms and head trauma from birth—made it too difficult to determine the cause of this death.
"I'm troubled with the flat-out statement it had to be shaken baby syndrome and nothing else," pathologist Rudiger Breitinger said on Jones' behalf during the trial. "I don't think we have enough proof of that."
When Jones was released on parole in 2017, the medical consensus around shaken baby syndrome had changed dramatically. What was once a near-universally accepted diagnosis was now deeply controversial, with much of the research justifying the label having since come into question.
"Where the near-unanimous opinion once held that the SBS triad of symptoms could only result from a shaking with the force equivalent of a fall from a three-story to four-story window, or a car moving at 25 mph to 40 mph (depending on the source), research completed in 2003 using lifelike infant dolls suggested that vigorous human shaking produces bleeding similar to that of only a 2-foot to 3-foot fall," wrote Radley Balko in a 2009 summary of new findings in Reason. "Furthermore, the shaking experiments failed to produce symptoms with the severity of those typically seen in SBS deaths."
So far, at least 26 people convicted of shaken baby syndrome–related crimes have been exonerated. In 2021, Jones became one more among them, after a panel of judges on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals granted him a writ of actual innocence. Jones had already been released from prison in 2017, but the exoneration was still a tremendous victory—he was no longer subject to parole, and he was no longer a convicted murderer.
"Since 1999, scientific and medical literature has identified other natural causes of retinal hemorrhages and other eye findings as seen in Collin," the court wrote. "Because Collin's medical conditions were quickly dismissed as potential causes of the constellation of symptoms that Collin presented, such evidence would be especially important when there is a history of illness, hospitalization, and an absence of external injuries."
Under Maryland law, exonerees are eligible for compensation under state law. According to The Daily Record, Jones is eligible for around $1.6 million, though he faces an uphill legal battle to obtain compensation. Despite his writ of actual innocence, the state of Maryland contends that Jones cannot provide the "clear and convincing evidence" required for compensation and that"he did in fact murder his child."
"Even after his 2021 exoneration, Baltimore County prosecutors have opposed Clarence receiving compensation for the injustice of being wrongfully convicted," Lauren J. Kelleher, an attorney representing Jones, told The Daily Record. "Instead of trying to mitigate the difficulties he endures and will continue to endure for the rest of his life, they have decided to wrongly re-prosecute him for the tragic death of his own son."
As Jones tries to obtain compensation for his time spent unjustly behind bars, the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome continues to come under scrutiny. In 2022, one New Jersey judge declared the label "junk science" and barred testimony from shaken baby syndrome–experts in one case involving an allegation that an infant became severely injured due to shaking.
The post He Was Exonerated of Killing His Infant, but the State Still Says He's Guilty appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma's attorney general has gotten permission from the courts to slow down and push back the state's intense schedule of executions, spacing them at least two months apart.
Last June, then-Attorney General John O'Connor arranged for 25 of the state's death row inmates (more than half of the total number of people in the state facing capital punishment) to be executed over the course of 29 months.
But O'Connor was defeated by Gentner Drummond in last year's Republican primaries in Oklahoma, and Drummond took office earlier this month. He attended the first execution of the year, that of Scott Eizember, convicted of killing an elderly couple 20 years ago, and apparently came away concerned after meeting with Department of Corrections staff. He's not concerned about whether the state should be in the business of killing prisoners but rather how the tight schedule may negatively impact corrections staff.
"One aspect that has become clear over time is that the current pace of executions is unsustainable in the long run, as it is unduly burdening the (Department of Corrections) and its personnel," he wrote to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. "This is especially true given the extensive and intensive nature of the training DOC personnel undergo to prepare for each execution."
And so, instead, he wants these executions to be 60 days apart instead of 30 days apart. The court agreed, and several executions that were planned for the winter and early spring have been pushed to summer and fall.
While providing corrections staff with more time to prepare for executions doesn't stop the state from ending the lives of prisoners, it may prevent death row inmates from needless suffering and botched executions.
For death row inmate Richard Glossip, this is the ninth time he has been given a date for execution. Glossip was last scheduled to be executed on February 16, but this new schedule moves his execution date to May 18.
Glossip's case has garnered attention from death penalty opponents, because he's on death row for a murder he did not commit. Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly masterminding the murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of a hotel where Glossip worked, in 1997. Glossip allegedly convinced Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old maintenance man at the hotel at the time, to kill Van Treese, and in exchange the two would split the victim's money.
Glossip has insisted on his innocence, and there is no corroborating evidence tying him to the crime. Once Sneed confessed to the killing and pointed the finger at Glossip, he was convicted and sentenced to death based upon the testimony of Sneed alone. Sneed avoided the death penalty. Since then, Glossip and his attorneys have been fighting to get the state to reconsider its plans to execute him.
Then in 2015, the state suspended executions entirely over problems with the procurement of the drugs they use. (One inmate, Charles Warner, was executed using the wrong drugs. The year before, Clayton Lockett's execution went awry, with the man writhing around and speaking long after the drugs were supposed to have knocked him out.) And so, Glossip was spared execution then.
In 2021, Oklahoma resumed its executions, and the very first of them went badly, with inmate John Marion Grant reportedly convulsing and vomiting as he was dying. Since the state has resumed the executions, it has put eight men to death via lethal injections.
Glossip has received support from a bipartisan pack of state lawmakers who are increasingly concerned the state may be about to execute an innocent man and have been pushing the attorney general's office and the courts to allow for new hearings to reconsider the evidence. Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has ordered stays of execution for Glossip's team to try to get new evidentiary hearings, but the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals rejected them.
Then on January 26, Drummond directed an independent counsel to review Glossip's conviction and sentencing, hiring former prosecutor Rex Duncan to "ensure that we are appropriately responding to all evidence that has been presented through Mr. Glossip's conviction and incarceration."
This isn't a promise of any particular outcome, but it is yet another chance for Glossip and council to try to convince the state that he didn't orchestrate Van Treese's death.
In any event, Drummond may not be slowing down the frequency of executions because he is concerned about the pain the state might inflict on death row prisoners. Nevertheless, making sure the corrections staff has enough time to prepare properly for each execution may reduce the likelihood of mishaps or unnecessary suffering. Contrast Oklahoma's move with Alabama's, where the state's Supreme Court has responded to the issue of corrections officials botching the execution process and actually failing to properly prepare inmates for lethal injection by giving staff wider latitude to prolong the process.
The post Oklahoma Pulls Back the Relentless Pace of Planned Executions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma's criminal appeals court has denied a motion by death row prisoner Richard Glossip for a new evidentiary hearing to consider the possibility that he's innocent of murder and shouldn't be executed.
Glossip has been on death row for most of the past 24 years, having been convicted in 1998 for orchestrating the murder of Oklahoma City hotel owner Barry Van Treese. Glossip was never accused of directly killing Van Treese. He was convicted of convincing Justin Sneed (who was 19 at the time), the maintenance man of the hotel where Glossip was the manager, to do the deed, with Glossip saying they would split Van Treese's money.
Glossip has maintained his innocence. Sneed's testimony has served as the primary evidence against Glossip. Sneed himself was sentenced to life in prison, and Glossip's lawyers have argued that detectives investigating the case essentially fed Sneed the story to blame Glossip to deflect full responsibility.
Though Glossip was first convicted in 1998, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals tossed out his conviction due to the poor evidence and he was retried. He was nevertheless convicted again in 2004.
The lack of much evidence outside of Sneed's testimony has lent a lot of credibility to claims of Glossip's innocence, and in the past year, a pack of bipartisan lawmakers (several of whom support the death penalty) have been calling for another review of the evidence. Bolstering Glossip's claims was a report from law firm Reed Smith detailing many problems with the case. In August they unearthed what appears to be a 2007 letter from Sneed to Gina K. Walker, who was his public defender, suggesting that he was rethinking his testimony, calling it a "mistake," and asking to meet with her.
Subsequently, Gov. Kevin Stitt ordered a two-month stay of Glossip's execution, which had been scheduled for Sept. 22, for his innocence to be considered. On Nov. 3, Stitt granted a second two-month stay as the legal proceedings continued. He is now scheduled for execution on Feb. 16, 2023.
But today's ruling puts a damper on those efforts and also serves to show how heavily the deck is stacked against defendants once they've been sentenced to death. Glossip's motion makes several claims of procedural and due process issues, none of which the court will consider, Judge David Lewis explains, because Oklahoma's Post-Conviction Procedure Act puts strict time limits on when these claims can be made.
The court can still consider claims of factual innocence, and Glossip did claim as such in this motion. Unfortunately the Criminal Court of Appeals did not find that Glossip had provided enough proof of his own innocence to call for a new hearing. Now that Glossip has been convicted by a jury, the onus fall on him to provide evidence that he's innocent. Oklahoma law requires that Glossip show by "clear and convincing evidence" (a legal standard showing a "high probability" that the claim is true) that he's innocent. David notes in the denial that "[The court's judges] weigh any evidence presented against the evidence as a whole, in a light most favorable to the State, to determine if Glossip has met his burden."
The judges note the various jailhouse informants who have provided affidavits claiming to have heard Sneed admit killing Van Treese in order to rob him while never mentioning Glossip and evidence that Sneed was a drug user with a "violent personality." But none of that clears Glossip. Davis writes, "Contrary to Glossip's assertion, there is no evidence that Sneed has ever sought to recant his testimony in any meaningful way. Further, none of the other witnesses against Glossip have changed their story."
In other words, the judges don't see a difference between the evidence used to convict Glossip in the first place and the evidence they're looking at now. But because Glossip has already been convicted, even if the evidence seems very thin now, the judges need Glossip to prove more than that it's highly likely that Sneed is lying. And mind you, all these hurdles are just to open a new evidentiary hearing, not to throw out the conviction.
"This is a very difficult decision to understand," said Don Knight, Glossip's attorney, in a written statement. "The evidence of Rich's innocence, and the State's misconduct, is overwhelming and deserving of, at the very minimum, a fair hearing where we can present our evidence. This is all we have ever asked for and is something that, obviously, the State is desperate to see never happen."
Glossip has a second petition for relief submitted to the same court, alleging prosecutorial misconduct and again mentioning Sneed's past interest in possibly recanting. Glossip has had his execution delayed six times now. But the clock is ticking again. In June, Oklahoma's attorney general asked the state to start scheduling executions of 25 inmates, Glossip just one among them. The state has executed four prisoners this year and has two more scheduled before the end of 2022.
The post Oklahoma Court Denies New Evidence Hearing for Death Row Inmate Richard Glossip appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A California court has vacated the conviction of Maurice Hastings for a 1983 murder. DNA testing of semen collected during an oral swab of the victim, whose body was found in the trunk of her car, did not match Hastings. It did match that of another man who was convicted of an armed kidnapping in which he forced the victim to perform oral sex on him and placed her in the trunk of her car. That man died in prison in 2020. Hastings had asked for DNA testing on the oral swab in 2000, but the district attorney refused.
The post Brickbat: Better Late Than Never appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal grand jury in Brooklyn has awarded Justin McClarin $890,000 after finding he was wrongfully arrested by the New York City Police Department. McClarin said cops planted cocaine on him and forced his girlfriend to falsely claim he kidnapped her. One of the cops named in McClarin's lawsuit, David Grieco, has been named in almost 50 other lawsuits in which the city has paid out more than $1 million in settlement money.
The post Brickbat: Costly Employee appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Despite the popularity of cop shows about investigators bringing criminals to justice based on a few fingernail clippings and a dropped tissue, the track record of forensic evidence is spotty at best. Critics, including Reason journalists, have shown that too much crime-stopper "science" resembles tea-leaf reading more than it does the efforts of Sherlock Holmes.
Now a federal agency says that bitemark analysis, something of a poster child for bad forensic technique, is every bit as sketchy as skeptics claim.
"Forensic bitemark analysis lacks a sufficient scientific foundation because the three key premises of the field are not supported by the data," finds a draft report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "First, human anterior dental patterns have not been shown to be unique at the individual level. Second, those patterns are not accurately transferred to human skin consistently. Third, it has not been shown that defining characteristics of those patterns can be accurately analyzed to exclude or not exclude individuals as the source of a bitemark."
There's a lot more in the report, which is currently in its comment period and so isn't yet finalized. It's worth noting this 2022 document is a response to a 13-year-old call for a stronger scientific basis for the proliferating use of forensic evidence.
"NIST scientific foundation reviews fill a need identified in a landmark 2009 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which called for research to address issues of accuracy, reliability and validity in many forensic science disciplines, including bitemark analysis," acknowledges NIST.
That was after journalist Radley Balko, then with Reason, had pointed out some of the glaring flaws in forensic science in general, and bitemark analysis in particular.
"He claims to have perfected a method of identifying bite marks using laser light and orange goggles that he modestly calls 'the West Phenomenon,'" Balko wrote in 2007 of Mississippi dentist Michael West. "He has said his error rate in bite mark analysis is 'something less' than the error rate of 'my savior, Jesus Christ' and has compared his bite mark virtuosity with the musical talent of Itzhak Perlman."
Balko subsequently literally wrote the book about West, fellow practitioner Dr. Steven Hayne, and the injustices resulting from their forensic testimony. But even with NIST acknowledging, at long last, that "the ability of bitemark analysis to accurately exclude or not exclude individuals as a source of the mark is not supported," he sees little hope for reform.
"If the criminal legal system prioritized justice, we'd have long ago seen a thorough review of every bitemark conviction in the country—if not after the first series of DNA exonerations of bitemark convictions, then certainly after the NAS report cast doubt on the entire discipline," Balko writes. "Tragically, judges and prosecutors seem to have concluded that real legitimacy lies in pretending the biggest, most consequential mistakes never happened."
Maybe not, but it's worth highlighting the extent to which the NIST report debunks bitemark analysis. The report points out that bitemark analysis relies on the assumptions that: teeth marks are unique; that they reliably transfer to surfaces such as skin; and that the marks can then be analyzed and linked to specific individuals.
First of all, it's not at all clear that bites leave distinct patterns. "Bitemark patterns typically only represent the anterior teeth" (those in the front of the mouth) and the marks they leave can vary depending on injuries, breakages, or obstructions. That leaves limited information with which to work even before we get to the contradictory evidence available about the individuality of bites from one mouth to the next.
Second, skin is the surface most often analyzed for bitemarks, but it's malleable and doesn't reliably take teeth marks to begin with. "In addition, human skin can change the appearance of a bitemark over time depending on the rate and amount of swelling at the site, healing, and skin elasticity." As a result, "human skin as a dependable material for bitemarks is a key area of dispute in the field."
Finally, linking bitemarks that may or may not be unique, left on elastic surfaces that swell and heal, to people is fraught with uncertainty. "Multiple studies have demonstrated a widespread lack of agreement on conclusions reached with bitemark data, including those relating to whether the mark was indeed a bitemark, features present, and inconsistency in techniques used to analyze bitemarks from one case to the next."
That's right. Scientists don't always agree they're examining a bitemark, let alone on who left it.
The NIST report might or might not inspire some humility in the criminal justice system. But it should offer ammunition to defendants against whom bitemarks are included in the prosecution's evidence.
Unfortunately, as that 2009 NAS call for better scientific support for forensic science suggests, the problem doesn't stop with bitemarks. Reason has documented the unreliability of drug-sniffing dogs, flawed drug tests, shaken-baby junk science, and the sometimes dishonest testimony of technicians called to make the state's case. The unreliability of much of this evidence isn't a recent revelation.
"In September the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report finding 'a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence'—such as analyses of hair, bite marks, and shoe prints—'that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity,'" C.J. Ciaramella wrote for Reason in 2016. "This is not just a theoretical problem. Last year, the FBI admitted that nearly every one of the experts at its microscopic hair analysis lab had given scientifically invalid testimony. The breaches affected almost 270 cases. Of those, 32 defendants were sentenced to death, and 14 were executed or died in prison."
So, the NIST report on the failings of bitemark analysis provides extra backing for what even the White House admitted two administrations ago: those cop shows about super-accurate science linking criminals to their foul deeds are more science fiction than whodunnit. As it turns out, it takes a lot more evidence to end the use of bad forensic techniques than it does to throw people in prison or put them on death row.
The post Federal Report Adds to the Evidence That Bitemark Analysis Is Nonsense appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2016, Adnan Syed—the man who was convicted in 2000 of murdering his high school classmate Hae Min Lee—was offered a new trial. The podcast Serial had thrown much doubt on the levers pulled, and not pulled, that led to his conviction, including (but not limited to) the prosecution relying on shoddy evidence and his defense attorney failing to represent him adequately.
Syed's conviction was vacated last month, and today, prosecutors in Maryland dropped the charges. That's not a result of the new trial, which you would be forgiven for not knowing about, because it never happened.
But the trial-that-wasn't is still important to this story, as it says a lot about the lengths to which the U.S. criminal legal system goes to protect the integrity of wrongful convictions, despite that being an oxymoron.
A year and a half after Serial forced new life into Syed's case, a judge with the Baltimore City Circuit Court vacated his conviction—not to be confused with Syed's vacated conviction this past September—and, in June 2016, ordered a retrial, citing ineffective assistance of his defense counsel. That attorney, who was disbarred a year later, had failed to press the state's witness about the notorious unreliability of cellphone tower location "evidence."
In March 2018, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals confirmed that decision. "The criminal justice system places great value on finality, and there are a multitude of procedural hoops, unforgiving deadlines, and burdens of proof for inmates to meet when appealing a sentence," wrote Reason's C.J. Ciaramella after that ruling came down. "Add in recalcitrant district attorney's offices that often oppose DNA testing and introduction of new evidence that could lead to exonerations, and it's a small miracle when anyone succeeds."
The above was perversely prophetic in a way because, like the inmates who fail for the outlined reasons, Syed did not actually succeed. Another wasted year later, after yet another government appeal, Maryland's highest court revoked that new trial in 2019, acknowledging that Syed's counsel had not done her job but ruling he was out of luck anyway.
That the legal system can persist in withholding someone's liberty in the face of viable innocence claims may seem shocking. But it is the rule, not the exception, and Syed's release is the exception, not the rule.
Case in point: The overturning of Syed's conviction happened in spite of, not because of, his appeals to his innocence. Quoting a wise painter, it was a happy accident. Doomed to die in prison, he applied for mercy under a Maryland law that permits resentencing consideration after people convicted as minors serve at least two decades behind bars. But as Lara Bazelon notes in New York magazine, the chief of the Sentencing Review Unit for Baltimore City, Becky Feldman, found a lot more in his application than just a potential candidate for early release. In addition to the aforementioned holes in the case, it became clear that the prosecution had pinpointed two other potential suspects—one had threatened to murder Lee prior to her death—and had concealed at least one of those possible perpetrators from the defense, which is illegal.
More frustrating still is the why. Why is the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office declining to retry Syed, as is often the case when convictions are overturned? DNA evidence from Lee's shoes, which were just recently tested, excluded him. That evidence did not just magically appear 23 years after the murder.
"The Adnan Syed case just goes to show you that there are many, many more [wrongful convictions] underneath," Bazelon, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, tells Reason. "The only reason he got out was because of the sheer pressure of the media attention forcing prosecutors to revisit it over and over…. [Most] don't have any resources, and it's going to be really, really hard to ever find them, and then if we do find them, it's almost impossible to get them out because of these crazy procedural obstacles that we stick in their path."
Syed is indeed not alone. A recent example may be found in Charlie Vaughn, a man who is serving a life sentence for murder and whose case has been meticulously outlined by journalist Radley Balko, as the state continues to prioritize procedure over his claims of innocence. More pertinent still is that today, on the same day that prosecutors dropped the charges against Syed, the Supreme Court will hear a case centered around a man named Rodney Reed. The question before them: Should the state perform DNA testing before it executes Reed for a murder he says he didn't commit?
The post Adnan Syed's Exoneration Shows How Hard It Is To Free Innocent People appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Black people represent less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for more than half of all exonerations, according to a new report released today.
The National Registry of Exonerations releases an annual report each spring documenting trends in cases the previous year where people who have been convicted of crimes have subsequently been found guilty. Today's report delves into racial patterns of the 3,200 exonerations the registry has documented dating back to 1989.
The registry has taken note in its past annual reports of how black citizens are much more likely to be falsely convicted and then exonerated than white defendants. This report, looking over decades of history, shows that innocent black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted.
There are some categories, like child sexual abuse and white-collar crimes, where a greater percentage of the exonerations are of white defendants. But in all categories except for white-collar crimes, blacks are disproportionately represented compared to their share of the population.
The reasons why are varied depending on the crime. It's more complicated than simply crying "racism," and the report explores some of the systemic issues. When talking about murder, the report doesn't shy away from the high homicide rate within the black community and the fact that the vast majority of homicides among both whites and blacks target somebody of the same race. Nevertheless, you can see big disparities in the likelihood of a black person getting convicted for a murder in which they are innocent. The report calculates that even though 40 percent of defendants imprisoned for murder are black, 55 percent of those exonerated for murder are black.
We shouldn't take this to mean that we should be looking for a more representative balance of race among exonerees. Rather, it's a warning of how our justice systems handle or mishandle investigations or prosecutions when the defendants are black. The report notes, "Official misconduct is more common in murder convictions that lead to exonerations of black defendants than in those with white defendants." The report analyzes several different types of government misconduct—from concealing evidence to witness tampering to perjury by officials—and calculates that such misconduct can be found in a greater percentage of murder cases with black defendants than white defendants. The difference is just 14 percentage points, but when you account for the greater number of black exonerations, official misconduct played a role in twice as many convictions (500 blacks to 236 whites) documented in the registry. And the study attributes the difference in the rate almost entirely to police misconduct.
For sexual assault, nearly 60 percent of all rape exonerations were of black defendants, even though only a quarter of all rape prosecutions involve a black defendant. Most are the result of misidentification by rape victims, most of whom were white. Innocent black people are almost eight times more likely to be falsely convicted of rape.
The misidentification problem is well-established by now, and the report points to the simplest explanation: "One of the oldest and most consistent findings of systematic studies of eyewitness identification is that white Americans are much more likely to mistake one Black person for another than to mistakenly identify members of their own race."
The number of new exonerations for sexual assault has declined, and that's actually good news. The number has plunged because the availability of pretrial DNA testing has made it much less likely that somebody will be convicted due to misidentification. DNA-based exonerations jumped up through the 1990s and early 2000s and then started to decline as the availability of testing stopped innocent people from being convicted in the first place. There have been only two documented cases of misidentified rape victims being exonerated since 2009.
Drug crime convictions also get some heavy analysis here because of the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws and the corruption it fosters in black communities. Even though surveys from the Department of Health and Human Services show that white and black people use drugs at similar rates (12 percent and 13.7 percent, respectively), blacks are up to five times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, depending on the year surveyed.
The report notes that there's very little effort to exonerate people convicted of low-level crimes, even if they are innocent. Much of the effort focuses on people with very long prison sentences instead. But drug crimes are a big exception. They account for 17 percent of all exonerations, the second largest category after murders.
The registry focuses on these types of exonerations because of how they illuminate some very serious trends in bad policing. The registry notes clusters and groups of exonerations due to bad policing practices that draw in dozens, possibly even hundreds, of false convictions. In Harris County, Texas, for example, 157 exonerations happened over several years of people who had pleaded guilty to drug possession. Subsequent testing uncovered no illegal drugs in the substances that had been seized. And the registry notes that these exonerations only happened because Harris County has a policy of testing the drugs in a laboratory even if the suspect pleads guilty.
In Chicago, 186 people have been exonerated of drug crimes since 2017 due to a pack of police officers planting drugs, falsifying records, and committing perjury as part of running their own drug racket.
The emphasis on race when discussing criminal justice can frustrate people who see it all as a polarizing part of the culture war. The report doesn't treat it that way, fortunately. But what it does note in its conclusion is something libertarian criminal justice reformers note all the time. The elimination of the drug war entirely would result in a more just system that would be less likely to result in minorities as targets for police abuse. The solution to some of this racist police behavior isn't training or empathy or lectures on critical race theory. It's to just end the stupid drug war. The report concludes:
The causes of this extreme racial discrepancy are plain. Black people are much more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by officers who are trolling for drugs, which puts them at risk of false drug convictions based on factual errors. And Black people are the great majority of the victims of police officers who systematically fabricate evidence to frame innocent defendants for drug crimes.
The solution is equally clear: Stop treating illicit drug use primarily as a criminal problem. The War on Drugs is a heavy burden on our country, but the worst costs are born by Black people and other people of color. If white people were stopped, searched and humiliated as often as Black people, would we even have a War on Drugs? What if police across the country engaged in methodical programs of planting drugs on innocent white people? It's hard to believe.
The post Why Are Half of All U.S. Exonerations of Black Prisoners? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma's governor has ordered a two-month stay of execution for Richard Glossip as the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals considers whether to review new evidence that might prove his innocence.
Glossip was scheduled to be executed on Sept. 22. On Tuesday, Gov. Kevin Stitt released an executive order allowing a 60-day stay and rescheduling the execution for Dec. 8 "to allow time for the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to address a pending legal proceeding."
Glossip has been convicted twice of the 1997 murder of Oklahoma City hotel owner Barry Van Treese. Glossip did not kill Van Treese. Justin Sneed, who was 19 years old at the time, beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. Both Sneed and Glossip worked at a hotel Van Treese owned. Sneed claimed that Glossip orchestrated the murder out of fears that he would lose his job at the hotel and that he promised Sneed money. Glossip denied any involvement, and his lawyers have argued that what likely happened was a robbery attempt gone wrong by Sneed.
Sneed accepted a plea deal to avoid the death penalty and blamed Glossip. Glossip took his case to a jury and was convicted and sentenced to death, which he's been fighting ever since. The lack of concrete evidence against Glossip has fueled concerns that the state may be about to execute an innocent man. This year dozens of state lawmakers, including many Republicans who otherwise support the death penalty, have joined the chorus pushing for a new review of the evidence.
Last week, Reed Smith, the independent law firm that has been reinvestigating the case, released some new evidence that casts further doubt on Glossip's guilt. Sneed sent a letter to his public defender in 2007 saying he wanted to contact Glossip's attorneys, adding, "It was a mistake reliving this." Advocates of Glossip's innocence see this as a possible indication that Sneed was thinking of recanting his testimony against Glossip.
As a result of Reed Smith's disclosure, lawmakers have been pushing harder to convince Attorney General John O'Connor to support a new evidentiary hearing. Tuesday's order from Stitt creates an opportunity for the Court to consider if there's enough evidence that Glossip was wrongfully convicted. Glossip has also filed a clemency petition with the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board.
The post Oklahoma Governor Orders Stay of Execution for Richard Glossip appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Dozens of state lawmakers in Oklahoma (several of whom support the death penalty) are urging the state to consider new evidence that might clear death row inmate Richard Glossip, who has been scheduled to be executed on September 22.
In a letter dated August 4, 61 state legislators urged Attorney General John O'Connor to join a request by Glossip for a new evidentiary hearing to look over some of the information compiled by national law firm Reed Smith that purports to show Glossip's possible innocence.
Glossip is on death row for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese. Glossip did not actually kill Van Treese himself. Rather he was convicted for allegedly masterminding a plan for Justin Sneed (who was 19 at the time) to kill Van Treese. Van Treese owned the hotel in Oklahoma City where the two men worked; Glossip was the manager and Sneed a maintenance man. Sneed claimed that Glossip pressured him and offered him money in return for the deed. Glossip would ultimately be convicted twice—the first conviction being tossed in 2001—and sent to death row almost entirely on Sneed's claims. For his part, Sneed was spared the death sentence, accepted a plea deal, and sent to prison for life for beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat.
Glossip was scheduled for execution in 2015, but he was spared when prison officials realized they had received an incorrect drug for the cocktail they use to execute inmates. The governor ordered a stay on all executions until officials could figure out what happened. Executions in the state were paused until just last year.
In June, after successfully fighting off a constitutional challenge to the state's execution methods, O'Connor began the process of rescheduling dozens of executions for the inmates sitting on death row. Glossip is second on the list, and the rescheduling has prompted a new push for a chance to prove his innocence.
Reed Smith released a lengthy report and summary in July laying out some of the problems with the case. The report shows that police investigating the murder immediately suspected Glossip and when interrogating Sneed repeatedly brought up Glossip's name and essentially pushed Sneed to point the finger back at Glossip. Jurors were not played the interrogation tape at either of Glossip's two trials. Other problems with the case have been highlighted in depth over the past decade.
This week, Reed Smith released an update that shows a letter Sneed allegedly sent from prison in 2007, following Glossip's second trial, to Gina K. Walker, the public defender who handled his case. In the letter, Sneed says he's planning to contact the attorneys with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System (OIDS) who represented Glossip in the second trial. "I think you know were [sic] I'm going," Sneed wrote, "It was a mistake reliving this." He asks Walker to write back.
Walker (who died in 2020) wrote him back acknowledging that "some things are bothering [him]." She says she knows OIDS lawyers attempted to talk to him on Glossip's behalf and says that had Sneed refused a plea deal, he would be on death row himself. She is unsympathetic to Glossip's situation, saying, "Mr. Glossip has had two opportunities to save himself and refused to do so both times," meaning that Glossip had refused plea offers of his own and insisted on a right to a trial to prove his innocence. She concludes, "I hope he has not or his lawyers have not tried to make you feel responsible for the outcome of his case and his decisions."
Of course, Walker's job here is to defend her client and discourage Sneed from making decisions against his own interest. And the fact that Sneed is not on death row himself is likely attributable to his acceptance of the plea deal. But the tone of both Sneed's letter and Walker's response should clearly cast doubt on the circumstances of Van Treese's murder.
This newly revealed letter has prompted Oklahoma state Rep. Kevin McDugle (R–Broken Arrow) to push harder for a new hearing on the evidence against Glossip.
"In 2014, there were statements circulating that Sneed's daughter said Sneed wanted to recant, but she never came forward. With this letter written by Sneed, we have compelling new evidence that strongly supports what we heard. That Sneed wanted to recant his statement implicating Richard Glossip and his attorney shut him down," said McDugle in a prepared statement. "Given that the state's case rests entirely upon Sneed's testimony implicating Glossip, it is imperative that the court remand the case for a hearing before Richard is scheduled to be executed on September 22."
Prosecutors in O'Connor's office have been resisting this push and urging Oklahoma's courts to reject the hearing as a delaying tactic.
The post Oklahoma Lawmakers Urge New Review of Evidence Before Richard Glossip Is Executed for Murder appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor is asking the state to schedule executions of 25 prisoners on death row.
Executions in Oklahoma had been suspended temporarily as death row inmates fought the state's method of execution—a lethal injection of three drugs. One of the drugs, midazolam, is supposed to serve as a sedative that would render the prisoner unable to feel the pain as potassium chloride stops the heart. The death row inmates and their attorneys argued that midazolam has shown to be insufficient to dull the pain and executing prisoners with these drugs amounts to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
But last week a federal judge ruled against the inmates and determined the three-drug cocktail is a constitutional method of execution. On Friday, O'Connor submitted 25 filings with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to try to set 25 dates for executions of inmates. Oklahoma currently has 43 inmates on death row.
According to the Associated Press, O'Connor is requesting the first execution no earlier than August 25 and then a four-week interval between each execution to account for the state's clemency process, so these executions would take place across the next two years. First up would be James Coddington, who would have been executed in March were it not for the aforementioned lawsuit.
Second on the list would be Richard Glossip, who was the lead plaintiff of the aforementioned lawsuit. Glossip was very nearly executed in 2015, but prison officials realized that they had received the wrong drug. Oklahoma officials later realized that they had actually executed a prisoner previously with the wrong drug and all executions were put on hold until last year.
Glossip has been Oklahoma's highest-profile death row inmate because he is plausibly innocent and the details of his case have brought celebrities, activists, and bipartisan calls for mercy. Glossip was originally convicted in 1997 of the murder of Barry Van Treese. Glossip did not actually kill Van Treese directly, but he was convicted of allegedly convincing Justin Sneed to do the deed in exchange for money and the prospect of managing a motel. Sneed cooperated with police and confessed to avoid death row himself. Jurors were not shown footage of police interrogating Sneed and encouraging him to implicate Glossip to save himself.
Glossip's team has evidence and witnesses and experts have come forward to say that Glossip was not involved in this murder. They say instead that it was a robbery gone wrong by Sneed. But despite all the evidence, Glossip has exhausted his appeals.
The evidence in the Glossip case was enough to get 28 Republican and six Democratic Oklahoma lawmakers to send a bipartisan letter to the Gov. Kevin Stitt to ask for a review of Glossip's case. Glossip's attorney, Don Knight, put out a statement urging the state to not execute him while the case is still being reviewed.
"Those findings could reveal exculpatory information previously unknown until this point," Knight wrote. "Until everyone has the opportunity to examine the final report, the attorney general has a moral duty to delay the execution of Richard Glossip. No matter where people stand on the death penalty, no one should want to kill an innocent man. The stakes are too high to rush this process. A man's life is on the line."
Oklahoma has had four executions since restarting them in 2021, but Stitt did deliver mercy to a death row inmate where there were questions of actual guilt. In November, Stitt commuted the death sentence of Julius Jones, just hours before he was scheduled to be executed for the murder of a man killed in a carjacking in 1999. As with Glossip's case, several Republican lawmakers came forward with concerns about Jones' guilt, and the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board agreed and voted 3-1 that there were enough concerns about his guilt to commute his sentence.
It's already settled fact that Glossip didn't actually kill anybody. There's also evidence that Sneed pointed to Glossip to save his own hide. We may see within the next couple of months whether this information is enough to save Glossip from lethal injection.
The post Oklahoma Starts Planning Executions for 25 Death Row Inmates, Including Richard Glossip appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has repeatedly blamed bail reforms and local judges for exacerbating gun violence by releasing defendants back onto the streets, but on Monday she took her rhetoric a step further, saying that people charged with violent crime should be kept in jail because only guilty people get charged with violent crimes.
The comments, first reported by the Chicago Tribune, were part of a longer harangue against the Cook County courts and bail reform efforts.
"We shouldn't be locking up nonviolent individuals just because they can't afford to pay bail. But, given the exacting standards that the state's attorney has for charging a case, which is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, when those charges are brought, these people are guilty," Lightfoot said. "Of course they're entitled to a presumption of innocence. Of course they're entitled to their day in court. But residents in our community are also entitled to safety from dangerous people, so we need to keep pressing the criminal courts to lock up violent dangerous people and not put them out on bail or electronic monitoring back into the very same communities where brave souls are mustering the courage to come forward and say, 'this is the person who is responsible.'"
The comments outraged civil liberties advocates and public defenders in Chicago, and rightly so. They should offend anyone familiar with the American criminal justice system and why it places such an emphasis on the presumption of innocence: to force the government to prove its case and shield defendants from prejudice and demagoguery. Lightfoot's statements are particularly absurd, given the enormous amount of taxpayer money Chicago has spent settling wrongful conviction lawsuits.
"It is sad to see a highly-trained lawyer and former prosecutor so badly mangle the meaning of our Constitution," Alexandra Block, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, said in a statement to Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt. "A charge based solely on assertions of police often has proven unreliable in this city—as evidenced by the city's history of paying large settlements for CPD's role in wrongful convictions."
Last month, the Chicago City Council voted to approve a $14.25 million settlement to Daniel Taylor, who spent more than 20 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 1992 double murder. Taylor alleged that police beat a false confession out of him and hid evidence that he was actually in police custody at the time of the murders. His conviction was overturned in 2013 after the Illinois attorney general revealed that the county prosecutors had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to Taylor's defense counsel, including custody records and interviews with several officers showing that Taylor was indeed behind bars before, during, and after the murders. Two other co-defendants in Taylor's case also received a combined $10.5 million settlement.
In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an investigation into accusations that retired Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara had framed more than 50 people for murders they did not commit. Since then, at least 20 people have already been exonerated in cases that Guevara led.
The most infamous and expensive series of wrongful conviction cases in Chicago have been tied to disgraced Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Burge led a group of detectives who were accused of torturing confessions out of more than 100 men between 1972 and 1991, using methods like suffocation, electrocution, and burning. Burge was fired in 1993 after a police board found he tortured a man suspected of killing a police officer. Overall, Chicago taxpayers have footed the bill for $130 million in lawsuit settlements and judgments related to Burge and his crew, including $5.5 million in reparations to torture survivors.
"Chicago is the false confession capital of the nation," Cook County Public Defender Sharone R. Mitchel Jr. said in a statement. "For decades, the city has shamefully disregarded the presumption of innocence—which applies to everyone, regardless of the charge against them. As an attorney, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot knows that the criminal justice system is not designed to decide guilt early in a case. In fact, in the past year the Cook County Public Defender's Office represented people in more than 11,000 cases that ended in dismissal or a finding of not guilty."
As the ACLU and public defender's office both noted, Lightfoot's attacks on bail reforms have been based on shoddy or nonexistent data. WBEZ reported last year that hacked emails from Lightfoot's office showed that city officials and CPD were aware that the link between gun violence and people bonding out of jail was weak and not supported by studies, but they continued to press the talking point anyway.
Lightfoot's office tried to clean up the mess in a statement later on Monday.
"Let's be clear, as a lawyer, former federal prosecutor, and former criminal defense attorney, the Mayor, of course, knows that individuals are entitled to the presumption of innocence, which is precisely what she said today," Lightfoot's office said. "The Mayor has been explicit that violent offenders should be held accountable for their actions that harm our communities."
Precisely, but not entirely. She also said that the bar for prosecutors to win cases is so high that prosecutors won't bring weak cases, but Chicago's recent history shows the exact opposite.
Lightfoot has a habit, when criticized or facing political pressure, of embracing authoritarian solutions and rhetoric. She recently tried to change the city's curfew for teens through an executive order, despite the fact that such statutory changes have to go through the City Council.
Lightfoot has also repeatedly called on the City Council to pass a new ordinance allowing the city to sue gang members and seize their property, despite pushback from civil liberties groups. Or how about when Lightfoot threatened to jail people who violated Chicago's stay-at-home orders during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Lightfoot often says exactly what she thinks, and if it was a mistake, it was only for erring on the side of too much disclosure.
The post Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Says People Charged With Violent Crimes Are Guilty Because Prosecutors Say So appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Texas mom who has spent 14 years on death row and was scheduled to be executed Wednesday has been given a reprieve by the state's Court of Criminal Appeals.
In 2007, Melissa Lucio was convicted and sentenced to death for the killing of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah. Prosecutors attributed Mariah's death to abuse, but Lucio said Mariah's injuries were the result of a fall down the stairs of the family's apartment.
Lucio, assisted by representation from the Innocence Project, has been fighting for years to prove that Mariah's death was the result of a tragic accident, not murder or abuse. She has claimed that alternative explanations for the child's death were not explored at trial and her confession had been coerced during a lengthy police interrogation. Her other children had been interviewed and told investigators she never beat them. One of them supposedly witnessed Mariah's fall, but the defense did not call on them to testify.
A panel of judges for the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Lucio should get a retrial. But when the state appealed to the full appeals court, judges decided to defer to the state court and uphold the conviction.
For the current appeal in state court, Lucio's attorneys presented nine separate claims as part of a motion to stay her execution. In Monday's order, the Court of Criminal Appeals determined that four of her claims met the threshold to stay her execution and to remand the claims to a trial court for review.
The four claims are significant. The court is willing to consider that false testimony was used to convict Lucio; previously unavailable scientific evidence could exonerate her; the state suppressed favorable evidence; and finally, she may actually be innocent.
"I am grateful the Court has given me the chance to live and prove my innocence. Mariah is in my heart today and always," Lucio said in a statement through her attorneys.
CNN reports what will happen next: A court in Brownsville, Texas, will consider the evidence of Lucio's innocence and make a recommendation to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The court will then decide whether Lucio should receive a new trial.
To be clear, Lucio hasn't been exonerated. The court is going to look at additional evidence that could clear Lucio as well as the claims that faulty science (like a disputed claim that the child had been bitten by an adult) played a role in Lucio's conviction.
Until then, she remains on death row, but she will at least not be executed on Wednesday.
Lenore Skenazy looked at the complicated details of Lucio's case for Reason in March. Read more about it here.
The post Texas Court Stays Execution of Mom Sentenced for Child's Death appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Wrongfully imprisoned persons lost a total of 1,849 years of their lives before being cleared in 2021, according to the newly released annual report from the National Registry of Exonerations.
Last year, 161 people were exonerated for crimes ranging from drug dealing and possession all the way up to murder. People wrongfully convicted of murder made up nearly half of the exonerations, with 75 in all. An average exoneree served 11.5 years in prison before being cleared and freed.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Registry—a product of the law programs at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and the University of California, Irvine's Newkirk Center for Science and Society. Though the registry is only 10 years old, the exoneration records it uses to calculate total numbers and trends go back to 1989. Since 1989, the Registry has counted more than 3,061 exonerations. Taken together, those prisoners lost nearly 27,000 years of life before being exonerated.
As with the Registry's last annual report, official misconduct by prosecutors or police played a huge role in explaining how innocent people end up behind bars for years. Official misconduct played a role in 102 of last year's exonerations. In more than three-quarters of the murder cases that ultimately led to exonerations in 2021, misconduct contributed to the false conviction.
The report notes that the role misconduct plays in faulty convictions has increased in part due to increases in exonerations for drug-related cases and also as result of greater understanding by the public and the courts about bad police behavior:
A majority of those drug cases involved perjury or false accusation, mainly by police officers who framed innocent people. But the increase also represents increased awareness by courts of other kinds of official misconduct, such as forensic fraud and the failure by police and prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence.
Illinois ended up being the state with the most exonerations (38) because of this police corruption. The state is still finding innocent people framed by a group of crooked Chicago cops led by Sgt. Ronald Watts. In 2017, Illinois had its first "mass exoneration" of 15 men who had been falsely convicted based on misconduct by Watts, who was involved in hundreds of convictions that are still being examined. In 2021, another 14 people convicted by the tainted conduct of Watts and his officers were exonerated.
In 2021, the Registry takes note of another mass exoneration in New York City. There, allegations of misconduct and perjury charges against former New York Police Officer Joseph Franco led to prosecutors either dropping charges or vacating the convictions of more than 450 defendants in 2021 and 2022. Those numbers aren't included in the report's 2021 stats, but it's an example of how greater understanding of police misconduct is drawing attention to the horrible excesses and harms of the war on drugs.
The Franco cases also highlight the critical role prosecutors—when they actually care about ethics and innocence—can play in exonerations. The 2021 report notes that conviction integrity units in prosecutors' offices have participated in about 20 percent of all the exonerations in the Registry. They've become very important in getting courts to cooperate in efforts to get people out of prison when they turn out to be innocent. So when Virginia's new attorney general came into office in January and dumped the entire conviction integrity unit in one fell swoop, people were concerned that there would be less interest in releasing innocent prisoners. Attorney General Jason Miyares said that he's actually expanded the unit and now calls it the "Cold Cases, Actual Innocence and Special Investigations Unit."
But at the same time, Miyares has withdrawn support for a 78-page report by his predecessor, former Attorney General Mark Herring, that sought to clear Terrence Richardson. Richard was sentenced to life in prison for drug crimes and involuntary manslaughter. Though he was found not guilty by a federal jury of killing a police officer in 1998, a judge nevertheless used his involuntary manslaughter guilty plea to sentence him to life in prison.
Richardson's attorney has filed a writ of actual innocence with the court to try to get Richardson's manslaughter conviction tossed, and the unit under Herring had supported the effort. But after taking office, Miyares formally reversed the state's opinion on the matter and now argues that Richardson is not eligible because he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter.
It's an example of how prosecutors can get in the way of exonerations—using the complicated rules of the court to keep people behind bars even if there's evidence that they're innocent. An appeals court could decide in May if Richard can join the ranks of exonerees.
The Registry notes that unlike what we're seeing in Virginia, conviction integrity units are proving their worth elsewhere. In 2021, six units reported their first exonerations, including a newly created unit in Orleans Parish, Louisiana. That is a positive trend. It's tempting to look at all the years lost in these reports and despair, but more prosecutors are showing that they're willing to look backward and correct these mistakes.
The post Imagine Having a Decade of Your Life Erased. It Happened to 161 People Exonerated from Prison in 2021. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Shane Lee Brown, then 23, spent six days in a Las Vegas jail in 2020 after cops arrested him on a warrant for Shane Neal Brown, then 49. In addition to the age difference, Shane Neal Brown is white and is taller than Shane Lee Brown, who is black. Shane Lee Brown is now suing the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the Henderson, Nevada, police department, which made his initial arrest, for civil rights violations, false imprisonment, negligence and other wrongful conduct.
The post Brickbat: A Mistake Anyone Could Make appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The authorities executed just 11 prisoners in 2021—the U.S.'s lowest total in recent history. It was the seventh consecutive year that fewer than 30 death row inmates were executed.
According to a December report published by the Death Penalty Information Center, we're also seeing big plunges in death sentences for those newly convicted of capital crimes. Only 18 people were sentenced to death last year, matching the number sentenced in 2020.
Despite the uptick in homicides and gun violence during the past two years, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of pressure to reverse the trend toward fewer executions. Indeed, Virginia, the state that has executed the most prisoners throughout American history, formally ended the use of the death penalty in 2021. Even before ending the practice, the state hadn't executed anybody since 2017. Twenty-three states have now stopped using the death penalty.
There was one major exception to the recent trend of fewer executions. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice began executing federal death row inmates in 2020. Before that, there hadn't been a federal execution since 2003. In the final six months of Trump's term, 13 federal death row inmates were executed, the final three in January 2021, just days before Trump left office.
When President Joe Biden was on the campaign trail, he promised to support an end to the federal death penalty. There have been no executions since he took office. But this moratorium is eminently reversible unless Congress actually passes a law ending the practice. Similarly, Gov. Gavin Newsom has a moratorium in place for California, which has the most inmates on death row (at 699). California hasn't executed an inmate since 2006, though prosecutors can (and do) still seek death sentences there for capital crimes.
Elsewhere, Oregon's Supreme Court ruled in October that a 2019 law that narrows capital crimes to four specific types of aggravated murders (terrorist acts that kill two or more people, premeditated murder of children, prison murders by those already incarcerated for murder, and premeditated murders of correctional officers) should be applied retroactively. This, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, has the potential to resentence all 24 people currently on death row in Oregon. Meanwhile, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has maintained an existing moratorium put into place in 2011.
There are now pushes in Ohio and Utah to abolish the death penalty in those states, and the Death Penalty Information Center notes the bipartisan nature of the two proposals. Utah's Republican-led effort is supported by four county prosecutors (two Democrats and two Republicans). In a group letter, the prosecutors wrote that "the death penalty in Utah today is a permanent and irreversible sentence within an imperfect system. It fails to deter crime. It retraumatizes victims. It disproportionately applies to minorities. It is expensive. And it makes plea negotiations coercive." The bill would replace the state's death sentence with a 45-years-to-life prison sentence.
2021 provided two examples of inmates cleared of the crimes that had put them on death row. In January, Eddie Lee Howard was exonerated for a murder after spending 26 years on death row in Mississippi. Also in Mississippi, Sherwood Brown was exonerated of a triple murder in August. He too spent 26 years on death row. In each case, forensics malpractice played a role in the men's convictions; both were ultimately cleared by DNA evidence.
The Death Penalty Information Center has also calculated the additional costs to taxpayers when people who had been sentenced to death due to prosecutor or police misconduct sue and are awarded settlements or damages. The cases they analyzed for 2021 added up to $78 million in court awards and settlements. Most of that money went to half-brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were coerced into confessing to rape and murder with fabricated evidence when they were teens and served 31 years before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2014. They were awarded $75 million in damages in May.
The post The Death Penalty Continued Its Downward Trend in 2021 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How hard was it to crack the case that exonerated the man accused of raping Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold in 1981 when she was a college freshman in Syracuse?
For Tim Mucciante, the producer who was making a film version of Lucky, Sebold's book about the rape, "the miscarriage of justice seemed obvious," he writes in The Guardian. Sebold had identified a different man in a police lineup than the one she'd first identified, and the district attorney prosecuted the wrong person. But the film's production team assured him the book had been fact-checked, so he should chill out.
Mucciante did not chill out. He bristled at the director's suggestion that they change the race of the rapist from black to white, to avoid perpetuating stereotypes. That willingness to fudge basic facts unsettled him further. "I began to sense that portions of the book that dealt with the arrest and subsequent trial of her attacker were not credible," he wrote in another op-ed on the same topic, this one in The Los Angeles Times.
He stopped being involved with the production but still felt compelled to dig into the case. So a month later, he hired a private eye. Within two days, they had uncovered the name of the real person who had served 16 years in prison for Sebold's rape: former Marine Anthony Broadwater, now 61. (In the book, he was given a pseudonym.) Then, when Mucciante and the investigator got hold of the actual files, they discovered that the case never should have proceeded in the first place.
Sebold originally noticed Broadwater on a Syracuse street five months after the attack and became convinced that he was the man who had raped her. Misidentifying him in the lineup should have stopped the case in its tracks, but it didn't. The only other evidence against Broadwater was microscopic hair analysis—a forensic technique so fallible that the FBI admitted it was junk science in 2015.
Broadwater served 16 years behind bars. When he got out, he married but never wanted kids. He didn't want them growing up with a dad labeled a rapist on the sex offender registry. He lives today in a humble home and has subsisted on odd jobs. It has been 40 years since Sebold's rape, and he has always maintained his innocence.
For this American tragedy, Mucciante does not blame the 18-year-old Sebold. Rather, he blames "an unethical and unscrupulous assistant district attorney." He blames the whole justice system.
But he also has questions "about the 39-year-old Sebold who wrote Lucky." Before writing the book, she had the opportunity to look at a photo of the police lineup again. Wouldn't being confronted with the fact that she identified a man—number five—who looks different from Broadwater—number four—send a chill of doubt up her spine? And at that point, Mucciante wonders, wouldn't she have thought to ask for the case to be reexamined?
For her part, Sebold recently published an apology, writing:
"I will remain sorry for the rest of my life that while pursuing justice through the legal system, my own misfortune resulted in Mr. Broadwater's unfair conviction for which he has served not only 16 years behind bars but in ways that further serve to wound and stigmatize, nearly a full life sentence."
Broadwater has accepted her apology. "It comes sincerely from her heart," he said. "She knowingly admits what happened."
Then again, he and Mucciante are now producing a documentary about the case. It's called—what else?—Unlucky.
The post Why Didn't Alice Sebold Realize Her Mistake? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday, The Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold apologized to the innocent man who ended up imprisoned for 16 years for her rape 40 years ago. Her publisher has also announced that it will stop distributing her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which detailed the crime.
Sebold was beaten and raped in 1981 while she was a freshman at Syracuse University. She identified Anthony Broadwater, now 61, as her attacker. Broadwater was convicted and spent 16 years in prison. After his release in 1999, he was placed on New York's sex offender registry.
But he was innocent. Broadwater was a victim of Sebold's misidentification, as well as some sketchy microscopic hair analysis now deemed to be junk science. Broadwater's conviction was officially overturned on November 22 and he will have his name stricken from the sex offender registry.
At the time of Broadwater's exoneration, the Syracuse Post-Standard reached out to Sebold for comment but she didn't respond. On Wednesday, she broke the silence in a Medium post, apologizing for what happened to Broadwater but also acknowledging that "no apology can change what happened to [him] and never will."
She explains that she has spent the days since Broadwater's exoneration reckoning with what happened:
Today, American society is starting to acknowledge and address the systemic issues in our judicial system that too often means that justice for some comes at the expense of others. Unfortunately, this was not a debate, or a conversation, or even a whisper when I reported my rape in 1981.
It has taken me these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened. I will continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail. I will also grapple with the fact that my rapist will, in all likelihood, never be known, may have gone on to rape other women, and certainly will never serve the time in prison that Mr. Broadwater did.
Her recognition that her actual rapist was never punished hits at the double-pronged injustice whenever a prisoner is later shown to be innocent. Not only was Broadwater's life ruined, but Sebold also didn't get justice. The prosecution of Broadwater is a microcosm of so many issues with the way the U.S. prosecutes crimes and the zealousness that transforms the drive for justice into a need to hold somebody accountable.
In Sebold's case, she actually identified somebody else as her attacker during a police lineup, highlighting a consistent problem that leads to false convictions. Eyewitness accounts are and remain a central feature of prosecutions, but studies show that they're prone to manipulation and nudging from friendly police. DNA tests have cleared people whom witnesses had previously identified as attackers.
The discredited science behind the use of Broadwater's hair to convict him speaks to the faulty forensics techniques that have led to many, many bad convictions. Broadwater was convicted in 1981 partly on the basis that microscopic analysis of hair at the scene was similar to Broadwater's, though there was a chance it could have been somebody else's. It wasn't until 2015 that the FBI acknowledged that this was junk science. In potentially thousands of cases prior to the year 2000, the FBI's hair forensics experts were giving flawed testimony overwhelmingly intended to help convict defendants.
Neither Sebold nor Broadwater is alone here, and even as Sebold apologizes, she was also let down by a justice system that wanted a frightened young woman to have a better memory than she did and a forensics expert who was more certain than he realistically could have been.
The post Best-Selling Author Alice Sebold Apologizes to Innocent Man Who Served 16 Years for Her Rape appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A lot of people want Oklahoma's governor to stop state officials from executing Julius Jones on Thursday.
Jones, 41, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing businessman Paul Howell during a 1999 carjacking in Edmond, Oklahoma. Jones has insisted all along that he is innocent and wasn't at the scene of the crime. He and his defense attorneys point the finger at co-defendant Christopher Jordan, who got a deal from prosecutors in exchange for testifying against Jones. Jordan has served 15 years in prison and is free now.
A change.org petition has more than 6.4 million signatures asking for mercy. Celebrity and criminal justice reform advocate Kim Kardashian spent time with Jones and his mom and is supporting his cause. On November 11, five Republican Oklahoma lawmakers called on fellow Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to grant Jones clemency. The lawmakers' request comes on the heels of a 3–1 recommendation on November 1 from Oklahoma's Pardon and Parole Board supporting clemency for Jones. Many officials are clearly uncertain of Jones' guilt and think executing him at this point is a bad idea.
"The last thing the state should be doing is taking the life of someone who may be innocent," said Oklahoma state Rep. Gary Mize (R–Edmond) in a prepared statement. "There is too much doubt here, especially given that Julius Jones' codefendant has confessed to being the real murderer. We can't move forward with an execution under these circumstances in good conscience. I hope and pray Gov. Stitt accepts the recommendation of his Parole Board."
Stitt has not yet announced his decision, and the "Justice for Julius" campaign is urging folks to call Stitt's office and request clemency on Jones' behalf.
Stitt has overseen the return to executions in Oklahoma after a six-year moratorium prompted by concerns that the drug the state is using, midazolam, is causing painful reactions in prisoners while they die. At the first execution since the moratorium ended, John Marion Grant vomited and went into convulsions as he was dying.
Jones, like Grant, had sued (along with many other Oklahoma death row inmates) to try to stop this drug protocol, arguing that the dangers of midazolam violated their constitutional right to avoid "cruel and unusual punishment." Both Jones' and Grant's lawsuits were tossed because neither proposed any alternate methods for their executions.
Jones' separate lawsuit with four other inmates challenging Oklahoma's execution drug cocktail was rejected Friday by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Based on previous rejections, it seems unlikely that there are enough votes on the Supreme Court to consider intervention. So that just leaves hopes that Stitt, like this small group of Republican lawmakers and like the state's Pardon and Parole Board, has doubts about Jones' guilt.
The post Will Oklahoma's Governor Stop the Execution of a Man Many Think May Be Innocent? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Kevin Strickland, Christopher Dunn, and Lamar Johnson all have something in common: they all have spent decades in the Missouri prison system, they all maintain their innocence, and the cases that led to their convictions have all fallen apart. Yet the men remain behind bars with no release in sight despite various government actors suggesting they should have their verdicts overturned.
It's hard to cook up a more nightmarish scenario.
Dunn was convicted in 1991 of the murder of Ricco Rogers, who was shot while on a neighborhood porch when Dunn was 18. The lone evidence against Dunn: the testimony of two boys who said later that they had been coerced by prosecutors and the police.
"Coupled with the evidence in the record that Petitioner had an alibi," wrote Texas County (Missouri) Circuit Court Judge William E. Hickle in a habeas corpus ruling issued last fall. "This Court does not believe that any jury would now convict Christopher Dunn under these facts."
But Hickle's finding is not enough to set Dunn free, thanks to a Missouri Supreme Court precedent that holds such "freestanding" claims of innocence be limited to prisoners on death row. In other words, had Dunn been sentenced to die for the 1990 crime, he would be in a more advantageous position today. Instead, he received life without parole and thus has no recourse.
"To sit there and watch the judge's reaction to everything the witnesses said, I just knew there was a chance I was going to walk out of there," Dunn told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in April. "To hear him say I was innocent, but yet he can't free me because I'm not a death row inmate, I didn't understand."
Johnson and Strickland's cases are even more absurd, in that prosecutors agree they are innocent. "My job is to apologize" to Strickland, said Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker at a press conference in May. "It is important to recognize when the system has made wrongs…and what we did in this case was wrong. So, to Mr. Strickland, I am profoundly sorry."
Now 62, Strickland was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1979 for a triple-murder that took place the year prior in Kansas City. He has had several heart attacks and sometimes needs a wheelchair.
Strickland's conviction was also circumstantial, hinging on testimony from a woman named Cynthia Douglas, who picked him from a lineup. She, too, later recanted and said that police had pressured her to select Strickland. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and he was convicted on the second go-round.
"I think I've been destroyed," Strickland told the local ABC affiliate in June. "I've been placed in an environment where I had to adapt to living with all sorts of confessed criminals. The way I see things now is not normal, I would think, for somebody in society."
St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner zeroed in on Johnson's case two years back and sought to have him released. Convicted of the 1994 murder of Marcus Boyd, the 49-year-old's story follows a familiar arc: A jury delivered their verdict based only on testimony from a witness who later recanted, admitting police had paid him for his services.
"What we uncovered was devastating, not only to myself, but to the criminal justice system," said Gardner, who described the evidence pointing to Johnson's innocence as "overwhelming" and noted that the jury heard information that was "false and perjured." Two other men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, confessed to the murder in 1996 and 2002, respectively, and signed affidavits saying that Johnson was not involved. Howard is in prison for a different homicide, and Campbell served just 6 years for a crime that Johnson is still paying for.
The fates of Johnson and Strickland are in the hands of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who insists on Strickland's guilt and says that Johnson exhausted all his appeals.
If Schmitt does not petition for their verdicts to be overturned, it would be up to Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, to issue executive clemency. Parson yesterday released a list of pardons that included Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who attracted national media attention after waving their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis.
In the spirit of forgiveness and redemption, their pardoning makes sense; his failure to also pardon Dunn, Strickland, and Johnson does not. If Parson wants to make a point about prosecutorial overreach, he should grant mercy to prisoners incarcerated for crimes the government concedes they did not commit.
The post The Government Says These Missouri Men Are Innocent. It Won't Release Them From Prison. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In England, the Greater Manchester police department said it is investigating after newly uncovered DNA evidence implicated another man in a rape for which Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in prison. No physical evidence tied Malkinson to the crime, and a key witness in the trial now says she was pressured by police to testify against him and does not believe he committed the crime. The police have also acknowledged that two other witnesses against Malkinson had multiple criminal convictions, even though they told the court they had none. "It seems the more questions that are asked about this case, the more skeletons are coming out of the closet," said Emily Bolton, an attorney with Appeal, which works to exonerate those who are wrongly convicted and is representing Malkinson.
The post Brickbat: Under Pressure appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former, Dallas County, Texas, assistant district attorney Richard Jackson has surrendered his law license after the State Bar of Texas found he withheld evidence in a case that led to the wrongful conviction of two men in the murder of a pastor. Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee spent 14 years in prison. The two were freed in 2013 after a new district attorney examined the case file and found evidence that had not been turned over to the defense attorneys. Jackson, who retired in 2013, said he is innocent of the claims against him but will not spend his retirement savings fighting them.
The post Brickbat: The Eyes of Texas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Pennsylvania court has vacated the rape conviction of Termaine Joseph Hicks, freeing him from prison after almost 19 years. The Philadelphia District Attorney's office agreed with defense counsel that Hicks was convicted based on false evidence and lies, possibly concocted to cover up his unjustified shooting by police. On Nov. 27, 2001, Hicks heard a woman crying for help and rushed to her aid. Her attacker fled, but just after Hicks arrived two police officers came upon the scene and shot him. Hicks' attorney says the cops then planted a gun on Hicks. The officers claimed he'd pulled it out of his pocket when they approached him. But the gun had been smeared with blood, and Hicks' pocket was clean. The gun was registered to a Philadelphia police officer who had not reported it missing. The two officers remain employed by the Philadelphia Police Department.
The post Brickbat: The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.
That's the primary theme of a new report, "Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent," released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.
This new report drills into all of the exonerations they've archived up until February 2019. That's 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.
In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.
Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.
The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.
But what happens when a person is ultimately exonerated and the truth of police and prosecutorial misconduct is revealed? Are the police officers or prosecutors disciplined for their behavior? Often the answer is no. The report analyzed what happened to cops and prosecutors who engaged in misconduct and found that some sort of discipline was imposed in only 17 percent of these cases. Prosecutors are hardly ever punished for misconduct, even though the report notes that they are equally culpable as cops. In only four percent of cases did they find prosecutors disciplined in any way for misconduct. Just two have been fired, three disbarred, and only two have ever themselves been criminally prosecuted and found guilty of misconduct.
Police officers, on the other hand, were disciplined in some fashion in 19 percent of all exoneration cases involving police misconduct. That's still remarkably low, but police are far more likely than prosecutors to be criminally charged with misconduct in these cases. At least 30 officers have been convicted. That number may seem low, but the report notes that a single police officer may actually be responsible for several false convictions (most notably in Chicago, which has seen mass exonerations over police misconduct).
After examining a couple of specific cases where problems in police and prosecutor culture contributed to the convictions of innocent people, the report gets to the heart of the matter: Are there any specific, substantive policy changes that can reduce behaviors that lead to false convictions? The final quarter of the report is devoted to recommendations: record police interrogations; have forensic crime labs operate independently of police departments to reduce the pressure to fudge results; create special units in prosecutors' offices to revisit old cases and look for errors; implement open-file discovery and better information-sharing practices with public defenders; and, obviously, institute actual consequences for officers and prosecutors who engage in misconduct that leads to the innocent being convicted.
"Official misconduct damages truth-seeking by our criminal justice system and undermines public confidence. It steals years—sometimes decades—from the lives of innocent people," wrote Samuel Gross, University of Michigan law professor emeritus, lead author of the report and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations. "The great majority of wrongful convictions are never discovered, so the scope of the problem is much greater than these numbers show."
On Monday, after 37 years in prison, Robert DuBoise was formally exonerated in Florida for a rape and murder from 1983 that DNA evidence now proves he did not commit. He was convicted partly due to testimony from unreliable jailhouse informants and controversial, discredited bite mark analysis. His case is a perfect example of how much our justice system is plagued by bad behavior.
The National Registry of Exonerations is a joint project by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Michigan State University College of Law. The full report can be read here.
The post Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last month, Mark and Patricia McCloskey were captured on video aiming guns towards anti-police brutality protesters after the protesters breached the gate to their private neighborhood. On Monday, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner—the city's elected head prosecutor and a Democrat—filed felony charges against the couple for the unlawful use of a weapon.
Gardner's decision to charge the couple despite the fact that they did not fire their guns, no protesters were injured, and the couple did not leave their own private property led Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, to file a brief saying that the couple was free to defend their property under the state's "castle doctrine."
"There is a common law interest if the attorney general feels that the broader interest of Missourians are affected, like the chilling effect that this might have with people exercising their Second Amendment rights," Schmitt told the St. Louis-Dispatch. "We felt it was important to get it in and make the state's position known early."
The conflict between Schmitt and Gardner over the McCloskeys is an inverse mirror to their conflict over Lamar Johnson. Between the two cases, neither prosecutor appears to be consistently applying their own philosophies of discretion and restraint.
Johnson is now spending his 25th year in prison for the 1994 murder of Marcus Boyd. For Johnson to have killed Boyd, as Reason reported last year, he would have needed to leave an apartment party, travel three miles on foot, commit the murder, and travel back to the same party on foot, all within the span of five minutes. Unfortunately for Johnson, his case was marred by false testimony and Brady violations. According to a 67-page motion for a new trial for Johnson filed by Gardner (which accompanied an exculpatory report from her office's Conviction Integrity Unit), Johnson's conviction was reliant upon "perjured testimony, suppression of exculpatory and material impeachment evidence of secret payments to the sole eyewitness, and undisclosed Brady material related to a jailhouse informant with a history of incentivized cooperation with the State."
Johnson remains in prison despite the fact that the lead detective, Joseph Nickerson, was found to have fabricated parts of his investigation. Nickerson reportedly bribed a witness $4,000 to identify Johnson as the killer at trial. Additionally, Boyd's killers confessed to their crimes and absolved Johnson of any involvement in 1996 and 2002.
While Johnson's innocence claims are supported by Gardner, the Midwest Innocence Project, and many others, he continues to sit behind bars because of a procedural deadline that provides just 15 days after a conviction for the filing of a motion for a new trial. When Gardner attempted to file a motion for a new trial last July, Circuit Judge Elizabeth B. Hogan used the procedural deadline to deny the motion.
Schmitt, meanwhile, opposed a new trial for Johnson solely, he said, because of the filing deadline. What's more, Schmitt also supports a proposed Missouri House bill that would weaken Gardner's prosecutorial discretion by giving Schmitt the power to pursue charges where local prosecutors have already decided the penalties to be unduly harsh.
As with most defendants, the fates of the McCloskeys and Johnson do not rest in the hands of impartial people. But in this case, their odds are doubly bad due to a political beef between a tough-on-crime Republican state attorney general and a reform-minded Democratic city prosecutor.
It is odd and unfortunate that Schmitt believes the dismissal of charges in only one of these cases serves the "broader interest of Missourians," and that Gardner appears to have a similarly exclusive view of when her discretion is appropriate. While these two battle over their respective turfs, Johnson is still set to die in prison for a crime he did not commit and the McCloskeys are facing the wrath of the criminal justice system for threatening violence—but not actually committing it—in order to defend their home.
No matter who wins between Gardner and Schmitt, justice loses.
The post The Missouri A.G. Is Advocating for the McCloskeys' Civil Liberties. What About Lamar Johnson's? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, judge sentenced Cody Gregg to 15 years in prison after Gregg pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Days later, a drug test found that cocaine was actually powdered milk. Gregg withdrew his plea, and the judge dismissed the charge. Gregg had initially pleaded not guilty to the charge, saying the powder was actually powdered milk, but changed his mind after spending two months in the Oklahoma County jail. Gregg said he pleaded guilty because he wanted to get out of the jail.
The post Brickbat: Does a Body Good appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When three Tampa, Florida, police officers were fired for misconduct earlier this year, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren put his newly created "conviction review unit" to work. The members pored over 225 closed cases that the officers were involved in, and Warren's office ultimately vacated 17 convictions.
It was a relatively rare move by a prosecutor's office. In less scrupulous jurisdictions, the officers' misconduct might have been concealed under police secrecy laws or the defendants might have been left to challenge their convictions in court, but Hillsborough County is one of the few dozen places in the United States that has a unit dedicated to rooting out bad cases. "In short, we felt that convictions cannot stand based exclusively on the testimony of discredited officers," Warren says.
Conviction review units, also known as conviction integrity units, operate within prosecutors' offices to investigate old cases for errors or misconduct that may have led to a wrongful conviction. The first one started in Dallas in 2007. There are now around 45 across the country, mostly in major cities.
Many district attorney's offices have traditionally operated under a "just win" mentality, measuring their performance by the number of convictions they obtain. Conviction review units are an acknowledgment that public officials can suffer from tunnel vision, confirmation bias, professional ambition, and bureaucratic self-preservation. Left unexamined, these failings can lead police and prosecutors, especially in an adversarial justice system, to dismiss the possibility that they put the wrong person behind bars.
We know that wrongful convictions happen. According to the Innocence Project, there have been 365 DNA exonerations in this country since 1989. Some of the exonerees were awaiting execution. But conviction review units require support and funding—otherwise they're little more than Potemkin projects.
They also need some measure of independence from the larger prosecutorial system. The Hillsborough County state attorney's conviction review unit, for instance, includes a review panel made up of a former Florida Supreme Court justice, a former state appellate judge, and a current appellate judge. Warren says that about half of the conviction review units he's looked at around the country have similar panels.
Another crucial element is buy-in from local law enforcement. "The reality is that we're all doing our jobs because we want to make our community safer and because we believe in justice and fairness," says Warren. "Having innocent people in prison does not advance that mission. They know that, and they recognize that we all make mistakes. We're not perfect, and so just having a mechanism to go back to try to right a wrong that may have occurred is a good thing."
Not all elected prosecutors are so enthusiastic. The Dallas County Conviction Integrity Unit exonerated 30 people between 2007 and 2015 under District Attorney Craig Watkins. Since he lost his re-election bid, however, the only exonerations have been a handful of cases initiated during Watkins' tenure.
The difference between an aggressive conviction review unit and a neglected one is stark. In 2013, Florida resident Eric Wright fired a warning shot at an aggressive ex-girlfriend who burst into his mother's house and refused to leave. Under the state's harsh 10-20-life law for firearm offenses, Wright received a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison. The trial judge who sentenced him and the appellate judge who upheld that sentence lamented the fact that they had no authority to change it. Even the ex-girlfriend wanted him out of prison.
Wright's attorney approached Jacksonville State Attorney Melissa Nelson's conviction review unit about his case in 2018. The head of the unit suggested Wright file a procedural appeal. Instead of challenging it, Nelson's office then offered him a plea deal to be released on time served.
Although the case was outside the scope of the unit's regular work—Wright's claim was that his punishment was outrageously cruel, not that he was innocent—it was the correct function of a conviction review unit, which should determine not only factual innocence or whether rules were broken but also whether the law was justly applied.
In 2018, there were 151 exonerations in the United States, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations. Conviction review units secured 58 of those, even though they only operate in a tiny fraction of the country's roughly 2,300 prosecutors' offices. Imagine how many more people are languishing behind bars for want of government self-reflection.
The post Why Prosecutors Should Revisit Their Wins appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Why should we be concerned about U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr's proposal last week to resume federal executions for some particularly horrendous crimes? Because there's no reason to believe that the flaws that originally cast doubt on capital punishment have become less of an issue.
In his announcement of resumed executions, Barr focuses on "bringing justice to victims of the most horrific crimes." He wants to begin with prisoners "convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society—children and the elderly."
There's no doubt that we're discussing horrific acts. But can we be sure that we've arrested, tried, and convicted the actual perpetrators?
The proportion of death row inmates executed to those set free isn't exactly encouraging. Since 1972, 1,500 people have been executed in the United States. Over that same time, "166 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges and set free," according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Extrapolating from the cases in which death row inmates were proven to have not committed the crimes of which they were convicted, a 2014 study estimated that 4.1 percent of all death row inmates could be exonerated. "We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States," the authors added.
That's an awful lot of people cooling their heels behind bars for crimes they didn't commit.
When former Illinois Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions, in 2000, he decried his state's "shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on Death Row. He said he wouldn't allow executions "until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty."
Capital punishment was formally abolished in Illinois in 2011, inspired by a Chicago Tribune exposé of the human error and malice plaguing the criminal justice system. In the years leading to Ryan's moratorium, 13 state inmates condemned to die had been exonerated instead. Nobody knows how many prisoners who had been executed had not really committed the crimes for which they'd been convicted.
Nothing quite so earthshaking brought about the unofficial suspension of federal executions in 2003, but similar concerns have dogged the practice for every jurisdiction in the country.
Those concerns about getting it right—imprisoning and killing only criminals guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted—continue to cast a shadow over Barr's plan to resume capital punishment, starting with judicial killings of five inmates.
Nationally, the death penalty was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972's Furman v. Georgia over concerns that it was applied in a capricious and discriminatory manner. Further limitations followed in later court cases. And jurisdictions that wished to retain execution as an option reworked their laws in the years that followed to bring their administration of capital punishment into line with the Supreme Court's standards.
The death penalty was restored at the federal level in 1988, and three executions followed: Timothy McVeigh, in 2001: Juan Raul Garza, in 2001; and Louis Jones, in 2003. Without fanfare, the Jones execution was the last such killing by the federal government until—it seems—whatever results from Barr's recent announcement.
The quiet federal moratorium occurred as the criminal justice system across the country came under renewed scrutiny. News reports and independent investigators revealed a litany of tales about incompetent legal representation, lying police, prosecutors suppressing evidence, mentally challenged defendants, dubious crime lab standards, and more. Using relatively new DNA evidence, the Innocence Project boasts of exonerating 365 convicts to-date.
Some of the flaws in the criminal justice system that lead to false convictions are probably inevitable in anything designed by and for imperfect human beings. Others seem fixable, but remain broken because of a lack of political will. In either case, that's plenty of reason to hesitate before imposing an irrevocable penalty on people who might well have been misidentified or even railroaded into convictions for crimes of which they are innocent.
At least something can be done to make things right for the wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. "The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 35 states have compensation statutes of some form," notes the Innocence Project. These jurisdictions offer (often inadequate) monetary compensation, public apologies, counseling, and assistance in reentering society.
In other cases freed inmates have to fight in court to win some redress for the years of their lives stolen from them by the state. But at least they're free and often gain public sympathy.
What do we have to offer innocent people killed by the state because of false convictions for crimes? A lovely bouquet won't do it.
While the evidence suggests that the system is pretty good about getting it right, we do get it wrong. We have lots of room for improvement in the system, including better standards for forensics labs, disincentives to cops to lie and to prosecutors to conceal exculpatory evidence, better legal representation for defendants, and so much more. All of that needs to be done to improve a system that has the inherent power to destroy lives as completely as the the worst criminals it confines do.
Even then, however, we'll never get it completely right. There's always going to be room for malice, incompetence, and corruption. That's why we should punish people for committing the sort of horrendous crimes that Barr highlights while leaving ourselves room to make good when we inevitably convict innocent people.
The post If Bill Barr Brings Back Federal Executions, Innocent People Will Die appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When They See Us. Available now on Netflix.
Five years ago, when director Ava DuVerney came under attack for distorting the history of the civil rights movement (particularly in turning Lyndon Johnson into one of the chief villains) in her film Selma, she retorted that she'd never said it was a documentary. "I'm not a historian," DuVerney insisted. "I'm a storyteller."
That may also be the bottom line on DuVerney's controversial new Netflix miniseries on the infamous Central Park Five rape case of the 1980s, When They See Us. As television storytelling, it's little short of brilliant. As history, the verdict is less certain.
The five were black teenagers charged with rape and near-murder of Patricia Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker who went jogging in New York's Central Park on the evening of April 19, 1989. Found by passersby with multiple skull fractures and lacerations so deep that she lost 80 percent of her blood, the jogger lay in a coma for a week before waking up—with no memory at all of what happened to her.
The kids (they were all between 14 and 16) had all been in the park that night, part of a group of several dozen young black men who had been essentially running amok—"wilding," some of them called it, harassing and sometimes doing much worse to bicyclists, joggers and strolling pedestrians.
Questioned at first as potential witnesses, they soon turned into suspects and then defendants, as one by one they admitted to fondling the jogger or watching her be raped, though none admitted raping her himself. Their interrogations were long, rough and conducted without the presence of defense attorneys or even, mostly, parents.
Those confessions—vague and sometimes contradictory—were about the only evidence linking them to the rape. What very little semen was recovered from the jogger's body didn't produce a DNA match to the teenagers. Neither did a more substantial sample found in a discarded sock nearby.
Their trial turned into a hellish exposition of New York City's (and, to some extent, the nation's) frightful racial paranoia: on the white side, fear of untrammeled black savagery; and on the black side, fear of kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out white policing. And it turned out to be only the opening act of a decade that would continue with the Rodney King riots and the razor-edge divide over the O.J. Simpson verdict.
All five teenagers were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of 5 to 15 years. Except for 16 year old Korey Wise, they were all sent to juvenile facilities and were out in seven years or less. Wise spent 13 years in some of New York's most hard-core prisons, including Attica and Riker's Island—mostly in solitary confinement to avoid beatings from white gangs.
Wise was the only one still serving a rape sentence when a jailed serial rapist (who had also murdered one of his victims), Puerto Rico-born Matias Reyes, came forward in 2002 to confess to the rape of the jogger.
When his DNA matched that of the semen found in the sock, the case against the men began crumbling. The district attorney's office that prosecuted them recommended throwing out their convictions, and the state supreme court complied. Eventually city and state governments settled lawsuits by the five for $41 million, about $1 million per year they served in prison.
This is the story DuVerney—who wrote, directed and produced—tells in When They See Us, and she does it astoundingly well. The chaos of the crime scene, the muddled give and take of the investigation, the complexity of the legal arguments across two trials: Through it all, her narrative never once lurches off the tracks, and her expositional expertise is stunning. No criminology textbook or newspaper investigative series, much less any other film or TV show, has ever more deftly sketched the stacked deck facing men paroled from prison than DuVerney does in a two-minute scene in which a parole officer outlines the Byzantine rules of association for one of the Central Park Five upon his release. The bottom line: Enjoy your time outside, kid, you're almost certainly going back to the joint.
Even more impressive is the way DuVerney follows five principal characters, who age from goofy adolescence to grim, battered adulthood in the course of her tale, never blurring their edges or short-changing their stories, which are relentlessly painful.
One of the most terrifying aspects of When They See Us is that the kids (and, later, the men they turn into) have no one at all they can trust. When terrified Bobby McCray (Michael K. Williams, The Wire) orders his 14-year-old Tron (Caleel Harris, Castle Rock) to sign anything the cops want, is the dad just worried that the cops will otherwise reveal his police record to his boss at work? Or does he sincerely believe that prison is less dangerous than disagreeing with the cops: "They will lie on us. They will lock us up. They will kill us."
This is the stuff of Kafka by way of Stephen King. But … is it true? Cops and prosecutors and the right-wing chattering class have argued furiously that When They See Us is revisionist balderdash—the work of a politically correct Hollywood mob that "thirsts for vengeance against evil spirits," as Ann Coulter puts it with characteristic venom.
To be sure, DuVerney is essentially repeating, unquestioned, the story told by the Central Park Five themselves. Much of it, of course, has been confirmed by events. DAs do not casually vacate hard-won victories in highly publicized cases. Even less easily do local governments fork over $41 million to settle false-imprisonment claims.
And though it's true that prison inmates facing hopelessly long sentences sometimes offer up false confessions to clear buddies or secure favors, Matias Reyes is unquestionably tied to the rape by the match of his semen to that found in the sock at the scene of the rape.
But there's more to When They See Us than the question of guilt or innocence. In DuVerney's view, the New York City criminal justice system didn't just get the Central Park rape case wrong, it actively conspired to convict and imprison five kids it knew were innocent.
The kids were spoon-fed details to include in their confessions. (Cop: "The lady, she was in jogging clothes, right?" Kid nods uncertainly. Cop: "So what was she wearing?" Kid: "Umm, jogging clothes?") When they got details of the rape wrong, they were told to change their stories. When the timeline of events seemed to make it impossible for the kids to have committed the crime, it was rewritten.
The Professor Moriarty directing this conspiracy was, in DuVerney's view, Linda Fairstein, then the head of the Manhattan DA's sex-crime unit and, more recently, a best-selling crime novelist. Fairstein (played by a steely Felicity Huffman, who in real life is getting acquainted with the other side of the criminal justice system) is shown supervising the police investigation from its opening moments, alternating racist rants ("Every young black male who was in that park last night is a suspect!") with rape-culture feminist cant, arguing that it doesn't matter who gets punished for sexual assault as long as somebody does.
When another prosecutor points out that Fairstein's plan to keep quiet about the existence of the sock full of unidentified semen amounts to suppressing evidence— "crossing a line"—Fairstein snaps back, "Where's the line for Patricia?" (Whether DuVerney intended it or not, much of the first two episodes of When They See Us can easily be read as an attack on the overzealous elements of the #metoo movement.)
Fairstein has furiously challenged the way she and the investigation are portrayed in the show, calling it an "outrage" in terms of both tone and factual content. (Most seriously perhaps, she denies supervising the police investigation or even having anything to do with it for the first day.)
I haven't read all the depositions and testimony on the Central Park case and I've no idea if Fairstein's factual claims are correct. But the idea that the police investigation was a fraudulent act of persecution right from the start seems unlikely. The teenagers were first questioned by cops not because they were five random black guys but because witnesses saw them in the park that night, running with the wilding crowd. And the wilders were not just overexuberant children on a lark but a frenetic mob administering beatings to random white people, at least one of whom had to be hospitalized. It made perfect sense for cops to question everybody who was a part of it, even if some of them turned out to be just along for the ride.
There are other annoying and unnecessary bits here and there in When They See Us. One is an absurd preoccupation with Donald Trump, who made some typically stupid and loudmouthed remarks about the Central Park Five while they were awaiting trial. But in 1989, Trump was just a blowhard real-estate hustler, still decades from the presidency or even a reality TV show. He had nothing to do with what happened to the teenagers.
And neither did Al Sharpton, who gets a shoutout near the end of When They See Us as one of the teenagers' champions. Sharpton is mostly famous for his part in promoting a black teenager's phony 1987 claim that she had been kidnapped and sexually abused by a cop and a prosecutor. If Sharpton really was a friend of the Central Park Five, they certainly wouldn't have needed any enemies.
The post <em>When They See Us</em> Is Compelling Storytelling, but Not All Rings True appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before being locked up on murder charges 23 years ago, Ricky Kidd says he was "naive" about how the criminal justice system worked.
"I didn't know that innocent people go to prison," Kidd, now 44, says by phone from the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri. He told anyone who would listen, starting with the detectives who first took him into custody, that he didn't do it. "I needed," he says "to be believed."
In May 1996, Kidd was charged in the double murder of George Bryant and Oscar Bridges in Kansas City, Missouri. The evidence against him was weak, his alibi was solid, and the case in his favor has only grown stronger since Kidd and his co-defendant, Marcus Merrill, were convicted of the murders in March 1997 and sentenced to life without parole. Kidd nevertheless remains locked up.
There's no simple explanation for why he's still in prison. A combination of factors, including an inadequate public defense system, alleged prosecutorial misconduct, and a court system where innocence isn't always enough, has contributed to what Kidd describes as a "horrible nightmare."
This week, Kidd has a hearing for habeas corpus relief under Rule 91, a state law that allows convicted inmates to allege unlawful imprisonment even if their prior appeals have been unsuccessful.
After more than two decades of legal battles, this is Kidd's "best last bite at the apple," says Sean O'Brien, a law professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He has represented Kidd since 2006. Today he is co-counsel along with the Midwest Innocence Project (MIP), a nonprofit that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted inmates.
"While I may fall in the cracks of legal terms or certain legal impediments, my facts will hold up," Kidd says. "I'm certain of that."
***
On February 6, 1996, Alvin Brooks, a former Kansas City cop who was then running a nonprofit called AdHoc Group Against Crime, got a call from a man who said he'd witnessed a shooting. The caller claimed he'd seen three men drive off afterward, Brooks recalls. He told the man to send in a tip to police.
At 11:50 a.m., police were dispatched to the scene. They found Bryant, who was known around the neighborhood as a drug dealer, lying outside his home in a pool of blood. Bridges' body was discovered in the basement.
Kidd, who was 21 at the time of the murders, had a pretty good alibi. He said he was awakened early that morning by his sister, Nikki, who had stayed with him the previous night and wanted to drive his 1993 Toyota Corolla to work.
By mid-morning, Kidd said he and his stepfather had successfully started his other car, an unreliable white 1981 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Taking Nikki's young son D.J. with them, Kidd and then-girlfriend Monica Gray drove the Delta to Nikki's work, where Kidd said he retrieved his Corolla keys.
After picking up the keys at around 11:30 a.m. or noon, Kidd said they took the Delta home. Then Kidd, his girlfriend, and his nephew drove together in the Corolla to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office at Lake Jacomo so Kidd could get a gun permit for a .357 revolver he had his eye on. The sheriff's office was a roughly 30-minute drive from Kidd's residence, says Gray.
Kidd said he filled out an application but was told he'd have to wait a few days for a background check. After stopping to see his ex-girlfriend Kelley Magill and daughter Jasmine, Kidd said he took Gray to her aunt's home, picked his sister Nikki up from work, and drove to his grandmother's house. That's where he learned that Bryant had been killed.
That's quite a few witnesses. But the prosecution argued that sequence of events occurred on a different day than the murders. At trial, Jackson County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Michael Buffalow said the form Kidd filled out, which is dated February 6 and was processed that day and the next, could have been mailed in or turned in by hand prior to that date.
But a 2007 deposition from Susan Jordan, the Jackson County Sheriff's deputy who processed the form, revealed that mail-in applications were exceedingly rare, and that applications were nearly always completely processed either the day they were received or the day after.
Kidd's defense team has taken the straightforward position that since his application was dated February 6 and processed on February 6 and 7, it's unlikely he turned it in on another date.
The dated application serves as a crucial part of Kidd's alibi, but it also suggests a more basic, common-sense defense of his innocence. Why would a killer try to legally obtain a firearm within 24 hours of committing murder? As Brooks, the former cop who got that eyewitness call about the shooting points out: "Even the dumbest of criminals probably wouldn't have done something like that."
***
So why was Kidd charged with the murder in the first place?
A drug dealer before going to prison, Kidd acknowledges he hasn't always been entirely truthful. He lied to police about owing Bryant $500 at the time of his death. More important, though, he failed to reveal a crucial conversation with one of the other men implicated in the killing.
While considerable evidence connects Kidd's co-defendant Merrill to two of his cousins—Gary Goodspeed Sr. (a.k.a. Abu-Rahman Saad Muwwakkil) and his son Gary Goodspeed Jr. (a.k.a. Rahib Muwwakkil)—neither was charged.
Merrill and his cousins resided in Georgia, but all three were in Kansas City at the time of the murders. While he was in town, Goodspeed Sr. rented a white Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera that matched witnesses' descriptions of the three suspects' car.
The three men had similar alibis for February 6. After spending time together at the Adam's Mark Hotel, they said they went to see Henrietta Bynum, Goodspeed Sr.'s ex-wife and Goodspeed Jr.'s mother, with whom the victim, Bryant, was rumored to have had a romantic relationship.
"They had more of a motive at that moment in their life than Ricky did," Teresa Anderson, Kidd's former public defender, says of the Goodspeeds. "Independently of them, I don't think he had any grudge with anybody."
Kidd, who was first named in connection to the crime by anonymous tips, is the "odd man out," his current attorneys claimed in a 2015 petition for writ of habeas corpus.
And at a 2009 federal hearing, Merrill confessed to the murders and furnished crucial additional information to the courts. In his confession, Merrill described how the Goodspeeds met him at a friend's house the morning of February 6 and drove him to Bryant's home. Goodspeed Sr. and Merrill were both armed with handguns, the friend, Eugene Williams, testified—Goodspeed Sr. with a .45-caliber and Merrill with a Glock .9 millimeter. Both kinds of shell casings were later found at the crime scene.
Bryant's 4-year-old daughter Kayla, who was home when her father was killed, told investigators she had seen the perpetrators at the house before. Goodspeed Jr. told police he and Merrill had visited Bryant a few days prior.
"Daddy's brother shot Daddy," Kayla told police. She also reported that one of the men tried to comfort her.
Her account makes more sense in context. Goodspeed Jr. was friends with Bryant and shared a physical resemblance to him. Bryant would sometimes refer to Goodspeed Jr. as "little brother," Merrill testified. He also said he ignored Goodspeed Sr.'s directive to kill Kayla, instead telling her everything would be OK and firing a bullet through the wall.
Goodspeed Sr. shot Bryant and took Bridges, who was remodeling the house, down to the basement, said Merrill. Bryant later got up and ran into Merrill, who shot him again.
Why did Merrill confess so long after the fact? Kidd and Merrill exchanged a series of letters while both were incarcerated, with Kidd trying to convince Merrill to admit his guilt and exonerate Kidd. His efforts were largely unsuccessful until Kidd asked Merrill if the Goodspeeds were doing anything to take care of Merrill's daughter, perhaps implying that Merrill was protecting them in exchange for nothing.
"You could look at it as a crisis of conscience," says O'Brien. "Gary Sr. was the one who killed both of these guys, and Marcus is effectively doing Sr.'s time." Having unsuccessfully appealed his own conviction, Merrill also hopes for a shot at parole if the case is reopened and he testifies against Goodspeed Jr.
Kidd was a one-time roommate and former close friend of Goodspeed Jr. And this was the other key information he initially withheld from police: On February 5, Goodspeed Sr. asked if he wanted to help rob Bryant, Kidd testified in 2009. During their February 7 meeting, Goodspeed Sr. confessed to killing Bryant, Kidd said. He was afraid to volunteer this information, ironically, because he didn't want to be connected to the crime.
***
The witness who placed Kidd at the crime scene was the person who telephoned Brooks, a man by the name of Richard Harris. Harris told police he was walking home after visiting his neighbor when he saw Bryant run out of the garage, yelling for help.
One of the suspects, who Harris identified as Goodspeed Jr., dropped a garbage bag containing what he assumed was cash and drugs, pursued Bryant, and tackled him. Then another man came out of the garage and shot Bryant with a .45, Harris claimed. While Harris identified the killer as Kidd, in his 2009 confession Merrill said it was actually Goodspeed Sr.
While Harris was the prosecution's key witness in its case against Kidd, he's never been able to get his story straight. "He has said virtually everything about everything," Kidd's lawyer O'Brien says, wryly.
Harris told police he had started running away by the time Bryant was shot. But at trial, he said he saw the killer "stand over" Bryant and shoot him.
Harris claimed to have been standing in front of Bryant's house at the time. His now ex-wife, Letha Jones, testified in 2009 that Harris told her he was at his mother's house, about 100 feet or more away from Bryant's home. Another neighbor who witnessed the shooting, Phyllis Davis, testified that she could not recall seeing Harris.
In a 2007 deposition and again at the 2009 hearing, Harris said Bryant's killer had long hair and was wearing a red do-rag. But Kidd was bald around that time.
Harris was also not the casual bystander he initially made himself out as. He later admitted to buying drugs from Bryant on multiple occasions, even though he initially told police they were just neighbors.
Harris may have testified against Kidd because he was scared the Goodspeeds would kill him, according to Brooks. "Since then, he called me," says Brooks of Harris, and "he said why he did what he did."
Little else should have implicated Kidd. "There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime scene that I recall," said Amy McGowan, Jackson County's lead prosecutor on the case, in a 2017 deposition. McGowan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said her "personal belief" is that Goodspeed Jr. was one of the men responsible. She suspected Goodspeed Sr. was involved as well, but claimed she didn't have enough evidence to go after either man.
Brooks thinks the police deserve blame. "They really did a poor job of that case," he says, pointing to investigators' failure to build a strong case against the Goodspeeds based on the similarities between their rental and the getaway car. "They didn't follow up," he adds.
All of which means the prosecution had just two people who implicated Kidd: the unreliable witness Harris and the contradictory testimony of 4-year-old Kayla Bryant.*
***
Lacking the resources for private representation, Kidd's case was handled by a public defender at a time when Missouri's public defenders were utterly unable to devote the resources to Kidd's case that might have led to his exoneration.
A 2012 audit found that Missouri's public defense caseload grew 70 percent since 1990. The office, however, has only expanded by 58 percent. After the findings were released, auditor Tom Schweich said that public defenders have relied for decades on outdated 1970s standards for appropriate caseloads. This has gradually led to more overworked lawyers with less time to spend on each case.
"Everybody deserves to have the best defense that they can have," says Anderson, Kidd's old public defender, who understands this better than anyone.
That right was clearly established for the first time by Clarence Earl Gideon who radically changed the face of the American judicial system with nothing but a pen and prison paper. Gideon was accused of felony breaking and entering, but since he was poor, he was left to defend himself in court. After being convicted, Gideon took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment guarantees every citizen the right to counsel.
While the case expanded civil liberties, the divide between rich defendants and poor defendants remained. While those lacking funds now have access to counsel, many judicial systems, including Missouri's, struggle to ensure access to adequate counsel.
A serious lack of resources cheats Missouri public defenders out of the chance to provide the best defense. Lawyers in an office on a shoestring budget are expected to go up against well-funded prosecutors, despite dealing with heavy caseloads and a lack of information.
One fed-up director of the public defender's office even assigned a case to then-Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D), who was attorney general at the time of Kidd's conviction, as an act of protest in 2016.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class action lawsuit in 2017 claiming that Missouri's public defender system was a "constitutional crisis." It is not unheard of for poor defendants to spend months in jail waiting for a trial. Once they're finally able to see a public defender, their lawyer only has a short amount of time to review their case before entering the courtroom.
"Some people might say that Ricky fell through a crack in the system," O'Brien says. "This is not a crack. This is the system."
Anderson and O'Brien agree that a lack of resources in the public defender's office contributed to Kidd's problems. And at this stage in his appeals process, Kidd no longer even has the right to counsel. For inmates like him, access to adequate representation is largely determined by one's ability to pay for it.
While O'Brien doesn't keep time on Kidd's case, he estimates that exonerations normally cost between $500,000 and $1 million of a lawyer's time. Most attorneys can't devote that much time to a pro bono case. There have been about 2,400 exonerations in the United States since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. It's difficult to ascertain the exact nationwide wrongful conviction rate, though the MIP's website says it could be between 2 and 5 percent or as high as 7 percent.
***
As Gideon v. Wainwright changed the face of American defense, Brady v. Maryland changed the face of American prosecution.
John Brady had been charged with murder by the prosecution, even though his robbery partner, Charles Boblit, previously confessed to the actual killing. The Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that the prosecution's suppression of Boblit's confession during Brady's trial violated his right to due process.
Kidd experienced firsthand how the suppression of key information can seal a terrible fate. In the 2015 habeas petition, Kidd's attorneys identified some of the missteps taken in the trial, including the prosecution's failure to correct false evidence presented in court.
Kate Ladesh, the lawyer representing Marcus Merrill in the joint trial, attempted to divert the blame from her client to Kidd by saying Kidd's fingerprint was found in a vehicle. Kidd's fingerprint was indeed found in a vehicle: His own.
Ladesh never made an effort to clarify this fact, leaving the court to believe that Kidd's fingerprint was discovered in the getaway car. His lawyers think this key omission helped paint Kidd as the guilty party.
McGowan had a legal duty to correct Ladesh's fingerprint claim, according to Kidd's attorneys. They believe Supreme Court cases like Berger v. United States and Giglio v. United States set the legal precedent that McGowan should have done everything in her power to convict Kidd without the use of false evidence.
But rather than correct the record about Kidd's fingerprint, she allowed Ladesh to present her misguided argument without challenge, ultimately helping her own case against Kidd. Additionally, McGowan went so far as to bring up Kidd's fingerprint in her argument without accurate citation of context.
Kidd's attorneys have also claimed McGowan engaged in unfair tactics by pressuring young Kayla Bryant to identify Kidd as one of the suspects. The girl twice denied in court that one of the suspects was in the room, so the prosecution turned to an alleged out-of-court identification she made of Kidd.
Kayla Bryant had previously failed to identify Kidd several times in a photo array, which was captured on video. Police coaxed a flimsy positive identification from her after showing Kidd once again in a video lineup. Kidd's lawyers said that introducing Kidd's image multiple times was a form of suggestive procedure, which made the lineup more likely to end in a misidentification.
Kidd's defense team also argues the prosecution failed to disclose the Goodspeeds' depositions, which were not taken until the Friday before the trial. Anderson says she was not made aware of the depositions despite searching for the Goodspeeds before the trial.
Prosecutors are obliged to "present all of the evidence per the rules of evidence in a fair manner," Anderson says. "And if you have the evidence that someone's guilty, that's what the jury will determine. If you have to shade the evidence in a way to make your case better, you're not doing your job."
McGowan would eventually become a prosecutor in Douglas County, Kansas. But in 2013, the Kansas Supreme Court found her at fault for misconduct and trial errors due to improper comments made during a sentencing hearing. The sentence was vacated as a result. Four other cases were also appealed on similar grounds, and some of her other cases were redistributed among other prosecutors.
Kidd's claims of innocence have earned him the support of a different former Jackson County prosecutor, Cindy Dodge, who's now on his legal team. She told KSHB in 2016 that her own investigation into Kidd's case led her to believe he's innocent. "I wouldn't be working on this and spending hundreds of hours of free time," she said at the time.
McGowan's actions, meanwhile, mean that a guilty man in Goodspeed Jr. is still walking the streets, Kidd's supporters say. And in cases of prosecutorial misconduct, there's often no accountability.
O'Brien says it's "pretty rare" for prosecutors to be disciplined by bar associations for sitting on evidence. After running through a handful of examples, O'Brien jokes that he may have named all of the cases where prosecutors have faced repercussions.
One of the most well-known disbarments in recent history occurred more than a decade ago. Durham County prosecutor Mike Nifong was disbarred after withholding exculpatory DNA evidence in the controversial 2006 Duke University lacrosse rape case. He was sentenced to one day in jail after lying about giving the DNA evidence to defense attorneys.
***
This week in Missouri's 43rd Judicial Circuit, Kidd's lawyers are invoking Rule 91, a state law that gives inmates their last chance for habeas corpus relief in court. It's the latest in a decades-long series of legal fights.
"It's an uphill battle trying to prove your innocence," says Kidd. He believes he'll win, though his optimism arises partly out of necessity. "Surrendering just isn't an option," he says.
O'Brien shares those sentiments. "I should be really cynical after doing this shit for 30 years," he says. "But I'm not, because if you give into it—if the lawyers think you're going to lose—you're going to lose."
Kidd's current legal team argued for years that ineffective counsel, particularly during his trial, violated his Sixth Amendment rights. That claim has been procedurally barred because Kidd's public defenders failed to adequately pursue it during his prior appeals, O'Brien says.
Instead, Kidd's attorneys are now alleging prosecutorial misconduct on the part of McGowan, who they believe committed Brady violations, particularly by withholding the Goodspeeds' depositions. Kidd's lawyers must prove the transcripts of those depositions would have caused a jury to doubt his guilt.
They're also claiming actual innocence. But because Kidd is not on death row, that might not be enough. The Missouri Supreme Court granted habeas relief in 2003 to another wrongfully convicted O'Brien client, Joseph Amrine. But Amrine was a death row inmate and the rejection of a subsequent case suggested the court is inclined to limit this remedy only to those condemned to die.
If the circuit court rules against Kidd, he can appeal to the district court and even the Missouri Supreme Court. And then that's it—he will have exhausted his legal options, with the exception of executive clemency.
Kidd and his supporters believe a court system where asserting innocence on appeal is unduly difficult has contributed to his continued incarceration. The public defender on his direct appeal, for instance, didn't even try to argue his actual innocence. "We have a system that values finality over fairness," says Tricia Bushnell, the MIP's executive director and one of Kidd's attorneys.
After O'Brien took the case, he unsuccessfully petitioned for federal habeas corpus relief. The since-deceased Judge Scott Wright of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, who denied the petition, nonetheless said at Kidd's 2009 hearing that "for [Goodspeed Sr.] to get off free would just be awful." Goodspeed Sr. has since died.
"On the federal level in the United States, it's an open question of whether or not being innocent entitles you to be released from prison," says Bushnell.
"We're here asserting his actual innocence, but we get stuck in these arguments of procedure," Bushnell says. "What if we just agreed that the court should hear the evidence, and just decide it on the merits?"
"They don't engage the facts," Kidd says of the state's attorneys, "so they nickel over the technicalities of the law."
Kidd compares the experience of losing time and again in court to taking a gut blow during a boxing match. "Suddenly, all the air has left your lungs," he says. "While you're waiting for them to fill back up, you can imagine yourself gasping for air and enduring extreme pain all at the same time."
***
"I'm going to walk a testimony of faith and transformation."
Kidd wrote these words in "I Wanna Be Like My Father," a play recently performed by his fellow inmates. Their performance was captured and shared on YouTube. The play focuses on a man trying to choose between a life of God and peer pressure.
Religious themes are often present in Kidd's plays, poetry, and books. So is the legal system. If exonerated, Kidd hopes to bring another play, "Justice, Where Are You?" to the stage.
His writing, he says, has helped him throughout the last 23 years.
"I use pen and paper to express myself," Kidd says. "Writing has been instrumental as a coping tool or a coping mechanism for me. Bottled emotions and expressions not properly channeled, shaken up, can cause a mess."
But like Clarence Earl Gideon, Kidd's writing has done more than offer personal solace. When he was first incarcerated, he wrote hundreds of letters proclaiming his innocence to people on the outside. While his fellow inmates laughed, Kidd kept going. For years following his conviction, his efforts were largely to no avail. But eventually, thanks to Kidd's unrelenting labor, the cavalry did come.
And this week, the court may join the growing number of people who have come to believe in Kidd's innocence. If that happens, it will be because Kidd didn't abandon his struggle. "All I know to do is fight," he says. "The opposite is not an option."
*CORRECTION: This article originally stated that three people implicated Kidd: Richard Harris, Kayla Bryant, and Marcus Merrill. In fact, Merrill did not implicate Kidd and never accused him of the crime. We regret the error.
The post 'Some People Might Say That Ricky Fell Through a Crack in the System. This Is Not a Crack. This Is the System.' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2018 alone, wrongly convicted prisoners lost more than 1,600 years of life behind bars.
That's a new record, according to the annual report from The National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks all exonerations from 1989 onward. In 2018, 151 people were freed from serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. They had served 1,639 years altogether, an average of about 11 years per person.
Another record set last year is also worth our attention: More of these exonerations are happening in cases where misconduct by officials played a role. The report documents official misconduct in at least 107 exonerations last year. Official misconduct played a role in 80 percent of the 54 homicide cases in 2018 in which the person convicted was subsequently exonerated.
One of the big drivers of misconduct-fueled exonerations in 2018 was good old, corrupt Chicago. In 2017, Chicago saw its first-ever "mass exoneration" due to a corruption scandal involving Sgt. Ronald Watts. Watts was charged with leading his unit of officers in a massive protection racket where officers planted drugs on people who refused to pay extortion demands. In 2017, the convictions of 15 men were tossed out by prosecutors.
Further investigation into the extent of Watts' actions and those of his officers led to more exonerations in 2018. Another 31 defendants had their charges tossed out last year. And the report notes that even more exonerations have come this year—another 14 of them. The Watts cases have prompted the National Registry of Exonerations to rethink how it handles "group exonerations." Historically, this report has not included group exonerations in its statistics (the Watts exonerations from 2017 were not in its last report) because its definition calls for individualized re-examination of specific cases. After taking a closer look at the Watts cases, they've realized that even though these are group exonerations, the defendants are also seeing individualized reinvestigations. So they're going to start adding these exonerations to their statistics if they qualify.
Because of Chicago's police corruption, Illinois topped the list of states for exonerations last year, with 49. New York and Texas tied for second with 16 exonerations each, which shows just how much the behavior by Watts' crew shaped the overall statistics.
A few additional details from the latest report:
Check out the full report here. The National Registry of Exonerations is put together by the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Michigan State University College of Law.
The post U.S. Prisoners Have Lost a Combined 20,000 Years of Life to False Convictions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In my opening article, I explain that a growing body of academic literature discusses the problem of wrongful convictions—i.e., convictions of factually innocent defendants for crimes they did not commit. But how often do such miscarriages of justice actually occur? Justice Scalia cited a figure of 0.027% as a possible error rate. But the conventional view in the literature is that, for violent crimes, the error rate is much higher—at least 1%, and perhaps as high as 4% or even more.
My article suggests a much lower estimate is appropriate. Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas. Combining empirically based estimates for each of these three factors, a reasonable (and possibly overstated) calculation of the wrongful conviction rate appears, tentatively, to be somewhere in the range of 0.016%–0.062%—a range that comfortably embraces Justice Scalia's often-criticized figure.
If my article's tentative error-rate range is correct, it means that previous scholarship has significantly overstated the risk of wrongful conviction. Moreover, it is possible to compare the lifetime risk of being wrongfully convicted to the risk of being a victim of a violent crime. The relative risk ratio appears to be about 30,000 to 1. This decidedly skewed ratio suggests that reform measures for protecting the innocent may need to be cautiously assessed to ensure that they do not interfere with the important goal of prosecuting the guilty.
Professor Thomas' article then advances a slightly different view, partially in response to mine. Thomas argues that the DNA revolution has revealed that the conviction of an innocent defendant by the vaunted American criminal justice system is far from a freakish event. The National Registry of Exonerations now lists more than 2,200 cases of wrongful convictions. Thomas notes that 2,200 cases is a minuscule number compared to the roughly 1.5 million felons in state and federal prisons at any given moment. But the last quarter century has seen a vigorous debate about the error rate that leads to the conviction of innocent defendants. Estimates have ranged from 0.027% to 15%. Thomas finds most estimates are in the 0.5% to 2% range.
Professor Thomas then makes the first effort to draw on an existing data set of actual claims of innocence to estimate the overall error rate in the criminal justice system. The data come from the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission (NCIC), a unique program that allows applications for exoneration from convicted felons. Conservative assumptions about the North Carolina data set produce a likely error rate of 0.125% to 0.5%. Though his estimates of the wrongful conviction rate are limited to North Carolina, Thomas finds no reason to think that the error rate is materially different in other states. His article is, in part, a response to my opening article (discussed above). Though Thomas' findings as to the estimated error rate are higher than mine, he agree that previous estimates tend to be generally too high.
In the last of the three articles, I briefly reply to Professor Thomas. I agree with him that determining an error rate for wrongful convictions remains among the most pressing problems in criminal justice research. And his use of the NCIC data provides an intriguing way to make that determination. My reply article reassesses Thomas's North Carolina estimate rate, concluding it to be somewhat too high. It then looks at another state—my home state of Utah—to find another possible jurisdiction-specific error rate. Properly calculated, the wrongful conviction rates for North Carolina and Utah support my earlier-offered suggestion of a wrongful conviction rate in this country much lower than the rates commonly suggested in other wrongful conviction literature. My reply concludes by underscoring the important point of convergence between Thomas's estimate and my estimates: both are much lower than the conventional wisdom on the subject suggests.
The post How often are innocent persons convicted? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New York will be the first state to establish an independent commission to investigate claims of misconduct by county-level prosecutors. Or rather, it will, unless the prosecutors use the courts to stop the law from taking effect.
On Monday, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that would create a commission to investigate claims of misconduct by prosecutors within the state. The panel is based on a similar panel in the state used to evaluate judges. It would have the authority to investigate claims of improper behavior by the state's 62 district attorneys (and their subordinates) and can censure them or even go so far as to recommend to the governor that the prosecutor be removed.
The timing of this bill connects well to the most recent report of exonerations in the United States. Last year, dozens of people were release from prison after misconduct by various government officials was uncovered. All but two out of 13 exonerations of prisoners in New York last year involved official misconduct in some capacity (this could include police and judges, not just prosecutors).
Prosecutors are rarely ever punished for misconduct when it's caught. Matt Ferner at The Huffington Post tags a report from 2013 showing that less than two percent of prosecutors found to have engaged in misconduct have been sanctioned in any way for misbehavior between the years of 1963 to 2013. In New York, only three prosecutors have been punished in 151 cases of misconduct from 2004 to 2008.
District attorneys are nevertheless resistant and are planning to file suit. The District Attorneys Association of the State of New York is trying to stop it, saying the measure is unnecessary and unconstitutional and is telling prosecutors to resist appointment to the commission to try to keep it from actually operating (prosecutors will be assigned to four of the 11 seats). The association complains that only the governor can remove prosecutors. Cuomo's signature on the bill comes with a condition that it be amended to fix any constitutional concerns before the commission actually gets to work.
The district attorneys also point to existing grievance committees in each appellate division to handle complaints. One such committee disbarred a former district attorney over the summer for misconduct. But opponents point to those stats Ferner mentioned. Prosecutors are rarely ever punished for misbehavior, even when it results in innocent people being imprisoned for years.
The Innocence Project praised Cuomo for signing the legislation. As Policy Director Rebecca Brown notes in a statement, "while most prosecutors respect their ethical obligations, far too many innocent people have been wrongly convicted as a result of prosecutorial misconduct, and until today there was no effective means for holding those who commit bad acts accountable. We hope other states will follow New York's lead and address this serious problem plaguing the criminal justice system."
Read the bill here.
The post New York Sets Up First Statewide Panel to Investigate Prosecutorial Misconduct appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended several questionable forms of forensic evidence Tuesday.
"Most of you work on the front lines of the criminal justice system, where forensic science has been under attack in recent years," Rosenstein said in a speech at the National Symposium on Forensic Science. "Some critics would like to see forensic evidence excluded from state and federal courtrooms."
Over the past two decades, DNA testing has revealed hundreds of wrongful convictions, many of them stemming from "pattern" evidence such as bite marks, shoe prints, and microscopic hair comparison. The Justice Department has been under pressure to improve forensic standards since it and FBI admitted in 2015 that two dozen examiners in one of its hair analysis labs had given flawed testimony in hundreds of cases. In those cases, 32 defendants were sentenced to death; 14 were eventually executed or died in prison.
In 2016, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report finding "a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence"—such as analyses of hair, bite marks, and shoe prints—"that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity."
But the Justice Department, under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, has rejected calls to stop relying on such evidence. In his speech Tuesday, Rosenstein continued to defend them:
Many of the challenged methods involve the comparison of evidence patterns like fingerprints, shell casings, and shoe marks to known sources. Critics argue that the methods have not undergone the right type or amount of validation, or that they involve too much human interpretation and judgment to be accepted as "scientific" methods.
You regularly face Frye and Daubert motions that challenge the admission of routine forensic methods.
Those arguments are based on the false premise that a scientific method must be instrument-based, automated, and quantitative, excluding human interpretation and judgment. Such critiques contributed to a recent proposal to amend Federal Rule of Evidence 702 for cases involving forensic evidence. The effort stems from an erroneously narrow view of the nature of science and its application to forensic evidence.
Forensic science is not only quantitative or automated. It need not be entirely free from human assumptions, choices, and judgments. That is not just true of forensic science. It is also the case in other applied expert fields like medicine, computer science, and engineering.
Betty Layne DesPortes, a Virginia criminal defense attorney and past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is troubled by Rosenstein's comments on court challenges to evidence. "Not challenging 'routine methods' is what got us dozens of wrongful convictions with bite marks and hair analysis," she says, speaking in her personal capacity. "The idea that we're scientists, so don't challenge us, is very, very dangerous for the criminal justice system, and quite frankly dangerous for science too."
DesPortes and other figures in the criminal defense world say Rosenstein inaccurately portrayed both their position and the actual issue: the untested reliability of pattern evidence like bite marks and shoe prints. Rosenstein's speech "mischaracterizes and distorts the issues raised over the last decade concerning the problems with unreliable forensic practices," says Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project. "The criticism of pattern matching disciplines is not that these disciplines involve human judgment and interpretation, but rather that there has never been sufficient scientific empirical research to ensure that those human judgments and interpretations have a reliable scientific foundation. The Department of Justice, no less than the Innocence Project, should want to ensure that only reliable science is used in criminal prosecutions because we are all harmed when the wrong person is convicted of a crime."
For example, in the case of bite mark evidence, the PCAST report stated that "available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark."
Reporting by former Reason reporter Radley Balko has revealed several wrongful conviction cases based on spectacularly flawed bite mark analysis. And yet bite mark evidence, along with such questionable methods as blood spatter and tool mark analysis, has never been barred from a single courtroom in the U.S.
Drew Findling, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), points out that his organization has worked for several years with the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Innocence Project to review flawed microscopic hair comparison analysis and notify defendants who this evidence was used against.
"Given this context, we are concerned about [Rosenstein's] comments that pattern evidence that does not have sufficient foundational validity may be offered solely based upon 'human assumptions, choices and judgments' instead of science," Findling says. "NACDL is concerned that the remarks could lead to a policy that will leave the door open to unreliable forensic evidence."
While the Justice Department has made many changes to improve forensic practices, it has strenuously resisted calls for more sweeping reforms. Under former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the Justice Department rejected PCAST's recommendations to require expert witnesses to disclose error rates in their testimony and, where methods haven't been scientifically verified, not use them at all.
The National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS), an independent review group formed by the Obama administration, released a draft code of ethics for forensic science providers. The draft code included a mandate to inform all parties, including defendants and victims, when misconduct or a lack of professional standards adversely affected a case. But when Lynch adopted the new code of ethics in a 2016 memo, it only required forensic providers to "inform the prosecutors involved…of material nonconformities or breaches of law or professional standards that adversely affect a previously issued report or testimony."
Last April, the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, chose not to renew the NCFS's charter, effectively shuttering the group. At the the commission's final public hearing, Keith Allen Harward, who spent 33 years in Virginia state prison for rape and murder before being exonerated by DNA evidence, testified.
"It's not right. Why's it still around?" Harward said of bite mark evidence. "Just this year there's been two people, like me, who've gotten out. Explain to me, what does it take to admit that this stuff's all crap?"
The Justice Department replaced the commission with new working groups, but former members of the NCFS and others in the field worry that these are essentially in-house and will lack the NCFS's independence.
Rosenstein's comments are a shame, DesPortes says, because almost everyone welcomes many of the improvements he announced, such as introducing rules about what language forensic experts can use while testifying.
"The ironic thing is, I think both sides agree that the steps being taken are good steps," DesPortes says. "We all agree on what to do, it's just we don't agree on how each side is characterizing the battle. When both sides do that, walls go up and things become more difficult."
The post Rod Rosenstein Defends Bad Forensic Science appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2017, 84 Americans were freed from prison after revelations of government misconduct helped prove them innocent. That sets a record, according to an annual report on exonerations in America.
It's actually only part of the picture. An additional 96 defendants in Chicago and Baltimore were released last year in "group exonerations" as a result of two very high-profile police corruption cases.
The details are part of the National Registry of Exonerations' annual report, a project by the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Michigan State University College of Law. All in all, 139 exonerations were added to their registry for 2017, a drop from 171 in 2016. Though the total number of exonerations came down, a record number of people were exonerated due to official misconduct, mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions, and perjury or false accusations.
There has been a significant decline in exoneration for drug crimes—just 16 this year—and that's because a backlog of cases from Harris County, Texas, has finally been cleared. In Harris County, the district attorney's office discovered hundreds of cases where defendants pleaded guilty to drug possession but subsequent crime lab tests discovered no actual illegal substances in the drugs. The county has been working since 2014 to go through all these cases and free people imprisoned for substances that turned out to not be illegal.
These stats do not include the group exonerations in Chicago and Baltimore, because the National Registry treats them separately from targeted exonerations of individuals who have had to prove their innocence from behind bars. Around 1,800 people were freed in such group exonerations from 1989 to 2017; the number of targeted exonerations in that period is 2,161.
Some other interesting stats:
The Registry of Exonerations' reporting only goes back to 1989. But this week they've also unveiled a database of 369 exonerations that they have been able to track down that took place prior to 1989, going all the way back to 1920. Exonerations were much less frequent, but the circumstances around them were similar to what we see today—faulty eyewitnesses, bad forensics science, official misconduct.
"Fifty or a hundred years ago, an innocent defendant in prison had no one to turn to," said Michigan State University law professor Barbara O'Brien, editor of the registry, in a press release. "The main reason we're seeing more exonerations now is that they can seek help from innocence organizations and prosecutors' offices who are committed to fixing wrongful convictions and are increasingly working together."
The report notes that organizations devoted to helping people prove their innocence participated in 54 exonerations last year—another record. On Monday, I moderated a panel at South by Southwest in Austin that included Rebecca Brown, policy director of the Innocence Project. Brown discussed reforms that can help keep innocent people from getting caught up in the justice system, and we talked about what can be done to help those who have been exonerated. An audio recording of the panel can be heard here.
The post Discovery of Police Corruption Freed Dozens of Imprisoned Americans in 2017 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Guess which city's police department is so corrupt that prosecutors this week performed what they're calling the county's first "mass exoneration" of men framed for drug crimes?
It's Chicago, of course. Cook County prosecutors have just tossed out the convictions of 15 men framed by a pack of police led by Sgt. Ronald Watts. Watts was accused of running a drug and protection racket with his fellow officers and was eventually convicted and sent to prison for taking money from a drug courier who was actually an undercover FBI officer.
There may be more to come. According to defense attorneys with the University of Chicago's Exoneration Project, Watts was involved in nearly 500 convictions, all of which are now considered suspect.
As for the rest of Watts' crew, Chicago Police announced Thursday night that seven other police officers have been put on desk duty while their behavior is investigated. Asked why they're still on the force, a city official said they hadn't been convicted of a crime. Via the Chicago Tribune:
Asked earlier Thursday why several officers tied to Watts' corrupt crew were still on the force, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson noted none had been convicted of a crime — unlike Watts.
"They have due process and rights just like any citizen in this country," he told reporters after his speech to the City Club of Chicago. "… But we just can't arbitrarily take the job away from people."
Apparently, it was even a struggle to get the police to take them off the street during the investigation. Earlier Thursday, the city was adopting a "wait and see" attitude, but they had changed their mind by the evening.
In the private sector, employers don't have to wait for somebody to be convicted of a crime to cut ties with them. It's not "arbitrarily" taking a job away to fire a police officer who is deemed to be dangerous or incompetent or corrupt, even if he or she has not been convicted of an actual crime.
The Tribune notes that the exonerations will now allow the 15 men to file wrongful conviction lawsuits against the city. Chicago has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for police misconduct. Two police officers who were blackballed while attempting to expose Watts' misconduct themselves earned a $2 million settlement in a lawsuit.
Chicago has a serious police misconduct problem. Chicago also has a serious budget crisis that they're trying to tax and fine their way out of (and failing). It's not "arbitrary" to dump out bad cops that are costing the city millions due to their bad behavior. It, in fact, may be necessary to keep the city solvent.
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]]>After 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, charges against Desmond Ricks have been dropped. The Michigan Innocence Clinic showed that his 1992 conviction was based on fraudulent evidence contrived by Detroit law enforcement reported, The Detroit News.
Ricks was convicted of second degree murder for the death of his friend Gerry Bennett, who was shot outside of a Detroit burger joint. Prosecutors and police claimed that Ricks killed Bennett in cold blood using a gun that belonged to his mother, Mary Ricks. The Detroit Police Crime Lab, which was closed in 2008 due to an audit that found errors in ballistics testing, claimed to match the bullets from Bennett's body to those in Mary Ricks' gun. His case was referred to the Michigan Innocence Clinic in late 2011.
David Moran, director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, spoke with Reason. He believes evidence shows that the Detroit Police Crime Lab acted fraudulently:
"On the same day that the police seized the gun from Mary Ricks, Desmond Ricks' mother, the Detroit Police Crime lab issued a one page report saying that the bullets pulled from Gerry Bennett's body matched that gun and no other gun in the world. And that's simply not possible because we now know what those bullets looked like. They were analyzed by the Michigan State Police and we have photographs of them. They are horribly mangled as you would expect from soft lead .38-caliber bullets that go from a skull all the way to the spine. There are just not enough marks left on the bullets to match them to any gun. So there is no way that those bullets could have been definitively matched to any gun…It's very hard to see how that could have happened otherwise outright fraud."
In the original trial, the judge appointed ballistics expert David Townshend to conduct independent analysis of the bullets. Townshend initially verified the Detroit Crime Lab's findings.
From prison, Ricks contacted Townshend and asked him to visit him here, even offering the retired Michigan State Police Officer gas money. As explained by Moran, Townshend would conduct his analysis by firing bullets from Mary Ricks' gun into a water tank and comparing those to the autopsy bullets given to him by Detroit police. Townshend was always suspicious of the bullets he received "because they didn't seem like they were mangled enough for having gone through a skull and in the spine. Nor did they have the stains that you would expect to see on bullets that had been pulled out of a dead body" Moran said.
After the 2008 crime lab scandal and visiting Ricks in prison, Townshend came to the conclusion that the autopsy bullets were switched with the Detroit Crime Lab's own test bullets. He signed an affidavit in 2015 stating that the bullets he received were not from Bennett's body.
Unfortunately, Ricks' case may just be the tip of the iceberg. According to Moran, the Detroit police violated the Constitution frequently in the 1990s by inventing false confessions or arresting and holding witnesses until they implicated a defendant. While the Wayne County Prosecutors Office received a grant to look into other cases that the Detroit Crime Lab may have mishandled, they only searched back to 2003. Moran intends to ask the Michigan Attorney General to launch a full independent investigation into convictions based on crime lab analysis.
For now, Ricks told The Detroit News that he is ready to move forward: "There's no excuse for what they did, but I have to move on. I just didn't want to die in prison. Now, I'm just trying to get some semblance of my life back. I just want to pay my taxes and be a good citizen."
He is also entitled to $1.25 million from the state.
The post Man Free After Serving 25 Years for Murder Linked to Switched Bullets appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>America saw another record year for the number of prisoners being exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science & Society, University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law.
For 2016, 166 people were exonerated of crimes and released from prison, 52 of them for murder. Of all the exonerations, 70 cases involved official misconduct of some sort, and in 74 of the cases, convictions came from guilty pleas. And in 94 cases (also a record) it turned out that no actual crime occurred at all. These were mostly drug cases but also some child sex abuse cases. Most famously, the San Antonio Four, four women convicted in 1998 in a fabricated satanic child sex abuse ring scandal, were released in 2016 after it finally became clear the crimes never occurred.
This year researchers decided to go back over its entire history of reporting exonerations dating back to 1989 to examine the role of race in wrongful convictions. It turns out it's a big role. Try to contain your surprise. The analysis focused on the three types of crimes that have, over time, produced the greatest number of exonerations in the registry: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes. Here's some of their calculations from 27 years of data pulled from the study's executive summary:
A reader examining the studies cannot help but come away with the impression that government official misconduct combined with the obsession with the drug war (which feeds the need for results, which therefore encourages the misconduct) play a massive role in putting innocent people away. This is not to dismiss issues of race and how it affects jury decisions and eyewitness accounts—but many police and prosecutors are more than willing to use and abuse those issues to get "results."
Read the exoneration report for 2016 here. Read the special report on the relationship between race and wrongful convictions here.
The post Decades of Exoneration Stats Show Blacks More Likely to Be Wrongfully Convicted appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Donald Trump so famously believed in the guilt of five teenagers accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989 that he put out full-page advertisements in New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in the state.
There was no evidence attaching the five young men to the crime, and they were convicted on the basis of confessions coerced after days of interrogations. It wasn't until 2002 that another man (who encountered one of the convicted men in prison) confessed to the crime. DNA evidence (which was not presented in the original trial) matched up. The five boys, now full-grown men, have been exonerated. They've gotten a settlement for $41 million from the city of New York.
Trump still thinks they're guilty. They confessed! The police said they were guilty! That's apparently what Trump recently told CNN in an interview:
"They admitted they were guilty," Trump said this week in a statement to CNN's Miguel Marquez. "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same."
Since Trump obviously still believes that the Central Park 5 are guilty, it cannot be said he is lying or even misleading. But he is undoubtedly holding steadfast to an opinion in the face of DNA evidence to the contrary and the fact that the Central Park 5 have been exonerated by the legal system.
One wonders if he even knows about the gentleman who confessed. According to the Innocence Project, one of our four people who have been convicted but are later exonerated due to DNA evidence have actually confessed to the crime. There are a whole host of reasons why the boys confessed their own involvement or that of their friends.
Trump's stubborn clinging to his snap conviction of the boys from back in 1989 should be considered a dire warning about any sort of possible criminal justice reform if the man were to become president. Concepts like reduced sentences, eliminating mandatory minimums, ending the unnecessary use of solitary confinement, increased commutations—all of these criminal justice reforms depend on people in positions of authority recognizing that their long-held concepts of judicial punishment are incorrect. In order to reform sentencing for harsher convictions for crimes connected to crack cocaine instead of powder, for example, one has to first acknowledge that the panic over crack cocaine was itself misguided and the overly harsh sentencing has not made the country safer.
But Trump is not willing to countenance the idea that he might have been wrong about the Central Park 5. He insists that the unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program in New York City helped reduce crime, though there's no evidence that it did anything of the sort, and crime continued to fall after the program ended.
Trump sees an out-of-control crime crisis where one does not currently exist. Perhaps his unwillingness to believe that these men were innocent of a crime is part of that mindset. Or perhaps it's a reflection of his general unwillingness to acknowledge being wrong. Either way, it's yet another reason to be concerned about how law enforcement policy would look under Trump.
The post Trump's Stubbornness on the Central Park Five's Guilt a Warning to Criminal Justice Reformers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Glenn Ford spent 30 years on Louisiana's death row for a murder he didn't commit, only to die of cancer a year after being exonerated and released from prison in 2014.
The prosecutor who put him there, A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, has apologized for relying on "junk science" during the trial and for pursuing a court victory at all costs, at the expense of justice. Stroud even went so far as to admit that knowing what he knows now, Ford should never have even been arrested, since the hardest evidence against him was a statement from a witness who later recanted.
Yet, somehow, members of the Louisiana legal establishment still insist on questioning Ford's innocence and even accuse him of things which were either never proven or proven to be false, all to protect the state from having to bear the modest financial cost of paying for the life they stole.
Last month, an appeals court ruled Ford's family could not collect the $330,000 which state law says a wrongfully convicted person is entitled to, because even though Ford was exonerated, he could not prove he was "factually innocent" of any involvement in the crime. In response, Louisiana state Rep. Cedric Glover introduced a bill to correct what he described as "a technical over-interpretation of the law."
But as Andrew Cohen writes at The Marshall Project, the introduction of this bill may have "spooked" Judge Joe Bleich, who wrote that the appeals court's decision denying Ford's family compensation would be amended, essentially as a means of destroying Glover's bill before the legislature even has a chance to vote on it.
In his memo, Bleich claims the state would be subject to "automatic financial liability" if Glover's bill (which by design would make it harder for the state to shirk its monetary obligations to compensate the wrongfully convicted) were to pass.
Calling Bleich's memo "one of the most remarkable examples of judicial activism I have ever seen in nearly 20 years as a legal analyst," Cohen characterizes the rest of the amended decision:
It's essentially an ad hominem attack on Ford in which assertions that were never proven at trial, or which were later refuted by state prosecutors, are leveled at a man no longer alive to defend himself. The "summary" labels Ford a "sinister guardian of the killers," for example. Not even the state lawyers fighting to deny compensation to Ford's family have made that allegation.
When people say they don't trust the system, this is precisely what they mean.
It's bad enough that Ford was wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury on shoddy evidence. It's worse that he spent 30 years on death row, then died a sad, impoverished, cancerous death before he had a chance to resume his life. It's appalling that his family is denied even modest compensation for the profound tragedy they suffered at the hands of the state.
But it is simply unconscionable for a judge to slander a dead man, and try to pre-emptively destroy legislation from the bench, all to save the state money.
The post Glenn Ford Spent 30 Years on Death Row, Was Exonerated, Died, Yet is Still on Trial appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The family of the late Glenn Ford, the Louisiana man wrongfully convicted of murder who subsequently spent 30 years on death row only to die a year after his release from prison, is not entitled to any financial compensation from the state, per an appeals court ruling this past Wednesday.
Last year, the prosecutor who put Ford in prison,
A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, penned a soul-searching public letter of apology for being "not as interested in justice as I was in winning" and for relying on "junk science" to secure the conviction. Stroud also called on the state to pony up the $330,000 Ford was entitled to under state law for the decades he spent rotting in a cell.
But the state ruled to deny Ford any compensation, because he could not prove himself "factually innocent" of the crime. That ruling was upheld by judges of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, who wrote in their opinion, "We find no manifest error in the trial judge's conclusion that Ford failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit any crime based upon the facts used in his conviction."
The state opposed payment to Ford, saying that even though he was not guilty of murder, "he was up to his neck" in the events surrounding the death of Shreveport jeweler Isadore Rozeman, who was killed during a robbery at his Stoner Avenue store in 1983. While Ford did not shoot Rozeman, he had helped the killer get a gun and had pawned some of the items stolen from Rozeman.
Clearly, Ford was no angel, but he paid for his crimes and then some. According to his lawyer, he hoped to secure some compensation from the state to create an educational trust fund for his grandchildren.
Last week, I wrote about a bill introduced by state Rep. Cedric Glover, which would correct what he described as "an over-technical interpretation of the law" that denied Ford's family compensation for the life they lost.
In a statement, Glover wrote:
This bill changes the law to bring it in line with all of our original intentions: to compensate the wrongly convicted. Glenn Ford was wrongly convicted. He has not been compensated. The law needs changing. It's that simple.
The post Wrongfully Convicted Man Who Spent 30 Years on Death Row Not Entitled to Compensation, Court Says appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2014, Glenn Ford walked out of prison
after spending 30 years on death row for a murder he didn't commit, only to die of cancer a little more than a year later.
Louisiana law allows for exonerated ex-prisoners to receive compensation of up to $330,000 (which wouldn't even be all that much if it were a life insurance policy), but Ford was denied the right to collect what little money the state legally owed to him, because he could not prove he was "factually innocent."
That's right, you're innocent until proven guilty before a trial, but if falsely convicted AND exonerated in Louisiana, you must prove your innocence after the fact.
The man who put Ford on death row, former Caddo Parish prosecutor A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, wrote in an a letter to the Shreveport Times last year that during the trial, "I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning."
Stroud says he relied on "junk science" in prosecuting Ford, and that after learning of the results of a 2013 investigation into the murder in question, he believed Ford likely shouldn't have even been arrested at all. Stroud pleaded for Ford's forgiveness, begged the state to do the right thing by compensating him in full, and even repudiated the death penalty itself.
Ford is gone now, but there's new hope that his family may yet enjoy some justice. The News Star reports:
State Rep. Cedric Glover has filed a bill that would provide compensation to the family of the late Glenn Ford, who was released from prison after serving 30 years on death row after being wrongly convicted of a Shreveport murder.
Glover, who is on his second stint as a state legislator after serving as mayor of Shreveport, told Gannett Louisiana:
I couldn't in good conscience return to this body and not try to address what I believe is a grave injustice and a misinterpretation of the law.
Most reasonable folks find it an injustice that he and his family wouldn't qualify for this compensation…It's something highly regrettable, and it's incumbent on me to step forward and offer a legislative remedy.
It's absolutely tragic and preposterous that all a person whose life was stolen from them is entitled to is $330,000. But if Glover's bill passes, at least Ford's family can take heart that the state paid, however pathetically, for the crime it committed against their departed loved one.
The post Innocent Man Spent 30 Years in Prison, Died a Year After His Release. Now the State Might Finally Pay appeared first on Reason.com.
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