There was an article just published in the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle about a shaken baby syndrome case in Monroe County, NY.
If you’re new to the “SBS wars,” this article does a pretty good job of outlining the basics of what the debate is all about.
You can read the article here.
Posted in Junk science
The Medill Justice Project at Northwestern University has recently produced a video featuring a number of notable participants in the current SBS debate. The title is Shaken Baby Syndrome: Perspectives on a Controversial Diagnosis.
You can see that video here.
Thanks to Sue Luttner at OnSBS.com for the notice about this video.
It’s been four years since the National Academy of Sciences published its landmark study of forensics in the US — Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States - A Path Forward (commonly known as ‘the NAS report’). The report was nothing short of a “bombshell,” detailing the substantial scientific deficiencies of essentially all forensic disciplines, with the exception of DNA. A report by the National Registry of Exonerations, covering 873 wrongful convictions from 1989 to 2012, shows that “false or misleading forensics” was a contributing cause in 24% of those cases. The NAS report has been previously covered on this blog here and here.
The NAS report was met with “stonewall” and dismissive resistance by the extant forensic community, as well as the National Association of District Attorneys. This is not surprising, since the members of these groups have much personally invested in the existing (but scientifically invalid) methods of forensics - not the least of which is careers. The inertia to be overcome in “fixing” forensics is monumental, and for this reason, many of us in the innocence world (this editor included) feared that the NAS report would languish on the bookshelves of the legislators.
I am happy to report, however, that a significant first-step action is now underway at the federal level. The Justice Department has announced that, in cooperation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it is forming the National Commission on Forensic Science. The commission will have responsibility for developing guidance concerning the intersections between forensic science and the courtroom and developing policy recommendations, including uniform codes for professional responsibility and requirements for training and certification.
Now, before jubilation sets in, note that the commission’s responsibilities are described as “guidance” and “recommendations.” The commission has not been endowed with the powers of oversight, enforcement, or establishing standards. So, clearly, this is just a first step in the journey toward “fixing” forensics. But as the old proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step.” Nothing is going to happen quickly, but it is a start, and we’ll take it.
It has been heavily documented that eyewitness misidentification is the single largest contributing cause of wrongful conviction. The reasons for this are many, and range from the vagaries of how the human brain works, to the procedures used by law enforcement for establishing an eyewitness identification. In court, an eyewitness identification will even trump a rock solid alibi, so it’s important to do everything possible to ensure the integrity of eyewitness identifications. There’s not a lot we can do about the vagaries of the human brain, except try to understand how they impact a person’s memory and perception. But there are lots of things we can do about how police go about establishing an eyewitness ID. Federal guidelines have been issued, and a number of states have taken steps to improve the process, including mandating the use of “blind” administration of lineups. It seems, however, that what’s being done in practice is lagging far behind what’s being recommended or required. A recent article by Kevin Johnson in USA TODAY brings this point home:
WASHINGTON — More than four out of five police agencies in the U.S. have no written policies for handling eyewitness identifications despite long-standing federal guidelines, according to a report obtained by USA TODAY.
The findings in the National Institute of Justice report, come as flaws in eyewitness identification represent the single greatest cause of wrongful conviction, contributing to 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to challenge criminal convictions.
The report, which was produced for the Justice Department’s research arm by the Police Executive Research Forum, is the first national assessment of eyewitness identification standards. In it, 84% of police agencies reported that they had no written policy for conducting live suspect lineups, and slightly more than 64% said they had no formal standard for administering photo displays of potential suspects.
Read the full story by Kevin Johnson of USA TODAY here.
Here’s a cautionary tale about DNA contamination from The San Francisco Chronicle.
By Henry K. Lee
When a San Jose man charged with murdering a Monte Sereno millionaire was suddenly freed last month, prosecutors acknowledged he had an airtight alibi - he was drunk and unconscious at a hospital when the victim was killed in his mansion miles away.
But a mystery remained: How did the DNA of 26-year-old Lukis Anderson - who was so drunk his blood alcohol content was five times the legal limit - end up on the fingernails of slaying victim Raveesh “Ravi” Kumra?
Santa Clara County prosecutors answered that question Wednesday, saying the same two paramedics who had treated Anderson for intoxication at a downtown San Jose liquor store in November had responded to Kumra’s home just hours later.
“It’s a small world,” said Deputy District Attorney Kevin Smith. “We are pleased to have finally been able to determine how we believe the DNA got from Mr. Anderson to Mr. Kumra.”
Anderson’s attorneys from the public defender’s office reacted cautiously. “It is really too early to comment on any of this because we don’t have all of the DNA reports, and our experts have not yet examined any evidence,” said Public Defender Molly O’Neal. “We want to conduct our own investigation and only then comment on the DNA and any transference theory.”
Anderson spent more than five months in jail after he was connected to the slaying of Kumra, a cell phone entrepreneur and former Saratoga winery owner, during a home-invasion robbery. Two alleged Oakland gang members and a prostitute - people Anderson had never met - remain charged in the case.
A charge of accessory to murder was dismissed Wednesday against a second alleged prostitute, Raven Dixon, after authorities determined that she did not have any ties to the slaying, Smith said.
Dixon, 22, pleaded no contest Friday to prostitution with a gang enhancement as well as a marijuana charge, both felonies. She is expected to be released with credit for time served - seven months - when she is sentenced in July.
Dixon’s attorney, Andrew Dosa, said police initially believed his client was involved because she had taken pictures of Kumra’s home - months before the slaying - and posted them on Instagram, the photo-sharing service, through her Facebook account. The photos didn’t show the front door or any access points, he said.
“It basically says, ‘Look how big this house is,’ ” Dosa said. “I think she posted it because she thought it was interesting. It’s a mystery to me why they thought she was involved in the first place.”
Kumra’s body was found Nov. 30 after police were called by his wife, Harinder Kumra, 63, to their ransacked 7,000-square-foot brick mansion on Withey Road, in the hills west of San Jose. Kumra died of asphyxiation after his assailants left him gagged with packaging tape as they beat his wife and told her to “be quiet if you want to live,” police said. They made off with cash, jewelry and rare coins.
Anderson was arrested a week later. But investigators later confirmed that he had been brought to Valley Medical Center in San Jose by a two-man crew from Santa Clara County Ambulance about two hours before the attack on Kumra began, Smith said.
Anderson was still at the hospital 12 hours after the victim was killed, the prosecutor said. His blood alcohol content was 0.40 percent, five times the legal limit for driving, authorities said.
The paramedics physically moved both Anderson and Kumra, resulting in the inadvertent DNA transfer, Smith said. Authorities would not discuss whether the paramedics had properly cleaned themselves between the two calls. Citing the unique nature of the two incidents, Smith said, “This is not going to happen on a regular basis.”
Brian Hubbell, an ambulance company spokesman, said, “We follow the highest standards when it comes to infection control and cleanliness. We consistently and always wash and clean all of our equipment in between patients.”
Defense attorneys had initially questioned whether the county crime lab might have made a mistake. Smith said the investigation confirmed there was no impropriety.
Posted in Forensic controls
Watch video here:
In 1976 Sunny was wrongly convicted for murdering two police officers and put on death row in Florida.
During this time her former partner Jesse, who was also wrongly implicated in the crime, was executed by electric chair.
Sunny told This Morning presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby she experienced a mixture of feelings towards the injustice.
“We were basically in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and unfortunately if you are there, then people think you must have had something to do with it or at least have knowledge of it,” she said.
“At first I was very angry and I felt that everything I had been taught to believe in was a lie. Even maybe including God, because how could God let this happen to me and my whole family.”
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland in 1980, Sunny’s current partner Peter was also wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for murdering two police officers.
During his 17 years on death row, Peter had his sentence commuted to 40 years in prison, but he was determined to prove his innocence and so began to study law.
He eventually got his case reopened and in 1995 his conviction was quashed and he was finally freed.
“The face of injustice is the same everywhere,” he said.
“The same methods are used in every country, not just in Ireland, or in America or Britain.
“If a number of people are given too much power and are not held accountable for what they do there’s temptation, they are human beings, they want to win.”
But despite having their freedom, the couple admit they both struggled to cope with life in the outside world.
“You stay exactly the way you were because there is no way to grow up and mature in prison. You are told what to do, you have to ask for permission for anything you want to do,” said Sunny.
“Not only is freedom a huge responsibility, it’s not free.”
The couple’s unlikely love story began in 1998 when Sunny travelled to Ireland along with a charity which helps people wrongfully accused of crimes.
Sunny and Peter met and immediately hit it off after discovering the similarities in their lives.
“The first conversation we had, for three and half hours, was (about) forgiveness,” said Peter.
While many people in their situation would be inclined to feel anger and hatred at the injustice they have faced, Sunny and Peter said they both decided very early on not to live that kind of life.
The couple now live a quiet existence in Ireland and aim to set up an organisation to help people who have been released from prison following a wrongful conviction.
Posted in Uncategorized
From source:
Wrongful convictions are disturbingly common. In the USA alone, over 1,050 innocent people who were found guilty in court have subsequently been exonerated. A new study, the first to systematically study stigma towards convicted innocents, finds that the old adage is true - mud sticks. Convictions may be overturned, but stigma persists.
Kimberley Clow and Amy-May Leach surveyed 86 psychology students in Canada about either “people who have been wrongfully convicted of a crime”; “people who have been convicted of a crime that they actually committed”; or “people in general”.
The students rated wrongfully convicted people in a similar way to offenders, including perceiving them as incompetent and cold, and having negative attitudes towards them. Although the students desired less social distance from the wrongly convicted compared with offenders, they preferred to have more distance from them than people in general. And while they expressed more pity for wrongly convicted people than offenders, this didn’t translate into greater support for giving them assistance such as job training or subsidised housing. In fact, the students were more in favour of giving monthly living expenses to people in general as opposed to the wrongly convicted.
“A wrongly convicted individual should be viewed as any other non-convicted citizen,” said Clow and Leach. “Our findings, however, suggest that this does not occur … Wrongly convicted persons are not perceived as other citizens.”
Bear in mind these results are only a tentative first step towards greater understanding of this issue. It’s unsafe to generalise confidently from a student sample, and we haven’t learned much about why the participants stigmatised the wrongly convicted so harshly. It’s possible the students held a general belief that wrongly convicted people are likely guilty of other crimes. Or perhaps they believed them morally contaminated by their time in prison.
Despite its limitations, the new study chimes with anecdotal evidence. Consider the case of the unfortunately named Kirk Bloodsworth. In 1993, after nearly nine years in prison, Bloodsworth was a free man thanks to DNA testing that showed he was not guilty of raping and killing a nine-year-old girl - the first time the scientific technique had been used in this way. Yet despite his release, Bloodsworth continued to be vilified, including having “child killer” scrawled in dirt on his truck.
Posted in Uncategorized
An emotional Uriah Courtney, 33, became the eleventh person to be exonerated through the efforts of the California Innocence Project (CIP), with assistance from students at the California Western School of Law, yesterday. Courtney had served eight years of a life sentence in prison for a 2004 rape and kidnapping of a sixteen-year old girl in Lemon Grove, California.
The exoneration was possible because evidence from the crime was retained and could be retested with more advanced DNA technology. The results not only eliminated Courtney but linked to another man, who closely resembled Courtney, and lived within three miles of the crime. Continue reading
Kimberly McCarthy, who claims jury selection in her trial was tainted by racism, is on track Wednesday to become the 500th person executed in Texas during the modern era. The total dwarfs that of every other state. The closest, Virgina, has put to death 110.
KIMBERLY McCARTHY has the gruesome distinction of holding No. 500 in the Texas death-penalty lottery. Unless she receives a stay before Wednesday night, McCarthy will become the 500th person, and only the fourth woman, executed by Texas during the post-reinstatement era of the U.S. death penalty. The ex-crack addict was condemned in a 1997 robbery-slaying near Dallas. McCarthy is the former wife of New Black Panther Party founder Aaron Michaels, with whom she has a son. She is one of 10 women on Texas death row. McCarthy’s appeals allege that jury selection in her trial was tainted by racism.
If Texas follows through with its plan, Execution Watch will provide live coverage and commentary on the execution, as well as the protests planned outside the death house in Huntsville.
http://executionwatch.org > Listen
Posted in Capital punishment
Fresh off a survey published in Legal and Criminal Psychology showing that many people show “contemptuous prejudice” toward the wrongly convicted, Direct TV is running a commercial that could make perceptions even worse.
The commercial apparently first ran in 2012, but it is now back on the airwaves. It shows how a lawyer who endured the frustrations of relying on cable TV failed to do his job, leading to his client’s wrongful conviction. It then shows the wrongly convicted man in prison longing for the day he can have his revenge on the attorney. The final scene shows the lawyer’s house blowing up as he arrives home one day.
The intended message is that cable TV is bad for you and that you should get Direct TV. But another message is that the wrongly convicted are angry and dangerous people when they are released. This is exactly the wrong kind of message those struggling to overcome a wrongful conviction need.
Tucker Carrington and others have posted the above-titled article on SSRN. Download full article here. The abstract states:
Over the last four decades, extending even through the most recent twenty years of rapid forensic science advancements in the solving and prosecution of criminal offenses, Mississippi has maintained its condonation of systemic forensic malfeasance, and, more specifically, refused to adapt and properly accommodate contemporary forensic science in its courtrooms. Among the public health consequences was a medico-legal spoils system that valued pseudo-science and expedient criminal convictions over scientific validity and defendants’ basic civil rights. As a direct and entirely natural correlation Mississippi produced a significant number – and shocking type – of wrongful convictions and perpetrated some of the most notorious forensic fraud in American legal history.
This article documents for the first time the complete tragic history of the State’s medico-legal system from the mid-1970’s, when initial efforts were made to improve the local, coroner-based system, to the present day. Its primary purpose is to provide a comprehensive narrative through which the State might honestly come to terms on a morally acceptable basis with the attendant failures of justice that occurred as a result of the path it chose. In that way this article also offers up the Mississippi medico-legal system as a cautionary tale, a study in what not to do. Although all of the cases, agencies, and people discussed in this article are from Mississippi, the lessons learned from the Mississippi medico-legal system are universal.
Posted in Forensic controls, Junk science, Scholarship
The Innocence Project is urging New York citizens to voice support of criminal justice reform to their legislators before the current legislative session ends on June 21. The legislation is designed to reduce wrongful convictions by requiring the full recording of interrogations in serious felonies and by improving police witness eyewitness identification procedures.
The Innocence Project has made it easy to voice support for the legislation with a prepared message (here). Continue reading
The task of bringing true science to bear on the issue of shaken baby syndrome has proven to be incredibly difficult. Progress has been meager and slow, and for those committed to seeing that true justice is done in these cases, the work is extremely frustrating. The extant pediatric medical community continues to wrap itself ever tighter in their beliefs in the medical folklore that has resulted in so many wrongful convictions based upon rigid, unyielding diagnostic dogma that has been discredited. For background on the SBS problem, please see previous WCB posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Dr. Steven C. Gabaeff is a California physician who has specialized in child abuse cases, and is a member of the Los Angeles Superior Court Expert Witness Panel. Dr. Gabaeff is also one of those rare medical practitioners who is board certified in Emergency Medicine, and who understands the flaws in the currently prevailing views of SBS. He recently responded to an SBS online bulletin board posting concerning an article about a man who has been charged for a second time with infant abusive head trauma. I believe that his response provides an insightful view of what the situation is today, and also reveals some of the frustration that so many of the people who are dedicated to this cause have to deal with. That response is posted here with his permission.
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Regarding the case … the likely etiology of the problems with the second newborn was perinatal subdural hematoma rebleed from moderate trauma, and probably other treatment failures that would never see the light of day in an article like this in the newspaper, that resulted in severe brain damage.
What can he do? He should have moved to another country… until we solve this.
Most of the time we look like Don Quixote, and unfortunately we are not addressing the issues here on the scale required. The authorities’ MO (modus operandi) has not changed an iota in 40 years: they diagnose abuse and only abuse, repress contradictory evidence, and abuse their ill-gotten authority to accuse, convict, intimidate, and to clone a new generation prescreened to be the same or better at executing the same conviction-producing MO as the old timers. There really isn’t that much evidence that what we’re doing is preventing what happened to this guy already or even what will happen to him in the near future.
Joel Freedman, a frequent contributor to MPNnow of Canandaigua, New York, has posed a question very important to the Rosario family whose gatherings take place at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. His opinion piece (here) asks, “Why is Richard Rosario still in jail?” The question has a short answer, but it elevates a troubling issue in DNA-era criminal justice. Continue reading
Wisconsin Professor Keith Findley has posted the above-titled article on SSRN. Download full version here. The abstract states:
The growing number of wrongful convictions exposed over the past two-and-a-half decades, and the research that points to a few recurring types of flawed evidence in those cases, raise questions about the effectiveness of the rules of evidence and the constitutional admissibility standards that are designed to guard against unreliable evidence. Drawing on emerging empirical data, this Article concludes that the system can and should be adjusted to do a better job of guarding against undue reliance on flawed evidence. The Article first considers the role of reliability screening as a constitutional concern. The wrongful convictions data identify what might be called “suspect evidentiary categories” — a few types of evidence (eyewitness identifications, confessions, forensic science, and snitch testimony) that are both recurring features of wrongful convictions and not otherwise susceptible to correction through traditional trial mechanisms and that, therefore, can and should be subjected to heightened scrutiny for reliability under the Due Process Clause.
Recognizing, however, that the Supreme Court is moving away from using constitutional doctrine to screen for reliability, this Article considers other mechanisms for better ensuring reliable evidence and accurate trial outcomes. First, current trends in Supreme Court jurisprudence suggest a due process framework that focuses upstream of the trial process on regulating the police and prosecutorial conduct that generates some of the most suspect trial evidence. Second, the Article assesses new applications of non-constitutional evidence law that offer promise for filling the void in reliability review of such suspect types of evidence. Finally, the Article considers remedies in addition to exclusion that might aid in the enterprise of mitigating the harm from flawed evidence. Principal among these are broader use of expert witnesses and jury instructions to educate fact finders about the counter-intuitive but scientifically established qualities of these categories of suspect evidence. And because courts have proven reluctant to apply reliability-based exclusionary rules rigorously, the Article concludes by exploring partial exclusion — excluding the most objectionable parts of the evidence while permitting other parts — as a remedy that courtsmight be more likely to actually enforce.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) at Northwestern Law reports today that Cook County prosecutors have dropped all charges against Nicole Harris, who was wrongfully convicted of the May 2005 strangulation murder of her 4-year-old son, Jaquari Dancy. Harris served seven years of a 30-year sentence before a federal appeals court reversed the conviction. As reported last February on this blog (here) and (here) the court opined that Jaquari’s older brother, Dante—five at the time—should have been permitted to testify. Dante had told police that his brother accidentally strangled himself with a bed sheet while playing and that his brother’s death was an accident. Continue reading
Posted in Exonerations, False confessions
The New York Times has an excellent update here on the controversial convictions of Jesse Friedman and his father, Arnold, for sexual abuse in the 1980s that were the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary and an appeals court’s searing criticism.
Posted in Uncategorized
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