Quattrone Center press release: Montgomery County (PA) District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman was joined today by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law to announce the implementation of key changes in the organizational structure of her office to ensure the highest professional standards, integrity, and quality control in the county’s criminal justice system. The changes are being implemented at the conclusion of a root cause analysis conducted in partnership with the Quattrone Center. Keep reading….
Editorial by Lawrence Hellman, director of Oklahoma Innocence Project, with case update and discussion of Conviction Integrity Units
Aboriginal chiefs in British Columbia finally exonerated after being executed 150 years ago
“An eye for an eye” is the top reason cited by Americans who support the death penalty
By Dave Moran, clinical professor of law and the director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School.
On Sept. 8, my client Jamie Peterson walked out of a jail in Kalkaska, exonerated by DNA after 17 years in prison for a murder and rape he did not commit.
The DNA testing not only excluded Peterson but matched another man, Jason Ryan, who will stand trial later this year.
I am thrilled that Peterson is finally free. But I am also angry that the previous Kalkaska County prosecutor, aided by a local judge, managed to prevent the DNA from being tested and the real perpetrator from being identified for 12 years, even though they knew the DNA did not match Peterson. For 12 long years, Peterson remained in prison and Jason Ryan remained free because the prosecutor did not want to know the truth.
Peterson was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Geraldine Montgomery even though the male DNA recovered from her rape kit did not match him.
At trial, prosecutor Brian Donnelly repeatedly insinuated that another stain found on Montgomery’s shirt would match Peterson if it could only be tested. Since none of the physical evidence matched Peterson, he was convicted entirely on a series of wildly inconsistent confessions he had made to the police, who knew that he was mentally ill.
By 2001, DNA testing had improved to the point that the stain on the shirt could be tested. Further, the CODIS system had come online so that the unknown male DNA from the rape kit could be compared to state and national databases of thousands of convicted felons.
One would think that the prosecutor would want to know the identity of the unknown male whose DNA was in Montgomery’s rape kit. But no, Donnelly fought for 12 years to keep the DNA from being tested.
When the issue went to court in 2002, Judge Alton Davis issued a baffling opinion concluding that since DNA wasn’t used to convict Peterson, there was no reason to find out whose DNA was inside and on the victim’s body. Donnelly continued to successfully resist repeated requests for DNA testing for another decade.
When I think about how Donnelly and Judge Davis fought the DNA testing in the Montgomery case, I’m reminded of Jack Nicholson’s line in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!” Rather than risk learning the uncomfortable truth that an innocent man might have been convicted, they chose to not find out who left DNA inside and on Geraldine Montgomery the night she was savagely murdered.
Finally, a new prosecutor, Michael Perreault, was elected in 2012, and to his great credit, he readily agreed to DNA testing when we and the Center on Wrongful Convictions approached him. The testing was performed in 2013, and it proved that all of the male DNA, including the stain on the shirt, came from the same man. A CODIS search quickly identified that man as Jason Ryan, who had been in the pool of original suspects in 1996. Ryan was finally arrested last December.
But the kind of obstruction we saw with Peterson continues to happen in other cases.
On Sept. 2, just six days before Jamie Peterson walked free, the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by Oakland Circuit Judge Rae Lee Chabot that blood found on and near a murder victim, Robert Meija, shouldn’t be DNA tested even though the prosecution conceded that the blood type did not match Meija or Gilbert Poole, the man convicted of Meija’s murder. Despite the Cooley Innocence Project’s investigation that pointed to another suspect and its offer to pay for the testing, the Oakland County prosecutor opposed testing, making the same argument that was used to deny Peterson testing: since the blood wasn’t used to convict Poole, why should we test it now to find out who left the blood?
It’s so easy to answer that question. We should test that blood because the DNA may very well hit on a person who remains at large and who has continued to commit other crimes. There was only one perpetrator in the Poole case. Identifying a complete stranger to Poole, as Ryan was to Peterson, would strongly suggest that the wrong man is in prison.
The bottom line is this: Why doesn’t the Oakland County prosecutor want to know whose blood was found at the scene of a vicious murder? More broadly, why are some prosecutors so afraid of the truth? And why are some Michigan judges willing to help them hide the truth even when it means leaving violent criminals free to commit more crimes?
Man convicted in case for which Bennett Barbour of Virginia had originally been wrongfully convicted of rape
Three months after murder charges against a Kentucky woman were dismissed by the state’s Court of Appeals, the state’s attorney ruled Tuesday that she won’t face a new trial. The Courier-Journal reported that Susan Jean King spent six years behind bars for a 1998 murder after pleading guilty, even though she didn’t commit the crime, because of pressure from a state police detective who told her she faced life in prison. She was released in 2012 before she had served out her sentence.
DNA testing in West Virginia Innocence Project case raises questions about guilt of former state legislator convicted of sexually molesting a senate page
Though the shootings of unarmed black men by police officers have understandably had an increasing profile in public discourse since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Mo., the Agency Theater Collective’s latest offering, “At the Center,” highlights another troubling aspect of our criminal justice system. Despite a few stiff polemicizing moments, it’s a largely gripping and thoughtful drama that goes beyond Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank’s widely produced “The Exonerated,” about death row inmates who were found innocent.
Inspired by interviews with attorneys and staff at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s School of Law, the play (written and directed by Andrew Gallant and Tim Touhy) presents a fictional account of Hector Reyes (Armando Reyes), who has spent 19 years in prison for the brutal rape and stabbing of Elizabeth Harvey (Sommer Austin). The latter has spent the years since the assault fighting addictions and largely turning over the raising of her teenage daughter, Rebecca (Nicole Magerko), to her sister Kathleen (Sarah Welborn).
When DNA testing proves Hector is innocent — despite his confessing to the crime and Elizabeth identifying him from a photo array as her attacker — both find their lives turned upside down.
This is where Gallant and Touhy’s play is at its strongest. By showing us Hector’s attempts to reassimilate (he saves receipts from shopping trips because the date and time stamps will provide him with alibis), as well as Elizabeth’s guilt and horror at having identified the wrong man, “At the Center” forces us to look at the cascading consequences of detectives who are eager to close the books on violent crimes.
It also provides insight into why innocent people will confess under duress (even if it’s not physical abuse), and why eyewitness testimony is less than reliable. Reyes and Austin deliver powerhouse performances, and their climactic face-to-face meeting pays off without feeling like a cheap tidy-bow reconciliation.
The weakest parts of the show, ironically, are those involving the attorneys. They aren’t quite fleshed out beyond their good-hearted Samaritan outlines. But when James Munson’s Bill (based on the center’s executive director, Rob Warden) philosophizes that wrongful convictions happen because some crimes are so horrific that society demands that someone — anyone — must pay the penalty, whether truly guilty or not, it holds a mirror up to our collective thirst for vengeance masquerading as justice.
Through Nov. 2, Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.; $25 atwearetheagency.org
Wrongful convictions are an international problem. Our Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted decided there was a need for an International Wrongful Conviction day. It was the idea of one of our founders, Win Wahrer. Seven other countries have now come on board—the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., the Netherlands, Ireland and Japan.
Why a wrongful conviction day?
Wrongful Conviction Day informs the general public, on an international level, that wrongful convictions have occurred, are occurring and will continue to occur in the future. There’s a need to change our system to uncover them and avoid them in future.
It’s also a day for the wrongfully convicted themselves—for those who’ve managed to get their convictions quashed and those hoping that that will happen in the future. It is an acknowledgement of the injustice of what’s happened to them.
The right not to be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit is a human right—and if one day a year is a wrongful conviction day, that’s a good thing.
Getting the innocent out of jail and convicting the right person
Here are three cases where a wrongful conviction ultimately led to conviction of the right person.
Nova Scotia’s Donald Marshall Jr. spent 11 years in jail for the murder of Sandy Seale. After Donald was cleared, the real killer, Roy Ebsary, was convicted of the crime.
Newfoundland’s Greg Parsons was convicted of murdering his mother after she was found dead in her bathroom, stabbed more than 50 times. After Greg was cleared, Brian Doyle was convicted of her murder.
David Milgaard was convicted of the 1969 murder of Gail Miller, a nurse in Saskatoon—she was raped and stabbed to death on a street in Saskatoon.
Our association came onto the case in 1997, and we had the uniform Gail had been wearing sent to a laboratory in the U.K. for DNA examination. David Milgaard was excluded but Larry Fisher was a match.
Fisher was charged and convicted of the murder 30 years after it was committed. During the 23 years David Milgaard spent in jail for a crime he did not commit, Larry Fisher had continued raping and stabbing women.
David’s exoneration and Fisher’s incarceration were satisfying outcomes for the public and the criminal justice system.
Our priorities
Our association is at the forefront of trying to expose wrongful convictions in Canada. We prioritize the most serious convictions—mostly murder and manslaughter. These are cases where the individual is serving a substantial sentence, often a life sentence.
In Canada, the process of overturning a wrongful conviction is difficult to go through, complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Few people can afford to go through it and few cases do.
Our clients are people who have exhausted all their appeals. Their only remedy is to try and persuade the Minister of Justice in Ottawa to review their case. And if the decision is made that there was a miscarriage of justice, then the minister will send the case back to the provincial appeal court and have the case re-reviewed by the provincial appeal court.
A much more helpful system is possible
We in Canada are urging for a much more helpful system for claims of wrongful conviction. We’d like to see a tribunal, independent of the minister and governments, which could review, research, and subpoena witnesses and decide if a conviction should stand.
The UK has had this kind of process in place for 20 years now and it’s been extraordinarily successful. More than 500 wrongful convictions have been reversed, ranging from homicide to shoplifting.
What I’d like Wrongful Conviction Day to accomplish
I hope the day helps build awareness of our existence.
I would encourage the public to talk to MPs about the need for reform, to follow our cases on the Internet and through the media, look at our website to see what we’re doing, and keep informed of the issues.
That’s really important in this law and order age, when the focus always seems to be on conviction and punishment. Sometimes, like it or not, we get it wrong.
James Lockyer, a principal at Lockyer Posner Campbell, is co-founder and lead counsel of the Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, an organization that advocates for the wrongly convicted. His association has reviewed many cases since its inception in 1993, leading to the successful exoneration of 18 innocent people. He himself has helped expose more than ten wrongful convictions in Canada, including the cases of Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Clayton Johnsonand Gregory Parsons.
Yesterday, historian Rick Perlstein wrote an important piece about the Nixon pardon, which he shows was the true beginning of the political culture that holds that business elites and government actors cannot be held accountable for corruption and malfeasance because it will “destabilize” the system. From pardons of presidents to too-big-to-fail banks to torturers getting the benefit of “not looking in the rearview mirror,” it’s hard to come up with an example of elite, institutional players having to face the music.
But one of the more confounding aspects of this unaccountable culture of ours is the one that says the legal system has no responsibility to right its own wrongs or even admit to a lack of perfection even when it’s obvious they have made a grievous error (or broke the law). Yesterday I wrote about Justice Antonin Scalia’s rather shocking opinion that the Constitution provides no avenue for an innocent person wrongfully condemned to be released if all the proper i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed. That strikes me as a perverted definition of justice. But it goes even deeper than that.
The New York Times profiled the hard-charging prosecutor known as the United States’ “Deadliest DA” who tried the case of the two men who were exonerated in North Carolina last week after having been imprisoned for over 30 years for a murder they did not commit. He’s quite a guy, winning more than 40 death penalty cases over 20 years, an achievement that got him into the Guinness World Records book.
He’s 79 now and still punching. When told that his successor (a distant cousin) calls him a bully, his response was this: “Well, let’s say, if I was a bully, he is a pussy. How about that?” I think Johnson Britt has been hanging around too much with the wine and cheese crowd. So much for the dispassionate dispensation of the rule of law.
And despite the clear and overwhelming evidence that the two men who were released on DNA evidence along with a never processed fingerprint that implicated a known rapist in the crime, this fine representative of the people had this to say, “I thought the D.A. just threw up his hands and capitulated, and the judge didn’t have any choice but to do what he did. No question about it, absolutely they are guilty.” No, absolutely, they are not.
This attitude is pervasive among many prosecutors who all over the country pull out every stop available to them to keep DNA evidence from being tested and are unwilling to release wrongly convicted prisoners despite proof of their innocence. They refuse to admit they were wrong.
“The problem we face,” says social psychologist Carol Tavris, “is not from bad people covering up their mistakes and not wanting to face the truth. It’s from good people who deny the evidence in order to preserve their belief that they’re good people.”
Anthony Greenwald, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, says it’s natural for most of us to see ourselves in the most favorable light possible; to picture ourselves as more heroic or good or honorable than we are. For some, accepting that they may have contributed to an injustice would be such a massive blow to their perception of themselves that it is simply intolerable to countenance. So they don’t.
“People perceive themselves readily as the origin of good effects and reluctantly as the origin of ill effects,” says Greenwald. “I don’t think there’s anything special in thinking that this applies to people who work in law enforcement. The only thing one needs to assume is that they, too, are human – like the subjects in all the research that demonstrates the phenomena.”
Of course, law enforcement and prosecutors are human. They make mistakes. But too often representatives of the legal system, particularly as it’s interpreted by hardcore law-and-order types like Justice Scalia, believe that the state cannot err if it follows the rules, regardless of a single person’s “actual innocence.” Looking in the rearview mirror for truth will only destabilize the system and create a lack of confidence in the state’s ability to mete out justice. This isn’t about being human — it’s about being inhuman.
The lesson in all this is that the state cannot police itself when it comes to prosecutorial or judicial error or misconduct. Every incentive in the system calls for them to cover up their mistakes in order to maintain the illusion of infallibility (and their individual human belief in their own righteousness).
There is some good news on this front. The ability to test DNA is changing everything and the legal culture that has been fighting against reevaluating old evidence is breaking down. New science is questioning the use of confessions and eyewitness testimony and new procedures are being put in place after some truly horrendous crime lab errors were uncovered. Conviction integrity units and pre-trial reliability hearings are becoming more common, and outside groups like the Innocence Project and state commissions like the one that finally freed the two wrongly convicted men in North Carolina are making a difference. So there is progress.
The question is whether the wider culture of unaccountable leadership will continue to prevail. So far, there have been virtually no repercussions for acts over the past decade that devastated the economy and created the morass we now see in the Middle East. There is little appetite for revisiting the errors of omission and commission that were perpetrated by the government to both create and then exacerbate those crises. We seem to have settled on the idea that confronting our defects and admitting our mistakes will cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. One cannot help noticing that all these people who refuse to deal with the truth seem to have very little faith in the American system — and the American people.
You’d think a country that fetishizes the concept of freedom and allegedly worships the Bible would take John 8:32 a little bit more seriously: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Here is a press release from AIDWYC regarding the first Wrongful Conviction Day coming up October 2nd! Here are details about activities with the Irish Innocence Project
LAUNCH OF FIRST EVER WRONGFUL CONVICTION DAY OCTOBER 2!
Toronto, ON (September 29, 2014) – The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) is launching the first International Wrongful Conviction Day October 2nd, 2014. The annual event will highlight the need to prevent and remedy wrongful convictions around the world.
AIDWYC is a Canadian non-profit organization that is the direct successor to the Justice for Guy Paul Morin Committee, a grassroots organization that came into existence in support of Guy Paul Morin immediately following his wrongful conviction in the summer of 1992. This Committee reconstituted itself as AIDWYC in May 1993. The group’s volunteers have reviewed hundreds of cases, leading to the successful exoneration of 18 innocent individuals, who together have spent 175 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
The media is encouraged to cover this very first Wrongful Conviction Day. The Association’s pro bono lawyers, board members and some of the people who have themselves been wrongly convicted are available for interviews before and on October 2nd.
Event in Toronto October 2nd, 2014:
Law Society of Upper Canada
Lecture in Barrister’s Lounge 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.
Reception in Convocation Hall 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
130 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON M5H 2N6
LECTURE: AIDWYC will hold a lecture titled Preventing and Rectifying Wrongful Convictions by
Understanding Their Causes. James Lockyer, AIDWYC’s co-founder and the lead lawyer who represented many of the wrongly convicted who were eventually exonerated such as Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Steven Truscott, Clayton Johnson, Romeo Phillion and many others, will speak. York University’s Dr. Tim Moore, an expert on false confessions, will also make a presentation.
Dr. Moore offered the following explanation as to the importance of this particular topic on this memorable day: “False confessions are among the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Social scientists have shed considerable light on the investigative tactics that put people at risk
for confessing falsely. There are viable alternatives to current practices. It is time to start using them.”
RECEPTION: AIDWYC will be hosting a reception with a full program which will feature wrongly convicted keynote speakers:
Exoneree John Artis, who at the age of 19 was convicted of a triple murder along with his co-accused boxer Rubin Hurricane Carter, will speak. He spent 15 years incarcerated in New Jersey prisons because he refused to lie. John Artis had this to say regarding his wrongful conviction: “Devoid of any evidence or fact, authorities attempted to have me state that Rubin Carter was a murderer, to assist in convicting Rubin and sending him to the electric chair, for the promise that I would be released. In reality, it would have wrongfully convicted two innocent people and sent both of us to our deaths. I refused. Integrity is an innate, immeasurable, uncompromising quality.”
Exoneree Ron Dalton, who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, Brenda in Newfoundland, will speak. He spent nine years incarcerated and thanks to his own efforts and that of lawyer Jerome Kennedy, was exonerated in 2000.
Ron Dalton shared the following insight: “Personally, I found when all else was taken from me, I learned to appreciate and trust my own sense of self worth. I was truly the only person who knew, with absolute certainty, I was innocent. I remain extremely grateful to my friends and family members who believed in my innocence and worked tirelessly to help me prove it. Yet I took most solace from the sure and certain knowledge of my innocence that I alone possessed – the truth is a powerful companion in times of darkness. Simply put, wrong is wrong. We all have an obligation to right the wrongs which come to our attention and do what we can to prevent (or at least correct, when they occur) future wrongful convictions which serve to weaken our criminal justice system and lower our collective faith in fundamental truth and justice.”
Wrongful conviction programs will be held by participants in different parts of the world on October 2nd, including the United States, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands and others.
The story of David McCallum, a man some believe was wrongly convicted of murder nearly 30 years ago, will be screened next week in the same neighborhood where he was arrested. The film “David & Me” follows McCallum and the effort of filmmaker Ray Klonsky, attorneys and advocates to get McCallum released from jail. The documentary, which has been shown across Canada and at theManhattan Film Festival, will be screening at the annual Bushwick Film Festival next weekend.
Ohio Innocence Project sues Columbus Police Department for release of records under Public Records Act, seeking clarification from Ohio Supreme Court over obligation of state to disclose files in old, post-conviction cases under investigation by OIP.
Midwest Innocence Project will partner with clinic at University of Kansas law school to more effectively investigate Kansas cases of wrongful conviction
Professor Michael Naughten has posted the above-titled article on The British Journal of Criminology. Download here. The abstract states:
This article considers the apparent lack of serious engagement with issues pertaining to wrongful convictions by criminology at present. It seeks to address this by criminologizing wrongful convictions in two senses: firstly, by highlighting a variety of forms of intentional law or rule breaking by police officers and prosecutors in the causation of wrongful convictions that in other circumstances would likely be treated as crime and dealt with as such; and, secondly, to reveal the extent to which such powerful criminal justice system agents can cause profound and wide-ranging forms of harm to victims of wrongful convictions, their families and society as a whole with almost total impunity. In so doing, the relevance of the study of the intentional forms of crime and deviance committed by criminal justice system agents in the manufacture of wrongful convictions to both arms of the criminological divide is emphasized: mainstream and critical criminology. The overall aim is to show that the study of wrongful convictions can further extend and enrich existing criminological epistemology in vital and important ways and can even contribute to the prevention and possible elimination of those that are caused deliberately.
Professors Murat Mungan and Jonathan Klick have posted the above-titled article on SSRN. Download here. The abstract states:
A great concern with plea-bargains is that they may induce innocent individuals to plead guilty to crimes they have not committed. In this article, we identify schemes that reduce the number of innocent-pleas without affecting guilty individuals’ plea-bargain incentives. Large compensations for exonerees reduce expected costs associated with wrongful determinations of guilt in trial and thereby reduce the number of innocent-pleas. Any distortions in guilty individuals’ incentives to take plea bargains caused by these compensations can be off-set by a small increase in the discounts offered for pleading guilty. Although there are many statutory reform proposals for increasing exoneration compensations, no one has yet noted this desirable separating effect of exoneree compensations. We argue that such reforms are likely to achieve this result without causing deterrence losses.
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