From MPRnews.com:
ST. PAUL, Minn. — A man in a bathtub filled with blood. A dead woman, half-naked, lying face down in her kitchen. A child stabbed with a knife.
The photos, part of a lecture by the Hennepin County medical examiner, horrified the defense attorneys who had gathered in the dimly lit room. But they knew they needed to look. The lives of their clients depended on it.
The attorneys had gathered for a crash course on forensic science, organized by the Innocence Project of Minnesota, to help prevent wrongful convictions. Many in the room had followed media coverage of cases in which innocent people went to prison based on junk science and false testimony from forensic experts. The cases alarmed defense attorneys, who worried they lack the right kind of training to detect problems with science in the courtroom.
“You look at cases, and you wonder, if I got a report like that, would I have caught that problem?” said Mankato criminal defense attorney Allen Eskens, who attended the June 8 training at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul.
In wrongful conviction cases, defense attorneys often blame the shoddy work of a handful of scientists and doctors, said public defender Christine Funk, one of the training instructors. The real question, she said, is how that shoddy work ended up in the courtroom in the first place.
“We need to be investigating when we get science,” Funk told the group.
Funk used the example of a Michigan man, David Gavitt, who was convicted of setting a fire that killed his wife and two daughters. Decades later, students at the University of Michigan’s Innocence Clinic reviewed his case and found problems Continue reading →
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