UK exoneee Sam Hodgson dies at 61
The once powerful Williamson County (TX) District Attorney John Bradley is looking for a new job. He was the definition of a hard-nosed prosecutor and had served at the voters’ pleasure since his appointment by Governor Rick Perry in 2001 until his stunning defeat in the primary for his re-election earlier this year.
Bradley became high profile nationally when Governor Perry appointed him to chair the Texas Forensic Science Commission during the contentious discussions regarding arson forensic evidence in general and the Todd Willingham case in particular. Willingham, who always claimed innocence in the fire death of his Continue reading
Posted in Editorials/Opinion, Prosecutorial conduct (good and bad)
Tagged John Bradley, Michael Morton
USA Today just published a story about Nino Lyons, who was exonerated of drug trafficking charges for which he was convicted in 2001. It’s a very “telling” article. Here is the lead-in to the story:
“For more than a week in 2001, the jurors listened to one witness after another, almost all of them prison inmates, describe how Lyons had sold them packages of cocaine. One said that Lyons, who ran clothing shops and nightclubs around Orlando, even tried to hire him to kill two drug suppliers.
But the federal prosecutors handling the case did not let the jury hear all the facts.
Instead, the prosecutors covered up evidence that could have discredited many of Lyons’ accusers. They never revealed that a convict who claimed to have purchased hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Lyons struggled even to identify his photograph. And they hid the fact that prosecutors had promised to let others out of prison early in exchange for their cooperation.”
See full story here.
Quoted in the article is Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on misconduct by prosecutors. “It’s systemic now, and … the system is not able to control this type of behavior. There is no accountability.” (emphasis is mine)
The article focuses on federal prosecutors, but why would this situation be any different at state and local levels? My expectation is that it’s not. I’ve heard prosecutors quoted as saying “We will win at all cost.”
There has to be some accountability for these people who are invested with so much power, but it seems there is not.
Five Chicago men who were wrongfully convicted of murder when they were teenagers, known as the Dixmoor 5, filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday alleging crooked cops framed them. More details here.
Cara Wieneke
Congrats to Indiana post-conviction attorney Cara Wieneke, who had a murder conviction thrown out last week after proving that her client had been convicted based on a fingerprint misidentification. After learning of the story (here’s a news clip), I asked her to write a more detailed account. Here is what she wrote:
State of Indiana v. Lana Canen
On Thanksgiving 2002, Helen Sailor, an elderly woman living in Elkhart, Indiana, was found dead in her apartment. Because her apartment had been ransacked, police believed robbery was the motive for the killing. They found several latent prints, including one on a plastic container that held Sailor’s prescription medication.
Police had few leads, however, and the case went cold. Several months later, the Elkhart Police Department created a homicide unit and decided to reopen the investigation of Sailor’s death as one of its first cases. Police focused on Lana Canen, a tenant in Sailor’s apartment building.
Police contacted Dennis Chapman, a detective with the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department, to conduct a comparison of the latent print found on the plastic container with Lana’s fingerprints. Detective Chapman had some training in print classification and ten-print examination, but he had no training in conducting latent print comparisons. After conducting his examination, he concluded Lana was the source of the latent print.
Lana steadfastly maintained her innocence and said she had never been in Sailor’s apartment. Police knew Lana was physically incapable of killing Sailor, so Continue reading
In a troubling example of a bungled and costly case that ill-served the victim, her family, and Tennessee taxpayers, Shelby County Judge James C. Beasley Jr. overturned the murder conviction of Tennessee death row inmate Michael Dale Rimmer late Friday afternoon in a 212-page order in which he concluded that Rimmer’s 1998 counsel and his resentencing counsel “provided ineffective assistance of counsel by failing to properly investigate and present evidence…” The result: “…the court’s confidence in the verdicts has been undermined and reliability in the verdicts cannot be had.”
The prosecution was less than forthcoming about witness evidence that was contrary to their theory of Rimmer as perpetrator. Testimony from a man who Continue reading
Yesterday the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) held it’s fifth panel discussion on prosecutorial misconduct, this time at Santa Clara University. Unlike the previous four, the local district attorney, Jeff Rosen, accepted the NCIP’s invitation to participate.
According to the Mercury News (Silicon Valley, CA) here, Rosen “was elected on a promise to reform the office’s win-at-all-costs culture after a series of scandals.” He has re-established the office’s Conviction Integrity unit. While acknowledging that some prosecutorial misconduct is “egregious,” he expressed his belief that prosecutorial error is primarily “unintentional, not malicious.”
Also attending was Obie Anthony, who served 17 years in prison before a judge overturned his murder conviction. The judge noted prosecutorial misconduct in utilizing the key piece of evidence against Anthony, testimony of a pimp, and concealing the deal the prosecutor had made with him. Anthony essentially urged Rosen to be alert to criticisms as “notice” that someone in his office is committing misconduct. “You just need to be accountable,” Anthony said.
NCIP executive director Kathleen “Cookie” Ridolfi reported that a third of the misconduct cases from 1997 through 2011 involved “repeat-offender prosecutors.”
“A group of bad actors are dragging down the reputation of prosecutors, and we have a system that protects them,” she said.
The NCIP’s annual report counted 92 cases of alleged prosecutorial misconduct reaching state and federal courts in California alone, of which the courts set aside the conviction or sentence, barred evidence or declared a mistrial in ten. To put misconduct statistics in perspective, Ridolfi noted that 97 percent of criminal cases end in plea bargains. Since judges review primarily cases that have gone to trial, the vast majority of criminal cases rarely receive subsequent judicial review…and this opportunity for discovery of prosecutorial misconduct.
A webcast of the forum may be viewed here.
From Asahi Shimbun Digital News.Mr. Govinda Prasad Mainali (middle).
Previous posts on the Mainali Case here, here and here.
This is a 1997 robbery-murder case where Govinda Prasad Mainali, a Nepali national, was convicted and sentenced to life in Tokyo, Japan. Mainali was granted a retrial in June this year. The prosecution did not appeal the decision of the Tokyo High Court which rejected the prosecution’s objection against the decision to grant a retrial. Mainali has already gone back to his home country, Nepal.
It was revealed yesterday that an additional testing by the prosecution brought another exonerating result. A third person’s DNA profile has already been found on and inside the victim’s body during previous testings (hairs left near the victim’s body and semen). This time, the same person’s DNA was found on victim’s fingernail clippings. Scrapings from victim’s right thumb fingernail and left middle fingernail were concluded to have matched that person, and scrapings from other fingernails also might have come from him. The redundant DNA results from many different items found at the crime scene suggest that the DNA came from the actual perpetrator.
It is reported that the prosecutions will argue that Mainali is innocent of the crime during the retrial. The retrial will start on October 29th.
Read the news in Japanese here.
“Prosecutors can and should be leading the charge to ensure that the public has confidence that criminal convictions are of the guilty, not the innocent.” This truism comes from a new report, “Establishing Conviction Integrity Programs in Prosecutors’ Office” that is notable not only because it offers a blueprint to improve every prosecutorial office in the country, but also because most making the recommendations are former or current prosecutors themselves.
A product of NYU Law’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law (the Conviction Integrity Project), the report (here) provides a template for reforms Continue reading
Michael Hash
Wish we saw this type of investigative journalism more often these days….
From Starexponent.com:
Culpeper County Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Walther assisted as second seat prosecutor in the recently overturned 2001 capital murder conviction of then 19-year-old Michael Wayne Hash, cross-examining four alibi witnesses for the defense and arguing jury instructions with the judge.
The overall outcome of the controversial case resulted in 12 years behind bars for now 31-year-old Hash, freed in March after, by most accounts, enduring wrongful incarceration in violation of his constitutional right to due process, as knowingly perpetuated by the Culpeper County justice system, the record shows.
Walther, up for election in November to the top prosecutor’s seat as Culpeper County’s GOP nominee, continues to downplay his association with the Hash case, and has criticized his opponent, independent Megan Revis Frederick, and the press for making it an issue.
Fact remains, it is an issue regardless of whether or not Walther — widely supported by local and state Republicans as well as the local legal community, the mayor and a prominent local Democrat — wants it to be. The Star-Exponent recently reviewed the 1,300-plus page Hash trial transcript and its entire record on case — including criminal files, newspaper accounts, and personal interviews — in an effort to factually gauge Walther’s exact involvement, as he seeks to become the next gatekeeper to the Culpeper legal system.
The reversal that ignited controversy
For one, Walther, 58, former deputy commonwealth’s attorney, only got the top prosecutor promotion earlier this year because of the reversal by a federal judge in February of Hash’s capital murder conviction in the July, 13 1996 brutal shooting death of church organist Thelma Scroggins in her home in Lignum. Walther, who served under former longtime Culpeper County Commonwealth’s Attorney Gary Close – another prominent local Republican – for more than 20 years, said he never wanted to run for the constitutional office against his friend and boss.
But then Close, who had just won re-election to his sixth term in November, stepped down because of Senior U.S. District Court Judge James Turk’s scathing written opinion of his handling of the Hash prosecution, detailing “extreme malfunction in the state criminal justice system” and saying “the court is disturbed by the miscarriage of justice that occurred in this case.”
Judge Turk, in his extensive 64-page ruling on the matter, granted Hash full Continue reading
Previous posts on Higashi-Sumiyoshi Case here (part 1) and here (part 2).
This is an arson case where a couple (Tatsuhiro Boku and Keiko Aoki) was convicted in 1999 of setting their house on fire and killing an 11 year old girl (Aoki‘s daughter) in Higashi-Sumiyoshi Ward, Osaka Prefecture.
Boku and Aoki each filed a petition for retrial to the Osaka District Court in 2009, and were granted a retrial in March 2012. The presiding Judge stated in the decision that the petitioners’ confessions were unreliable and unreasonable from a “scientific viewpoint”, taking into consideration the result of the new experiment.
The prosecutors instantly appealed the ruling, and the retrial petition is currently being reviewed by the Osaka High Court.
Osaka District Court had also ordered Boku and Aoki’s immediate release. The prosecution also appealed this ruling. Osaka High Court agreed with the prosecution and reversed the District Court’s decision. The petitioners then filed a special appeal to the Supreme Court, but it denied the appeal on September 18th. The Supreme Court merely stated that the conditions of special appeal did not meet in the case. It did not even go into the actual facts of the case…
Even in the rare instances where a retrial is granted, the appeal process may take years. After the lengthy appeals process, the actual retrial process may take even longer…
A statement by the supporters can be found here (in Japanese).
John Edward Smith, 38, is expected to be released after serving 19 years in prison Monday afternoon. Prosecutors are not expected to oppose Smith’s petition for release in the hearing before a California Superior Court judge. Smith has been represented by pro bono attorneys from Innocence Matters (here). Attorney Deirdre O’Connor formed the group after becoming convinced Smith was innocent of the 1993 drive-by shooting in Los Angeles that killed one man and injured another.
Smith was convicted on the testimony of a sole witness, who has recanted. “I never got a good enough look to ever make an ID of the shooter,” Landu Continue reading
In all, 22-year-old Maligie Conteh, who immigrated to the United States from Sierra Leone at age 3, spent more than four years in prison: 17 months after a wrongful conviction of a $150-dollar robbery, and the remainder at an immigration detention facility in Porstmouth, Va., where he awaited deportation to Sierra Leone due to the conviction. Continue reading
Acting Supreme Court Justice Joel Blumenfeld (NY) ruled last April that Queens District Attorney Richard Brown’s program of interviewing suspects before arraignment violates New York State’s Rules of Professional Conduct. According to an article by Daniel Wise in the New York Law Journal (here), in People v. Perez, Judge Blumenfeld provided a sanction for the violation in ruling that the D.A.’s office could not use a statement given by Elisaul Perez in a pre-arraignment interview in its case stemming from Perez’s 2009 arrest for assault and robbery of an iPod and cash.
Judge Bloomenfeld found that the script used in interviews preliminary to arraignment gave suspects a “false sense of urgency” to speak up “now or never” Continue reading
An evidentiary hearing will begin today in the conviction of Green Beret Jeffrey McDonald, who was convicted of murdering his wife and children in their home in 1970.
McDonald always claimed that a group of “hippies” broke in and bludgeoned and stabbed his wife and children, while he sustained stab wounds resulting in a collapsed lung.
New DNA evidence, along with an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct will be assessed by the court.
McDonald was convicted by a Federal jury in 1979, and has been in prison since 1982.
See article here.
From the Chicago SunTimes:
Lori S. Yokoyama, the Republican who is challenging Democrat Anita Alvarez for Cook County state’s attorney, today criticized Alvarez’s seven-month-old Conviction Integrity Unit.
Yokoyama called on Alvarez “to explain why she continues to use office resources to fight the exonerations of several wrongfully accused men, while trumpeting the results of the Conviction Integrity Unit. The CIU, which is comprised of three Assistant States Attorney’s and woefully understaffed, has only released one wrongfully convicted person in 2012.”
Yokoyama also argued that, “For the last two years, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez fought against the DNA evidence that later set Mr. [Alprentiss] Nash free.”
Alvarez spokeswoman Sally Daly agreed the unit is understaffed. But Daly disputed Yokoyama’s claim that Alvarez fought against DNA testing for Nash.
In a press release, Yokoyama also said, “”With the extraordinarily high numbers of wrongfully convicted people in Cook County, it is shocking that Anita Alvarez waited three years to create a conviction review process. The Conviction Integrity Unit needs to be provided with additional assistant state’s attorneys and investigators in order to right the past wrongs of Anita Alvarez’ office and ensure that justice is truly served.”
Read a Sun-Times editorial about the Conviction Integrity Unit here.
From the WashingtonPost.com:
A Fairfax County judge on Thursday overturned the robbery conviction of a man who faced deportation, saying prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence that would have cast doubt on the credibility of the victim, who also was the only witness.
Circuit Court Judge Randy L. Bellows said he was confident in his verdict when he found 22-year-old Maligie Conteh guilty in 2010. But he reversed himself after learning that the victim had a conviction for possessing a fake Social Security card.
“It absolutely undermines my confidence in the outcome,” Bellows said.
Conteh, who served more than a year in prison, was facing possible deportation to his homeland of Sierra Leone because of the conviction. He has maintained all along that he was innocent and was using Facebook on a friend’s computer at the time of the crime. He had dreamed of joining the Marine Corps and was hoping to receive an acceptance letter the day he was arrested.
A group that included the staff director of the Senate Finance Committee, the Innocence Project of the University of Virginia and lawyers at the firm of McGuire Woods filed a petition asking the judge to vacate Conteh’s conviction.
They argued that the alleged victim’s crime was critical to the case because it could have undermined the truthfulness of his testimony. They also uncovered records showing that a photo and message had been posted on Conteh’s Facebook account about 10 minutes after the robbery, bolstering his alibi.
Dozens of friends and family members cheered and clapped outside the Continue reading
Hearing looms in Illinois in the shaken baby syndrome case of Pamela JacobazziFrom Mercurynews.com:
DALLAS—Despite the recent attention paid to wrongful convictions and the behavior of prosecutors, the state group of district attorneys says most claims of prosecutor misconduct are overblown.
The Texas District & County Attorneys Association released a report this week that acknowledges a handful of cases in which prosecutors may have mishandled their duties, but questions other allegations of misconduct. The report, issued Monday, responds in part to a study earlier this year by the Northern California Innocence Project, which reported 91 cases over four years of alleged prosecutorial error or misconduct.
The TDCAA’s report accuses the regional Innocence Project group of pointing to Continue reading
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