Wrongful Convictions Blog

From Haaretz:

The state has agreed to let a man convicted in the 2004 murder of Judge Adi Azar to send cigarette butts that were collected from the crime scene for DNA testing as part of his request for a retrial to prove his innocence, after the High Court of Justice suggested it do so.

The prosecution had originally refused to hand over the evidence to Yitzhak Zuziashvilli, based on the doctrine of finality of judgment. But during a hearing last week on a petition Zuziashvilli had submitted to the High Court, Justices Elyakim Rubinstein, Hanan Melcer and Anat Baron suggested that the prosecution reconsider because they planned to accept the petition.

The Public Defender’s Office, which had joined Zuziashvilli’s petition, cited data from the Innocence Project in the United States, which is dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. According to the data, DNA tests have led to the exposure of 329 wrongful convictions since the project was launched in 1992. In 149 cases, the testing led to the identification of the real criminal.

In addition to finality of judgment, the prosecution objected to the testing because Azar’s widow strenuously objected to have the case reopened, saying it would cause the family pain. To this defense attorney Shay Hemo countered with a quoted from Judge Dafne Barak-Erez in a different murder case in which additional forensic testing was requested by a defendant, who said, “The opposition of family members cannot be the only or determining factor, since the fate of the defendant is also at stake.”

The Public Defender’s Office criticized the policy of the state prosecution, which it said poses many obstacles to conducting testing on evidence for the purpose of requesting a retrial. According to the Public Defender’s Office, this policy has blocked the discovery of wrongful convictions and other errors in ostensibly conclusive verdicts, errors of the type that have been exposed in other countries by post-trial testing conducted on pieces of evidence.

The Public Defender’s Office cited seven instances in which it had sought help from the prosecution in locating investigative material to examine it after a trial. In four of them, the defense attorneys wanted the evidence to undergo scientific testing. In two of these cases the evidence had been destroyed, even though these were murder cases, for which evidence is meant to be kept forever. In the two other cases, the prosecution simply refused to give them access.

In the other three cases the defense attorneys wanted to read through and photocopy investigative material, but in two of them the material was never handed over, despite repeated requests.

From website:

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands decided on Tuesday (26 May 2015) to reopen the case against Martien Hunnik and referred the case to the Court of Appeals for a new trial. Martien Hunnik was convicted in 1984 for killing the Hilversum record label boss, Bart van de Laar, in 1981.

Hunnik was convicted for manslaughter and sentenced to two years imprisonment and “TBR”, a closed treatment facility for mentally ill offenders with diminished criminal responsibility. In the Netherlands, there is a gradual system of accruing criminal responsibility to mentally ill offenders; therefore it is possible to impose both a prison sentence and to order treatment in a mental facility.

Hunnik, who is represented by Mr. Knoops and Ms. Vosman of the Knoops’ Innocence Project, was convicted on the basis of false confessions he made in January 1983 and which he retracted in April of that year. Behavioral research demonstrated that Mr. Hunnik, at the time of his false confessions, had the tendency to confabulate and to distort the facts. Mr. Hunnik himself says he was mentally ill at that time and in search of attention.