wrongful-convictions

DNA no match to inmate

2011-12-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

By TONY HOLT | Hernando Today
Published: December 18, 2011

The wait has been excruciating for cancer patient Paul Hildwin and his attorney, Martin McClain.

Earlier this month, they got the break they had long been waiting for. There was no doubt it was coming, but it took longer than expected.

The DNA evidence found at a murder scene didn't come from Hildwin, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. It came from William Haverty, who has been in prison since a 1998 rape conviction.

Hildwin has lived on death row for 25 years. He was convicted in the slaying of Vronzettie Cox, 42, whose body was found in the trunk of her car the morning of Sept. 13, 1985 in the area of Royal Highlands — a rural community north of Weeki Wachee.

During the course of the trial, prosecutor Tom Hogan referred more than once to the fluids found on the victim's underwear and a nearby washcloth, which was discovered in the backseat.

Tests showed the fluids were semen and saliva, according to court testimony.

The 1986 trial took place before the advent of DNA evidence, but Hogan argued the semen came from a nonsecretor — someone whose blood type can't be traced through bodily fluids. Nonsecretors make up 11 percent of the world's population, said Hogan.

Hildwin was a nonsecretor, Hogan said. Haverty, who was Cox's boyfriend at the time of her death, was not.

Hildwin's defense attorney, Daniel Lewan, tried connecting the killing to Haverty, but was unsuccessful.

Hildwin was caught cashing one of Cox's stolen checks. He also gave different stories to authorities when questioned. He also told an incredible story to jurors when the inexperienced Lewan allowed him to testify, said McClain, who has since handled most of the appellate work on behalf of Hildwin.

There were other issues glossed over by the state during the trial, according to defense motions.

The window of opportunity for the slaying was small – roughly 90 minutes. During that time, the state argued Hildwin walked to a store off U.S. 19, murdered Cox, stuffed her body into the trunk, parked the car in the woods, cashed the stolen check and then walked back to his own abandoned car along the highway.

It was the forensic evidence against Hildwin, which now has been proven false, that put the case over the top for the state, McClain said. It was presented to jurors through the testimony of an FBI lab technician.

"The FBI analyst testimony excluding Haverty as the contributor of the material was and has been the lynchpin of the state's case," said McClain.

McClain said Hogan was secretive about the presentation of the evidence. Lewan didn't know about it until the fourth day of trial. McClain, through interviews, arguments and court filings, has been a sharp critic of Hogan's prosecutorial techniques.

Hogan now runs a private practice out of Brooksville. Months ago, he told Hernando Today he was still convinced Hildwin was the killer no matter who the DNA belonged to.

McClain said the state had long "locked out" the DNA from being uploaded into the database. It did so because it was convinced it wasn't Haverty's DNA.

"It's their actions that have caused this delay," said McClain. "My client has struggled to stay alive."

In a motion filed last week, McClain called the tactics by the Florida Attorney General's Office "indefensible." He said the attitude from the state has been inappropriate.

"Mr. Hildwin has been seeking an order for more than eight years comparing this sample to Mr. Haverty over the State's objection," he stated in his motion.

No one from the Attorney General's Office has commented about the Hildwin case because the appeal remains open.

Hildwin's cancer has been in remission. McClain said his client is relying on prison staff for his medical care as he awaits additional surgeries.

McClain had three appellate motions tied to Hildwin, including the one asking the state to upload the DNA.

Following his latest victory, McClain hopes it will accelerate the other motions and eventually overturn the verdict.

McClain said when he told his client about the latest development in the case, Hildwin smiled at him.

"I told you so," McClain said, recalling Hildwin's words. "I knew it. I knew it."

Win for death row inmate

2011-12-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

http://www2.hernandotoday.com/news/hernando-news/2011/nov/11/2/death-row-inmate-gets-a-victory-ar-302503/

Win for death row inmate

By TONY HOLT | Hernando Today
Published: November 11, 2011
Updated: November 11, 2011 - 7:45 PM

There was seminal fluid wrapped up in the victim's underwear and saliva on a washcloth. They were lying in the backseat of the victim's car.
Vronzettie Cox's naked body was found in the trunk. It was the morning of Sept. 13, 1985.
One year later in a Hernando County courtroom, Paul Christopher Hildwin was convicted of first-degree murder. He has spent the rest of his life living on death row.
The seminal fluid and saliva have never been uploaded in the state's database. On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court ruled it should.
The Attorney General's Office has 15 days to file a motion for a rehearing.
Hildwin's prosecutor, Tom Hogan Jr., mentioned the forensic evidence to jurors. He said it further proved Hildwin murdered the 42-year-old Cox and stuffed her body into the trunk of her car in Royal Highlands.
Hildwin's court-appointed defense attorney said years later during an appellate hearing he was blindsided by Hogan's presentation of the evidence.
If he had seen it coming, he would have made time to prepare for it, the defense attorney argued.
The trial took place prior to the advancement of DNA evidence, but Hogan told jurors the seminal fluid came from a nonsecretor — someone whose blood type can't be traced through bodily fluids.
Nonsecretors make up 11 percent of the world's population. Hildwin was among the 11 percent, Hogan said.
In 2003, a private company compared both the seminal fluid and the saliva to Hildwin's DNA. The results came back negative. As a result, a circuit court judge recommended to the higher court that the evidence be compared to other convicted felons.
If the state doesn't file the motion or if the court denies it, the semen and saliva samples will be uploaded to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement database.
If there's a match, the case could be turned on its head, said Martin J. McClain, Hildwin's attorney.
In an interview earlier this year, McClain said the state had so little evidence it relied on unethical tactics to win a conviction.
Every attorney who represented Hildwin during the appellate portion of the case has stated the same in court documents.
McClain said during a phone interview Friday that if the DNA matches someone in the database, there will be an onslaught of questions centering on a new possible suspect, including where he was and what he was doing the day Cox was murdered.
"It's all speculative at this point," said McClain. "There are thousands and thousands of people in that database."
Detectives at the time suspected Cox's then-boyfriend, William Haverty, could have had something to do with the crime, according to reports from the Hernando County Sheriff's Office.
Haverty has been in prison since 1998. He was convicted of sexually battering a girl younger than 12 years old.
McClain has two other appeals related to the Hildwin case. He said the Florida Supreme Court gave no indication about the progress of those appeals or whether they hinge on the pending DNA findings.

wholt@hernandotoday.com (352) 544-5283

Execution Date Nears for Ohio Man, Despite Evidence of Innocence

2010-08-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

Posted: August 10, 2010 2:58 pm

The Ohio Parole Board will hold a hearing tomorrow in the case of Kevin Keith, who is scheduled to be executed September 15 despite strong evidence of his innocence.

After the parole board makes its recommendation, Gov. Ted Strickland will have the final say on whether Keith is executed. Strickland said last week that the case “has circumstances that I find troubling.”

The Innocence Network is among a diverse coalition of organizations and individuals calling on Strickland to grant clemency in the case. In a letter last week to Strickland, Innocence Network President Keith Findley wrote:
“We believe the newly discovered evidence, which was withheld by the state at the time of (Keith’s) trial, provides compelling evidence of his innocence.”

Keith was convicted of shooting and killing three people in an Ohio apartment in 1994. He was convicted based in part on questionable eyewitness identification evidence, and key details were never shared with defense attorneys. The Innocence Network also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in April urging the U.S. Supreme Court to consider Keith’s case based on evidence that he was denied a fair trial. The court did not agree to hear the case.

In another recent letter to Gov. Strickland, former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro wrote: “I am gravely concerned that the State of Ohio may be on the verge of executing an innocent person.”

Nearly 10,000 people have signed a petition urging Strickland and the Parole Board to grant clemency in Keith’s case. Join them here.

Read more:
New York Times: Unusual Alliance Protests Execution

Columbus Dispatch: Timeout From Death?

More News Clippings on Derrick Williams

2010-07-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

From the Blog : Plain Error :

More News Clippings on Derrick Williams

Here are some straggler news articles on Derrick Williams:

Family Rallies to Proclaim Palmetto Convict’s Innocence (With Video) (Bradenton Herald)
Press Conference Photo Gallery (Bradenton Herald)
Inmate’s Case Puts Focus on Flawed System (Miami Herald)

Press Conference Regarding Derrick Williams’ Innocence Once again, IPF attorneys Seth Miller and Melissa Montle are onto a wrongful conviction. DNA test results proving the innocence...
DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent: Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not...
New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL on July 27th New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL New DNA Test Results Prove Derrick Williams’ Innocence This Tuesday, July...
Who said anything about an absence of DNA? Since we released the DNA results in the case of Derrick Williams earlier this week, there has been an outpouring...
James Bain Round-up Well folks, we had a successful release of James Bain’s DNA test results which prove that he did not rape...
NEWS REPORT: DNA Testing Granted in Pasco County Death Case On December 19, 2007, a Pasco County judge granted Samuel Jason Derrick post-conviction DNA testing on evidence in this case....

Who said anything about an absence of DNA?

2010-07-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

From the Blog : Plain Error

Who said anything about an absence of DNA?

Since we released the DNA results in the case of Derrick Williams earlier this week, there has been an outpouring of public support for Derrick, his family and for IPF. People recognize that the DNA test results are powerful new evidence that prove Derrick’s innocence and, at minimum, entitle him to a new trial. What doesn’t seem to make sense is the insistence by the prosecutor that we are relying on the absence of DNA to prove innocence in this case. After calling IPF names, which is a bit unnecessary, a commenter in a previous post illustrates this confusion:

Wow I cannot believe how gullible the people at The Innocence Project of Florida have become. All a convict has to say is “I’m innocent” and that MUST be the truth so they will spend $$$$ trying to free the criminal. This man is 100% guilty and your DNA tests are a joke! How does this DNA evidence demonstrate innocence ? Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence! Do you understand that? Just because you DID NOT FIND DNA on a shirt does not mean the man WAS NOT THERE!!! Stop wasting your time and money! In fact I have an idea. the IPF should hire me as a consultant.
I am willing to work very cheap, I can save the IFP a BOAT LOAD OF $$$

Let’s dismantle this illogical argument. We recognize better than most that most people in the prison system assert their innocence even if it is not true. Indeed, we receive approximately 1,200 requests for new assistance each year and only accept about 12 new cases, meaning we deny roughly 99% of the people who contact us for help. When we take a case, we take it because we believe we can meet the legal standards both to get DNA testing and to vacate the conviction should the results be favorable. The Derrick Williams case is no different.
We all agree that it is a single perpetrator, black on white, rape case where the perpetrator left his shirt in the victim’s car and it was later collected by law enforcement. This shirt was a key piece of evidence and the case really only hinges on the victim’s inconsistent and tainted ID and the strong effort by the prosecution to attribute the shirt to Derrick. Let’s not forget that when we petitioned for DNA testing, we argued that one possibility was to get the exact result we ended up getting, and with that knowledge, the prosecution recognized our entitlement to the testing.
We would not be where we are today if there was an “absence of DNA” on the inside of the collar of the perpetrator’s t-shirt. If that were the case, we would have had no DNA profile to compare to and Derrick would have to remain wrongfully incarcerated. No press conference, no news coverage, nothing left to do.
Of course, our result is much different. We DID find DNA in the inside collar of the shirt, which is a wearer area of the shirt. It is a place where, when people sweat normally when wearing a t-shirt, they leave their sweat and skin cells which contain their DNA. This is especially so, as in this case, when the wearing is done on a hot August day and a violent struggle occurred causing greater shedding of skin cells than that which takes place during normal wear. When we compared this wearer DNA found on the inside collar of the perpetrator’s t-shirt to the DNA profile Derrick Williams, he was excluded as a donor of the wearer DNA. This means the DNA wearer DNA was not his, he did not wear the shirt and leave it in the victim’s car after the rape, and someone other than him committed the rape.
Every single DNA exoneration necessarily requires the perpetrator to leave his biological evidence at the crime scene, either in or on a victim, or on a piece of physical evidence that has a nexus to the crime and the perpetrator. Thus, this case is no different than a perpetrator leaving semen on the victim’s underwear and it excluding the defendant.
It is the absence of the Defendant’s DNA and the presence of someone else’s DNA that makes this case just like the other 255 DNA exonerations before it. This new DNA evidence proves Derrick did not rape the victim and that he is innocent. We look forward to proving what most already understand: that these fanciful arguments by this commenter and the prosecution are really just non-science-based excuses for following their gut instinct instead of the evidence that is clear as day.

DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent: Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not...
More News Clippings on Derrick Williams Here are some straggler news articles on Derrick Williams: Family Rallies to Proclaim Palmetto Convict’s Innocence (With Video) (Bradenton Herald)...
New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL on July 27th New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL New DNA Test Results Prove Derrick Williams’ Innocence This Tuesday, July...
Press Conference Regarding Derrick Williams’ Innocence Once again, IPF attorneys Seth Miller and Melissa Montle are onto a wrongful conviction. DNA test results proving the innocence...
Crime scene left unsealed Earlier this month, Yale graduate student Annie Le went missing after she entered the research building she worked in but...
Eyewitness identification in the news Sam Sommers is a psychologist at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Today on his blog on Psychology Today, he relates an...

Press Conference Regarding Derrick Williams’ Innocence

2010-07-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

From the Blog Plain Error :

Press Conference Regarding Derrick Williams’ Innocence

Once again, IPF attorneys Seth Miller and Melissa Montle are onto a wrongful conviction. DNA test results proving the innocence of Derrick Williams who had been convicted of an August 1993 kidnapping and rape in Palmetto, Manatee County, FL were released by a Fairfield, Ohio laboratory on Monday, July 26, 2010. In addition to that, the IPF has unveiled other factors plaguing Williams’ case, including witness misidentification, the damaging and destruction of the evidence while it was under the care of Manatee County Sheriff’s Office (MSO), and the MSO’s denial of that neglection to the press (IPF Press Release). The following is a round-up of the press conference held on July 27, 2010 in regards to this development:
DNA test on evidence could overturn 1993 rape conviction of Palmetto man (Herald Tribune)
DNA used to contest Palmetto man’s conviction in 1992 rape (The Tampa Tribune)
Attorneys: DNA evidence exonerates inmate (MyFOX Tampa Bay)
Innocence Project demands release of Palmetto convict (Bradenton Herald)
Innocence Project says man convicted of rape should be freed (ABC Action News)
Innocence Project out to free Manatee man (BayNews 9)
Is convicted rapist innocent? Attorneys say DNA proves it (WTSP 10 News)
Will new evidence set Manatee County man free? (ABC 7)
Group says DNA proves Palmetto man didn’t rape woman in 1992 (Tampa Bay Online)

New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL on July 27th New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL New DNA Test Results Prove Derrick Williams’ Innocence This Tuesday, July...
DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent: Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not...
Bain DNA Test Results Press Conference Today We are in Polk County Florida today to hold a press conference with the 10th Judicial Circuit Public Defender. At...
Press Release: James Bain to Be Released James Bain Set For Release Based on DNA Test Results Proving Innocence Bain has Served Over 35 Years for a...
2008 Innocence Network Conference – San Jose, CA Pictured: (from right to left) Florida Exonerees Alan Crotzer, Wilton Dedge, Larry Bostic, Chad Heins, IPF Executive Director Seth Miller,...
The Florida Bar Foundation Supports the Innocence Commission Here is the press release from the Florida Bar Foundation who are also wonderful supporters of IPF’s work. FOR IMMEDIATE...

DNA used to contest Palmetto man's conviction in 1992 rape

2010-07-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

DNA used to contest Palmetto man's conviction in 1992 rape

By RAY REYES The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 27, 2010

Updated: 9 min. ago

Related Links

Bain: How you stay hopeful
Bain: Home for Christmas
Innocence Project website

Derrick Williams

TAMPA - An organization that used DNA evidence to free a Tampa man after 35 years in prison is working to exonerate a Palmetto man they said was wrongfully convicted of rape.

The Innocence Project of Florida held a news conference this morning at the Manatee County Courthouse in Bradenton to announce that DNA test results prove Derrick Williams did not rape a woman in 1992.

"It makes me extremely happy that it's finally coming to an end," Williams said in a statement through Innocence Project lawyers. "The results prove what I have said all along – I am innocent."

Seth Miller, the executive director of the Tallahassee-based nonprofit organization, said he has filed a motion today to vacate Williams' conviction.

"Hopefully, we can get it done as soon as possible," Miller said.

According to authorities:

The woman was kidnapped when she arrived home from work. The attacker forced her back into her car and drove to an orange grove, where she was raped in the back seat.

The man had removed a T-shirt he was wearing and told the woman to cover her face with it. After the attack, the man got out of the car to open the trunk.

The woman got in the driver's seat and drove away. The man's shirt, which became a key piece of evidence in the case, was still in the car.

A court-ordered test this year shows that skin cells and sweat on the inside collar of a shirt worn by the attacker does not match Williams' DNA. The technology was not available during Williams' trial in 1993.

During the investigation, the victim's description of her attacker was inconsistent, as was her account of how well she could see him, attorneys for the Innocence Project said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said a strand of hair found on the shirt did not come from Williams.

During the trial, the jury was not convinced by the FDLE report or six defense witnesses who said Williams was at a family barbecue when the rape occurred.

"After 17 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, the state should do the right thing and release this innocent man immediately," said Melissa Montle, an attorney for the Innocence Project.

Prosecutors will fight efforts to free Williams, saying someone else's DNA on the shirt doesn't exonerate him. The victim had picked Williams out of a photo lineup as her attacker, prosecutors say.

Miller questioned the procedure of the lineup, saying investigators included two photos of Williams when the packet was presented to the victim.

"They put him in the photo pack twice," Miller said. "That is kind of suggestive."

Williams, 47, is serving a life sentence at Hardee Correctional Institution. Before convicted in the Manatee rape case, he was sentenced to a prison term of two years in 1989 on grand theft and burglary charges, state records show.

Innocence Project attorneys said Williams has been a model prisoner, earning a GED and working as a supervisor for a program that refurbished Florida Department of Corrections vehicles and fire trucks.

Jamie Bain, who was freed from prison after the Innocence Project took on his case, attended the news conference to show his support for Williams. More than 30 members of Williams' family were also there to ask for his release.

Bain, who lives in Tampa, was freed Dec. 17. Results showed his DNA did not match a sample found on the underwear of a 9-year-old rape victim.

Bain's wrongful imprisonment is the longest time served by any of the 255 people in the country exonerated by DNA evidence.

He was invited to Philadelphia this year to ring the Liberty Bell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Bain was the guest of honor at a luncheon after the ceremony and received an award from city leaders.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. Reporter Ray Reyes can be reached at (813) 259-7920.

Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not Commit; Attorneys Call for Immediate Release

2010-07-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not Commit; Attorneys Call for Immediate Release

Innocence Project of Florida, Inc.

1100 East Park Avenue, Tallahassee, FL 32301

Telephone 850.561.6767 Fax 850.561.5077

For Immediate Release PRESS RELEASE

July 27, 2010

Contacts:

Seth Miller, Esq.: 202.341.2127

Melissa Montle, Esq.: 561.843.9304

DNA Testing Demonstrates Derrick Williams is Innocent:

Williams has Served Over 17 Years for a Rape he Did Not Commit; Attorneys Call for Immediate Release

Bradenton, Florida—On Monday, July 26, 2010, DNA Diagnostics Center, a nationally recognized forensic laboratory in Fairfield, Ohio, issued a report in the case of State of Florida v. Derrick Williams, which demonstrates Williams’ actual innocence of an August 1993 kidnapping and rape in Palmetto, Manatee County, Florida.

Upon an agreement by Williams’ attorneys at the Innocence Project of Florida and the State Attorney, the court ordered DNA testing on the t-shirt worn by the assailant before the rape and left in the victim’s car at the end of the crime. The testing excludes Derrick Williams as the donor of the DNA on the inside of the collar of the assailant’s t-shirt, confirming that someone other than Williams raped the victim and left the t-shirt in her car. “After over 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the State should do the right thing and release this innocent man immediately,” said Williams’ attorney, Melissa Montle, staff attorney for the Innocence Project of Florida (IPF).

At Williams’ trial, the State made the assailant’s t-shirt the central piece of physical evidence against Williams, even though there was an indication even before trial that the shirt may have belonged to someone else. Before trial, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement determined that a “Negroid” hair found on the t-shirt could not have come from Williams. Williams was convicted when the jury failed to believe that scientific evidence or his unrefuted alibi evidence given by six different witnesses (he was at a family barbeque); instead relying on the inconsistent and contradictory eyewitness identification by the victim. “Today’s DNA results demonstrate conclusively that the victim was mistaken about who raped her and that Derrick is innocent,” said Montle.

According to the Innocence Project of Florida, witness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions, contributing to 75% of the 255 wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing nationwide.

Other important physical evidence, including the victim’s rape kit and the foreign “Negroid” hair from the assailant’s t-shirt, were improperly stored and unlawfully incinerated by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office (MSO) in late 2003. Internal MSO memos indicate that, as early as 1996, leadership at MSO was made aware of poor climate control and mold issues in one of its storage facilities. Yet it never made any effort to move the evidence, examine it, or determine whether any pieces of evidence were salvageable. Instead, the evidence in the case of Derrick Williams and nearly 4,000 other criminal cases was summarily destroyed by mass incineration.

MSO denied the evidence damage and destruction to the press. It never informed defendants or defense attorneys in these cases about the destruction. The mass destruction was only revealed through the vigorous eighteen-month investigation of the Williams case by the Innocence Project of Florida. “The State simply threw away important evidence in Derrick William’s case and in thousands of other cases, and then pretended like it never happened. We now know that Derrick is innocent. How many others will never get the chance to prove their innocence because of this debacle?” said Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida.

For his part, Derrick Williams has been a model citizen in the Florida prison system. During his wrongful incarceration, he earned a GED and was an inmate supervisor for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE) refurbishing Department of Corrections vehicles and fire trucks for first responders nationwide. When informed of the results, Williams said, “It makes me extremely happy that it’s finally coming to an end. The results prove what I have said all along—I am innocent.”

The Innocence Project of Florida (IPF) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to finding and freeing innocent people in Florida prisons. IPF represents Derrick Williams for free, including all costs associated with DNA testing and litigation. IPF’s website is www.FloridaInnocence.org.

###

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Statement of Facts: State of Florida v. Derrick Williams

On March 19, 1993, Derrick Williams was convicted of kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, grand theft auto, and two counts of battery and was later sentenced to life in prison by the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court in Manatee County, Florida. Exactly 17 years later, on March 19, 2010, that same Court granted DNA testing of biological material on the assailant’s t-shirt. On July 26, 2010, a report was issued revealing DNA results that demonstrate Williams’ actual innocence.

The DNA: New DNA results reveal that DNA from the assailant’s skin cells and sweat on the inside collar of the assailant’s t-shirt came from someone other than Williams, thus confirming that someone other than Williams committed the kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, grand theft auto, and batteries, and left his t-shirt in the victim’s car. Williams’ attorneys, the Innocence Project of Florida (“IPF”), requested this DNA testing in 2009 and the State Attorney for the Twelfth Circuit agreed to the testing. The testing was paid for by IPF and performed at DNA Diagnostics Center, a private lab in Fairfield, Ohio.

The Crime: After she arrived home from work on August 6, 1992, the victim was kidnapped in her own car by an unknown black male and taken to a nearby orange grove where she was raped in the back seat. Before the rape occurred, the assailant removed the t-shirt he was wearing and told the victim to cover her face with the shirt. When the assailant exited the car to open the trunk, she escaped and drove home with the assailant’s t-shirt still in the car. Law enforcement collected the t-shirt for processing.

Williams was known to law enforcement in the area for property crimes leading them to include him in the photo line-up shown to the victim. Contrary to sound police procedure, two photos of Williams were included in the same photo line-up. After viewing the lineup with the suggestive double photo inclusion, the victim identified Williams as her attacker. Although Williams had an alibi, never confessed to the crime, and always maintained his innocence, police arrested him.

The Trial: The State’s case was based largely on the victim’s identification of Williams as her assailant and on evidence linking the t-shirt left in the car to Williams. In addition to the State’s evidence, the Defense called 7 alibi witnesses, including Williams himself, who were all sure that Williams was at a family barbecue at the time of the offense.

(1) Victim’s Misidentification: The traumatized victim was inconsistent with her description of her assailant and her description of how well she was actually able to see him. In fact, her best opportunity to see her assailant was when she first drove up to her house with her window cracked and he was standing on her porch 20 feet away. After that glimpse, her view was completely obstructed for the remainder of the crime—he had her in a head lock in the car before the rape and his t-shirt was used to cover her face during the rape. The victim’s physical description of the assailant also did not match Williams’ appearance. She initially described her assailant as between 5’6” and 5’8” with a scar on his gut whereas Williams is 5’11” and has a scar on his back. At trial, the victim changed her testimony to eliminate this discrepancy by stating that she did see a scar on her assailant’s back, even though she had testified unambiguously at her earlier deposition that she never saw her assailant’s back.

Even more telling was law enforcement’s preparation of a photo line-up which included 2 photos of Williams. This type of double photo inclusion is improper and inherently suggestive. After viewing the photo line-up with 2 photos of Williams, the victim identified Williams as her attacker, but was admittedly only 80% sure it was him. After a subsequent live line-up, she stated she was positive Williams was the perpetrator. DNA results now prove that someone other than Williams left the t-shirt in the victim’s car during the rape and that the victim’s tainted identification of Williams as her rapist was a mistake.

(2) The Assailant’s T-Shirt: The State’s Key Piece of Physical Evidence: It is undisputed that the t-shirt on which DNA testing was performed belonged to the assailant. More specifically, it was the State’s theory at trial that the assailant who raped the victim was wearing the t-shirt when he first met her and kidnapped her, took the t-shirt off and covered her face with it to prevent her from identifying him during the rape, and inadvertently left the t-shirt in the victim’s car when she managed to surprise him and escape. The State then attributed the t-shirt to Williams in order to convince the jury that he was the assailant. The victim herself identified the t-shirt as the assailant’s and it was admitted into evidence as State’s Exhibit 9A. In addition, Williams’ girlfriend made a pretrial statement saying that Williams owned a similar shirt but repudiated that statement at trial. The State continued to contend that the t-shirt belonged to Williams even though a “Negroid” hair extracted from the shirt, according to FDLE, could not have originated from Williams. DNA results now prove that the State’s theory that Williams was the assailant and left the t-shirt in the car, along with the evidence used to prove this theory, was simply wrong.

(3) Williams’ Alibi: In his defense, 6 witnesses, including family, friends, and neighbors, provided unrefuted testimony that Williams was at a barbecue at his mother’s house when the crime occurred. In addition, Williams took the stand in his own defense and testified that he was at the barbecue, he did not commit this crime, and the assailant’s t-shirt did not belong to him. DNA results now prove Williams’ alibi to be credible and his claims of innocence to be true.

Unlawful Destruction of Evidence: In addition to the assailant’s t-shirt, an abundance of other evidence was collected by law enforcement after the crime. This other evidence also could have been DNA tested to reveal the rapist’s identity and included (1) the victim’s rape kit, which contained semen; (2) floor mats from the victim’s car, which indicated the presence of bodily fluids; (3) Negroid hairs extracted from the assailant’s t-shirt; (4) Negroid hairs extracted from the car’s vacuumings; (5) the assailant’s white cloth left in the car, which indicated the presence of bodily fluids; and (6) the victim’s clothing worn during the rape. Unfortunately, each of these items (along with evidence from thousands of other cases) was negligently stored by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office (“MSO”) in a storage unit that flooded. According to internal memos, the possibility of major water damage was known to MSO as early as 1996. MSO incinerated each and every single piece of evidence in this water damaged storage unit in 2003, without first performing a thorough review to determine the extent of the damage and whether evidence was suitable for future storage, and without notification to defendants or their counsel affected by the damage.

Conclusion: Unfortunately for Mr. Williams, who has spent 17 years in prison, this DNA evidence did not exist at the time of his trial. Now that the key piece of physical evidence has been analyzed using modern science, DNA testing proves that skin cells and sweat on the inside collar of the assailant’s t-shirt belong to someone other than Derrick Williams. Thus, the assailant’s t-shirt, which was once the lynchpin of the State’s case linking Williams to the crime, is now actually powerful, affirmative evidence of innocence.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Derrick Williams: Unlawful Destruction of Evidence

The Manatee County Sherriff’s office (“MSO”) destroyed evidence in thousands of Manatee County criminal cases, due to its improper storage and mishandling of the physical evidence.

During its routine investigation and review of Derrick Williams’ case, the Innocence Project of Florida (“IPF”) discovered that much of the evidence had been destroyed under mysterious circumstances. It appeared that MSO had not been open and honest about the circumstances which surrounded the destruction of evidence in Williams’ case. In addition, MSO would not produce the required contemporaneous documentation regarding the destruction.

Specifically, IPF sent its first formal public records request regarding evidence in Williams’ case on August 4, 2008 and received no response. On September 29, 2008, IPF called MSO in an attempt to follow up on the request and locate the evidence. At this time, IPF was told by the supervisor of the property room at MSO that MSO was not in possession of any evidence in the Williams case. MSO provided no documentation to prove this claim. On October 30, 2008, IPF was able to reach the supervisor of the MSO Crime Lab who stated that any and all evidence and destruction orders would be in the possession of the property room. So, on November 3, 2008, IPF followed up with the supervisor of the property room who on this date stated that the Williams evidence was either destroyed or in “the boxes” but that these “boxes” were in the process of being moved and it would be months before she could locate “the boxes” or the destruction orders for the Williams evidence. Unwilling to wait months, IPF sent a renewed public records request on November 25, 2008, laying out the conflicting information received up to that point from MSO.

On December 5, 2008, IPF received a written response from Major Keith Stewart at MSO stating that it was possible that the Williams evidence was destroyed when the entire contents of one MSO storage unit, the First Union Bank vault (“vault”), was lost due to water and mold, but this had not yet been determined. This was the first that IPF had heard about possible water damage. The Major also stated that if it was discovered that the evidence was indeed destroyed by the water damage, documentation would be provided to IPF. A second response from Major Stewart was received on the same date, December 5, 2008, stating that the Williams evidence was indeed in the vault that was damaged by water and mold and any and all evidence in that facility was completely destroyed. This destruction of an entire MSO storage facility occurred between the months of November and December 2003 by burning the evidence in an incinerator.

In response to Major Stewart’s second letter purportedly confirming the destruction of the Williams evidence, IPF sent another letter on December 19, 2008 requesting proof of destruction pursuant to Florida Statutes and requesting a complete list of all of the evidence that was destroyed in the Williams case. On December 23, 2008, still troubled by this purported mishandling and destruction of valuable evidence, IPF followed up with a written request to MSO specifically for contemporaneous destruction orders, an itemized list of evidence destroyed, written confirmation that a thorough search for the evidence was performed, and a complete list of all of the cases in which evidence was destroyed in November-December 2003.

On January 2, 2009, IPF received a response from MSO General Counsel acknowledging receipt of the recent requests and promising to continue to work to provide the requested documents and information. During a call with MSO General Counsel on January 21, 2009, IPF learned that all of the requested information was in existence and would be put together within a few weeks. On February 25, 2009, MSO General Counsel provided IPF with the Williams’ case file and documentation regarding the destruction of the Williams evidence. On this date, IPF was assured that it would receive a complete list of all cases in which evidence was destroyed due to water damage in the vault once it was compiled. MSO provided this list of thousands of cases on March 18, 2009. After over a year and a half of haggling, IPF received all of the information it requested from MSO. During this same timeframe, MSO was patently denying to the press that a flood or water damage occurred in any of its storage facilities and apparently failed for over five years to notify anyone outside of MSO that the mass destruction of evidence occurred.

Unfortunately, the information received by IPF proved that, indeed, the invaluable Williams evidence was destroyed by incineration due to improper storage and mishandling by MSO. This evidence included (1) the victim’s rape kit, which contained semen; (2) floor mats from the victim’s car, which indicated the presence of bodily fluids; (3) Negroid hairs extracted from the assailant’s t-shirt; (4) Negroid hairs extracted from the car’s vacuumings; (5) the assailant’s white cloth left in the car, which indicated the presence of bodily fluids; and (6) the victim’s clothing worn during the rape. IPF believed in Williams’ innocence and pursued DNA testing of the only 2 pieces of evidence still in existence—the assailant’s t-shirt and the victim’s pantyhose used as a ligature.

Not only was MSO’s avoidance of the truth and resistance to providing proper documentation a problem, but included in the documentation ultimately provided to IPF was proof that MSO knew of the possibility of water damage in the vault, yet did nothing to prevent it. In an internal MSO memorandum dated October 24, 1996, the supervisor of the property room noted the possibility of a major problem with water/sewage damage of evidence in certain areas. Yet, it appears that no action was taken to address this problem because in July 2001 the supervisor of the property room in two memorandums requested authorization to destroy evidence in hundreds of cases in the vault noting that “all of the cases” in the vault “have built up a lot of mold/mildew which is a hazard to your health.” It is disturbing to note that MSO requested destruction of this evidence without taking any steps to remediate the damage or move the evidence. On May 17, 2002, the property supervisor requested that photographs be taken of the damaged evidence in the vault in order to bolster the request for destruction. Again, the request was for photographs, not for retrieval or remediation of the evidence. On May 12, 2002, citing a non-functioning dehumidifier, an MSO memorandum stated that the evidence in the vault should be removed and disposed. Finally, an MSO memorandum dated October 16, 2002 noted that while “Operation Vault Clean-out” was to begin on July 23, 2002, a health problem required MSO to push the cleaning back to October 2002.

Never in any of these internal memoranda does anyone associated with MSO even consider that the evidence should be sorted through, that some of it may still be in good, usable condition, that some of it may be exculpatory, or that contemporaneous records should be made of its destruction. Nor do they consider notifying the criminal defendants or attorneys involved. Even after the public became aware of this improper and unlawful mass destruction of evidence, MSO downplayed the importance of the destroyed evidence and asserted that the destruction was harmless because all of the lost evidence was for cases that had already gone through the legal system. Derrick Williams’ case “had already gone through the legal system.” In fact, the State had knowledge of the existence of exculpatory evidence in the Williams case, namely a Negroid hair from the assailant’s t-shirt that FDLE determined before trial could not have originated from Derrick Williams, and still unlawfully disposed of this evidence as part of its mass destruction of evidence.

This improper storage and unlawful destruction affected thousands of Manatee County defendants. New DNA test results now demonstrate that one of them—Derrick Williams—is innocent. It is frightening to consider how many more are innocent but will be unable to prove their innocence due to this unlawful mass destruction of evidence in Manatee County.

T-shirt that was key evidence in prosecution could now exonerate him

2010-07-27T04:34:00.000-07:00

DNA evidence may free man after 17 years
T-shirt that was key evidence in prosecution could now exonerate him
Derrick WIlliams

By Todd Ruger

Published: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:54 a.m.

MANATEE COUNTY - The same gray T-shirt that helped put Derrick Williams of Palmetto in prison for life on a rape conviction in 1993 has resurfaced as the piece of evidence that may exonerate him.

A woman escaped from the rape with her attacker's gray T-shirt, and she identified Williams in court as the man who took off his shirt to cover her face during the attack. Williams' girlfriend also told the jury that he left home that day wearing a gray shirt but returned with a red one.

But on Monday, Williams' attorneys revealed that new DNA tests of sweat and skin cells on the inside of the shirt collar did not come from Williams. They say the results prove Williams is innocent, and that he has spent the past 17 years in prison on a wrongful conviction.

"The T-shirt has the DNA of the perpetrator, and it's not our guy," said Melissa Montle, staff attorney for the Innocence Project of Florida. "It's really, really good news."

Williams' attorneys will file motions today to vacate his kidnapping and rape convictions and life prison sentence. The new lab results sent to prosecutors Monday exclude Williams from being a contributor to a mixture of DNA found on the inside of the gray shirt's collar -- where skin and sweat from the wearer would collect.

Twelve people in Florida -- and 255 nationwide -- have been exonerated based on DNA evidence, which has advanced to allow testing on hair and even degraded substances since Williams went to prison, said Seth Miller, the Innocence Project executive director.

"We had another case just like this in Brevard County, and that gentleman was exonerated after 27 years in prison," Miller said. "We think we should have the same result here."

The Innocence Project called on prosecutors to immediately agree to release Williams. But a local prosecutor said the new evidence does not prove Williams' innocence, and said the state will ask for a hearing before a judge to discuss it.

Williams was informed of the results in prison and, according to the Innocence Project, said: "It makes me extremely happy that it's finally coming to an end. The results prove what I have said all along -- I am innocent."

Police accused Williams, now 47, of abducting the 25-year-old woman from her Palmetto home, forcing her into her car and driving her to an orange grove to rape her.

Williams testified on his own behalf at trial. Relatives told the jury he was eating chicken and drinking beer with them at a family barbecue at the time of the attack.

Labs create a profile from a suspect's DNA by using 13 locations on the DNA that are known to vary from person to person. It is then compared to a profile of DNA taken from evidence. Any difference in any one of the locations means there is no match and the suspect therefore could not have left the DNA.

At the time of his arrest, Williams offered to give blood and saliva samples. But there was no sperm found to compare the genetic material, and DNA techniques used to find samples on evidence were not known then.

That meant the case was largely based on the victim's identification of Williams, but her description of her assailant differed from Williams and her story had several inconsistencies. Misidentification is often the cause of wrongful convictions that are later overturned by DNA evidence, the Innocence Project said.

Law enforcement prepared a photo line-up that included two pictures of Williams -- which is inherently suggestive -- and the victim said she was 80 percent sure Williams was her attacker, the Innocence Project says.

The victim did a live line-up later and said she was sure it was Williams. Her best opportunity to see her attacker was with her car window cracked with the man on the porch 20 feet away -- she said he had her in a headlock or with the shirt on her head the rest of the time, the Innocence Project said.

The victim said her attacker was 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8 with a scar on his gut, whereas Williams is 5-11 with a scar on his back. She changed her testimony at trial to say the scar was on her attacker's back, even though she had told investigators she never saw her attacker's back.

The state also contended the shirt belonged to Williams even though the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had used a microscope to determine a hair extracted from the shirt could not have been Williams', the Innocence Project says.

The Innocence Project sought to test that hair and other evidence in Williams' case, such as the car's floor mats, the rape kit and the victim's clothing during the rape.

But those items were destroyed by the Manatee County Sheriff's office after a 2003 water leak in an evidence storage facility, along with evidence in about 3,600 other criminal cases.

Miller said there was a good chance they would have been able to find DNA evidence to test on those other items to help further show Williams' innocence.

That is important because if the conviction and sentence are vacated, the next step procedurally is a retrial. Prosecutors would not have much of the evidence from the case since it was destroyed.

At the time of his conviction, Williams was already a felon, and had been accused and acquitted of a rape years earlier.

A woman said two men abducted her car from the parking lot of a north Manatee County convenience store in 1980, drove her to an orange grove and raped her.

In that case, the woman identified Williams and another man as her attackers; the other man was in jail at the time of the rape and Williams' relatives said he was home sleeping at the time.

New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL

2010-07-26T15:45:00.001-07:00

Innocence Project of Florida, Inc.

1100 East Park Avenue, Tallahassee, FL 32301

Telephone 850.561.6767 Fax 850.561.5077

For Immediate Release PRESS Advisory

July 26, 2010

Contacts:

Seth Miller, Esq.: 202.341.2127

Melissa Montle, Esq.: 561.843.9304

New Wrongful Conviction Press Conference in Bradenton, FL
New DNA Test Results Prove Derrick Williams’ Innocence

This Tuesday, July 27, 2010, Derrick Williams’ attorneys from the Innocence Project of Florida will hold a press conference to release new DNA test results that demonstrate Mr. Williams’ innocence of a 1993 Palmetto, Manatee County, Florida kidnapping and rape.

Attorneys from the Innocence Project of Florida will discuss the results and take press questions regarding the case at this press conference. Members of Mr. Williams’ family will also be available for comment at this time. Florida’s most recent DNA exonoree, James Bain, will be in attendance to show support for Mr. Williams and his family. Bain’s 35 years of wrongful incarceration is the longest time served by any of the 255 DNA exonorees nationwide.

The press conference will be held at 10:30 a.m. on the west side of the new Manatee County Courthouse (in the courtyard between the old and new courthouses), 1051 Manatee Avenue West, Bradenton, FL.

The Innocence Project of Florida (IPF) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to finding and freeing innocent people in Florida prisons. IPF represents Derrick Williams for free, including all costs associated with DNA testing and litigation. IPF’s website is www.FloridaInnocence.org.

Former Florida Death Row Inmate Crosley Green Petitions for New Trial

2010-07-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

PUBLISHED FRIDAY, JUL. 09, 2010

WASHINGTON, July 9 -- 14 Witnesses Step Forward to Bring New Light to Green's Innocence

WASHINGTON, July 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Former death row inmate Crosley Green has petitioned a Florida court for a new trial concerning the 1989 murder of Charles "Chip" Flynn in Mims, Florida. The petition sets forth sworn statements from four of the prosecution's witnesses who have recanted their testimony and new evidence that speaks to Green's innocence, including eight sworn affidavits from key alibi witnesses who say they saw Green far away from the scene of the crime at the time of the murder. The petition also presents two sworn affidavits from former Brevard County Sheriff's first responders to the murder scene who state that the evidence they witnessed the night of the murder pointed to someone else, and not Crosley Green, as the person who shot Chip Flynn. Pro Bono lawyers from the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Crowell & Moring LLP working with local counsel have filed the petition for Green in the 18th Judicial Circuit Court of Brevard County, FL.

"Crosley Green has spent 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and he deserves a new trial. Eight witnesses put him at a different place at the time of the crime, and the prosecution's star witnesses have since recanted their testimony that led the way to his false conviction. Crosley deserves his life back, and the Flynn family deserves to learn the truth about the tragic loss of their loved one," said Crowell & Moring LLP partner Keith J. Harrison, lead attorney for Green.

In 1990, Green was found guilty of first degree murder of Flynn and sentenced to Florida's death row. After a decades-long battle to appeal the sentence, Green was released from death row in 2009 and re-sentenced to concurrent terms of 17 years and to a consecutive term of life without eligibility for parole before 25 years on convictions related to the incident.

Green steadfastly maintains his innocence and hopes that a new trial will lead to his exoneration. The petition includes affidavits from four of the prosecution's witnesses, including a new affidavit from Laymen Layne, who state that their testimony at the time of trial and a post-trial hearing was untrue and that Green never confessed to the murder. All four state that they offered testimony against Green to help themselves in connection with unrelated cases.

The filing also includes sworn affidavits from former officers of the Brevard County Sheriff's Office who, as first responders to the scene, state that another individual, not Crosley Green, was the initial prime suspect in the murder based on their crime scene observations. The petition also provides seven new affidavits (eight in all) of eyewitnesses who corroborate Green's alibi, and it sheds new light on DNA and other critical evidence.

Robin M. Maher, director of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project, recruited the firm for the matter and has been closely following developments in the Green case. "The stellar team from Crowell & Moring has done absolutely Herculean work on the case and has given Mr. Green real hope for justice," she said. "His case deserves careful consideration by the courts going forward as he works to prove his innocence."

Lead counsel for Green are Crowell & Moring partners Keith J. Harrison and Robert T. Rhoad, and associate Stacie B. Lieberman. Local counsel for Green is D. Todd Doss of Lake City, FL.

Crowell & Moring LLP is an international law firm with more than 500 lawyers representing clients in litigation and arbitration, regulatory, and transactional matters. The firm is internationally recognized for its representation of Fortune 500 companies in high-stakes litigation, as well as its ongoing commitment to pro bono service and diversity. The firm has offices in Washington, DC, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, Anchorage, London, and Brussels. Visit Crowell & Moring online at http://www.crowell.com.

Contact:	Nicole Quigley
	(202) 624-2849
	nquigley@crowell.com

SOURCE Crowell & Moring LLP

Supreme Court to decide on compensation for miscarriages of justice

2010-06-19T17:19:00.001-07:00

2 June 2010

A man who was wrongly convicted of murder and released after 14 years in prison has won permission for his compensation claim to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Daniel Machover, partner at Hickman and Rose, said the Supreme Court would have to decide what exactly was meant by the phrase ‘miscarriage of justice’ for the purposes of statutory compensation.

Machover is acting for Andrew Adams, who was convicted and jailed for life in 1993 for the murder of former science teacher Alfred ‘Jack’ Royal. Royal was gunned down on his doorstep in Gateshead.

The Court of Appeal quashed Adams’ conviction in 2007, on the grounds that evidence had been missed by his original defence team. However, the same court decided last year that he should not be awarded compensation.

Delivering the leading judgment in R (on the application of Adams) v Secretary of State for Justice [2009] EWCA Civ 1291, Lord Justice Dyson held that it could not be said in the case of Adams that errors by counsel had caused something to go “seriously wrong” with the trial process.

“These errors were committed by experienced and apparently competent counsel acting conscientiously in good faith in the best interests of their client,” he said.

“It cannot fairly be said that the errors showed that the appellant was deprived of effective representation.”

As a result, Dyson LJ concluded that there was not a “miscarriage of justice” according to Lord Bingham’s definition in R v Home Secretary ex parte Mullen [2004] UKHL 18. Lord Justices Waller and Lloyd agreed.

Machover said that the Court of Appeal’s approach meant that compensation would be paid for miscarriages of justice by the state in only one or two cases a year, where a victim could show beyond reasonable doubt that he was innocent.

“You must have been exonerated by new forensic evidence, especially DNA evidence, delivering a knock-out blow to show it could not have been you,” he said.

“Or the true perpetrator must have confessed, or the complainant felt guilty and retracts their evidence.”

Machover said the key issue was the meaning of ‘miscarriage of justice’ and whether it included cases where something went badly wrong even if the victim could not show beyond reasonable doubt that he was innocent.

He said that in the case of Adams the Court of Appeal accepted that, under section 133 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, there was “new or newly discovered” evidence.

At least three law firms are understood to have similar compensation claims to Adams, which have been stayed pending the Supreme Court judgment.

Machover added that since the ‘ex gratia’ scheme for miscarriages of justice had been abolished by the Labour government, the only other ways Adams could obtain compensation was by suing the police or the CPS for malicious prosecution or suing his original legal team for negligence.

The order granting permission to appeal to the Supreme Court was made by Lords Rodger, Brown and Clarke. The appeal will be heard early next year.

DNA Database Search Could Free Man on Florida’s Death Row; Legal Papers Filed to Force State to Allow Search for Real Perpetrator in 1986 Murder Case

2010-06-10T13:14:00.001-07:00

(TALLAHASSEE, FL; June 9, 2010) – The Innocence Project today announced that it has filed a petition asking the Florida Supreme Court to order a DNA database search that could prove beyond any doubt whether a Hernando County man on death row was wrongfully convicted. The order is necessary, attorneys said, because the state has gone to “enormous lengths” to block the search despite assuring the Court five years ago that it would actively pursue all available means to obtain the truth.

“This one-time database search is in everyone’s interest, because it could not only provide conclusive proof that Paul Hildwin is innocent, but at the same time, identify who actually committed the crime,” said Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Nina Morrison. “That’s why most prosecutors in Florida and around the country routinely work with us to conduct searches like these without delay. But in Mr. Hildwin’s case, the Attorney General’s office has spent more than five years opposing our request for a search, even though they have never denied that a database hit to another offender could both prove the innocence of a man on death row and permit the state to prosecute the real killer.”

In 2003, DNA test results proved that Paul C. Hildwin was not the man whose semen and saliva were found on key items of evidence in the vehicle of the woman he was convicted of murdering in 1986. The Innocence Project, affiliated with Cardozo Law School, is now seeking to have that same DNA sample searched in the federal DNA databank, known as CODIS, and in Florida’s state database system. In a matter of days, such a search could determine whether the DNA in Hildwin’s case comes from another offender — potentially someone with a history of similar murders — whose profile is contained among the millions now stored in the system.

In legal papers filed June 8th, the Innocence Project asked the Florida Supreme Court to invoke its “all-writs” jurisdiction under the state constitution to order the CODIS search. This little-used procedural step is an appropriate use of the court’s authority not only because of the state’s continued stonewalling, but also because of the court’s role as “the ultimate arbiter of fairness and equity in the administration of capital cases,” according to the Innocence Project petition. The petition further notes that recourse to the Florida Supreme Court under an all-writs petition is necessary because the state has taken the hard-line position that no court, state or federal, has the power to order the search under traditional legal routes if, as here, the state chooses not to conduct a search on its own.

Morrison is co-counsel in the case of Hildwin, who was convicted of murdering Vronzettie Cox, a 42-year-old woman whose body was found in the trunk of her car in Hernando County 25 years ago. Her death was due to strangulation. Because the victim’s corpse was nude, and unidentified semen stains were found on a pair of her underwear in the back of her vehicle, investigators also concluded that she had likely been sexually assaulted.

Hildwin became a suspect in the murder after stolen property from the vehicle was found in his possession. When questioned, he told investigators that he had hitched a ride with the victim and her boyfriend several days earlier, and admitted stealing property from the vehicle, including the victim’s checkbook. But he denied assaulting or murdering her, and insisted that he left the victim with her boyfriend by the roadside after the two got into an argument and pulled over the car. (The victim’s boyfriend, William Haverty, has since been convicted of multiple violent sexual offenses against children and is presently serving prison sentences for those crimes.)

At the time of Hildwin’s trial, the only forensic evidence connecting him to the crime was a serology test showing that stains from semen and saliva on a pair of panties and a washcloth found in the back seat of Cox’s car may have belonged to a “non-secretor”—that is, the 11 percent of the population whose blood type doesn’t show up in other bodily fluids. According to prosecutors, these results meant that Hildwin, a non-secretor, had likely sexually assaulted Cox before murdering her, making the crime even more serious (Cox’s boyfriend Haverty was a secretor, and prosecutors argued this eliminated him as a suspect). Because Cox’s body was badly decomposed, however, it was impossible to tell for sure whether she had been raped. Nonetheless, the prosecutor made every effort to use this evidence to convince the jury to convict Hildwin — including, according to one news report, waving Cox’s tattered bra at the jury in his closing argument.

In early 2003, DNA tests on those same samples proved that Hildwin was not the source of the semen or saliva after all. Based on this important new exculpatory evidence, Hildwin’s lawyers requested a new trial. The Florida Supreme Court denied the request in 2006 by a narrow 4-3 margin, saying that although the new evidence was “worthy of consideration” it would not “probably” produce an acquittal at retrial. Three members of the Court strongly disagreed, writing that “justice demands a new trial for Paul Hildwin” because the new evidence would have provided strong support for his innocence claim and likely caused a jury to have a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

The Court issued this close ruling only after the State explicitly assured the Justices at a 2005 hearing that it would allow a CODIS search once an eligible DNA profile was available from a state-approved laboratory. Such a profile has been available since 2008, the Innocence Project said in legal papers, yet the state continues to oppose the databank search, notwithstanding its earlier promise to the Court.

Hildwin’s attorneys believe that a DNA “hit” from the CODIS databank could produce precisely the additional evidence the Court requires to order a retrial — and could, in fact, avoid the need for a new trial altogether by providing clear proof of his innocence. Florida’s database system, according to government reports, produces “an approximate 50 percent match rate – that is, about half the time, a known sample is linked to a forensic (unknown) sample.”

The Innocence Project also noted in its filing that many of the 254 individuals exonerated through DNA evidence to date involved defendants who had appeared unquestionably guilty in light of the evidence offered against them at trial (including multiple eyewitness identifications, detailed confessions to the crimes, and various non-DNA forensics). In addition, the dozens of DNA exonerations facilitated by CODIS searches over the last decade include many cases in which – as with Hildwin – the defendant had previously failed to secure a retrial based on exclusionary DNA results alone.

Hildwin, now 50 years old and suffering from cancer, is represented in his death row appeal by attorney Martin J. McClain of the law firm McClain & McDermott in Wilton Manors. McClain today filed an appeal before the Florida Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of Hildwin’s death sentence on various grounds.

Read the full petition to the Florida Supreme Court here.

Media Contact: Emily Whitfield; 212-364-5346;

EWhitfield@innocenceproject.org

Congo renews death sentence on Norwegian mercenaries

2010-06-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland face death penalty for a second time after a similar verdict last year was overturned

Two Norwegian ex-soldiers have been sentenced to death for a second time in
Democratic Republic of the Congo by a military tribunal.

Joshua French, 28, who has dual citizenship with Britain and briefly served in the British army, and Tjostolv Moland, 29, were originally found guilty of murder and espionage by a Congolese court last year.

The men, who had been working as private military contractors in other countries and were operating in Congo under murky circumstances, denied shooting dead their driverAbedi Kasongo in May 2009. They claimed bandits killed him.

During the first trial the court also fined Norway $60m (£41m), alleging that the Norwegian men were spies.

The death sentences were upheld on appeal, but in April a military court in the capital Kinshasa overturned the convictions for technical reasons and ordered a retrial with fresh judges.

That took place in the north-eastern city of Kisangani, near where Kasongo was killed. Colonel Pierre Agabu, the prosecutor, said today that French and Moland had again been sentenced to death for murder, attempted murder, criminal association and spying.

The original fine, which was calculated to represent one dollar per Congolese citizen, was also upheld, with the Norwegian government jointly liable. A payment of $4.5m (£3m) was due to Kasongo's widow and his father, the court ruled, with a further $100,000 (£68,000) payable to the Kisangani drivers' association.

French and Moland, who had tried to establish a security company in Uganda early in 2009, crossed the border on motorcycles into eastern Congo, a highly unstable part of the country, in April that year.

Two weeks later Kasongo, who had been hired as their driver, was found dead beside a road. The Norwegians, who fled the scene – fearing for their lives, they said – were arrested separately several days later.

In the original trial, prosecutors claimed that French and Moland were carrying military ID cards at the time of their arrest. They produced a photograph allegedly taken by French that showed Moland grinning widely as he washed blood from Kasongo's Toyota Landcruiser on the day he was killed.

British legal charity Reprieve today described the court proceedings as a "show trial" and alleged the prosecution witnesses were bribed with large sums of money.

"This farce of a trial would be comical if the stakes weren't so tragically high," said Reprieve campaigner Tineke Harris. "Each time the military prosecution changes their theory, the witnesses all obligingly change their story. It is now clear why the DRC's own constitution forbids the military from administering justice."

The case has attracted huge media coverage in Norway and strong criticism of Congo from the Norwegian government. Norway says the men have had no ties to it since 2007 when they served in the elite Telemark battalion.

The Foreign Office said it was disappointed at the latest verdict and would work to ensure the execution was not carried out. In recent years most death sentences issued in Congo have been commuted to life imprisonment.

Reprieve said Moland had been extremely ill in jail after contracting celebral malaria and was delusional during the first trial and appeal. It said French, who had a British father and spent part of his childhood in Margate, was forced to sign a confession after being beaten.

Access to DNA Testing

2010-05-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

Despite the widespread acceptance of DNA testing as a powerful and reliable form of forensic evidence that can conclusively reveal guilt or innocence, many prisoners do not have the legal means to secure testing on evidence in their case.

Barriers to the truth
Forty-eight states have some form of law permitting inmates access to DNA testing. The other two states have no law granting such access. Click here to learn if your state allows access to testing.

Even in many of the states that grant access to DNA testing, the laws are limited in scope and substance. Motions for testing are often denied, even when a DNA test would undoubtedly confirm guilt or prove innocence and an inmate offers to pay for testing.

Federal incentives for granting access to DNA testing
Federal law, the 2004 Justice For All Act, grants access to DNA testing for federal inmates claiming innocence and also allocates various justice-related funding to any state that grants DNA testing access to inmates claiming innocence. To meet the requirements of the federal law, states should pass or strengthen laws granting access to DNA testing.

Clear and comprehensive laws can ensure justice
Some states have passed statutes that include barriers to testing that are insurmountable for most prisoners. These include restrictions against inmates who pled guilty or whose lawyers failed to request DNA testing at trial. In many cases, the questionable evidence used to convict a defendant at trial – like eyewitness identification or snitch testimony – is used by judges as grounds to deny a DNA test. These barriers keep innocent people from securing DNA tests that could prove their innocence.

An effective post-conviction DNA access statute must:

Allow testing in cases where DNA testing can establish innocence – including cases where the inmate pled guilty

Not include a “sunset provision” or expiration date for post-conviction DNA access

Require states to preserve and account for biological evidence

Eliminate procedural bars to DNA testing (allow people to appeal orders denying DNA testing; explicitly exempt DNA-related motions from the restrictions that govern other post-conviction cases; mandate full, fair and prompt proceedings once a motion seeking testing is filed)

Avoid creating an unfunded mandate, and instead provide the money to back up the new statute
Provide flexibility in where and how DNA testing is conducted

For the Innocence Project’s complete recommendations for post-conviction DNA access statutes, view our DNA access fact sheet or review model legislation on the issue.

Alaska, Welcome to the Club

2010-05-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

From the blog PLAIN ERROR :

Seth — May 28, 2010 @ 2:30 PM

We forgot to document an important story that happened a few weeks ago. Alaska, then only one of three states left without a DNA access law which would allow for postconviction DNA testing, finally passed such a law. Out of all places, the Dallas Morning NEws Crime Blog covers it:

On May 14, Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell signed a new state law allowing prisoners to seek post-conviction DNA testing in cases where it can prove innocence. The groundbreaking new law will help Alaska prisoners fight injustice and leaves only Oklahoma and Massachusetts without such measures.
Passed this month with unanimous support in both houses of Alaska’s legislature, the critical reform came about thanks to years of work by a coalition of advocates including the Alaska Innocence Project and the Innocence Project. Among other provisions, it provides for state funding in cases where a judge decides that DNA testing could prove innocence and requires the state to preserve biological evidence from crime scenes as long as a defendant is in prison (or for 50 years in unsolved crime).

Congrats to the One-Man Innocence Project, Bill Oberly, director of the Alaska Innocence Project and the folks at The Innocence Project for making this a reality. Now what is the matter with Oklahoma and Massachusetts, the last holdouts?

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Some Thoughts on Osborne I was about to walk into a prison for a legal visit yesterday when Ryan texted me the news that...
Great opinion piece on obtaining post-conviction DNA testing I ran across this wonderful opinion piece on the Criminal Justice blog. It says everything that needs to be said...
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In Death-Penalty Cases, Innocence Has to Matter

2010-05-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

By Adam Cohen

Hank Skinner, who is on death row in Texas, had a simple request. Before the state took his life, he wanted to test DNA evidence from the crime scene that could prove he was wrongly convicted. Texas prosecutors, whose love for the death penalty is legendary, refused.

Skinner then sued, claiming that federal civil rights laws gave him a constitutional right to do the testing. A federal appeals court ruled against him. (See TIME's death penalty covers.)

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Skinner's case. That's good news. The Justices should use the case to expand the right to do DNA testing. But Skinner's case also gives the court a chance to confront a disturbing aspect of the nation's approach to the death penalty: the fact that the legal system does not always seem to care whether the people it executes are actually guilty.

There's no denying the crime Skinner, now 48, was convicted of in 1995 was a vicious one. Skinner's girlfriend and her two mentally challenged sons were stabbed, strangled and bludgeoned to death. But Skinner has always insisted he is innocent. The evidence against him is largely circumstantial, and his lawyers argue that the girlfriend's uncle, who they say had been harassing her that night and acted suspiciously after the crime, was likely the real murderer.

When students from Northwestern University's Medill Innocence Project investigated, they found evidence that raised serious questions about the prosecution's case. A toxicologist who testified for the defense said he had "never known a verdict of the jury to be so at variance with what I believe to be scientific fact."

It's not hard to believe Skinner could have been wrongly convicted. With the rise of DNA evidence, we now know that people are falsely convicted of crimes, including capital crimes, all too often. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 138 people have been released from death row since 1973 with evidence of innocence. (Read "The Death Penalty: Racist, Classist and Unfair.")

Skinner has tried for 10 years to get access to key pieces of biological evidence — including his girlfriend's rape kit and two knives that may have been used in the killings. After prosecutors turned him down, Skinner sued, arguing that the refusal violated due process and constituted cruel and unusual punishment.(Comment on this story.)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of the most conservative courts in the country, rejected his claim in a brief decision. The judges focused on legal fine points without engaging the larger injustice of the situation — that Texas was seeking to execute a man while denying him access to evidence that could exonerate him.

Skinner's case never should have gotten this far. When someone facing the death penalty asks for relevant evidence for DNA testing, the state's answer should simply be yes. After all, the government's interest is not in seeing people put to death or in reflexively defending criminal convictions. It is in making sure that the guilty are punished and the innocent go free.

Prosecutors do not always see it that way. They defend all sorts of practices that call into question the reliability of the convictions they obtain. A while back, in an infamous case, Texas fought to execute an inmate even though his lawyer slept at his trial — repeatedly, and for long stretches of time. The Fifth Circuit ultimately ruled that the defendant was entitled to a new trial.

This callousness about death-penalty cases is not limited to states like Texas — or to prosecutors.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia set off a firestorm last summer when he wrote a dissent — joined by Justice Clarence Thomas — that the highest court in the land is not necessarily concerned with whether a person facing execution had actually committed the crime. The court "has never held," Justice Scalia wrote, "that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a ... court that he is 'actually innocent.'" Scalia was taking issue with the court's ruling that a lower court give Georgia death-row inmate Troy Davis a new hearing.

This idea that the Constitution allows innocent people to be put to death should be abhorrent to anyone who cares about justice. As Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz pointed out, Justice Scalia seemed to be saying that if a man was convicted of murdering his wife and then showed up in court with the wife, who was still alive, seeking a new trial, it should not matter. As long as the man's conviction was procedurally proper, Justice Scalia apparently believes, he should still be executed. (See a photo gallery of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.)

The Supreme Court — which will take up Skinner's case in its next term — should rule that people accused of capital crimes can use federal civil rights laws to obtain the DNA evidence they need to prove their innocence.

And the Justices should use the case to underscore that we, as a nation, care whether people facing the death penalty have actually committed the crimes they were accused of.

— Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board

Wrongful Convictions Clinic client released from prison

2010-05-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

May 07, 2010 | Duke Law News

Duke Law students and faculty welcomed the release of Shawn Giovanni Massey after 12 years of incarceration for crimes he didn’t commit.

Massey, a client of the Law School’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic, was released from the Maury Correctional Institution in Maury, N.C., on Thursday, after Mecklenburg County District Attorney Peter Gilchrist ’65 secured a Superior Court order vacating his conviction on multiple counts of second-degree kidnapping, as well as one count each of felonious breaking and entering and robbery with a dangerous weapon. Incarcerated since his May 1998 arrest for the crimes against a Charlotte woman and her two young children, Massey, 37, had two years left to serve on his sentence.

Clinic co-directors James Coleman and Theresa Newman picked Massey up from prison and took him to Charlotte where he was reunited with his jubilant family. Coleman, Newman, and Kim Kisabeth ’07, a fellow with Duke’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, have worked with numerous other students, alumni, and friends for more than four years to build their argument that Massey was a victim of erroneous eyewitness identification.

Their case turned on the perpetrator’s hair style and weight, two key issues at Massey’s trial. On noting his resemblance to her attacker in a series of photos, the victim told the police that he lacked her attacker’s cornrow braids. She made the same observation on seeing him in person for the first time prior to the start of his trial, and also observed that he had a lighter complexion and weighed less than her attacker. These observations, and photo notations uncovered years later by Duke students investigating the case, were not passed on to Massey’s trial lawyer.

“We believe the evidence is clear that Shawn is innocent and this was an erroneous eyewitness identification,” said Coleman, the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law. “We think when the victim identified him at trial she did so in good faith, but we think she made a mistake. She confirmed to us that the person who committed the crime had cornrows. We are certain that Shawn did not have cornrows at the time — he couldn’t have had cornrows. And we presented evidence to the district attorney that supports that.” Coleman credits the victim for her willingness to meet with Kisabeth and others to discuss her identification of Massey during their investigation of the case.

For Kisabeth, who first worked on Massey’s case as a student enrolled in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, it was a joy to call Massey in prison to tell him he would be released within hours. “He was thrilled,” she said. “This has been a long time coming and I think he was speechless. His initial reaction was excitement at getting to reunite with his grandmother and with his aunts and especially to be able to see his son, Dantrez, who is now a junior in high school.” It was equally thrilling to tell his aunt and grandmother to expect him home, she said.

“Both of them just started crying as soon as I gave them the news. [His aunt] started praying and thanking God for making this happen — and thanking Duke for making this happen.”

Three teams of Wrongful Convictions Clinic students worked on Massey’s case: Kisabeth and Aleksandra Kopec ’07; Susan Pourciau ’09 and Emily Sauter ’09; and Jessica Neiterman ’09 and Toby Coleman ’10. Last fall, Pourciau joined Kisabeth in Georgia to interview the victim about her identification of Massey as her attacker. As the case neared a resolution, the clinic also enlisted the assistance of Tommy Holderness and Adam Doerr ’06, a partner and associate, respectively, at Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson in Charlotte.

“These cases really do take a village,” said Jim Coleman. “This is an effort that a lot of people worked on. And I think all of them contributed something that was important to the result.”

Kisabeth recalled her first meeting with Massey, during her student days, as being her first lawyer-client interaction — and her first ever visit to a prison. “It was a great learning experience. And having that experience under Jim and Theresa’s leadership was wonderful,” she said. “Having been so invested in this case as a student, I was excited for the opportunity to come back as a fellow and build on the work that the other students had done. They did amazing work on this case.”

Taking in the reaction of Massey’s aunt and grandmother to news of his release offered another lesson, she added.

“I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the legal system impacts people, and this is really about people.”

Wife’s outrage over wait for murder appeal

2010-05-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

By Colin Adwent,  Crime reporteThursday, 20 May, 2010
12:00 PM

CAPEL ST MARY: Outraged by the wait for the date of her husband’s appeal against his murder conviction, Simon’s Hall’s wife has written to the new Home Secretary.

Hall, 32, formerly of Hill House Road, Ipswich, was given a life sentence for stabbing to death 79-year-old Joan Albert at her home in Boydlands, Capel St Mary, on December 16, 2001.

However, Hall has always strenuously denied killing the pensioner.

In October last year the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) decided to refer Hall’s conviction to the Court of Appeal as it found new forensic evidence.

Despite a directions hearing in March this year, Hall and those fighting for his freedom are still awaiting a date for the appeal.

Now his wife Stephanie has sent a letter to Home Secretary Teresa May and the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke, along with Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

The letter briefly outlines the background to Hall’s case.

Mrs Hall, who lives in Ipswich, then comments: “Simon has served nearly eight years in prison for another man’s crime and has had to wait for over seven months, and is still waiting for a date for his appeal to be heard. It is absolutely outrageous that a public body has been allowed to stall and avoid accountability. I am therefore contacting you to ask that this matter be looked into at the earliest possible opportunity.”

The CCRC has said it believes its findings cast doubt on whether Hall is guilty of the murder.

They centre partly on fresh forensic analysis of fibre samples taken from the crime scene and other locations during the original police investigation.

There is also said to have been significant evidence relating to another burglary in Capel St Mary on the same night as Mrs Albert was murdered.

At the time it announced it was referring Hall’s case for appeal, a spokesman for the CCRC said: “The commission has decided to refer the case to the Court of Appeal because it believes that new forensic evidence is capable of undermining key forensic evidence presented at the trial and therefore raises the real possibility that the court would quash the murder conviction.”

Hall was convicted at Norwich Crown Court in February, 2003. He appealed against his conviction, but it was dismissed in April 2004.

Hall then applied to the CCRC for a review in June 2005.

Court takes prosecutorial immunity case (March 22, 2010)

2010-05-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether a district attorney's office can be held liable for the actions of prosecutors in the case of a former death row inmate who accused them of withholding evidence to help convict him of murder.

The case concerns John Thompson, who was convicted of attempted armed robbery in 1985, shortly before he was scheduled to stand trial in an unrelated murder case. He did not testify during the murder trial. Prosecutors used Thompson's conviction in the robbery case to help secure the death penalty in the murder case.

In 1999, an investigator working on Thompson's case discovered a crime lab report that prosecutors had not turned over, indicating Thompson's blood type did not match the perpetrator in the attempted robbery.

A state appeals court set aside Thompson's murder conviction in 2002 after deciding he'd been unconstitutionally deprived of his right to testify during the murder trial. That cleared the way for the new trial in which Thompson was acquitted.

After Thompson's acquittal, he sued the district attorney's office that was led at the time of his 1985 conviction by Harry Connick, alleging that evidence had been wrongfully withheld.

The current Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, has said the judgment is roughly equal to his office's annual operating budget and would have "devastating" financial consequences.

On March 22, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case for review. The justices will hear oral arguments in the fall.

Question presented: Does imposing liability for failing to train a prosecutor on a district attorney’s office for a single Brady violation contravene rigorous culpability and causation standards?

Source(otd.oyez.org)

Thirteen police officers accused of framing three men over Cardiff prostitute murder

2010-05-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

4/03/2009

Thirteen police officers were yesterday accused of framing three men wrongly jailed for killing a prostitute 21 years ago.

They are alleged to have fabricated evidence in the case of Lynette White, 21, who was stabbed 70 times.

Her boyfriend and two friends - dubbed the Cardiff Three - were originally jailed for life for the killing but freed two years later on appeal.

The real murderer Jeffrey Gafoor was eventually convicted six years ago through DNA evidence.

This sparked an inquiry into the detective work in Lynette's case.

Now the CPS says there is enough evidence to prosecute 13 officers - three serving and 10 retired - involved in the original investigation.

They are to be charged with conspiracy to pervert justice. Two civilian workers face perjury raps.

Tom Davies, the Independent Police Complaints Commission boss in Wales, said yesterday: "It is important for public confidence in the police and the complaints process that the full story of this re-investigation is told.

"The trial of these people will enable that to happen."

Lynette was murdered in a flat above a betting shop in Cardiff in 1988. Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris were jailed for murder but released in 1990 after their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal.

Last October, three witnesses were jailed for perjury after admitting lying under police pressure at their trial.

The CPS decision to charge 15 officers and civilian staff over a miscarriage of justice is unprecedented in its scale.

Few officers have ever been tried over claims they fabricated evidence.

The accused have been summonsed to appear at City of Westminster magistrates court next month.

The maximum sentence for conspiracy to pervert justice is life. The longest for perjury is seven years.

DUE IN COURT

The 13 summonsed with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice are: PC John Howard Murray, Det Sgt Paul Stephen, Det Con Paul Jennings, Wayne Pugh (now a civilian police worker) and former officers Graham Mouncher, Richard Powell, Thomas Page, Michael Daniels, John Brian Gillard, Peter Greenwood, John Seaford, Rachel O'Brien and Stephen Hicks.

Civilians Violet Perriam and Ian Massey are summonsed with two counts of perjury in relation to the evidence they gave at the murder trials.

"Last chance to prove my innocence," Skinner tells Medill student-reporters

2010-05-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

By Gaby Fleischman and Emily Glazer
May 2, 2010

LIVINGSTON, TEXAS – For the past five weeks, Henry “Hank” Skinner wakes up hoping to hear that the Supreme Court has taken his case, and given him a chance to leave Texas Death Row a free man.

On Monday, the Supreme Court is expected to make its decision. Since granting Skinner a stay of execution on March 24, there have been three delays.

“Every Monday morning I come out on pins and needles, about to have a stroke,” he said. “In a way you're relieved, but then I’ve gotta live the rest of this week wondering what’s gonna happen now.”

Skinner, who was convicted of a triple homicide in 1995, has been on Death Row for 15 years. Less than an hour before his scheduled execution, he was told the high court had spared his life – at least for the time being.

If the Supreme Court takes the case, it could lead to DNA testing of all the crime scene evidence. Much of the physical evidence in Skinner’s case has yet to be tested and could conclusively prove his guilt or innocence.

“I was trying to get the DNA tested because I really feel that’s my last chance to prove my innocence,” Skinner said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

Skinner has always maintained his innocence. He was sentenced to death for the brutal murders of his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two sons, Randy Busby and Elwin Caler. Skinner does not deny being present at the time of the murders, but says he was passed out from a combination of codeine, alcohol and anti-anxiety medication. According to toxicology reports, Skinner would have been in a near-comatose state. He was found several hours later at a neighbor's house, his clothing stained with blood from two of the victims. All of his appeals have been denied, leading him to ask the Supreme Court to review his case.

After the Court granted the stay of execution, Skinner and his legal team said they thought they would hear an update the following Monday, March 29. But Monday came and went without word from the nine justices.

Waiting for the Supreme Court decision has not been easy for Skinner. He compared the experience to a game of Russian Roulette.

“The first 20 or 30 times it would scare you, but after 20 years when someone does that to you…you’d just become so unaffected by it,” he said.

Doug Robinson, one of Skinner’s appellate lawyers, has also anxiously awaited the decision.

“The last two Mondays I sat at my computer just hitting the refresh button on the Supreme Court website waiting for that order list to come up,” he said.

Robinson said he does not think the decision will be a “plain old ordinary” denial of a writ of certiorari, the most common way the Court is asked to hear a case. (Last term, the justices denied 98% of all such writs.)

There are many possibilities, but Robinson said it’s probable there could be a denial of certiorari with a dissent, which means the Supreme Court would not take the case over the written objection of one or more of the justices.

Another possibility is a summary judgment where the Court orders a hearing on the DNA evidence in the federal district court. Down the road, this could turn into a suit based on federal civil rights law, Robinson hopes.

“If we’re successful, it would provide a means by which a lot of other prisoners in Hank’s situation could get DNA testing,” he said.

Skinner’s legal team has been unsuccessfully pushing for complete DNA testing for the last decade.

The current Gray County District Attorney, Lynn Switzer, has repeatedly refused to release the biological evidence for DNA testing.

“It's already been handled,” Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer told the Texas Tribune on March 30. Switzer is the third district attorney in Pampa involved with the Skinner case, but she is the one being sued to release the DNA evidence.

“He doesn't need to keep trying it over and over and over again. It's already been handled.”

In legal documents opposing the DNA testing, lawyers for Switzer have contended there was sufficient evidence to convict Skinner without additional DNA testing and that Skinner waived his rights to new tests when he didn't request them before his trial.

Harold Comer, Skinner’s attorney at the time, did not respond to repeated interview requests.

Some evidence that was tested did not match Skinner, including a head hair found in Twila’s hand and blood found on the sidewalk in front of the home. The majority of the evidence found at the crime scene, including the murder weapons, the rape kit, skin cells under Twila’s fingernails, and a windbreaker found next to her body, have still not been tested. The blood-stained windbreaker was similar to one worn by an alternative suspect in the case -- a man who witnesses saw stalking Twila shortly before the murders.

Skinner said the untested evidence could prove his innocence and unveil the imperfections of the justice system.

“Citizens think in terms of us and them. If you’re one of us, you’re one of the good guys and if you’re one of them, you’re one of bad guys,” Skinner said. “So this evidence…proves that I’m not one of them, I’m still one of us. And if it could happen to me, it could happen to you, your sister, your brother, your son, your daddy.”

Skinner’s two daughters, Kristen Keaton and Natalie Skinner, said they pray the Supreme Court will make the “right” decision. Kristen and Natalie were re-united with their father the day before his scheduled execution.

“I wanted the glass out of the way," Natalie said. "I wanted to be home across the kitchen table or anywhere but where we were…the setting was not proper for the feelings."

Despite the circumstances, just seeing his daughters was life changing for Skinner.

“When my daughters came back into my life, I had a renewed reason to live because of them,” he said.

But for now, like Skinner, his daughters can only wait.

“I’m scared for him,” Kristen said. “I’m scared for him more if he doesn’t get justice, if he doesn’t get a fair shake at this.”

Robinson, Skinner's attorney, said when you’re dealing with a person’s life all the evidence should be tested.

“It should not be the law in this country that it’s possible to execute someone when there is troubling evidence as to their guilt or innocence, and there’s still some uncertainty about it,” he said.

But for now, Skinner’s fate is out of his hands and with the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday.

“I gotta deal with whatever happens and I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he said. “You just have to try and pull yourself together with every fiber you got and hold on to your sanity.”

Rachel Cicurel and Alexandra Johnson contributed to this article.

Editor's note: The Supreme Court on Monday, May 3 once again failed to announce a decision in the Skinner case. No reason was given for the delay, the fourth time the justices have met to consider the case without issuing a ruling. The next date the justices will conference is Thursday, May 13, with announcements of their decisions expected on Monday, May 17.

Frank Sterling and the Next Exoneree

2010-05-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

On April 28, 2010, Innocence Project client Frank Sterling was exonerated in Rochesterm New York. He served 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit before DNA testing proved his innocence and implicated another man as the real perpetrator.

The Innocence Project is committed to helping Sterling and other clients adjust to life after exoneration, and we’re hard at work on freeing other innocent prisoners across the United States.

Can you donate $25 today to help us answer cries for help from prisons across the United States? Click here to donate online today.

Learn more about Frank Sterling’s case here.

(Photo: Frank Sterling and Innocence Project Staff Attorney Vanessa Potkin)

Source(www.innocenceproject.org)

A PLEA FOR JUSTICE: The Timothy Cole Story

2010-05-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

During the closing months of 1984 and extending through March 25, 1985, a number of violent rapes occurred around Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. As a result, females, both students and employees of the university, along with those who worked in the general area, were caught up in a wave of terror in the persona of the Tech rapist.

A PLEA FOR JUSTICE: The Timothy Cole Story recounts how a 24-year-old black student, an army veteran also attending Tech, became entangled in a web of deceit that branded him as the assailant.

After conducting a brief investigation that yielded no physical evidence whatsoever to link Tim Cole with a recent rape, overly-aggressive police detectives concluded nonetheless that he committed the aggravated sexual assault on a fellow student whom he had never actually seen until the first day of his trial.

Before he passed away while serving the thirteenth of a twenty-five year sentence, Tim Cole expressed a fervent desire to be vindicated, exonerated, and pardoned, and in an effort to honor his last wishes, a devoted mother and family, supported and represented by the Innocence Project of Texas, carried the fight through the court system, both houses of the Lone Star State’s legislature, to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and finally to the governor.

This is a gut-wrenching story of courage, devotion, conviction, honor, a family that never compromised its principles—and at the end of a struggle that lasted almost twenty-five years, the manner in which the Lone Star State conducts criminal investigations and treats its exonerees is rocked to the very core.

Read more: FOREWORD by Jeff Blackburn, founder and chief counsel, the Innocence Project of Texas

Source(www.timothybriancole.com)

Protecting the innocent

2010-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sending innocent people to prison and keeping them there are among the worst mistakes government can make. It has happened at least a dozen times in Florida, by one group's count.

Florida could learn from those mistakes -- and, possibly, prevent them in the future -- if the Legislature supports a state senator's push for an "innocence panel."

The senator, Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, added a budget amendment last week that would provide $200,000 for a commission to "examine why people have been sent to state prison for crimes they didn't commit," according to an article in Florida Today. The panel also would work "to prevent more innocent people from going to jail."

A group of attorneys suggested the panel idea to the Florida Supreme Court last year. Last month, the court expressed support for the suggestion but noted a lack of funding for implementation.

Haridopolos' measure aims to clear that hurdle, although $200,000 may not be enough, experts say. Still, it's an important step that deserves the Legislature's backing.

Florida prisoners exonerated

In Florida, 12 prisoners have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing since 2001, according to the Innocence Project. The group is a national network that specializes in using DNA evidence to clear people wrongly convicted of serious crimes.

Anthony Caravella, imprisoned for 26 years after being found guilty of a Broward County rape and murder, was Florida's 12th person to be freed by the process. The 1983 crime occurred before DNA testing was available. But last year, the evidence was put to the test. Final results, made public last week, confirmed that his DNA was not found on crime scene materials. The hunt for the real killer continues.

In another case, Alan Crotzer was released from state prison in 2006 after spending 24 years incarcerated for crimes he didn't commit. Crotzer was arrested in 1981 and charged with robbery, kidnapping and sexual battery in connection with crimes committed in Tampa. He was convicted and sentenced to 130 years. He was released after being vindicated by a series of DNA tests and other discoveries. A court vacated his conviction and sentence.

Two years ago, the Legislature appropriately provided Crotzer with $1.25 million to compensate for his wrongful imprisonment, which was the result of flawed testimony from witnesses and the use of questionable tactics by the prosecution.

Four key factors

The Innocence Project has found that at least one of four key factors often plays a role in wrongful convictions. Those factors are:

Eyewitness misidentification, the "leading cause" of wrongful conviction.

Use (and misuse) of scientifically unproven forensic techniques. Comparative bullet-lead analysis, for example, is considered questionable.

False confessions -- particularly when the defendant is a juvenile, has diminished mental capacity, or is under duress. (Caravella, just 15 when charged and with an IQ considered mildly mentally retarded, is one example.)

"Snitch" testimony, which can be highly unreliable.

Criminal justice procedures are needed that reduce the incidence of these errors prior to conviction -- and that provide opportunities for post-conviction relief.

The Innocence Project advocates legal reforms that include requirements to preserve DNA evidence in all cases of serious crime; recording interrogations in their entirety; double-blind police lineups and photo identification procedures; and policies that reduce obstacles to DNA testing late in the "justice cycle."

Compensation for the wrongly convicted and help as they re-enter society are also needed.

Florida already has instituted some of these reforms, but more are necessary.

An "innocence panel," exploring the "how" and "why" of wrongful convictions, would be a powerful, positive step.

Source(www.heraldtribune.com)

Wrong man convicted even though "everybody did their best"

2010-04-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

By LINDA P. CAMPBELL

lcampbell@star-telegram.com

Shortly after he opened a church-based office to help poor people with legal problems, Brooks Harrington took up the case of a woman who faced jail for not paying child support. She was indigent and unemployed and hadn't received the hearing to which the Constitution entitled her.

Harrington challenged the entire process by which his client could be sentenced to jail and persuaded the judge to drop the contempt conviction.

A lawyer and ordained Methodist minister, Harrington applies the same thoroughness and tenacity to representing clients who can't pay that he used while becoming one of the most successful defense lawyers in North Texas.

Now representing battered women and children, he believes he's answered his calling.

But in December came shattering news: A man Harrington helped send to prison for murder in 1982 was being released because DNA testing showed he was the wrong guy.

A Washington, D.C., jury had convicted Donald Eugene Gates of shooting and raping Georgetown University student Catherine Schilling in Rock Creek Park, not far from the Kennedy Center.

As an assistant U.S. attorney, Harrington prosecuted Gates and had been certain a dangerous man was kept from harming other women.

But he was wrong.

That left him sick and sleepless: What red flags had he missed? What would happen to Gates, who had been homeless 28 years ago? Where was the real killer? Were other convictions flawed?

And there was the sobering reality that "You can do your best and the system still fails."

Texas' criminal justice system has taken a beating because of case after case in which DNA testing has revealed wrongful convictions.

In response, state leaders have explored ways to boost accuracy, such as monitoring crime labs better, recording interrogations and improving eyewitness identification procedures.

But it isn't just Texas that needs self-examination. It doesn't take callousness or wrongdoing to cause injustice; even good people doing their jobs in good faith can make mistakes.

Harrington, a former Marine from Fort Worth, spent five years in the U.S. attorney's office, handling some of the toughest cases. He visited neighborhoods where tourists don't go and the only hopeful voices came from African-American churches.

He still sees the scene of a couple's murder-suicide, where a 3-year-old sat crying so hard no sound came out and the dead man's blood dripped through the floor, puddling next to a mattress where two toddlers slept.

He knew the system didn't always work. In 1981, he did the legwork to free a man wrongly charged with rape based on mistaken identity. The charge was dismissed the day of the trial.

In Gates' case, the prosecution relied on several pieces of evidence.

An FBI analyst testified that Gates' hair matched one found on the victim. Harrington said the defense team's analyst didn't dispute the match, just the odds that it was Gates' hair.

A paid informant said Gates had confessed. Harrington said he "pushed the informant hard" to test the validity of his story.

"The more time I spent with him, the less I liked him and the more I believed him," he said.

The jury also heard about Gates attacking another woman in the park not long before Schilling was killed.

Gates maintained he didn't commit the murder but lost his appeals.

Harrington, meanwhile, came back to Fort Worth in 1983. He quit private law practice in 1990, spent five years co-pastoring a church in a low-income neighborhood, then took up medical malpractice defense. In 2006, he started the Methodist Justice Ministry at First United Methodist Church Fort Worth.

He wasn't aware that in 1997, a Justice Department report raised questions about the FBI analyst's testimony in a case involving a federal judge. The credibility of the analyst's work in Gates' case wasn't reviewed by the U.S. attorney's office for years.

A public defender sought more DNA testing for Gates in 2008, and today's sophisticated tests determined he didn't match the specimens found on Schilling.

In a letter the day before Christmas, Harrington told Gates he was sorry, included his phone number and enclosed a money order.

Gates wrote back, "I forgave you long ago and now consider you my friend."

Harrington called that "the greatest gift I've ever received."

Gates is entitled to compensation from the government, but it's not yet clear how much.

He's living in Tennessee, though he recently told Harrington he can't find work and is feeling stressed.

There are many pressures on those within the criminal justice system: to protect the public, get convictions, move the sheer volume of cases. Mistakes are inevitable. But they can't be taken lightly.

"Everybody did their best, and we convicted the wrong guy, and that's terrifying," Harrington said.

"The mindset has to be one of fear and humility: Fear of convicting the wrong guy and humility about your own judgment."

Source(http://www.star-telegram.com)

New Science to Right Old Wrongs

2010-04-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

DNA technology has proven 252 Americans innocent of crimes years -- even decades -- after their convictions.

New science is burgeoning that will give advocates of the wrongly convicted more tools to prove actual innocence.

Join us April 16-18, 2010, to learn the latest information in forensic science and the newest methods Innocence advocates are using to help their clients.

This weekend of cutting-edge law and science will leave you newly inspired.

Source(http://www.innocence2010.org)

Texas Forensic Science Commission to reopen discussion of Willingham case this month

2010-04-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

Texas Forensic Science Commission to reopen discussion of Willingham case this month

Posted Saturday, Apr. 10, 2010

By DAVE MONTGOMERY

dmontgomery@star-telegram.com

AUSTIN -- After months of delay and internal upheaval, the revamped Texas Forensic Science Commission is poised to reopen discussion of the Cameron Todd Willingham case when it meets April 23 in Irving.

Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani, appointed to the panel in December, is likely to play a central role in the inquiry to determine whether a flawed arson investigation led to Willingham's execution in 2004.

The commission also includes two other members from Fort Worth: defense attorney Lance Evans and Jay Arthur Eisenberg, a professor and chairman of the department of forensic and investigative genetics at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth.

The meeting will mark the first time that the commission has revisited the Willingham case since a membership shake-up halted the inquiry more than six months ago.

"I think the commission is looking forward to being able to get down to work," said Evans, who was appointed in October.

Willingham, an unemployed Corsicana mechanic, was convicted of setting a house fire in 1991 that killed his three daughters. But several fire experts, including one hired by the commission, have challenged the arson findings, raising the possibility that the fire may have been accidental.

Controversy, criticism

The case has drawn national attention, becoming a rallying point for anti-death penalty groups saying Texas may have executed an innocent man on Gov. Rick Perry's watch. The controversy intensified in the fall when Perry replaced four of the nine commissioners.

Commission Chairman John Bradley told the Star-Telegram in e-mails last week that the commission will discuss the Willingham case and other pending complaints when it meets at the Omni Mandalay Hotel at Las Colinas. It is not known how long resolving the Willingham case will take.

Bradley, who is the Williamson County district attorney and was named by Perry to replace ousted Chairman Sam Bassett, came under fire at a legislative hearing last week for what critics suggested was a heavy-handed leadership style that stifles public discussion. Bradley, who was not at the hearing, later called the assertions unwarranted and his approach fair and inclusive.

"I'm not knocking their right to criticize," Bradley said. "I'm just suggesting that it isn't a balanced view of our work."

A new approach

In a meeting in January, the restructured commission adopted policies and procedures that Bradley said were necessary before the commission can move forward on pending investigations, including the Willingham case.

The new policies call for creating separate panels to screen complaints and handle investigations, with recommendations ratified by the full commission. Panel members are appointed by the chairman, subject to approval by the commission.

Bradley declined to discuss the commission's investigations, but three other commissioners said the Willingham inquiry has been tentatively assigned to a three-member investigation panel: Bradley, Peerwani and Sarah Kerrigan, a forensic toxicologist and director of a regional crime lab at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville.
Bradley, Peerwani and Eisenberg are also on a committee that will valuate complaints and recommend to the full commission whether they should be pursued. If the commission votes to go ahead, complaints are assigned to three-member investigative panels that will present their findings to the full commission.

Still up in the air
Peerwani said that the screening committee has scheduled a meeting for Thursday in his Fort Worth office but that members of the second panel who were assigned to the Willingham case have yet to get together. It remains unclear to what extent the Willingham panel will rely on the previous work of the original commission, but Peerwani hopes that the panel won't have to start from scratch.

"We do have a lot of material that the commission has collected," said Peerwani, who has been Tarrant County's medical examiner for 30 years. "I don't think we have to go back and restart all those investigations."

But "it's still up in the air. I don't know what the commission is going to do," he said.

Eisenberg, a member of the commission since October 2006, said he is "pleased that we're going to get back to the discussion."

"We had invested a lot of time and effort in terms of the material," Eisenberg said.

Renewed inquiry

One crucial element from the original inquiry was a report that was prepared for the commission by Baltimore fire expert Craig Beyler, who concluded that the arson investigation that led to Willingham's conviction was based on outmoded techniques and could not sustain a finding of arson.

The commission agreed to look into the case after receiving a complaint from The Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group, in December 2006.

Beyler, whom the commission hired December 2008, submitted his report in August 2009 and was scheduled to appear at a commission hearing that was abruptly canceled after the membership shake-up in September. Beyler told the Star-Telegram late last week that he has not been invited to the upcoming meeting.

Under the new policies and procedures, the commission can find that a "forensic analysis met the standard of practice that an ordinary forensic analyst would have exercised at the time the analysis originally took place."

Other options are concluding that the evidence did or did not sustain a finding that "professional negligence or misconduct" occurred in a forensic analysis and taking "such other action as appropriate."

'Quagmire of delays'

The restructured investigative approach -- which may still have to be formally ratified at the upcoming meeting -- has raised questions among Bradley's critics, who believe that it may give him too much power over the Willingham case.

Bradley's appointment by Perry-led accusations that the governor was trying to dictate the outcome of the Willingham case to avoid potentially embarrassing findings, assertions that Perry and Bradley have denied.

"The notion that he would be on this particular committee in light of everything that has gone on in the last year is particularly inappropriate," said Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth. "A suspicious mind would be concerned about nefarious activities."

Burnam, who said he plans to attend the upcoming meeting, also expressed concerns that the new approach would keep the investigation out of the public eye. "It runs contrary to every gut instinct I have about how government should work," he said.

Bassett, the former chairman who has criticized Bradley's approach, said the creation of the panels would differ from previous practice, in which the commission conducted inquiries as a body. He said Bradley's presence on an investigative panel would give him more control over the ultimate outcome.

"He can have an influence over what's written, there's no question," said Bassett, an Austin defense attorney. "I don't think it's improper. I'd say it's more a question of personal style. I would have preferred the entire commission to debate the findings that are going to be in the draft report rather than just three people."

At last week's hearing of the House Public Safety Committee, Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview and committee chairman, sharply challenged Bradley's insistence that new policies and procedures were needed before the commission could move forward on investigations.

The result, he said, was "a quagmire of delays" that needlessly stalled the work of the committee.

But Bradley, in e-mails after the meeting, defended the new rules. "Previously the Commission literally had no written guidelines. There was no definition of misconduct or negligence. There was no written process for how to accept or investigate a complaint."

Bradley also disputed assertions that he single-handedly prepared the new policies and guidelines, saying they were drafted by a committee that included Eisenberg and Evans, and were "debated and amended considerably" at the commission's last meeting. He called the product "very much a collaborative effort.

"No doubt it will be revisited, but it does give us a strong set of policies and procedures from which to work," he said.

Source(www.star-telegram.com)

Innocence Commission – The Ball is in the Florida Supreme’s Court

2010-04-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

From the blog of the Innocence Project of Florida :

Seth — March 31, 2010 @ 8:50 AM

We have had some new news on the Florida Actual Innocence Commission front. We had previously discussed this idea on Plain Error a few months back here and here. The Innocence Commission got some mixed news last week.

On March 22, 2009, Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Peggy Quince sent Senator Mike Haridopolos, the next Senate President, a letter stating:

The court is very much interested in looking at the cases of actual innocence and is considering the establishment of a commission or task force to study this issue and to make recommendations. We are most appreciative of your interest in and support of this effort, and hope that we can additionally count on the support of the Legislature during this session.

Justice Quince noted that the budget for the Gender Bias Study Commission over a three year period was $321,589, peaking at about $146,000 in fiscal year 1988. The Racial and Ethnic Bias Study Commission had a $378,350 budget over five years, with the highest yearly appropriation at $278,350 in fiscal year 1991. Of course, Justiece Quince noted, that these figures needed to be adjusted for the passage of time. This was a very positive letter.

In response to Sandy D’Alemberte’s petition to the Florida Supreme Court to create the Commission by rule, Chief Justice Quince sent Mr. D’Alemberte a separate letter stating that they were denying our petition to create the commission, BUT:

The Court, however, is very much interested in looking at the cases of actual innocence, and is considering the establishment of a commission or task force by Administrative Order,” she wrote. “As we explore the best avenue to make inquiries on this subject, we welcome any input you or your colleagues may have concerning funding sources, etc.

Since the letters, both the Daytona Beach News Journal and Jesse Diner, President of the Florida Bar have made impassioned pleas for the Supreme Court to create this Commission.

So it seems that either the court was blowing smoke or they are completely serious about implementing the Innocence Commission if they can just find the money in these tough economic times.

Well, as of this morning, we are likely going to find out the Court’s real intentions. Florida Today is reporting that Senator Mike Haridopolos is seeking to include $200,000 in THIS YEAR’s budget for the establishment of the Innocence Commission. That funding, as well as his pledge of staff support, should be enough to get this thing off the ground:

“This is really a two-way street,” Haridopolos said. “It will protect accused people who are innocent of crimes, but also give people the confidence to know that the people in prison are guilty.”

Politics is a funny business. I think it would be fair to say that Senator Haridopolos and I would agree on little in terms of the big public policy issues of the day. But he has been one of the strongest leaders on innocence issues in his time in the Senate, beginning with his sponsoring of the Dedge compensation bill, continuing with the sponsorship of the Dillon claims bill, and now his pursuit of an Innocence Commission.

Let’s give credit where it is due. If you get a chance, drop the good Senator a line and thank him for his leadership and commitment to this issue:

District Office: (321) 752-3131
Tallahassee Office: (850) 487-5056

haridopolos.mike.web@flsenate.gov

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Great Start, But Not Quite There Yet

2010-04-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Seth — April 1, 2010 @ 1:14 PM — Comments (0)

Yesterday I wrote, prematurely in hindsight, that because an amendment was offered to the state budget to appropriate $200,000 to the Florida Supreme Court for the creation of the Innocence Commission, that the ball was in the FSC’s court to actually create the Commission.

This of course is only partly true. Late yesterday, the Senate approved the amendment. Now this budget item must make its way into the House Budget, either through amendment or in conference, and then the Governor has to sign the budget into law.

Only at that point, will the burden shift to the Florida Supreme Court to get this Commission moving.

Related posts:

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Tim Cole still awaiting pardon Earlier this year, Timothy Cole was exonerated of a rape in Texas – ten years after his death in prison....

Execution delayed in DNA case

2010-03-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court on Wednesday evening delayed the execution in Texas of Henry W. Skinner, at least until the Court acts on his new case seeking to pursue a civil rights claim that he was denied a chance to have DNA evidence tested in an attempt to prove his innocence of a triple murder more than 16 years ago. The Court’s order blocked an execution that had been scheduled for 7 p.m. Washington time. The Court has not yet scheduled its consideration of his pending appeal (Skinner v. Switzer, 09-9000; his stay application was 09A743).

Skinner is seeking to raise an issue that the Justices had agreed to review last Term in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne (08-6). The Court decided the Osborne case on June 18, but left unresolved that specific issue. The question is whether a state inmate seeking access to and testing of DNA evidence may pursue that claim under civil rights law (Section 1983), rather than in a federal habeas challenge. Skinner’s lawyers contend that he has tried unsuccessfully to use Texas state procedures for DNA testing, so his only remaining chance to get it is through a civil rights claim.

He was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to death for the slaying of his live-in girlfriend and her two mentally retarded, adult sons, in their home in the small town of Pampa, Texas, on New Year’s Eve in 1993. He was in the home during the murder rampage, but has contended repeatedly since then that he was unconscious from using drugs and alcohol earlier in the evening. He also has contended that new evidence, about the physical nature of the killings, indicates that in his condition he had neither the strength nor clarity of mind to commit the crimes.

For ten years, his lawyers have said, he has sought access to DNA evidence that was never tested by prosecutors. He filed his federal civil rights claim only after those efforts had failed, his counsel has said. Although prosecutors arranged for some DNA tests on some of the evidence, and used the results to help convict Skinner, his attorneys contend that prosecutors only sought selective testing of crime scene materials.

In his petition for review, Skinner contended that he has a constitutional interest under state law in seeking to use evidence that would help prove his innocence, but that he has been frustrated in trying to vindicate that interest in state proceedings. In addition, the petition argued that the conflict among lower courts on whether a DNA access claim can be pursued under civil rights law, or only under habeas law, has intensified since the Supreme Court agreed to examine that issue in the Osborne case last Term. Thus, it said, the need for Supreme Court guidance is now “more urgent.”

Lawyers on both sides have completed all of the filings in the case on that issue, so the Court is expected to schedule it for Conference within a matter of weeks. In the meantime, the postponement granted Wednesday will stay in effect until the petition is acted upon and, if granted, until it is decided. If review is denied, the postponement will expire automatically and the state could then schedule execution anew.

Source(www.scotusblog.com)

After 16 years in prison, a whole new world

2010-03-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

For the last month, exoneree Greg Taylor is adjusting to life at home. He's photographed with his daughter.

To see the world through Greg Taylor's eyes, imagine being stuck in a time machine for 16 years and delivered to 2010.

Facebook, flat screens and DVDs are all new to him. Relationships that used to come with natural ease seem awkward.

Since 1993, Taylor, now 47, had been locked away in North Carolina's prison system for the murder of a prostitute. Last month, he was exonerated and freed.

"All that frustration and confusion I had stored up all those years was just let out," Taylor said, recalling the day he was released, February 17. "There was a lot of relief and gratitude. There was a whole lot to get used to."

He agreed to jot down his impressions and share them with CNN.

After a month readjusting to life outside prison, Taylor has concluded that Facebook is "neat but a waste of time." He's in awe that a flat, round disk called a DVD lets him rewind and fast-forward movies by just pushing a button. He finds the automatic soap dispensers in the mall bathrooms startling.

Taylor is the first man to be exonerated by a state innocence commission, which makes his case stand out from those of the more than 500 people across the country who have been exonerated by the work of private attorneys, according to the Life After Exoneration program.

The group that freed Taylor, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, was created in 2006 after a succession of wrongful convictions were revealed. It's a one-of-a-kind program with a state-mandated panel that re-examines questionable cases, including those that don't involve DNA evidence like Taylor's.

Other jurisdictions are following North Carolina's lead, looking at creating government agencies to prevent and reverse wrongful convictions. In New York City, the Manhattan District Attorney's office launched a program this month to proactively flag common errors such as witness misidentification and false confessions before the case go to trial.

A petition filed before the Florida Supreme Court by a group of attorneys asks the state to create an agency based on North Carolina's model that will examine why wrongful convictions occur. Attorneys hope gathering useful data on eyewitness misidentifications and snitch testimony will highlight systemic flaws that need repair.

In Taylor's case, the commission considered new tests that revealed that a stain found in Taylor's truck was not blood, as the prosecutor had argued. The commission also reviewed testimony from the jailhouse informant who implicated Taylor at the trial.

By the time the commission decided to free Taylor on February 17, he had already spent a total of 16 years behind bars.

That day, he stumbled out of the courthouse without shackles for the first time. He grinned when his 26-year-old daughter embraced him tearfully. No longer a 9-year-old, Kristen Puryear had a child herself, making Taylor a grandfather.

She drove while her father sat in the passenger seat.

The post-exoneration journey is daunting for many former inmates, most of whom have spent a large portion of their adult lives in institutional settings.

The Life After Exoneration Program found one out of three inmates has lost custody of children. About 25 percent develop post traumatic stress disorder, but access to counseling and medical care is limited without employment.

Unlike parolees, who are convicted of crimes, those exonerated don't have access to corrections services.

When Taylor left prison, the state of North Carolina gave him a $45 check. It was intended to get him a hotel room and back on his feet. The amount makes him laugh.

Taylor spent his first day after his release at the mall, eager to trade his scratched plastic prison glasses for new ones. He passed a bakery where the aroma captivated him. In prison, sights and smells are muted, he explained. Inmates wear identical uniforms and eat the same tasteless cafeteria food.

"I could have stood there all day," he said.

Incarceration can also place strains on relationships with loved ones. For Taylor, it separated him from his wife and some of his closest friends.

Three days after his release, Taylor received a phone call from his childhood friend, Kenny, who had sent Taylor letters and magazines in prison but never visited.

"There was a lot of people that could not stand to see me in prison," Taylor explained.

The two friends grew up as University of North Carolina basketball fans. This spring, they reunited in front of the television to cheer their favorite team on.

Taylor's marriage was another relationship that suffered when he was in prison. His wife of 10 years, Becky Taylor, supported him throughout the trial. But several months after he entered prison, they divorced.

For their first face-to-face meeting in 16 years, Taylor's ex-wife came for dinner at their daughter's house. The conversation was cordial. She had moved to another suburb and remarried. But the comfortable ease he once felt around her had faded.

"It was the loss that hit me," Taylor said. "I just don't know her that well anymore."

But some things are just like he remembered. Taylor spent last weekend at Lake Jordan State Park, one of his favorite retreats. Before prison, he used to go boating and water ski in the summer with his daughter. This time, they sat on the lake front watching the dark, still water and inhaling the crisp air.

"It was the largest body of water I had seen in a long time," Taylor said.

After three weeks of living with his daughter, Taylor knew he needed to pull his life together. He knew he couldn't stay in his grandson's room forever.

He's looking for a car. He's gone online to build a model of the Honda Accord he wanted using the slim laptop his family bought for him. They didn't have computers that skinny in 1993, he pointed out.

He went to the barbershop for a haircut to prepare for job interviews. There, a woman cut his hair with scissors. In prison, he said, other inmates used toenail clippers to trim his hair.

Taylor says he sometimes feels overwhelmed by the daunting tasks ahead -- getting a job with medical benefits and finding a place to live. Two-thirds of those exonerated will not become financially independent, according to the Life After Exoneration Program.

Sometimes, he said, it feels as if his body is being yanked in too many different directions. His father has helped him pursue some job leads. So far, he's had no luck.

"I can't live in my grandson's room forever," he said. "When I have a routine, that's where the happiness is going to be."

But he's in no rush. He's got a daughter and grandson to get to know -- and plenty of people to catch up with.

He says he's taking it month by month.

Source(edition.cnn.com)

Isn't a man's life worth an extra 30 days?

2010-03-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

Isn't a man's life worth an extra 30 days?

Posted Saturday, Mar. 20, 2010

By BOB RAY SANDERS

bobray@star-telegram.com

Henry W. "Hank" Skinner, convicted of murder in 1994, may be guilty as sin.

Then again, he may be innocent.

But so what?

This is Texas, and Skinner is scheduled to be executed Wednesday evening even though simple testing might prove conclusively that he was not the killer of his live-in girlfriend and her two adult sons 16 years ago in the Panhandle town of Pampa.

Of course, the DNA testing could confirm his guilt, or perhaps be deemed inconclusive.

Either way, would it not make sense to do the testing if it helped us to be sure one way or the other? Why is the state so adamant about not doing it?

Do we permit Texas to make a possible deadly mistake without even trying to learn the whole truth?

It seems almost ironic that Gov. Rick Perry came to Fort Worth on Friday with a freshly issued pardon for a man who was wrongly convicted of raping a Texas Tech student in 1985.

Tim Cole, who was exonerated by DNA testing last year, was not there to receive his pardon -- his mother accepted for him. The test that proved his innocence came too late for Cole. He died in prison while serving a 25-year sentence for that wrongful conviction.

Cole's family fought hard and long to clear his name and has worked tirelessly for legislation that would help keep such miscarriages of justice from happening. A state advisory panel on wrongful convictions was named in his honor.

I was with Cole's family Friday afternoon as his mother, Ruby Session, along with Cole's sister and five brothers accepted the pardon.

After Perry's visit, Session took the governor's pardon to her son Tim -- at his grave.

Session has said no other family should have to go through such an ordeal, especially when DNA testing could have proved a defendant's innocence.

That brings us back to Skinner's case.

He maintains his innocence, but none of us knows for sure whether he bludgeoned Twila Busby to death and fatally stabbed her two sons on New Year's Eve, 1993. Skinner's attorneys argue he was convicted on "entirely circumstantial" evidence even while untested evidence remains sealed. Prosecutors and the courts have refused to permit a forensic examination for DNA as Skinner's execution date draws near.

Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to intervene in the case, so hope lies with the U.S. Supreme Court and Perry.

Lawyers for Skinner officially asked the governor this month to grant a 30-day reprieve and order DNA testing on evidence that prosecutors say still exists.

In addition to the problematic trial evidence, the attorneys offer evidence to prove that Skinner was too incapacitated by alcohol and drugs to have committed the crimes even though he was in the house when they occurred.

Students of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, who investigated the case in 1999 and 2000, helped uncover some of the disturbing revelations in the case.

The state's star witness, a woman whose home Skinner went to after he left the crime scene, recanted her testimony on tape. She has repeated, under oath, that she lied after authorities intimidated her.

Several witnesses believe, as was suggested during the trial, that the dead woman's uncle was the killer, and it has been suggested that a windbreaker found next to Busby's body belonged to him. Again, prosecutors never followed up on those allegations, attorneys say.

But the most crucial evidence -- seven items, in fact -- could be the most revealing if only tested for DNA: 1) vaginal swabs taken from Busby; 2) Busby's fingernail clippings; 3) a knife found on the front porch of Busby's home; 4) a knife found in a plastic bag in the living room; 5) a dishtowel also found in the bag; 6) the windbreaker; and 7) hairs found in Busby's hands.

Hair that was introduced at trial, by the way, was not Skinner's.

This overwhelming information could give new insight into the case, not to mention other things in the lawyers' petition to the governor.

Texas has waited this long; what's wrong with taking an extra 30 days if it could get to the truth?

"I'm not an advocate of Hank Skinner," law professor Robert C. Owen wrote in the appeal to the governor. "If DNA tests could remove the uncertainty about Skinner's guilt -- one way or the other -- there's not a good reason in the world not to do it."

I totally agree.

As a resident of this state, and with Tim Cole constantly on my mind, I don't want the death of another innocent man on my hands -- or my conscience.

Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. 817-390-7775

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/20/2053857/isnt-a-mans-life-worth-an-extra.html#ixzz0iibP2i50

Dead Man Walking Play By Tim Robbins to Be Discussed on CatholicTV Talk Show

2010-03-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

WATERTOWN, MA (March 17, 2010) - On March 26, the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project (DMWST project) will be discussed on the CatholicTV talk show “This is the Day”. The DMWST Project works with high schools and colleges to produce the play “Dead Man Walking” which was written by actor Tim Robbins and is based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean which was also made into a film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. This is the 6th season that the play has been presented as part of academic and theater curriculums in schools.

Sister Helen’s books are accounts of her friendship with 2 death-row inmates and her call to end capital punishment. Sister Helen commits herself to the protection of life, both innocent and guilty.

This is the Day airs at 10:30AM ET at CatholicTV.com and on CatholicTV. This is the Day is hosted by the Director of the CatholicTV Network, Father Robert Reed, and General Manager, Jay Fadden.

Steven Crimaldi will be interviewed on This is the Day. Steven is National Coordinator of The Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project. Steve is currently working on the award-winning Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break. The specific purpose of the Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break is to bring students together for five days of anti-death penalty activism, education and fun. This is the place to be if you want to become a part of the next generation of human rights leaders. The 2010 event features six innocent death row exonerees: Shujaa Graham, Curtis McCarty, Ron Keine, Derrick Jamison, Perry Cobb and Juan Melendez. They are attending alternative spring break to speak with participants about how innocent people can end up on death row. Altogether, the six exonerees attending the alternative spring break spent a total of about 65 years on death row for crimes they did not commit.
More information on the Dead Man Walking School Theater Project and the Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break may be found at http://dmwplay.org/ and http://www.springbreakalternative.org/deathpenalty/

CatholicTV broadcasts across the US on Sky Angel channel 142, and selected cable outlets in New England and in Chattanooga (TN) where CatholicTV is available on FiTV channel 153. To find out where to watch CatholicTV visit: http://www.CatholicTV.com/schedule/where-to-watch.aspx

CatholicTV is a nationally-broadcasted television network streaming a live feed 24 hours a day at CatholicTV.com. Heeding Pope Benedict XVI's call to greater utilize the power of television and new media, the CatholicTV Network features its cable TV station, Catholic web site, mobile apps and widget. Celebrate Mass online; pray The Rosary; enjoy programs on prayer, the saints, the Scriptures and the Catholic Church on America's Catholic Television Network.

“This is the Day” can also be seen on demand at www.CatholicTV.com or downloaded via iTunes.com.and SQPN.com The hosts, Father Robert Reed, and Jay Fadden discuss various topics of the week and respond to viewer mail (you may email the show at thisistheday@CatholicTV.com)

Source(www.catholic.org)

2010-03-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

Chromosomal Laboratories Offers Pro Bono DNA Testing to Help Stay an Execution

2010-03-18T14:39:00.001-07:00

In response to a plea by the Innocence Project, Chromosomal Laboratories in Phoenix, Arizona has offered its accredited DNA testing services to help pursue justice. The offer was made to the Honorable Rick Perry, Governor of Texas for testing DNA evidence that could prove the innocence or guilt of Hank Skinner. Mr. Skinner is set to be executed on March 24th for the murder of his girlfriend and her two adult sons, which he was convicted of in 1995. The Innocence Project has asked that concerned individuals to urge Governor Perry to order a stay of execution until the testing can be completed.

DNA evidence in this case was never tested and the Texas’ highest criminal court has refused to intervene in the case. Mr. Skinner’s attorney claim that they have uncovered evidence that substantiates his claim that another suspect is involved and places doubt on his guilt of this crime. Mr. Skinner has always maintained his innocence and requested that DNA testing be done on potentially inculpatory evidence, in particular a windbreaker, knifes and hairs recovered from one of the victim’s hands.

While the Innocence Project does not maintain the innocence or guilt of Mr. Skinner, as they do not represent him, they point out that everything possible should be done before Mr. Skinner pays the ultimate price in what may be a colossal miscarriage of justice. When simple DNA testing may help prevent such a miscarriage, it seems implausible that the Governor and State of Texas would allow the execution to proceed. In order to help prevent this, Chromosomal Laboratories has decided to offer its services without any fees. We hope that the great State of Texas will accept this offer in the manner in which it is intended, to help promote justice.

About Chromosomal Laboratories, Inc.
Chromosomal Laboratories, Inc. is a full service DNA laboratory that specializes in providing advanced DNA testing for forensics, paternity, immigration and other relationships that can be resolved through DNA identification. Chromosomal Laboratories also provides research and development and DNA consulting services. The company is based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Source(www.webwire.com)

CCA Rejects Hank Skinner Habeas Petition

2010-03-17T13:20:00.000-07:00

The Court of Criminal Appeals Order is here.

Rob Owen of the University Of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center issued the following statement:

"Today, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to intervene in Mr. Skinner’s case (see attached Order). As a result, because state officials continue to refuse to conduct readily available DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene that could clear him, there remains a serious risk that Texas, one week from today, will execute an innocent man.

"We remain hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court, which has often found it necessary to correct egregious injustices in Texas capital cases, will intervene to protect Mr. Skinner’s right to pursue that DNA testing in federal court. We also trust that Governor Perry, having heard the voices of Texans insisting that the death penalty not be carried out while there are unresolved doubts about a defendant’s guilt, will do the right thing and postpone Mr. Skinner's execution until all the facts are in.

"Time is growing short, and ultimately someone must have the courage and the common sense to step forward and ensure the reliability of this verdict through the best available scientific technology."

AP's Michael Graczyk posts, "Convicted killer of 3 in Texas loses bid for execution delay," via the Houston Chronicle.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has refused to halt the scheduled execution next week of a man convicted of a triple slaying in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle more than 16 years ago.
The state's highest criminal court Wednesday denied a request from 47-year-old Hank Skinner to stop his lethal injection, set for March 24 in Huntsville.

And:

Skinner and his attorneys want additional time to test evidence for DNA they say could prove he's not the killer.

Earlier coverage of the Hank Skinner case begins with this post.

Source(standdown.typepad.com)

Killer of 3 in Texas loses bid for execution delay

2010-03-17T10:00:00.001-07:00

HOUSTON — The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has refused to halt the scheduled execution next week of a man convicted of a triple slaying in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle more than 16 years ago.

The state's highest criminal court Wednesday denied a request from 47-year-old Hank Skinner to stop his lethal injection, set for March 24 in Huntsville.

Skinner contends he's innocent of fatally bludgeoning 40-year-old Twila Busby and fatally stabbing her two adult sons, 22-year-old Elwin Caler and 20-year-old Randy Busby. They were killed at their home on New Year's Eve in 1993.

Skinner and his attorneys want additional time to test evidence for DNA they say could prove he's not the killer.

Skinner says he couldn't have committed the murders because when they occurred, he was passed out on a couch, sick from alcohol and codeine use.

Source(www.statesman.com)

Ellis, Scheck and Session: Trusting science in life and death

2010-03-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

When Gov. Rick Perry pardoned Timothy Cole earlier this month, it ended the Cole family’s long fight to clear his name. It is a heartbreaking case — and a stark reminder that we need to do more to ensure that our criminal justice system relies on solid evidence.

Cole was wrongfully convicted of rape two decades ago and died in prison in 1999. Last year, DNA testing proved his innocence and showed that another man committed the crime.

Cole’s conviction was based primarily on the victim’s identification of him and testimony from a forensic scientist linking him to the crime. The case is not an isolated mistake. Eyewitness misidentification contributed to more than 75 percent of the wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing nationwide, and invalidated or improper forensic science played a role in approximately half the cases.

In Tim Cole’s case, solid science came too late. Perry was right to pardon him, but he would do well to learn from this case and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

One such person might be Hank Skinner, who is set to be executed March 24. Skinner has requested DNA testing for 10 years, and there is no good reason for state officials to continue blocking these efforts.

We don’t know whether Hank Skinner is guilty or innocent. But we know the governor has the power to step in and delay the execution so DNA testing can be done to resolve this case once and for all — before Skinner is executed.

Cole’s pardon and Skinner’s execution date come as questions continue to grow about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for allegedly setting a fire that killed his children. At Willingham’s trial, forensic experts testified that evidence showed the fire was intentionally set. Several independent reviews — including one that was sent to Perry just hours before he failed to stop Willingham’s execution — have shown that the forensic science used in the case was invalid and that the analysts should have known that at the time.

Nearly four years ago, the Innocence Project asked the Texas Forensic Science Commission to review the cases of Willingham and another man, who was exonerated and pardoned by Perry because of faulty arson evidence. The Forensic Science Commission was asked whether the arson analysis in these cases was flawed, if other cases across the state might have been based on the same kind of faulty forensic analysis, and what improvements could prevent this from happening in other cases.

We believe it’s likely that there are other people in Texas prisons for arson convictions based on faulty forensic analysis. Unfortunately, politics interfered with the commission’s independent scientific work several months ago, when Perry replaced several commissioners. Days before the commission was to review the Willingham case, the new chairman canceled the meeting and has spent the past six months working on procedural issues.

Science proved Timothy Cole’s innocence 10 years too late. It threw Cameron Todd Willingham’s case into doubt several years too late. And it will soon be too late for science to definitively resolve Hank Skinner’s case before he is executed.

These cases remind us that much work remains to be done to ensure the integrity of Texas’ criminal justice system. Law enforcement agencies should establish written eyewitness identification procedures based on best practices, and we should ensure that forensic evidence is reliable and accurate, and defendants have access to that evidence.

The Forensic Science Commission needs to be protected from politicians so that Texans can trust that the commission’s decisions — and the evidence used in our courtrooms — are based on modern science instead of politics.

State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, represents District 13; his e-mail address is Rodney.Ellis@ senate.state.tx.us. Barry Scheck is co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project; his e-mail address is info@innocenceproject.org. Cory Session is the brother of Timothy Cole and an advocate for the wrongfully convicted; his e-mail address is corysession@sbcglobal.net.

Source(www.dallasnews.com)

Latest Developments in the Hank Skinner Case

2010-03-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

Attorneys representing Hank Skinner have formally asked Governor Rick Perry to issue a 30-day reprieve of Skinner's March 24 execution date and to order DNA testing in the case. You can view the letter and the appendices, which contain supporting documentation.

By this letter, we respectfully request that you exercise your authority to grant a 30-day
reprieve of execution to our client Henry W. Skinner, and order the DNA testing that Mr.
Skinner has unsuccessfully pursued for more than a decade, and which could resolve
longstanding and troubling questions about his possible innocence.
As set forth more fully below, since his arrest in the early morning hours of January 1,
1994, Mr. Skinner has always and consistently maintained that he did not commit the
crimes for which he was convicted. Physical evidence from the crime scene, witness
accounts, and expert testimony all demonstrate that Mr. Skinner was so severely impaired at the time of the murders as a result of his extreme intoxication from drugs and alcohol that he would have lacked the physical and mental coordination even to perform simple tasks, let alone these three murders. Forensic DNA testing has a very strong likelihood of either confirming or disproving his claim of innocence. Indeed, even the evidence presented at Mr. Skinner's trial raised disturbing doubts about whether he could have murdered the victims, and since that time substantial new evidence has been uncovered that supports Mr. Skinner's claim of innocence.

And:

Mr. Skinner’s case has understandably attracted a great deal of public attention in recent weeks. While Texans undoubtedly support capital punishment, they insist that it be reserved for those who are clearly guilty. Their view is reflected in comments like those of former Bexar County District Attorney Sam Millsap:
Last week, Gov. Rick Perry granted the state's first posthumous pardon to a man who was innocent of a crime for which he had spent 13 years in
prison. DNA testing cleared Tim Cole of a rape he did not commit, but
unfortunately it came too late — nine years after he had died in prison.
The state must do everything it can to prevent this kind of tragedy from
happening again.
On March 24, Texas plans to execute Henry Watkins Skinner even though
untested DNA evidence could show we've got the wrong man. DNA
testing could resolve doubts about Skinner's guilt in the 1993 Pampa
slayings of his girlfriend and her two sons, but the state inexplicably has
blocked that testing for more than a decade.
I'm not an advocate for Hank Skinner. I'm an advocate for the truth. If
DNA tests could remove the uncertainty about Skinner's guilt — one way
or the other — there's not a good reason in the world not to do it.

Rob Owen, Co-Director of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law, is one of Skinner's lawyers and signed the letter to Governor Perry. The Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University is also active in Skinner's case. Professor David Protess, the Director of the Medill Innocence Project, and eight of his journalism students conducted an extensive investigation of Mr. Skinner’s case in 2000. Their findings and additional background on the case can be found here.

The Texas governor's clemency authority is limited to issuing a single 30-day reprieve. Additional reprieves or longer reprieves can only be granted upon a positive recommendation by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. In Texas, governors do not sign a death warrant setting an execution date, and the governor has no legal authority over the execution date. The state district court in which the capital murder trial was held retains control of the case; the judge of that court orders the execution date.

More on clemency in Texas can be found in The Role of Mercy: Safegaurding Texas Justice Through Clemency Reform, which examined best practices in executive clemency. The 2005 report was issued by Texas Appleseed and the Texas Innocence Network. The Appendix contains comparative state information.

Earlier coverage of the controversial case begins with this post noting Sam Millsap's OpEd.

Source(standdown.typepad.com)

Column - Matthew Wright: DNA testing would resolve doubt in convicted killer's guilt

2010-03-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

Henry "Hank" Skinner is scheduled to be executed on March 24 for the murder of his girlfriend Twila Busby and her two teenage sons. The crime itself was horrible, so horrible that it is easy to see why most Texans continue to support the death penalty in appropriate cases.

The facts are so horrible that decent people cringe whenever they are discussed.

Hank Skinner and his supporters argue that he is innocent of the murders. They admit that he was present at the house that horrible night, but they claim that he was too intoxicated - on vodka and codeine - to have the strength or presence of mind necessary to commit the heinous acts. They say someone else - possibly, Twila's uncle, who has since died - actually committed the horrible acts.

More to the point, Hank Skinner and his supporters claim that the Gray County District Attorney's Office has possession of a rape kit, skin from the victim's fingernails, a windbreaker, and two weapons from the crime scene that were never tested for DNA. They claim that testing on those items would prove, once and for all, who committed the murders.

At the time of his original trial, Hank Skinner's controversial attorney decided not to test those items. (Skinner's trial attorney had previously prosecuted his client twice. Then he was removed from his office because of a scandal).

In 2000, the state agreed to test some of the evidence, expecting it to disprove Skinner's claims. But that didn't happen; a hair found clutched in the victim's hand came, not from Skinner, but from one of the victim's relatives. So far, the courts have ruled against Skinner's request to have the rest of the evidence tested. At the risk of oversimplification, the courts say they won't second-guess the questionable attorney's decision. The case has garnered a lot of attention recently because of the impending execution date, but Skinner and his supporters have been fighting to have those tests for more than a decade.

I have to assume that the district attorney, like everyone who wants the execution to happen, believes without any doubt that Hank Skinner committed these murders. So why should she order this evidence to be tested, especially since that might result in a slight delay in the execution date? I can think of three reasons:

First, the attention directed at Skinner's case, and at Gray County, will not go away if the state carries out the execution on March 24.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed more than six years ago, and the controversy over that decision in the legislature and the media continues to this day. All that negative attention, litigation, and political maneuvering could be avoided in this case if the state agrees to release the DNA results before the execution. If Skinner committed the murders, then the evidence will confirm that fact. All those who have opposed this execution will be silenced.

Second, if the testing is never conducted, then the horrible accusations directed against the Twila's uncle will continue to attract the attention of the press and the public, and the shadow cast over his memory will persist. If Skinner committed the murders, then this vicious criticism is completely undeserved. If Skinner committed the murders, then DNA tests will eliminate the uncle as a suspect and he will be the one exonerated.

Third, ordering the tests even without a court order shows the kind of courage and confidence Texans expect from our elected officials. One negative aspect of the coverage of this case is its focus on people's doubts about Skinner's guilt, which suggests that ordering the tests would be a tacit admission of weaknesses in the State's case. On the contrary, only the guilty and the mistaken have reason to fear the results.

That's why I encourage all responsible state officials to "take the high road" and order the DNA tests, then publish the results. That would show confidence in the outcome of the original trial. Those who believe Skinner is guilty don't believe they have anything to lose from the results, but they have much to gain.

I am troubled by the recurring suggestion that Texans are bloodthirsty and care nothing about innocence. Most people who support the death penalty believe it is the appropriate and moral punishment for someone who commits a heinous murder. No one believes that efficiency, finality, deterrence, or closure is so important that we should risk executing an innocent person.

If Skinner is executed before the evidence is tested, then generations of people will argue that Texas executed an innocent man. If Skinner is executed after the state publishes DNA results that stomp out those lingering doubts, then none of us will ever hear that accusation again.

Source(www.amarillo.com)

Big Brother in Blue

2010-03-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

The speaker of the New York City Council and the head of the Council’s Public Safety Committee are calling on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to get rid of his huge, noxious database of completely innocent New Yorkers who are stopped, questioned and often frisked by the police.

The stops themselves are an outrage and a continuing affront to black and Hispanic New Yorkers, who are the ones most frequently singled-out by the police for this public humiliation. But Speaker Christine Quinn and Council Member Peter Vallone Jr., the committee’s chairman, are focusing on the computerized files that the Police Department is keeping on people who are stopped but found to have done nothing at all wrong.

This is not a small problem. The cops are making more than a half-million of these stops every year. A vast majority of the people targeted — close to 90 percent — are completely innocent. They are not arrested. They are not given a summons. After enduring a mortifying public encounter with the police — which frequently requires the targets to sprawl face down on the sidewalk or spread themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car to be searched — they are sent on their way.

What they’ve left behind, however, if they’ve shown their identification to the cops or answered any questions, is a permanent record of the encounter, which is promptly entered into the department’s staggeringly huge computerized files. Why the Police Department should be keeping files on innocent people is a question with no legitimate answer. This is Big Brother in Blue, with Commissioner Kelly collecting more information than J. Edgar Hoover could ever have imagined compiling.

Ms. Quinn and Mr. Vallone believe it should stop. In a letter this week to Commissioner Kelly, they said that his intent to keep a permanent record of all the information gathered during the stops “raises significant privacy right concerns and suggests that these innocent people are more likely to be targeted in future criminal investigations.”

They bluntly urged the commissioner “to end this policy.”

In an interview on Friday, Ms. Quinn told me: “They should stop keeping the database on people who are not charged, who are not summonsed, and people who may be charged and then go through the judicial system and are found not guilty.”

She said the idea that a permanent database would be kept on people who “basically just got asked some questions” by the police is “extraordinary.”

Ms. Quinn does not oppose the tactic of stopping and frisking people, but said, “I have concerns that we have become overly aggressive in our use of it.” She said additional guidelines or regulations are needed. “I wouldn’t eliminate it from the Police Department toolbox,” she said, “but I would like to find a way to better monitor it and limit its use.”

It should be drastically limited. More than 575,000 stops were made last year, a record. But in 504,594 of those stops, the individuals had done absolutely nothing wrong. They had not violated any law but nevertheless were put through the anxiety and humiliation of a public encounter with the police.

From 2004 through 2009, according to Police Department statistics, an astounding 2,798,461 stops were made. In 2,467,150 of those encounters — 88.2 percent — the people were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

Groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union are fighting this wholesale mistreatment of innocent New Yorkers by the police. Blacks and Hispanics, and especially those who are young and those who are poor, are disproportionately singled-out for this peculiar form of police harassment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and other top leaders in this town would never tolerate this kind of systematic abuse of middle-class or wealthy, white New Yorkers.

The overwhelming majority of the stops yield no law-enforcement benefit whatsoever. An analysis of the stops in the first three quarters of 2009 showed that contraband, which usually means drugs, was found on just 1.6 percent of the blacks who were stopped, 1.5 percent of the Hispanics, and 2.2 percent of the whites (who are stopped far less often than the other groups).

The weapons yield was even lower. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites.

The reasons given by the cops for deciding which unfortunate New Yorkers will be stopped are beyond bogus. A “furtive movement” is the most popular. Walking down the street in broad daylight qualifies. And then there is always the bulge in the pocket. A cellphone, maybe. Or an iPod.

The truth — and many police officers will tell you this privately — is that the stops are often made first and the justification is dreamed up later.

Source(www.nytimes.com)

Houston's Death Penalty Hullabaloo

2010-03-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

Harris County Texas is the death penalty capital of the democratic world. It accounts for about 1 percent of the U.S. population but has carried out nearly 10 percent of the country's executions since 1976. So when a state district judge in Houston, Kevin Fine, unexpectedly ruled Texas's capital punishment procedures unconstitutional last week, it was a shot heard 'round the world.

Attorneys for the defendant in the case, John Edward Green Jr., who is charged with killing a woman in a robbery and shooting her sister, praised the decision as "the beginning of the end of the death penalty in Texas." But proponents of the death penalty, who carry larger bullhorns, were indignant. Greg Abbott, the state's attorney general, called the ruling "legally baseless," while Governor Rick Perry, who has presided over 211 executions during his long tenure, denounced the "activist judge [for] legislating from the bench."

Under fire from politicians and the media, which highlighted the magistrate's unusual background--his history of drug use, his liberalism, his tattoos--Judge Fine backed off on Tuesday, rescinding his decision and scheduling a hearing. But the legal and ethical issues are hardly settled. Acting on a pre-trial defense motion, Judge Fine asserted that Texas's death penalty is unconstitutional not because it's cruel and unusual, the province of the Eighth Amendment, but because the state's judicial institutions fail to guarantee criminal defendants due process under law, as required by the Fourteenth Amendment.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Judge Fine is correct, that Texas's practices in death penalty cases are more arbitrary than fair--and that innocents sometimes get the needle. The state's legal procedures tilt toward death from the moment a capital defendant reaches the courthouse door, especially in Harris County. There is no public defender system (though a fledgling office is under development), so low-income defendants get an attorney appointed by the trial judge. Unlike full-time prosecutors, defense lawyers are paid a flat fee, which rewards indolence since strenuous advocacy depresses the hourly wage. There is no set budget for independent experts, so most forensic evidence is vetted only by the county's infamously sloppy crime lab, which, according to a wide-ranging investigation launched in 2002, has botched hundreds of cases, almost always in favor of law enforcement. According to studies conducted by sociologist Scott Phillips, the outcomes of Harris County's capital prosecutions have been significantly influenced by a defendant's race, educational attainment, and ability to hire a private attorney.

Prompted by a string of scandals involving judicially appointed roustabouts who slept through their clients' trials or showed up to court drunk, Texas passed the Fair Defense Act in 2001, increasing state funding for indigent defense. Yet in Harris County prosecutors still outspend defense attorneys more than two to one. While the DA's office has a staff of 30 investigators, publically retained defense counselors have none.

Judicial review is supposed to guard against miscarriages of justice at trial, but Texas's elected appellate judges often wield their gavels as rubber stamps. In recent years, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, has refused to release inmates despite DNA evidence proving their innocence, declined to overturn a guilty verdict despite revelations that the judge and prosecutor were sleeping together during the trial, dismissed police and prosecutorial misconduct as irrelevant, and refused to consider a life-or-death stay request when it arrived after business hours, resulting in a hasty execution. After embarrassing rebukes by the U.S. Supreme Court--a body dominated by law-and-order conservatives--the Texas Monthly labeled the Court of Criminal Appeals "the most notorious state high court in the country."

Texas's prosecutorial judiciary, more than the state's elevated crime rates or the harshness of its juries, keeps the 6:00 pm shift at The Walls in Huntsville unusually busy. Although others states have larger death rows, Texas has carried out almost 40 percent of the nation's executions since 1976--450 in all.2 Harris County alone is responsible for 112 executions, more than the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, the country's second most active death penalty state.

The numbers make Texas's capital justice system the most effectively lethal in the United States. But the flip side of efficiency is error, and Texas also leads the nation in the discovery of wrongful convictions, including 40 by DNA evidence and 11 exonerations from death row.

Worse, Judge Fine contends that the state is failing to exonerate and is thus "executing innocent persons"--a fear borne out by extensive posthumous reviews of at least five capital cases. Most famously, in 2004 Governor Perry approved the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham (one of my research subjects), despite overwhelming evidence that his conviction for homicide by arson was based on discredited fire science. Last fall, the State Forensic Science Commission was moving toward clearing Willingham, albeit after his death, but before hearings could be held, Perry replaced the commissioners, thereby quashing the inquiry.

Advocates of judicial restraint argue that Texas should improve its capital punishment system legislatively, but in my research on the history of crime and punishment in the South, I found that meaningful change has almost always come from the outside, from the abolition of slavery forward. On a range of issues from racial bias in jury selection to capital verdicts in juvenile cases, Texas has stepped back from severity not after having second thoughts but in compliance with federal court orders. This could flip as the state's rapidly changing demographics alter its electoral and law enforcement culture, but until Texas's standards of decency evolve, maverick judges like Kevin Fine should be applauded for speaking uncomfortable truths. What Texas needs more of is precisely what its attorney general fears: "unabashed judicial activism" in the interest of equal justice.

Source(www.huffingtonpost.com)

Exoneration of Greg Taylor Reveals Practices that Cause Wrongful Convictions

2010-03-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Greg Taylor, finally free almost 17 years after being wrongfully convicted for murder, told the New York Times, “This morning, I was laying in a jail cell with a crazy person banging on the wall next to me. Now I’m sitting at a fancy Italian restaurant talking on a cellphone.”

Taylor is the first to be freed on the recommendation of North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission. He had served 6,149 days for a murder that a three-judge panel now says he didn’t commit. His conviction and eventual exoneration reveal much about shortcomings in America’s criminal justice system.

The Associated Press reported District Attorney, C. Colon Willoughby’s post-exoneration apology to Taylor. Willoughby, the DA for Wake County, North Carolina, serves the city of Raleigh, where Taylor had been convicted of the 1991 slaying of Jaquetta Thomas. Willoughby described his apology saying, “I told him I’m very sorry he was convicted. I wish we had had all of this evidence in 1991.”

Willoughby’s comments sound gracious, but how sincere are they?

The News & Observer, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, quotes former FBI agent Gregg McCrary, who said of the now vacated conviction, “There’s tunnel vision and a rush to judgment in this case.”

But there was no rush to reconsider his case, despite the shaky evidence that convicted him. The case built against Taylor relied on jailhouse snitches who received reduced sentences for providing prosecutors with testimony implicating him. There was also questionable physical evidence—stains in Taylor’s truck that investigators initially took for blood. But prosecutors, working under Colon Willoughby, have maintained that they were ignorant of further testing that showed the stains not to be blood. As late as 2003 the Wake County District Attorney’s Office—headed by the now-gracious Willoughby—opposed DNA testing that might have strengthened Taylor’s post-conviction claims of innocence. In 1996 Craig Taylor (no relation to the exonerated Greg Taylor) began trying to confess to the murder of Jaquetta Thomas. The News & Observer reports that prison medical records indicate that he’d told a prison therapist that he’d committed two murders. But no one talked to him further at that time.

So it was not until this month that Greg Taylor’s conviction was reversed. The New York Times explained that the panel charged with deciding on the recommendation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission determined that the evidence of Taylor’s innocence was “clear and convincing.” Greg Taylor “had been convicted based on flawed evidence and unreliable testimony.”

Although DNA didn’t play a role in Taylor’s exoneration, his case nevertheless reveals a pattern made clear by over 250 DNA exonerations documented by the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law. Taylor’s conviction resulted from improper application of forensic science, and the use of snitch testimony, two causal factors that have long been identified with wrongful convictions.

Other causes for wrongful convictions include eyewitness misidentification, government misconduct, false confessions, and bad lawyering. Because all of these factors are widespread, researchers think that wrongful convictions are far more common than once believed. Although recent emphasis has been on DNA exonerations, Taylor’s case shows that innocence claims without DNA support also merit a fuller consideration than our traditional appellate avenues have provided.

His case also exposes the inertia and arrogance of a criminal justice system that provides few routes for those who have valid claims of innocence. The process that led to Taylor’s release is unique to North Carolina. No other state has anything like its Innocence Inquiry Commission. The commission is made of eight members, a superior court judge, a prosecuting attorney, a criminal defense attorney, a sheriff, a victims’ rights advocate, a member of the public and two additional discretionary appointments, who review claims of innocence that involve new evidence. If, upon review of a case, the commission votes that there is sufficient evidence of factual innocence, the commission will ask a three-judge panel to hear the relevant evidence and rule on the case. The commission, established in 2006 is highly selective in choosing cases for review. Its formation in 2006 was spurred by exonerations that had been delayed, lengthy, costly, and damaging to public confidence.

It also remains to be seen if District Attorney Colon Willoughby’s newly found contrition will motivate him to reform the flawed practices that led to Greg Taylor’s wrongful conviction.

Source(www.examiner.com)

Death warrant for March 24th is upheld by the CCA - Help Hank get the DNA testing

2010-03-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

On March 4th, the CCA affirmed the March 24th date for Hank's
execution, or more exactly it states it doesn't have jurisdiction to
overrule the Judge's order. The order has been posted in the legal
documents section on the website.

Please help Hank get the DNA testing. I have added a list of
newspapers and journalists to whom you can copy your letter to the
DA, below:

Hank sent a 5-page letter to the Gray County D.A. Lynn Switzer with a
number of exhibits, which was received by her office on January 27th
2010.

These documents can be downloaded in the "legal documents" section -
"DNA Issue" paragraph on the website.

Please take the time to read the letter, the exhibits document all
the points and statements made by Hank in his letter.

As you will understand from his letter, Hank is asking the D.A. to
put the execution warrant on hold, to grant him a 120-day reprieve
and order the DNA testing. It is important to support him in this
vital attempt. Of course the purpose is NOT to write to the D.A. and
attack her for what she hasn't done or should have done. What needs
to be emphasized is that justice calls for the truth and the untested
evidence is crucial to prove his innocence. Her position as D.A. is
to ensure that justice is served and not to allow the execution of an
innocent man when so many issues remain unresolved just a few weeks
from his execution date.

You can send your letters with reference "Hank Skinner - Execution
Date March 24, 2010" to:

Ms. Lynn Switzer
District Attorney
Gray County Courthouse
Pampa TX 79065

For more impact, you may consider copying your letter to a local
media of your choice and also to enclose a copy of Hank's letter as
well. If you do so, make sure you include the information after your
signature; ie: cc. Houston Chronicle (whathever newpaper you choose
or the journalist's name). Here is a non-exhaustive short list of
newspapers and/or journalists you can cc your letter to:

The Pampa news
PO Box 2198
Pampa TX 79066
Editor bphillips@thepampanews.com

The Amarillo Globe news
Letters to the Editor
PO Box 2091
Amarillo TX 79166
Fax 1 806 345 3400
Letters@amarillo.com

The Houston Chronicle
Roma Khanna - roma.khanna@chron.com

The Austin American-Statesman
Chuck Lindell - clindell@statesman.com
Steven Kreytak - skreytak@statesman.com

The Dallas Morning News
Emily Ramshaw - eramshaw@dallasnews.com
Editor Michael Grabell - mgrabell@dallasnews.com

The Texas Tribune
Brandi Grissom - bgrissom@texastribune.org

CBS News - 60 minutes
60m@cbsnews.com

The Chicago Tribune
Steve Mills - smmills@tribune.com

The Columbus Dispatch
Jeff Dutton - jdutton@dispatch.com

Here are some points you can raise:

- All of the state's chief investigators and medical examiner on the
case testified in pre-trial and trial that they personally collected
the evidence in question that we are seeking to test, that they
believe evidence would conclusively show who killed Twila, Scooter
and Randy. So why won't they allow it to be tested?

- Both the State's star witnesses (Andrea Reed & Howard Mitchell)
have testified that they believe Hank to be innocent.

- All three of the previous D.A.s have publicly stated that they
believe the evidence needs to be tested.

- Article 2.01 of the TX code of criminal procedure compels the D.A.
to test the evidence or, allow the deffense to test it.

- The D.A. has admitted in Ch 64 DNA pleadings that the evidence is
in a condition making testing possible, that the chain of custody has
been maintained, that the evidence is capable of providing a
probative result and idendity is an issue in Hank's case.

- Texas should not execute a man it does not know for a fact to be
guilty. After Andrea Reed's recantation, according to the state own's
experts, the remaining evidence does nothing to prove guilt at all.
The A.G has stated through his spokesman that it would violate the
constitution to murder someone who is innocent - that has got to
apply equally to someone they do not know for a fact to be guilty.

Source(www.hankskinner.org)

Rick Perry's 211th Execution Carried Out; Overall 450th Texas Execution Since 1982

2010-03-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

Attend the Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break in Austin March 15-19, 2010.

Join us March 15-19, 2010 in Austin, Texas for the award-winning Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break.

Special guests will be six innocent death row exoneress: Shujaa Graham, Curtis McCarty, Ron Keine, Derrick Jamison, Perry Cobb and Juan Melendez. They are attending alternative spring break to speak with participants about how innocent people can end up on death row. Altogether, the six exonerees attending the alternative spring break spent a total of about 65 years on death row for crimes they did not commit.

It's free, except for a $25 housing fee for those who need us to arrange housing for you. We will house you in a shared room with other spring breakers in either a hotel or dorm. You are responsible for your travel, food and other expenses, but the program and most of the housing costs are on us. The $25 housing fee is all you pay.

source(stopexecutions.blogspot.com)

County pays $525,000 to former Death Row inmate in wrongful prosecution case

2010-03-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

The Cook County Board today agreed to pay $525,000 to a former Death Row inmate already given $5.5 million by the city to settle a wrongful conviction lawsuit.

The money due under the settlement approved by the board will be paid to Leroy Orange in five equal installments, the last of which is due in January 2014. He spent 19 years behind bars until former Gov. George Ryan pardoned him in 2003.

Like several other former murder defendants, Orange alleged that former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge used torture to force his murder confession. Neither the city nor the county admitted wrongdoing in settling the cases.

The city portion of the suit, settled two years ago, alleged wrongdoing by police officers. The county portion deal with alleged wrongdoing by a Dennis Dernbach, a onetime assistant state’s attorney who went on to become a judge before retiring.

“It’s really a good deal for everyone,” Commissioner Larry Suffredin, D-Evanston, said of the settlement. “It gets us out from under this, and it ends all litigation. There will be no appeal. This settles everything.”

Source(newsblogs.chicagotribune.com)

Texas board urges pardon in wrongful conviction

2010-02-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

Texas board urges pardon in wrongful conviction

The Associated Press
Saturday, February 27, 2010; 5:30 PM

LUBBOCK, Texas -- The Texas pardons and parole board has recommended clemency in the case of a man who died in prison after he was wrongly convicted of rape.

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported Saturday the recommendation in Tim Cole's case was forwarded to Gov. Rick Perry's office Friday.

Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle tells The Associated Press that he looks forward to pardoning Cole.

Cole's family has expressed relief over the recommendation.

Cole died in 1999 at age 39. He was convicted of the 1985 rape of a Texas Tech University student in Lubbock.

A 2008 DNA test cleared Cole and implicated convicted rapist Jerry Wayne Johnson, who confessed in several letters to court officials dating back to 1995.

Cole would be the state's first posthumous pardon.

New Hampshire doesn't need the death penalty

2010-02-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

Opinion
February 13, 2010 2:00 AM
Feb. 10 — To the Editor:

A system run by human beings can never be perfect. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that.

I was moved by Juan Melendez's words when he said he was not saved by the system but in spite of the system. New Hampshire can live without the death penalty. In reality, we have done so for the last 70 years despite having it on the books.

Let's get rid of it for good. Lock the murderers up and spend the appeal money on helping the victims' families deal with their losses.

Brad Greeley

New Castle

Freed from death row

2010-02-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

Juan Ramos Picks Up the Pieces

By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 1999

Twelve years after he left Florida's death row, Juan Florencio Ramos still paces like a prisoner locked in a tiny cell.

From the porch of his mother's house near Miami, he gazes at strange cars. He puffs on Marlboros. And when he climbs into his red Trans Am, he hits the gas and races down the street as if the guards are coming to drag him back to prison.

Ramos, a 41-year-old truck driver, is a member of a small but growing club that prosecutors don't like to talk about. From his wallet, he pulls out a pre-prison photograph of a fresh-faced young man with a hard body and smiling eyes. Now that body is scarred from prison fights, those eyes sometimes glazed in anger.

"That person," he says, choking back tears, "is not me."

Experts say wrongful death sentences are built on similar circumstances: police who use coerced confessions or questionable eyewitness identifications; prosecutors who exploit false testimony or inaccurate scientific evidence; jurors who are tainted by prejudice; judges who are out for headlines; and suspects who are easy marks -- because of their race, criminal background or inability to afford a good lawyer.

Only five of Florida's wrongly condemned have received compensation from the state, and they say the money can't replace what they lost.

There's an irony in the stories of death row survivors: It took a death sentence to free them. If they had received a life sentence, they probably never would have gotten out.

Michael L. Radelet, a University of Florida sociology professor who documents wrongful executions, says death row survivors are the lucky ones because only through good fortune and careful scrutiny of their cases were they vindicated before a fatal error. "As long as we have the death penalty," Radelet says, "innocent people will be executed."

With more capital punishment cases and shrinking legal resources, the danger of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions is "getting worse," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Most prosecutors, judges and Florida officials won't admit an innocent person has ever been executed here or convicted in error.

But Gerald Kogan, who recently retired after 11 years on the Florida Supreme Court, told the Associated Press in December that he wasn't convinced of guilt in "two or three" of the 25 state executions while he was on the court.

"There are several cases where I had grave doubts as to the guilt of a particular person, (and) other cases where I just felt they were treated unfairly in the system," Kogan said.

Kogan, a former prosecutor, refuses to elaborate on which cases he had in mind. "I've said what I'm going to say on that. I don't want to talk about that any more."

Gov. Jeb Bush, who has signed death warrants to send two convicted killers to the electric chair this week, declined to comment for this story. In meetings, Bush has voiced concern about people on death row who may be innocent, according to Carol Licko, his general counsel.

She says the governor signed the warrants only after a careful review of the cases to eliminate any possibility of a wrongful execution.

Life on death row

Each of the cells is 6 feet wide, 9 feet long and 91/2 feet high, with concrete walls on three sides and steel bars in front that look out over a 3-foot-wide catwalk. Each cell has a steel toilet, a steel sink, a steel footlocker and a steel bunk with a mattress 4 inches thick. Each cell also is equipped with a 13-inch black-and-white television. Meals, mail and Bibles are passed to the condemned through a slot in the bars
Inmates can't see into other cells, but they can look down the corridor by angling a piece of a mirror. They communicate with one another by talking down the corridor -- called "getting on the bars" -- or yelling through a vent or the plumbing pipes. Or throwing a long stick with a note attached to the person in the next cell.

Twice a week, they are let out for a two-hour trip to an exercise yard. Three times a week, they are escorted to the shower stall, where the water runs for five minutes. Occasionally, guards jerk open a cell door to search an inmate's belongings or body for drugs or shanks (crude, homemade knives).

Death row survivors remember the numbing cold in winter, the hellish heat in summer and the non-stop din of hundreds of voices and noises, relieved only by an eerie quiet on execution days.

Alone with nothing but time, they did almost anything to keep their minds occupied.

They counted every dent in the walls, every crevice on the floor. They learned the heavy footsteps of their favorite nighttime guard. They prayed for life and sometimes hoped for death.

They slept and wrote poetry, usually at night when there was less noise. They read and argued about things such as whether to go to the execution chamber kicking and screaming or "like a man."

Anthony Peek, who survived a decade on the row, paced so much -- five steps back and forth -- that his knees are weak. Dave Keaton, released from death row 26 years ago, could catch a glimpse of the afternoon sun if he stood at the right angle. Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who for a time was the only woman in the country on death row, painted by dipping strands of her hair in beet juice.

One rule of survival: be buddies with everyone but close friends with no one. That's because it hurts too much when a friend is executed.

Anthony Brown, who watched and listened 12 times as guards prepared for executions, tears up when he remembers his final hours with Marvin Francois. Francois, 39, was executed in 1985 for killing six people during a robbery of a Miami drug house.

"We wanted to send him out on a high," says Brown, 43, recounting how they shared a cigarette and fantasized it was a joint. "It took a little out of me when they killed him. I'd grown real attached to him."

No matter how they passed the time, they had one thing in common: a date with death in Florida's electric chair.

Too painful to forget

"No matter how hard he screams," Ramos says, "no one hears him.
Ramos grew up in Cuba, served three years in the Cuban military and came to Florida in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Within a year, he was married, living in Cocoa and making $11 an hour in a steel factory.

His new world collapsed in June 1982 when police arrested him for raping, beating, strangling and stabbing Sue Cobb, 27, an acquaintance who lived a block away. No physical evidence linked Ramos to the homicide, but there was seemingly damning evidence provided by a police dog named Harass II.

After sniffing an empty pack of Ramos' cigarettes, the dog was put in a room with five knives and five blouses. Harass stopped at blouse No. 5, the victim's bloody blouse, then licked knife No. 3, the bloodstained knife that had been embedded in her chest.

These were the only knife and blouse with blood on them -- which seemed to prove only that Harass was attracted to blood. But that was enough for a Seminole County jury to convict Ramos, who spoke little English, and for a judge to overrule its recommendation of life and sentence him to death.

Norman Wolfinger, who was Ramos' public defender and now is state attorney for Seminole and Brevard counties, cited another factor in what he called "the weakest murder case I've ever seen" -- racism. "Absolutely no attempt was made from Day One to pin the murder on anyone but the sap, the Cuban," Wolfinger said at the time.

Isolated from the world, Ramos remained defiant in his cell on death row. "I thought about my last meal," he says. "I was gonna tell them, "Just feed me the same s---. It's disgusting of you to offer me the best food when I'm gonna puke it back in your face.' "

Before he talked to the Times, Ramos, who learned English on death row, had never spoken about his ordeal to the media. His 61-year-old mother, Ena Garcia, tells him not to talk now. "You know it upsets you," she says in Spanish. "Why start trouble?"

But Ramos needs to talk, and for six hours, at times angry, at times tearful, he pours out details of his five years of wrongful imprisonment: beatings, a stabbing, paralytic asthma attacks and an attempted gang rape.

Once, he tried to commit suicide by making a noose with a bedsheet, tying it to the bars and sticking his head inside the loop. Another time, he fought with a guard and was sent to solitary, now known as "X-wing." The cell doors in "X-wing" are solid steel. To see out, Ramos scrunched his face against a half-inch crack between the steel door and the concrete wall.

And in his regular cell, he steeled himself for "Old Sparky," once shocking himself with the hot wire of his TV. "I wanted to know what it felt like to get cooked," he says.

While Ramos tried to keep a grip on his sanity, his lawyers fought for his life in the courts. In October 1985, they got a boost when the TV newsmagazine 20/20 exposed the unreliability of scent-tracking dogs, including Harass II, the German shepherd that put Ramos behind bars. The dogs and their trainer, 20/20 reported, had several times identified suspects who probably were innocent.

In August 1986, the Florida Supreme Court reversed Ramos' conviction, ruling that the dog-scent evidence was completely untested. At a retrial, Ramos was acquitted, and on April 24, 1987, he drove to his new home in Miami.

He enjoyed long showers and time with his wife, Danette, whom he leaned on to guide him. But he felt "like a time bomb." He had a hard time relating to people, especially women. "They talked only about superficial things," he says. "How can they really understand what it's like to be on death row?"

Ramos went into therapy, but four years ago his marriage fell apart. He moved in with his mother, claiming a mobile home on the property in south Miami-Dade County. He planted avocado, mango and sugar-cane trees, and now cares for four dogs, a cat and 20 roosters that wander around behind the locked front gate.

Every night, Ramos comes home to a hug from his mother and the smell of her cooking. Every morning, she delivers him cafe Cubano in a thimble cup.

Ramos says he feels less numb now, "much calmer." The only time the adrenaline really pumps is when he's tooling around in his red Trans Am or hauling steel in a semitrailer truck. As a truck driver, no one looks over his shoulder or watches what he's doing.

Still, he feels like a prisoner sometimes -- able to face up to death but worried he can't face up to life.

"I came here (to America) for a better life," he says. "In Cuba, I'd be dead. I was found innocent here, but it didn't wipe anything away. You're free, but free for what? The best, best years of my life are gone. . . . I carry this with me until the day I die."

Innocence Commission is Cooking with Gas

2010-02-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

From the blog Plain Error :

As you can see from our Press Release below, IPF’s efforts to create an Actual Innocence Commission in Florida have just been buoyed by one of, if not the most conservative members of the Florida Senate, Mike Haridopolos (R-Brevard). It is not insiginificant that he also happens to be the next President of the Florida Senate. He sent a letter this week to Chief Justice fo the Florida Supreme Court, Peggy Quince, supporting and offering legislative assistance in the creation of the Innocence Commission, the creation of which is being considered currently being considered by the court.

The Commission would not determine claims of innocence, which is the primary function of IPF, prosecutors and courts in innocence-based litigation. However, it would look at those cases where innocence has been determined and find out why those wrongful convictions occurred so it can make recommendations for policy reforms that will prevent wrongful convictions going forward.

Senator Haridopolos has cut his teeth on wrongful conviction issues by being the Senate sponsor on claims bills to compensate Florida DNA exoneress Wilton Dedge and, now, Bill Dillon. John Torres from Florida Today reports:

“Our goal should be justice,” Haridopolos said. “I’m known as being tough on crime, but let’s make sure the right guy is behind bars.” He said the letter is a result of his research on a special bill for William Dillon, a Satellite Beach man who spent 27 years in prison before DNA ultimately excluded him from key evidence.Haridopolos said the commission would save the state money by weeding out frivolous lawsuits and keeping guilty inmates from “abusing the system.” It also would eliminate the need for special compensation bills in the future because it would help limit wrongful incarcerations.

Haridopolos said the commission idea had been “floating around” for a couple of years. He said Florida could use a similar project in North Carolina as a model. “Their hard work has provided an example of how other states should react when faced with a plethora of wrongful incarcerations,” he wrote.

Reached in Tallahassee Thursday, Haridopolos said the time is ripe for this to happen. “The criminal justice system is not perfect,” he said. “We need to have something established like this. It will make sure that when a person is sentenced to a life sentence, or even to the death penalty, that they are truly the guilty one.”

This is just more proof that the “Innocence” issue must not be an issue where lines are drawn by party affiliation or political persuasion. With the support of the legislature and the recent unanimous support of the Florida Bar Board of Governors, the chances of creating this Innocence Commission have dramatically improved.

Source: www.floridainnocence.org

Press Release: Innocent Man Accepts Compensation For Wrongful Incarceration

2010-02-24T15:45:00.000-08:00

From the blog Plain Error :

Innocent Man Accepts Compensation For Wrongful Incarceration

Leroy McGee Holds Press Conference; Vows to Fight for Reform of State Compensation Law

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida—On Tuesday February 16, 2010, Leroy McGee will hold a press conference to accept $179,000 in compensation from the State of Florida for his wrongful conviction for a 1990 robbery after refusing to sign the acceptance paperwork over disagreements with unfair provisions in the compensation law. He spent three years and seven months wrongfully incarcerated until Judge Paul Backman ruled McGee had not committed the robbery and that his defense attorney at trial gave the “absolutely the worst performance in the courtroom I’ve ever seen.” Mr. McGee is Florida’s first innocent individual to be eligible and receive compensation under the Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act.

Leroy McGee was convicted in 1991 for an armed robbery he did not commit. During his incarceration, he continuously proclaimed his innocence. He pleaded with authorities and wrote numerous letters to judges. Finally, a special attorney, Mark Wrubel, was appointed to review his case. After several court filings, Judge Paul Backman ordered his conviction vacated. Judge Backman determined that Mr. McGee had simply been railroaded by an incompetent defense attorney who overlooked, or just failed to introduce, clear evidence of Mr. McGee’s innocence—Mr. McGee did not match the initial descriptions of the robbery suspect, none of the fingerprints found at the scene matched his, his car was inoperable at the time of the crime, and his employee time card showed that he was, in fact, at work when the armed robbery took place.

As part of this claim process Mr. McGee had to establish also that he has never been guilty of committing any crime. And this has to be certified by the FBI.

“I delayed taking this compensation to let the public know that there are a number of ways to improve the wrongful incarceration compensation statute. With the economy like it is, it was time to accept the compensation and continue this fight,” said Mr. McGee.

Specifically, the Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act does not allow someone who has been convicted of a felony prior to or during his wrongful incarceration to seek compensation. Thus, a very minor felony can trigger this “Clean Hands” provision to prevent someone from being compensated for a subsequent wrongful incarceration. Additionally, the law does not allow for attorneys fees for the legal work provided to obtain the compensation. Because the law will require in some instances a mini-trial where the innocent individual will again have to prove their innocence, it may shut out a financially poor exoneree from the compensation process.

“Mr. McGee has been absolutely courageous in foregoing this compensation for the last eight months so that he could shed light on some of the problems with the compensation statute,” said David Comras, McGee’s pro bono attorney.

After Mr. McGee, with the help of his attorney, had fulfilled all of the legal and evidentiary requirements imposed by Florida’s Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act, the Attorney Generals Office offered to pay Mr. McGee in the form of an annuity that is worth approximately $179,000, and which is to be paid to him over a ten year plus period. Apparently, there is no provision in the Act to allow for his substantial costs and legal fees incurred obtaining this compensation, despite the complex legal and heavy evidentiary burdens he had to overcome. “If you are out of prison, you are going to be struggling out there, trying to get a job,” McGee said. “Who has the money to pay lawyers up front? Any decision I make now (the State) will bring up to the rest of the guys (who apply).”

“Most exonerees come out of prison with limited resources or no resources at all. It is one of the reasons why they were convicted in the first place and were unable to effectively prove their innocence for so many years. Without providing a modest fee in the statute to allow them to hire a compensation attorney, it may prevent them from claiming compensation they deserve simply because they are poor and can’t afford an attorney,” said Seth Miller, Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Florida.

“Even though Mr. McGee didn’t have to pay for my help to get his compensation, he is standing up for those exonerees who can’t afford an attorney or can’t find a free one in these tough economic times,” Comras continued. “Few, if any, of those wrongfully incarcerated would be willing or able to bear such costs, risks and complications on their own account. And even when successful, they would remain substantially out of pocket for a great number of years concerning these costs,” Comras wrote the State in a Sept. 15, 2009 letter.

While there is a bill filed (SB 654) in the Florida Senate to remove the clean hands provision from the compensation law, the bill does not include a modest attorney fees provision. The bill also does not have a sponsor in the Florida House of Representatives. Without a companion bill in the House, it is unlikely that any positive changes will be made to the law this year. Members of the House have until Tuesday March, 2, 2010, the first day of the legislative session, to file bills.

Please join Mr. McGee and his attorney David Comras for a press conference to announce the acceptance of his compensation for wrongful incarceration and explain Mr. McGee’s strong stance against the shortcomings in the Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act. The event will be held at 2:00 PM at the Broward County Public Defender’s Office located at the main courthouse — 3rd Floor, North Wing, 201 SE 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301.

Source: http://www.floridainnocence.org

Innocence panel could improve justice in Florida

2010-02-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

People working in the criminal-justice system often become hardened to claims of innocence. It's a matter of survival: The claims are often bogus. And the prospect of putting an innocent person behind bars -- or on death row -- is too horrendous to contemplate on a daily basis.

But in recent years, a string of high-profile exonerations -- some sparked by DNA testing, others by dogged investigation -- have forced policymakers to confront the ugly reality. Innocent people are being sent to prison. Not many, but one is too many -- and Florida has seen 11 cases overturned by DNA evidence, with more in the pipeline. State leaders should ask why. Examining overturned cases reveals common elements. Other states have launched innocence commissions to systematically study wrongful convictions, and suggest changes to the criminal-justice system.

To their credit, key Florida officials are lining up behind the concept of an innocence commission. The most recent, Senate President-designate Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, received a harsh education on the injustice of wrongful convictions when he sponsored legislation to compensate Wilton Dedge, one of the first people to be exonerated by DNA in Florida. Dedge spent 22 years behind bars for a rape he did not commit, fighting for the last eight of those years to have DNA evidence tested that would prove his innocence. Even after a private lab cleared him in 2001, the state fought to keep him in prison. He was finally released in 2004.

Dedge's case exposed many of the weak points that experts say spawn bad convictions. He was misidentified by the victim in the case during a photographic lineup, even though she had previously given a physical description of an assailant considerably taller than Dedge. His first trial featured highly dubious testimony from a dog handler who has been linked by a Florida Today investigation to a string of other questionable convictions.

After Dedge's first conviction was overturned, on the basis that his defense attorneys weren't allowed to effectively refute the dog-sniffing evidence, Dedge was tried again under circumstances even more suspicious. That trial featured testimony from a convicted murderer, who had been placed in a prison van with Dedge. Clarence Zacke testified that Dedge boasted about the rape and gave considerable detail. What the jury didn't hear was that Zacke had previously testified for the state in another case, and had his sentence reduced after the Dedge trial.

Faulty eyewitness identification, untrustworthy snitches and unreliable scientific testimony are implicated in many overturned convictions. Other problems include false confessions and the proper preservation of evidence.

Wrongful convictions are costly in many ways. The largest burden falls on the innocent people incarcerated for others' crimes -- but the victims of crime also suffer, because their real assailants aren't caught and punished. Society pays as well, through compensation for those falsely imprisoned.

Finding patches for these gaps in Florida's criminal code isn't a matter of liberal versus conservative, but of right versus wrong. Asking experts to study the issue and recommend changes is an important step to ensure that every case is handled with the ultimate goal of justice.

Source(www.news-journalonline.com)

Thwarting Justice by Denying DNA Testing

2010-02-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

It is disheartening to hear of prosecutors opposing DNA tests which may prove the innocence of persons facing the death penalty. The objections usually center on the cost or maintaining closure and peace of mind for the victim's family. However, supporters of the defendant frequently offer to pay the cost, and one would think that the victim's family would prefer to have the actual perpetrator arrested and convicted rather than have an innocent person executed. It may also be that prosecutors wish to have their convictions maintained and avoid the embarrassment of having prosecuted and caused the conviction of an innocent man, an understandable consideration but hardly one consistent with the pursuit of justice.

A perfect example is the case of Henry Skinner who is scheduled for execution Feb 24th in Texas. Skinner has consistently maintained his innocence of the murder of his girlfriend and her two grown sons. The state has repeatedly refused to allow him to test evidence found on the victim that could point to another suspect. As a result of an investigation by the Medill Innocence Project (a highly respected group of student journalists from Northwestern University), they concluded that there were no eyewitnesses to the crime, no confession, but rather persistent denials, no apparent motive, nothing in Mr. Skinner's background to establish that he was capable of such a crime and most important, a viable alternative suspect with a motive and the means and opportunity to commit the crime. The state's star witness admitted to the students that she had lied in her testimony about incriminating statements Mr. Skinner had made. There is substantial other evidence to put the conviction in doubt.

The case also has a unique wrinkle which renders it somewhat bizarre. The lawyer appointed to represent Mr. Skinner had been the District Attorney and the case was prosecuted by his successor. In addition to the alleged conflict, Mr. Skinner's petition is replete with charges of the ineffective assistance of counsel, most of which have been rejected by the courts, including the failure to seek DNA testing. My own experience informs me that no judgment should be made regarding any of the court's rulings without much more information.

So I do not write as an advocate for Mr. Skinner, but rather as an advocate for our system of justice. If there are means available which will finally determine Mr. Skinner's guilt or innocence (and others like him), we should avail ourselves of them. Whatever the objections may be -- they cannot outweigh the potential calamity of executing an innocent person.

source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Texas Inmate Facing Execution Denied DNA Testing

2010-02-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

Henry Skinner is scheduled for execution in Texas on February 24 despite the lack of DNA testing of critical evidence from the crime scene that could lead to his exoneration. Skinner has always maintained his innocence of the 1993 murder of his girlfriend and her two grown sons in Tampa, Texas. At his trial, the prosecution presented the results of selective DNA testing on some of the crime evidence that tended to prove Skinner's presence at the scene, which was his place of residence, a fact he has never disputed. But the state has repeatedly refused his request to test other evidence, including material found on the victim, that could point to another suspect. In addition, an investigation by journalism students from Northwestern University in 1999 and 2000 revealed that a key witness from the trial had recanted her testimony linking Skinner to the crime. Texas has already executed a number of individuals who may have been innocent, leaving a cloud of doubt on the fairness of the criminal justice system. By conducting relatively routine DNA tests before his execution, the doubts surrounding Skinner's case could be resolved one way or the other.

Skinner's attorneys have filed motions for a stay of execution to allow for the DNA testing and are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the effectiveness of his trial counsel and other issues in the case.

Source(deathpenaltyinfo.org)

Stop TX From Executing Another Innocent Man

2010-02-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

In less than three weeks, Hank Skinner is scheduled to be executed in Texas for three murders he says he didn't commit. Despite the existence of untested DNA evidence that could prove him innocent or confirm his guilt, the state is seeking to go forward with his lethal injection on Feb. 24.

Even by the standards of our most execution-happy state, it's unacceptable that officials would put a prisoner to death while ignoring scientific evidence that could prove him innocent.

The case for Skinner's innocence is by no means certain. On the other hand, the case for DNA testing is clear.

Skinner admits he was in his house when his girlfriend and her two sons were killed, and he was found hours later by police at an ex-girlfriend's house with the victims' blood on his clothes and a gash in his hand. But there's an alternate suspect that exists, as well as evidence that hasn't yet been tested. A reasonable observer could raise doubt over his case, and scientific evidence can offer finality. Texas should conduct these tests before it carries out a punishment it can't reverse.

Send a letter right now to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles supporting Skinner's clemency petition so he can continue to seek DNA testing in the case.

Send a letter right now to Gov. Rick Perry, urging him to stay Skinner's execution so DNA testing can be conducted.

Source(criminaljustice.change.org)

Man Convicted 33 Years Ago Exonerated Through DNA

2010-02-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

Rochester, N.Y. – Thirty-three years after his wrongful conviction and 28 years after he was released on parole, Freddie Peacock, 60, has been exonerated with DNA testing at a Thursday hearing in Rochester.

It’s all part of something called the “Innocence Project,” which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld and Peacock’s other attorneys were in court with Peacock.

Peacock, who is mentally ill, was convicted of raping a Rochester woman in December 1976. At that time he told the officers about recent hospitalizations, but they continued to interrogate him until he allegedly confessed to the crime.

He was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. He was later released on parole in 1982.

A state judge in Rochester dismissed Peacock's conviction Thursday afternoon.

Peacock’s family is simply relieved, they say this was a long time coming and are very happy with the result. Peacock was advised by his attornies him not to speak.

A spokesman for the New York City-based Innocence Project says it took on the case in 2002 after being contacted by Peacock, who always maintained his innocence. He says the organization has handled other cases involving individuals cleared after their release from prison, but none after as long a time as Peacock's.

The group says police badgered the mentally challenged Peacock until he said “I did it,” despite the fact he had no details about how, when or where.

“The alleged confession had all the hallmarks of a false confession,” said Olga Akselrod of the Innocence Project.

Freddie's sister Edith says she's thrilled for her brother and is thankful for DNA evidence which the Innocence Project used to clear her brother's name. To other families facing similar situations, wrongful convictions, she says stay strong.

“Never give up. Keep fighting. DNA really is a good thing,” she said.

The Monroe County District Attorney’s Office consented to DNA testing and joined the Innocence Project in a motion to vacate Peacock’s conviction and dismiss the indictment against him, which fully exonerates him.

“Frankly, I’m glad for Mr. Peacock,” said District Attorney Mike Green. “If this case happened again today with the DNA technology that’s available to us, I’m very confident we wouldn’t be in this position and that that test would have been done before trial.”

The case is considered by the Project to be a national milestone, because it marks the 250th DNA exoneration in the United States.

Among the 250 DNA exonerations:
· 25 were in New York (the only states with more DNA exonerations overall are Texas with 40 and Illinois with 29)
· 76% of the wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification.
· 50% involved unvalidated or improper forensic science.
· 27% relied on a false confession, admission or guilty plea.
· 70% are people of color (60% of the exonerated are black; nearly 9% are Latino; 29% are white).

Source(www.13wham.com)

Juan Melendez, Death Row Exoneree, Speaking In Colorado

2010-02-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

On January 3, 2002, Juan Roberto Melendez, an innocent man, was released from Florida's death row after 17 years, eight months and one day.

During February 2010, Juan will be speaking in Colorado. Please join us to hear Juan speak about his experience on Florida's death row. Then you decide if the death penalty is worth executing even one innocent person.

Event Schedule

Juan Melendez will be speaking at these events:

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 12:00 Noon. This event is at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Get PDF with complete details.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 12:00 Noon and 6 p.m. These events are at the University of Denver. Get PDF with complete details.

Lunch or snacks may be provided at the events. Check the event PDFs for details.

Following the Wednesday, February 10, 6 p.m. event, there will be a screening of the documentary film, "Juan Melendez - 6466," followed by a reception with Juan.

Event Sponsors

The events with Juan Melendez are sponsored by Coloradans for Alternatives Against the Death Penalty, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, and the DU Law School's Chapters of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, NLG, and NBLSA.

Source(www.coadp.org)

Death row exonerations point to flaws in system

2010-01-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

By Alison Bath
alisonbath1@gannett.com

Eight men have been found innocent of the crimes that put them on Louisiana's death row. All were exonerated before they were put to death and ultimately freed from prison.

Most often, those exonerations came after it was revealed that prosecutors withheld evidence that was favorable to the defendant, relied on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch or used faulty eyewitness identification to gain a conviction.

Those men aren't alone.

Nationwide, 139 people sentenced to death since 1973 subsequently have been found innocent and released from death row, according to data provided by the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center.

With 23, Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations. Illinois, Texas and Oklahoma take second, third and fourth, respectively. And Louisiana holds fifth place with two other states for the most death row exonerations in the country.

The reasons for these wrongful convictions vary, but advocates say the exonerations are evidence the country's judicial system is fatally flawed when it comes to the death penalty.

"We don't know how many mistakes have been made," said Richard Dieter, Death Penalty Information Center executive director. "It points to a danger that we may have missed some. It raises a number of concerns that innocent people may have been executed."

But death penalty supporters say the exonerations are proof the legal system works. Higher court review and a lengthy appeal process help root out those who are innocent and ensure only the guilty are put to death. Additionally, there are some crimes that are so heinous and some criminals who are so depraved that the only answer is to put them to death, they say.

"It seems to be the character and propensity of this particular person are deserving of more than just locking him up," Orleans District Attorney Leon A. Cannizzaro, Jr. said

Numbers distorted?

While acknowledging some of the exonerated cited by Death Penalty Information Center likely are innocent, death penalty supporters insist the number of death row exonerations nationwide is distorted. They maintain the term innocence has been "redefined" to include individuals freed on a technicality or those not retried due to a lack of evidence. Actually innocent is different from legally innocent, they say.

"None of those exoneration categories establishes or even suggests actual innocence," death penalty supporter Dudley Sharp wrote in an article published at www.prodeathpenalty.com.

That notion is dismissed by opponents.

"Our system of justice from our founding is that the person is innocent until proven guilty," Dieter said.

"It's not a question of knowing absolutely what happened 20 years ago, but only that a person now has had their status of innocence restored. Certainly, those are not people who should be executed."

No single cause

Emily Maw, Project Innocence New Orleans director, said most exonerations don't have a single cause. Rather, a combination of factors paired with an overburdened and underfunded criminal justice system can lead to putting innocent people behind bars.

Among the causes of wrongful conviction:

Prosecutorial and police misconduct, such as withholding evidence or not revealing a witness was a paid informant.
Poor evidence handling and preservation, such as throwing away or careless processing.
Wrong witness identifications or using questionable witnesses to build a case, such as co-defendants who have a vested interest in pointing the finger at someone else.
Those problems, due in part to a "win at all costs" attitude among some statewide prosecutors, not only are resulting in wrongful convictions and increased jurisprudence costs but also are threatening citizens' safety, Maw said.

"It's not cost effective to incarcerate people who are innocent," said Maw, who was careful to point out that not all misconduct by prosecutors or people is willful. "If you incarcerate the wrong person, it's pretty likely that someone else is going to continue doing bad things."

In the case of the eight men exonerated, removed from Louisiana's death row and freed, most occurred after 1997. Some were freed because more sophisticated DNA testing was able to exclude them from the crime. Four of those exonerations — including the precedent-setting case of John Thompson — were the result of problem prosecutions out of the Orleans district attorney's office.

Cannizzaro candidly admits a former prosecutor was wrong when he withheld and destroyed crucial exonerating evidence in an effort to secure a conviction against Thompson for a carjacking in 1984 in New Orleans. The conviction kept Thompson from testifying on his own behalf and was used against him to obtain a death penalty verdict at a subsequent murder trial in 1985.

A judge later ruled that Thompson's rights were violated and ordered a new trial on the murder charge. A jury deliberated 35 minutes then found him not guilty in 2003. Thompson, who was able to testify and who maintained his innocence, was released from prison. He subsequently was awarded $15 million for his wrongful conviction. That verdict is being appealed by the Orleans district attorney.

"The Thompson case was a case that went terribly wrong, but it came out. It was exposed and we are paying a terrible price for that," said Cannizzaro, who was elected to office in 2008, more than two decades after Thompson was convicted. "Results like this cause people to lose confidence in this system."

But Cannizzaro and other district attorneys insist such examples are few — the majority of prosecutors don't break the rules to get a conviction. In the case of Thompson, a "rogue" junior district attorney acted outside the authority and scope of the office and without the knowledge of his supervisors, Cannizzaro said.

Prosecutors work hard to obtain legal and constitutional convictions. Cheating or unethical behavior is not tolerated and could result in a prosecutor being disbarred or prosecuted.

"The satisfaction you get is making sure the victim or the witness has their day in court," Cannizzaro said of a prosecutor's job. "It's not about winning at all costs. It's about doing what is fair and playing by the rules."

Locally, no Caddo, Bossier, Webster or DeSoto inmates have been exonerated from death row. However, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in November 2007 that prosecutors erred when they excluded a black man from a Caddo jury in the first-degree murder trial of Robert G. Coleman. As a result, his guilty verdict and death sentence were overturned. He faces a retrial in April for the killing of a retired Blanchard minister.

The death sentence meted out to a Caddo man accused of repeatedly raping a 5-year-old Shreveport girl was overturned in 2008 by the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision drew sharp criticism from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who said the court overstepped its authority.

"One thing is clear: The five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same 'standards of decency' as the people of Louisiana," the governor said in a news release in 2008.

Other states react

Citing concerns about the reliability of convictions and gross flaws in Illinois' death penalty, Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 death row inmates in 2003. Most received life in prison, but three were given 40 years with the possibility of parole. Ryan's actions came after 13 Illinois death row inmates were found to have been wrongfully convicted.

Likewise, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine commuted the sentences of eight death row inmates to life in prison in 2007 when he signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in that state. And in March, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson abolished the state's death penalty due to a lack of confidence in the justice system being the "final arbiter" when it came to meting out the death penalty for a crime.

Jindal, however, remains a strong supporter of the death penalty. "The most repugnant crimes deserve the harshest penalties, and nothing is more repugnant than the brutal rape of an 8-year-old child," he said in expressing outrage of the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring Louisiana's death penalty for child rape law unconstitutional.

Even so, Maw said, simple reforms could reduce the possibility of wrongful convictions not only for those under a death sentence but also for others serving life in prison or other sentences. Statewide, a total of 25 people, including a Caddo man who served 22 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, have been found innocent.

Those reforms include:

Changing eyewitness identification procedures, such as photo lineups, to help reduce the incidence of false identifications while not reducing true identifications.
Requiring law enforcement to videotape or record an entire interrogation would ensure investigators were not leading a suspect to make a false confession.
Mandating police, prosecutors and criminal laboratories to retain evidence indefinitely would ensure that evidence would be there when new technology or testing that could prove innocence becomes available.
Louisiana's law allowing the death penalty for a variety of crimes is too broad, making it vulnerable to the discretion of prosecutors and judges who are all too aware of the political consequences of appearing soft on crime, death penalty expert Burk Foster said. Limiting the crimes and extenuating circumstances eligible for the death penalty possibly could decrease wrongful convictions and reduce the number of death row sentences overturned on appeal.

"States should only seek the death penalty in the most limited circumstances," said Foster, a former associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who now teaches in Michigan. "It shouldn't be a panacea for any type of violent crime where someone gets killed."

Additional Facts
RELATED LINK
Project Innocence New Orleans http://www.ip-no.org
Death row exonerations in the U.S. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty

Death penalty supporter Dudley Sharp's argument questioning the validity of death row exonerations http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/innocence.htm
Standards the Death Penalty Information Center used in compiling its listing of death row exonerations http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row

Local Volunteers Take Part in Annual MLK Day of Service

2010-01-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

People throughout the country were celebrating the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service on Monday. Here in the Delaware Valley, thousands of volunteers were fanned out at various events to do their part.

KYW's Karin Phillips reports that 3,000 volunteers were expected at Girard College on Monday for the centerpiece of the Philadelphia region’s Martin Luther King Jr. day of service.

A health and wellness fair, community workshops, a civic engagement expo, weatherization kits, 175 community service projects throughout the Girard College campus, with the main activities in the Armory.

Todd Bernstein is executive director of the MLK day of service says Haiti will not be forgotten:

"At our opening ceremony, we will ask the 3,000 volunteers at the armory in Girard College to take out their cell phones and text in a donation for the people of Haiti through the Red Cross."

Martin Luther King Jr. came to Girard College in 1965 to march and help protest the then whites-only admission policy of the school.

KYW's Brad Segall reports that Doctor King’s spirit was alive and well in Montgomery County where students from throughout the area volunteered their time to help less fortunate students in the Philadelphia area.

Nearly 200 volunteers, including dozens of students, turned out at Cradles to Crayons to help make packages for underprivileged kids in the region. The organization partners with social service agencies to get school supplies, toys and clothing into the hands of kids who don’t have them.

Kelly is an eighth grader at Perkiomen Valley Middle School:

“I like helping kids in need and I know that they need a lot of help. It’s just kind of like from the goodness of my heart so, you know, it’s fun to help people.”

It’s also a big day for Cradles to Crayons. The non-profit organization is packing up it’s donated items, getting ready for a move to a new home -- a 19,000 square foot warehouse in West Conshohocken that will be ready in early March.

KYW's Steve Tawa reports that a Fishtown recreation center got the once-over by "White-Williams scholars" - both current high school students and alumni who wanted to be part of the MLK day of service.

The young people included at-risk, high achieving, low-income Philadelphians like Egypt and Tom, who were circling a bench outside the rec center, applying their design technique, and paint to liven it up:

Egypt: "We were going to put a message. This one reads 'the sky is the limit,' so we were going to make a message that people could read, and give them hope when they read it."

Tom: "What were doing is painting the bench, mostly red, but then there are blue squares in random parts of the whole bench."

Tanequa Neale is a program associate with the White-Williams scholars:

"Our theme is art for social change. Our students are excited about giving back. Civic engagement is an important component of our program."

Several others at the rec center on East Montgomery Avenue broke out lime green and aqua blue paint, to bring out the fish motif on the walls of the Fishtown skating rink.

KYW's Mike Dunn reports that this year's traditional Martin Luther King Day ringing of the Liberty Bell was particularly poignant: it featured a man freed after 35 years in prison after being exonerated of rape charges.

The bell ringing was ceremonial, of course, but standing at the Liberty Bell was a man who never imagined he would be there: 54-year James Bain, who just last month was freed from a Florida prison after serving 35 years. Ceremony emcee James Tucker praised Bain's courage:

"He is the personification of liberty and justice."

Bain was freed after the Innocence Project law center successfully petitioned the court for DNA testing. Bain reflected on the moment:

"I only have but a few words to put this. I never dreamed I would be here to do what I got to do."

KYW's Pat Loeb reports one MLK Day project took place at Richard Allen Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia.

Dozens of student and adult volunteers put the finishing touches on a library that's been three years in the making, according to Richard Allen Charter School's chief academic officer Jessica Richard:

"When we moved into this building, our school had not yet secured the funding to acquire the library books, furniture and all the necessary materials."

Richard says the school got grants for books and a server and, in honor of Martin Luther King, IKEA sent the furniture. Students such as Terrence Burnson came in on their day off and helped put it together, though he didn't see it as a purely noble activity:

"It's just about having fun, it's not really nothing special because this is my school and this is my library and this is what I do for my school, I work within my school."

Burnson also says he plans to take out plenty of books, now that the library is officially open.

KYW's Mike DeNardo reports that Jewish and Muslim students worked together in community service.

Students from the Al-Aqsa Islamic Academy in North Philadelphia and the

Saligman school in Melrose Park assemble toiletries in 200 so-called "dignity kits" for the homeless. They then helped to distribute them to the homeless with activist Sacaree Rhodes at the Municipal Services Building. Student Lily Mohamed says it's rewarding to find common ground:

"For Muslims and Jewish to unite in one place and work for someone, or try to help someone, that's actually a great feeling."

And student Josh Perloff says it's gratifying being able to see and interact with the people you're helping:

"It's a bit different of a feeling. You get a bigger sense of, 'Wow, I helped someone.' Rather than just giving money or something to an organization."

Students at South Philadelphia High School are using this Martin Luther King Day to help bridge the culture gap.

"You have to really allow yourself to be led by your partner."

In one workshop, students in parallel lines faced each other, and mirrored each other's movements. South Philadelphia High School principal LaGreta Brown says it's only one way to help blacks, asians, and all cultures find a common humanity on King Day:

"The significance of the activities are to continue the dream of Martin Luther King of Unity, of peace and non-violence."

After racial unrest at the school, superintendent Arlene Ackerman says the exercises are designed to promote Doctor King's teaching:

"What we're doing here is acknowledging that, and the importance of healing and unity."

About 75 students attended the workshops.

Source : www.kyw1060.com

Tortured into confessing, Chicago man freed in Burge case

2010-01-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

'I'm glad justice finally prevailed,' says man held over two decades for rape and murder.

Michael Tillman, a victim of torture linked to indicted former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, gets his freedom after 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Here he leaves Cook County Court on Thursday.

A man imprisoned for more than two decades for rape and murder on the basis of a confession he said he was tortured into making by officers under the direction of then-Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge was ordered freed this morning.

Michael Tillman, 43, confessed but long maintained he did so only after being tortured by officers under Burge’s command. And another man ultimately was convicted in the killing after evidence including his fingerprints and the victim’s possessions tied him to the crime.

“It felt good, and I’m glad justice finally prevailed,” Tillman said after being released.

Special Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Myles O’Rourke asked Judge Vincent Gaughan to drop all charges against Tillman in the murder, rape and kidnapping of Betty Howard, 42, citing “unreliable” and “forced confessions.”

Tillman’s attorney Flint Taylor said he plans to file documents seeking Tillman’s formal exoneration and might seek compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

Tillman was arrested July 22, 1986. He has long maintainted that, over three days in police custody, he was beaten with a phone book, punched in the face and stomach until he vomited blood, had a plastic bag put over his head and 7-Up poured into his nose in a crude form of waterboarding.

The result: Tillman, then 20, confessed to killing Howard, a mail clerk whose body was found in a South Side apartment building where Tillman lived at the time with his girlfriend and worked as the janitor.

Tillman told police at the time that two other men had also raped Howard before she was shot. One of the men, Steven Bell, was acquitted of charges related to Howard’s death, and the other man was never charged, prosecutors said.

He was convicted in a bench trial Dec. 18, 1986, solely on the basis of his confession, according to the petition filed in Cook County Circuit Court that led to his being freed today.

Tillman’s attorney initially raised the torture allegations during his trial, but the judge who heard the case refused to throw out his confession, and Tillman was sentenced to life in prison.

Police later arrested another man, 27-year-old Clarence Trotter. Trotter was found with Howard’s possessions, and his fingerprints and other physical evidence linked him to Howard’s killing.

Trotter was charged and convicted and given life in prison, and Tillman was granted a new trial in 1991.

But a jury again convicted Tillman in 1996. And, despite the conviction of Trotter, Tillman lost a 1999 appeal, when an appellate court decided that, despite the lack of evidence tying him to the crime or to Trotter, Tillman’s confession was “sufficient.”

Howard’s daughter Angelita and Howard’s boyfriend Ora Russell, who had proposed to her a day before her murder, said today they still believe Tillman was involved in Howard’s death.

Angelita Howard loudly sobbed as she left Gaughan’s courtroom, wailing repeatedly, “They let him go.”

Asked about how the case fell apart due to the police torture allegations, Russell said: “I’m sorry it fell apart, but. . . .I would have done more than that to them.”

Taylor expressed condolences to Howard’s family.

Tillman added, “I was a victim, too.”

Tillman, who now has two adult children, said he plans to take life as a free man “one day at a time.”

The sweatsuit-clad Tillman said his immediate plans were to get some chicken at Popeye’s and then start “getting to know his family better.”

Burge, former Area 2 commander, and more than 20 officers who worked with him have been accused of torturing confessions from murder suspects in the 1970s and 1980s. Burge now awaits trial on federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Flanked by his mother and sister, Tillman said he expects that Burge and his former underlings will “get what they got coming. The system will do to what they did to me.”

Source(www.suntimes.com)

Jamie Bain to Ring Liberty Bell

2010-01-15T02:52:00.000-08:00

From the blog Plain Error :

One of Jamie Bain’s heroes is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is fitting that on the day to commemorate Dr. King’s birthday, Jamie will be in Philadelphia to kick off the festivities by ringing the Liberty Bell. Jamie is being honored by the Philadelphia Martin Luther King, Jr. Association for Non-Violence as an honorary Bell Ringer and recipient of the 2010 Drum Major Award for Criminal Justice.

I will be in attendance and will have a report with photos when I return next next Tuesday. In the meantime, check out these enws reports from local Philadelphia news agencies on the ceremony and how Jamie’s brother Mark, who lives in enarby Allentown, PA, will be able to witness the event.

Source: www.floridainnocence.org

Exonerated Death Row Inmate Speaks To Students

2010-01-15T02:45:00.000-08:00

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A Florida man who spent nearly two decades on death row for a murder he didn't commit shared a message with high school students in Louisville Thursday.

Juan Melendez spoke to students at Central High School while visiting Louisville this week for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty conference.

Melendez said he has an important reason for going to high schools to share his story of resilience, courage and hope.

Melendez used humor as he told students how he came close to being executed for a crime he did not commit.

"It was May 2, 1984. I'll never forget it," said Melendez.

That's when, Melendez said, police officers came to his job in Pennsylvania looking for him in connection to a slaying in Florida.

"Then when I got in front of them, they told me to open my mouth. They wanted to see if I have a missing tooth. I show it to them. There you have it," Melendez recounted. "Then they told me to lift the sleeve on my left arm and then they said, 'Yes, you are the man we are looking for.

'"Melendez said he was extradited to Florida, but could barely speak English as he went through the trial. He did not understand much of what got him locked away.

Had it not been for the discovery of a long-forgotten taped confession of the real killer, Melendez said he most certainly would have been executed.

"People need to know you always can release an innocent man from prison, but you can never release an innocent man from the grave," said Melendez.

Melendez believes as more stories like his are told to the younger generation, they'll be moved to want to change the system in the future, so he travels to schools across the country.

"They are the ones who can take the job to the end," said Melendez.

Melendez was released from Florida's death row on Jan. 3, 2002 -- 18 years after he was imprisoned.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty conference is at the Seelbach Hotel through Sunday.

Source(www.wlky.com)

Jamie Bain and IPF on NPR

2010-01-12T04:18:00.001-08:00

From the blog Plain Error :

Jamie Bain and IPF on NPR

http://floridainnocence.org/content/?p=1716

Death row inmate might be innocent

2010-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Star witness admits she lied

November 2004
By Nathan Crabbe and Jamie Keaney

He seemed like a logical suspect. After all, Ernest Simmons had spent most of his adult life behind bars and his last prison stretch was for beating and robbing two elderly men.

So in May 1992, when 80-year-old Anna Knaze was found robbed and brutally murdered in her Johnstown home, suspicion quickly focused on Simmons. In short order, he was arrested, convicted and condemned to death row, where he has narrowly escaped execution twice.

In the past, Simmons had always pleaded guilty to his crimes, but this time, he swore he was innocent - even when he was being secretly taped by his girlfriend.

An investigation by the Innocence Institute of Western Pennsylvania at Point Park University and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shows he may be right. At the very least, the jury that convicted him lacked key evidence and information challenging witnesses' stories.

The jurors didn't know police withheld hair tests that didn't match Simmons. They never heard the secret tape recordings made by his girlfriend, which were hidden by police. They didn't know that two witnesses against him escaped time behind bars in return for their testimony. Most significantly, the jury didn't know the state's star witness lied on the stand when she identified Simmons as the killer--a falsehood she admitted just months ago to reporters from the Innocence Institute.

A federal judge heard arguments Jan. 30 on whether Simmons, now 46, deserves a new trial or certain death. Police and prosecutors maintain a steadfast resolve they have the right man and any errors made were harmless. In fact, they have intimated he got away with other murders before meeting his match in the aggressive detective who investigated Knaze's killing.

Simmons acknowledges he was a longtime thief but insists he is no killer.

"Merely because I was black and had previous convictions was I accused of a murder that had nothing to do with me," Simmons wrote from the section of SCI Greene that houses most of the state's death row inmates. "I, like most people, am not perfect, but I did not kill this elderly woman."

A frightened public

In the early 1990s, Johnstown was still recoiling from the collapse of the steel industry, which helped fuel a 21-year-peak in the city's crime rate. By 1992, the local newspaper had declared a crime wave was underway and residents were applying for new gun permits at a record pace.

After four residents older than 70 were attacked in February and March, the city's graying population was warned to be on alert. But Anna Knaze wasn't fazed. Her son would later recall she was a friendly old woman who didn't hesitate to help a stranger.

Knaze lived in one of a handful of aging residences on the road connecting downtown to the abandoned steel mills. When neighbors didn't see her for a day and her mail was untouched, they contacted her son.

He found her body slumped on a hallway floor in the late afternoon of May 6, 1992, and suspected she died from a fall or natural causes. But an autopsy uncovered the horrors of her final minutes.

Her spine was severed, all her ribs broken and she was strangled more than a day before she was found. Her purse, the only item missing from the home, would never be recovered.

An aggressive detective

The detective assigned to the case, Sgt. Richard Rok, grew up in Johnstown and always aspired to wear a badge. A graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and former juvenile probation officer, Rok started as patrolman in 1989 and in two years worked his way to detective.

Rok was known for busting drug dealers and breaking other high profile cases in a 13-year career that saw him rise to lead detective and department spokesman.

But he was also accused of abusing his authority, allegedly telling one black resident he didn't "need a warrant for niggers." Johnstown's black residents called him Robocop for his aggressive tactics and a fellow officer said the 5-foot-6 detective took his Napoleon complex out on suspects.

Knaze's killing was his first big murder case. Neighbors told Rok that they last saw her inviting a black man, who claimed his car broke down, into her home. He had Simmons pegged as the man from the beginning.

A troubled suspect

It's easy to see why Ernie Simmons was a target. Born in 1957 to a 13-year-old mother in Philadelphia, his father abandoned the family, then sexually abused him during visits. His mother controlled her son by tying him up, before letting him roam the streets and find his meals in the garbage.

After child welfare agencies took him, he bounced between foster homes until a Harrisburg preacher and his wife adopted him. His stepmother later told his lawyers he was their most grateful foster child, but said the couple "got to him too late. He had spent too many years on the street just trying to survive."

Simmons was busted for stealing at least three times as a juvenile and quit Susquehanna High School in the 11 th grade. By the time he was 27, he pleaded guilty to 19 different charges for stealing everything from swimming trunks to credit cards.

In his rare time outside prison, friends in Harrisburg say Simmons acted paranoid and exhibited delusions of grandeur, such as wearing a doctor's coat and claiming he was a medical student while working at a fast-food restaurant. He was later diagnosed with organic brain damage.

His most serious conviction came in 1984 in Harrisburg, where he admitted he forced his way into the homes of two elderly men, stealing a car from one and beating another before taking $70. He was sentenced to 7-15 years in prison.

At the same time, police began to suspect he was responsible for killing two other elderly Harrisburg residents, even though they lacked proof.

Was he a serial killer?

In prison Simmons earned his barber's certificate before being paroled in Aug. 1991 at age 34. He chose Johnstown as a place where he could have a fresh start. With ambitions to run the city's first black beauty shop, he found work cutting hair and enrolled in cosmetology school.

Within six months of arriving in Johnstown, he would run into trouble. Simmons called police and reported he stumbled upon an 83-year-old man with a knife in his neck in his apartment complex. The man died a month later without identifying his attacker.

Police believed Simmons committed the murder, but like the Harrisburg killings, they had no evidence.

On the second day of the Knaze investigation, Rok traced Simmons back to the Harrisburg detective who busted him for the robberies there. The detective said he believed Simmons also killed two other elderly victims but couldn't prove it.

Rok figured he had his man. Simmons was imprisoned on a technical parole violation nine days after the killing, giving Rok time to build a case against a man he now believed was a possible serial killer.

Simmons has been behind bars ever since.

Jail ID spurs charges

Simmons told police he drove his girlfriend to an appointment in downtown Johnstown on the day of the murder. He then took her friends to an auto shop and stopped at a bank on the way back. He was late picking up his girlfriend, arriving around 11:45 a.m.

He claimed the tight schedule precluded him from committing the murder, but Rok believed he had just enough time.

If the murder likely occurred around 11, as the autopsy showed, Simmons argued his tight schedule didn't give him time to commit the crime. Rok believed Simmons had just enough time. The belief was bolstered by two workers from a day-care center 150 feet away, who identified Simmons as part of an interracial couple they saw walk past near the time of the killing.

Later, they would hedge on who they saw.

A next-door neighbor and her son's girlfriend told Rok they watched Knaze speaking with a black man near her home between 11-11:30 a.m. But neither woman picked Simmons out of a six-man photo lineup.

A month into Rok's investigation, the same neighbor who couldn't identify Simmons reported her son, Gary Blough, also saw the man near the murder scene.

Blough was later jailed for violating parole on a two-year prison sentence for receiving stolen property, unlawful restraint and other charges. In a jailhouse interview with Rok, he fingered his fellow inmate Simmons.

Blough's statement would set him free, but the reason for his early release would be kept from jurors.

No physical evidence

Rok still had only questionable witnesses and no physical evidence connecting Simmons to the crime. Nine partial fingerprints found in Knaze's home didn't match him, while a bloodstain and fingernail at the scene weren't adequate for testing.

Two months later at a coroner's inquest, the next-door neighbor still didn't recognize Simmons in a six-photo lineup. But Blough joined the day-care workers in identifying him as the suspect.

And now Blough's girlfriend, who admitted she saw Simmons while visiting Blough in jail, identified Simmons as the suspect for the first time. He was charged the next day with murder.

"The police, who should have been searching for truth and justice, instead were allowed to manufacture charges and to suppress the truth," he later wrote.

A mysterious clue

Knowing he faced a trial with questionable witnesses, Rok stepped up his pursuit of Simmons' girlfriend, LaCherie Pletcher, figuring she knew more than she was letting on.

Long after the trial, Pletcher revealed in court that she agreed to help him because she "was scared he was going to try to pin something on me, and I was worried about the welfare of my daughter."

Her help included secret tapings, but the information wouldn't be revealed until years later.

Pletcher also provided a key tip: she told Rok that she searched Simmons' wallet weeks before the murder and found the license of an elderly woman who lived on Figg Avenue. The identification itself would never be found, but Rok pursued the lead anyway.

He used the morsel of information to locate a report Figg Avenue resident Margaret Cobaugh said her wallet was stolen around the same time. But that wasn't all.

He then found a report that Cobaugh also claimed she was raped, just 13 hours after Knaze's murder.

13 changes to story

Cobaugh, then 61, was a friend of Knaze and lived nearby . She had put an 11-year jail stint long behind her and worked at the local senior center.

According to the report, Cobaugh told police she was attacked as she walked home from helping her elderly next-door neighbor.

In her initial statement, Cobaugh said she called an ambulance company to fix the neighbor's faulty breathing system and left as the vehicle approached. A man grabbed her from behind and threatened to kill her if she screamed, she said.

She told police she didn't get a good look at the man's face . She didn't get medical attention and didn't tell her husband that night. Instead, she waited until the next day to call police and destroyed possible evidence by soaking her underwear in the toilet.

She would ask police the next day to withdraw the report, but that information would be long kept from Simmons' defense lawyers.

Rok also never let lawyers know he questioned her at least 10 times over two months before he took a formal statement from Cobaugh about the incident. By then, she had changed 13 elements from her original story.

Most critically, she now claimed her attacker had warned her not to "open your motherfucking mouth" or she would "get the same thing Anna Knaze got"--even though the attacker would have been saying the statement before Knaze's body had been discovered.

She now claimed she saw her attacker's face , later identifying him as Simmons. The threat was the crucial piece of information Rok needed to connect him to the killing.

'Tell him the truth!'

As the trial neared, Simmons' defense team began to uncover inconsistencies in witnesses' stories. Private investigator James Porreca, a retired Philadelphia police officer, found the two day-care workers who identified Simmons were hedging.

Rok said two day-care workers identified Simmons in front of Knaze's home, but one told Porreca she wasn't sure Simmons was the man because "all blacks look alike." The other said she told police she saw the same man again at a time Simmons was already in jail.

Porreca also found no ambulance company within 20 miles of Cobaugh's neighbor responded to her home. He interviewed the neighbor, who said Cobaugh admitted concocting the tale. The neighbor said she told Cobaugh, "You got yourself involved in something and don't include me in your problems."

Porreca later testified that he went to confront Cobaugh, he first encountered her double amputee husband Donald, who asked "What happens if they find out my wife was telling a lie?" When Margaret Cobaugh walked in the room, her husband said "Tell him the truth! Tell him the truth!" before she stopped the interview by wheeling him away.

After prosecutors complained about the incident, a judge chastised defense lawyers for badgering the witness. Porreca never found out what Cobaugh's husband meant. Neither would Simmons' jury.

Confusion among witnesses

"Shut your motherfucking mouth or you will get the same thing Anna Knaze got" were the first words out of Cambria County Assistant District Attorney Gary Costlow 's mouth at the start of the June 1, 1993 trial .

Costlow conceded he lacked physical evidence to tie Simmons to the crime, but told jurors "you will realize that the statement reveals the identity of the murderer in this case."

Simmons' lawyer, Cambria County Assistant Public Defender Michael Filia, told the jury police engaged in a "target-oriented investigation" aimed at Simmons. Filia would never be given the forensic evidence that excluded Simmons and supported his claim.

"The police had one suspect, one suspect in mind and that was Mr. Simmons ... Their investigation was designed to lead them to that conclusion," Filia said.

Five witnesses fingered Simmons as the man they saw near Knaze's home but contradictions were brought out in each case. The witnesses provided conflicting descriptions of his clothing and couldn't agree on times.

One of the day care workers identified Simmons despite admitting confusion, while the other wasn't called to take the stand.

Blough admitted he didn't contact police about seeing Simmons until after he was locked up but denied receiving any benefits for his testimony. Blough's mother and girlfriend also identified Simmons, despite the fact they repeatedly failed to identify him for months after the crime.

The mother said she spotted Knaze as late as 11:30 a.m., which would have given Simmons only 15 minutes to pummel and rob her before meeting his girlfriend.

Neighbor never called

As Costlow said in his opening, the prosecution's case hinged on Cobaugh's claim her rapist mentioned Knaze. Despite her claim in the first rape report she wasn't able to see her attacker's face, she now testified Simmons was definitely the man. At the end of the testimony, she collapsed before jurors.

Simmons' lawyers showed her story grew from initial statements to the court testimony, changing the time of the attack and adding the statement about Knaze.

They called representatives from the ambulance companies to show she made up that part of her story. But the neighbor who contradicted her refused to answer a subpoena.

Defense attorneys decided forcing the elderly neighbor to testify might harm Simmons' case, believing they already showed the jury Cobaugh was lying.

Cobaugh key to verdict

Attorneys again focused on the threat during final arguments of the four-day trial. Assistant public defender Kenneth Sottile suggested Rok led Cobaugh to invoke Knaze's name.

"Did your attacker say anything about Anna Knaze? That is all it would take. One question and I think Marge's mind would start," he said.

"What phrase could we use to summarize this case? 'Shut your f-in mouth or you are going to get what Anna Knaze got.' ... Who said that statement killed Anna Knaze," countered Assistant District Attorney Patrick Kiniry.

The jury, which included just one black member, took five hours to find Simmons guilty of murder and robbery. Juror Rose Anna Kaiser would later say she rationalized the changes to Cobaugh's story as results of the stress.

The conviction "was entirely based on circumstantial evidence, but it was strong circumstantial evidence," Kaiser said.

A decade later when told of the evidence she never heard, she said she likely would have voted to acquit him.

'It's far from over'

Prosecutors offered Simmons life in prison if he pleaded guilty to the Knaze murder and admitted to other crimes. He refused and entered the death penalty phase of the case with public defender Linda Fleming, who hadn't attended the trial.

The American Bar Association recommends attorneys develop their penalty phase argument early in the case and use a mental health specialist to mitigate evidence against defendants. Pittsburgh attorney Caroline Roberto, who has handled a half-dozen death penalty cases, said such work "takes weeks or months to do if you're going to do it right."

Fleming had just two days. She spoke two hours with Simmons, knew little about his background and didn't request a mental examination, calling only a woman he met through a prison pen-pal service in his defense.

After the prosecution presented witnesses who detailed Simmons' past crimes against the elderly, the jury deliberated less than three hours before condemning him to death. Even then, Simmons maintained his innocence.

"It's far from over," he told reporters.

Days before death

Simmons twice came close to lethal injection. After the state Superior and Supreme courts denied his appeals, Gov. Tom Ridge signed his death warrant in November 1995.

He was given a stay of execution to appeal the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Ridge signed another death warrant in March 20, 1996, setting the execution for April 14.

Four days before he was to die, Simmons was granted another stay for a post-conviction hearing.

Soon the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represents death-row inmates on appeal, found for the first time Pletcher helped police secretly tape record Simmons.

Despite five subpoenas, Johnstown police and prosecutors denied tapes existed. At a March 1998 hearing, Rok claimed 10 times that no tapes were made.

"If they exist, I am not aware of them. I never used them. I never played them. I never heard them," he said.

Pletcher, however, testified months of recordings were made. The day of her testimony, Rok checked out 1 1/2 hours of recordings from the Johnstown police evidence locker, where they'd been for five years.

Within a week, another Johnstown officer admitted he took home 20 pages of police reports referring to the tapes.

'The silence of the lamb'

On the tapes the jury never heard, Simmons told Pletcher "without a shadow of a doubt my innocence can be proven." He declared his innocence 19 times, while she lied nine times about working for police.

He said racism fueled the investigation. "Look, I'm black in a black and white relationship in a dominant white town." He said police accused him of being "the Johnstown Stalker," responsible for a dozen deaths across the state.

"Yesterday, I was a mild-mannered guy. And now they've got me as a serial killer, the silence of the lamb," he said.

Public defender Sottile called the tapes "a defense attorney's dream" at the post-conviction hearing. He would have been able to present Simmons' side of the story without putting him on the stand, which would have subjected him to questions about his criminal past.

"The argument is that they take the woman that he loves, they wire her up and they have her have a two-hour conversation where she very artfully tries to get him to make admissions (and) they didn't get anything even close to that," he said.

'I washed them away'

Eight months after Rok's denials about the tapes, he was hauled back to court to explain their discovery.

"I never thought of the tapes after those days ... I washed them away. I washed that situation away. I didn't obtain what we were seeking," he testified.

Under criminal law regarding discovery rules, prosecutors must seek out and provide defense lawyers evidence that might show innocence or shed negative light on witnesses. As it turns out, the tapes weren't the only withheld evidence.

Jurors never knew Cobaugh's clothes were tested after she reported the attack. No blood or semen was found on any of the items, but hair found on Cobaugh's nightgown matched neither her nor Simmons.

At the hearing, Rok claimed he didn't disclose the results because they were a "dead end." He explained, "They revealed no evidentiary value" -- meaning they didn't implicate Simmons.

Rok also admitted Cobaugh failed in her first attempt to pick Simmons from a book featuring 300 mug shots. He didn't divulge the information because he "never thought of it."

But he never hinted that Cobaugh's inability to identify Simmons went much deeper.

Secret deals revealed

Rok also prevented jurors from hearing about Cobaugh's criminal past. Cobaugh was a former runaway prostitute who was convicted of burglary and larceny at age 21 for breaking into a woman's home and stealing clothes. She served an 11-year prison sentence.

Days after she made the rape report, she bought a handgun and lied about the conviction on the firearms form. A state trooper discovered the offense during a routine check and she faced at least five years in prison for gun possession by a felon.

While the jury never heard it, Rok admitted at the appeal he asked the trooper to drop her gun case. A prosecutor acknowledged he convinced a judge to dismiss the charges three months before Simmons' trial.

Another prosecutor disclosed that he helped another witness, Blough, the ex-convict who was jailed on a parole violation, obtain early release. One of his fellow inmates told attorneys in a sworn affidavit that Blough called Simmons his "get out of jail free" card and would say whatever he needed to gain freedom.

Prosecutors in the case didn't answer questions sent to them. Public defender Sottile says he remains shocked by Rok and their claims of memory lapses about the withheld evidence.

"They would have mocked a criminal for that kind of testimony. They would have crucified him," he said.

The judge decided other evidence against Simmons outweighed the new information. He ruled the tapes contained self-serving declarations of innocence and the hair tests didn't prove anything, denying him a new trial.

A disgraced detective

Around the same time, Rok's abuses started to gain new attention. U.S. District Court records show Rok was accused of cajoling an elderly witness in 1998 to falsely identify a robbery suspect.

After the suspect was acquitted, he sued Rok and Johnstown police for false arrest, witness tampering and destroying evidence. The case was later dismissed.

Also in 1998, Rok helped Johnstown police apprehend a man in a domestic dispute. While the man was handcuffed on the ground, Rok kicked him in the face and broke his nose, then stepped on his groin, according to an action filed in U.S. District Court.

Following a federal investigation, Rok pleaded guilty in 2002 to a misdemeanor civil rights violation. After a hearing in which two other criminals claimed they were attacked by the detective, he was sentenced to one year in prison and quit the force.

Using the light sentencing of officers in the Rodney King case as an example, he appealed the sentence as too harsh. A judge upheld the sentence in September 2003.

Suffering from a lifelong kidney ailment that forced a transplant, he was sent to a federal medical prison in Missouri. He didn't return requests for comment sent to the prison, his wife and family members.

'He didn't have a witness'

Simmons would land a last-ditch federal appeal before another date was set for his execution.

The appeal judge ordered another piece of withheld evidence, the handwritten notes of the officer who took Cobaugh's initial rape report, to be turned over.

The notes showed for the first time that Cobaugh called police the day after the report and asked for the investigation to be ended.

Between her statements to police, conversation with a neighbor and testimony, Cobaugh had changed her story five times. Her recent conversation with reporters makes at least six.

Cobaugh, now 73, lives in the same home she did during the alleged attack. She told reporters from the Innocence Institute that she named Simmons because Rok "was positive that Ernest Simmons did it, but he had no proof of it.

"Detective Rok already knew it--but he didn't have a witness," she said.

Never saw his face

She now says Rok convinced her that Simmons was guilty, telling her that her license, Social Security card and checkbook was found on him. In reality, Rok had found nothing.

Cobaugh said she told Rok she "could not positively identify anyone," but he continued to interrogate her 10 times over several weeks.

"I think Detective Rok wanted a conviction more than anything. He wanted Ernie Simmons bad," she said.

After Rok showed her a picture of Simmons wearing a ring she said was similar to what her attacker wore, she finally agreed to finger Simmons.

"I didn't exactly picture Ernie Simmons, but what I went by is the ring on his hand," she said.

Despite her court testimony to the contrary, she now admits she never saw the face of her alleged attacker.

"It could have been [Simmons], it could have not," she said.

Admits lie, but still convinced

Cobaugh dismissed questions about the contradictions to her story, including her husband, neighbor and the ambulance companies refuting key details and forensic evidence that discounted Simmons.

She didn't mention the Knaze statement for at least four months after the rape because she was scared, she said, rejecting suggestions Rok fed the line to her.

"There's no way on this Earth that anyone in their right mind would make up a story like that," she said.

Cobaugh said she didn't care if she didn't see Simmons' face, she's still convinced he killed Knaze.

"He was not going to hurt another person if I could help it," she said

In a recent letter, Simmons wrote he wasn't surprised she admitted lying.

"It's something that I've been saying for years, to the point that I felt like the boy who cried wolf," he wrote. "She just can't keep changing her story when she wants to, and think that she's going to get away with it."

Not perfect, but innocent?

U.S. District Judge Sean McLaughlin heard arguments Jan. 30 on whether ineffective defense attorneys, police and prosecutor misconduct and new evidence are enough reason to grant Simmons a new trial.

If the judge rules against Simmons, he will have few appeals left.

When told about all of the new evidence, juror Rose Kaiser expressed frustration so much information was withheld from the jury.

"It's scary and it's mind boggling that something like that could happen," she said.

Public defender Sottile said the gross misconduct by police and prosecutors gives enough cause for a new trial because Simmons "never got a fair one the first time around."

Others believe a new trial would give a man they believe is a serial killer a chance at freedom.

Rita Marcinek claims Simmons killed her father, the Johnstown man he found with a knife in his neck.

"No one put Ernie Simmons where he is but himself," Marcinek said. "Now it's time to just face up to it."

Simmons' attorneys wouldn't allow him to be interviewed for this story. But in letters, Simmons expressed regret for past crimes but maintained his innocence in the Knaze murder.

"During my life there have been crimes for which I have been in prison and for which I served my time and for which I am sorry," he wrote. "However, now I am waiting my turn on death row for a crime which I did not commit."

Published version: Is death row convict guilty of killing Johnstown woman?
(January 25, 2004)

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

2010-01-09T15:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenobelpeaceprizetoryan.com/2010nobel.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – JANUARY 6, 2010

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

Francis A. Boyle, long-standing, distinguished Professor of International Law and Human Rights, announces his nomination of retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The lives of about 3297 people on death rows throughout the United States of America stand in the balance. For the sake of them all, I respectfully request that you award the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to George Ryan,” Boyle states in nominating Ryan.

The former Illinois governor’s courageous opposition to the death penalty initiated the groundwork for the Moratorium Movement when in the year 2000 he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium and emptied Illinois’ death row, the first such action in this country.
Due directly through Gov. Ryan’s pioneering efforts, the number of death sentences and the number of executions carried out in this country has reached a historical low, and has given promise to the end of the death penalty in the United States.

The year 2009 marked a historical landmark with the publication of The Death Penalty Information Center’s report "The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report” on December 18, noting that the country is expected to finish 2009 with the fewest death sentences since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Eleven states considered abolishing the death penalty this year, a significant increase in legislative activity from previous years, as the high costs and lack of measurable benefits associated with this punishment troubled lawmakers. In 2009 New Mexico became the 15th American state to repeal the death penalty.

According to Boyle: "Nothing could strike a more powerful blow against the death penalty in the United States and around the world" than for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to give their 2010 Award to Ryan.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign,

IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954(voice)

217-244-1478(fax)

Richard Dieter "2009 Death Penalty Info Center Report"

2010-01-09T15:13:00.001-08:00

Richard Dieter "2009 Death Penalty Info Center Report"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9if4Lt_bzw

The Death Penalty Information Center released its "The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report on December 18, noting that the country is expected to finish 2009 with the fewest death sentences sinc...

You will be able to see the video in LBN Studio here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9if4Lt_bzw