Category: DNA testing

Virginia executioner becomes death penalty opponent

· 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

This beautifully crafted story about an executioner turned death penalty abolitionist has the pacing of a crime novel.  Jerry Givens has experienced every aspect of the criminal justice system, including time behind bars.  If anyone has taken the full measure of the American gulag, he’s the guy.  The bit where Givens is asked if he would have executed Jesus if the state gave him the death penalty literally took my breath away. Highly recommended.

Ex-Virginia executioner becomes opponent of death penalty

By Justin Juvenal

Jerry Givens executed 62 people.

His routine and conviction never wavered. He’d shave the person’s head, lay his hand on the bald pate and ask for God’s forgiveness for the condemned. Then, he would strap the person into Virginia’s electric chair.

Givens was the state’s chief executioner for 17 years — at a time when the commonwealth put more people to death than any state besides Texas.

“If you knew going out there that raping and killing someone had the consequence of the death penalty, then why are you going to do it?” Givens asked. “I considered it suicide.” (more…)

DC exoneration raises painful questions

·
Sentae Tribble

By Alan Bean

Santae Tribble spent 28 years in prison for killing a Washington DC cab driver.   Prosecutors knew they had the right man because FBI forensic experts testified that a hair found in the stocking cap used by the killer matched Tribble’s hair sample “in all microscopic characteristics.”

According to the Washington Post, “In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further, saying ‘There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.'”

That was long before the feds started running DNA tests in 1996.  When Tribble’s hair was finally tested he was ruled out as the killer.  By that time, he had already served the entirety of his sentence. (more…)

Junk science in the courtroom

·

By Alan Bean

A feature length investigative piece in the Washington Post reports that FBI forensic experts regularly present overblown and inaccurate testimony at trial.  The problem is especially acute, the article suggests in the case of hair examination testimony.  When DOJ studies uncovered flawed forensic testimony, the article claims, the information was turned over to prosecutors and was often kept from defendants and their attorneys.

Here are some highlights from the five-page article: (more…)

Michael Morton tells his story

· 2 Comments ·

by Melanie Wilmoth Navarro

Michael Morton is a free man.

In a recent 60 Minutes segment, you see footage of Morton being released from prison and stepping out into the warm Texas sunshine for the first time in 25 years.  “The sun felt so good on my face, on my skin,” Morton recalls, “I felt like I was just drinking in the sunshine.”

In 1987, Morton was convicted of brutally murdering his wife, Christine.  He was sentenced to life in prison.

But he was innocent.

Morton’s case gained national media attention last year when he was exonerated based on DNA evidence — a bandana found near the scene of the crime had traces of Christine’s blood and the DNA of another man.  That same man’s DNA matched that found at the crime scene of another murder that happened in 1988 near where Christine was killed.  Morton was in prison when the second murder occurred.

An investigation by the Innocence Project revealed prosecutorial misconduct in Morton’s case.  Key pieces of evidence were withheld by the prosecution — pieces of evidence that would have cleared Morton’s name. The District Attorney at the time of Morton’s trial, Ken Anderson, is now under investigation.

“I don’t have a lotta things really driving me,” Morton says to the 60 Minutes reporter, “But one of the things is, I don’t want this to happen to anybody else. Revenge isn’t the issue here. Revenge, I know, doesn’t work. But accountability works. It’s what balances out. It’s the equilibrium.”

Check out the full 60 Minutes report here.

“Why do innocent people confess?”

· 2 Comments ·

by Melanie Wilmoth Navarro

For most people, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which you would ever admit to a crime you did not commit. However, psychological research suggests that innocent people do confess. In fact, according to the Innocence Project, in “25% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, delivered outright confessions, or pled guilty.”

Anything from abuse or threats from law enforcement to ignorance of the law can make individuals more likely to make a false confession. This video from the Innocence Project gives a brief overview of the issue:

 

A recent New York Times article by David Shipler examines the role of police interrogation in false confessions. To get a confession, Shipler states, “officers are taught to use all the tricks and lies that courts permit.” Although juveniles, people with mental illnesses or disabilities, and people under the influence of drugs or alcohol are more likely to make false confessions, the average adult can be manipulated into a false confession as well:

In experiments and in interrogation rooms, adults who are told convincing fictions have become susceptible to memories of things that never happened. Rejecting their own recollections through what psychologists call “memory distrust syndrome,” they are tricked by phony evidence into accepting their own fabrications of guilt — an “internalized false confession.” (more…)

Innocent man finally exonerated

· 3 Comments ·

Richard Miles served 14 years in prison for the murder of one man and the attempted murder of another.

Miles’ guilt rested on the testimony of one eyewitness who claimed that he saw Miles shoot two men in a Texaco parking lot. Similar to the Curtis Flowers case, detectives pinpointed Miles and decided that he was guilty within a few hours of the shootings. Miles had an alibi and several individuals who corroborated his story, but that was irrelevant. 

Despite little evidence, Miles was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

As of yesterday, however, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Richard Miles is officially exonerated.

Unlike most of the exonerations thus far, there was no DNA to test. After it was discovered that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, Miles was released in 2009 (but not officially exonerated). In 2010, the original eyewitness recanted his testimony, claiming that prosecutors coerced him into identifying Miles as the perpetrator.

Miles is one of many men who have recently been exonerated in Dallas, TX. The stories of several of these men are told in the book “Tested: How Twelve Wrongfully Imprisoned Men Held Onto Hope” by Peyton and Dorothy Budd. MWN

Two Years After Wrongfully Convicted Richard Miles Was Released, He’s Officially Innocent

by Leslie Minora

Free for two years, Richard Miles has nevertheless waited and waited for today — the official acknowledgement that he did not commit the  murder and attempted murder at a Texaco near Bachman Lake in 1994 for which he was sent to prison. The detailed 52-page opinion handed down from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reads like the outline of a Hitchcock film, detailing two police reports that weren’t disclosed at the time of Miles’s conviction, a 2010 recantation from the only uninvolved eyewitness and the determination that the small amount of gunshot residue on Miles’ hand was inconclusive. All of which amounted to the decision that the wrong man spent 14 years behind bars.

“When we balance the newly available evidence … with other exculpatory evidence and the evidence of guilt presented at trial, we are satisfied that Applicant has shown by clear and convincing evidence that no rational jury would convict him in light of the new evidence,” reads the court’s opinion released today.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s office recommended Miles’s release in 2009 after they determined that flaws in his trial violated his constitutional rights. Since his release more than two years ago, he’s been working, piecing his life back together and finding support in other exonerees as he waited for a decision from the state court, which must rule on all exoneration cases. But finally, as of today Miles can file for state compensation for his years spent locked up.

“This is going to be great for him because now he can do some of the things he wanted to do” like help his mother, said Charles Chatman, an exoneree who was released in 2008. Chatman and the other exonerees, including Miles, meet monthly, and Chatman tells Unfair Park that he and the other guys have given Miles a helping had since his release.

“We have helped him,” Chatman says, quickly adding that Miles isn’t “the kind of person who just depends on nobody.” Miles has been getting by working at a hotel, Chatman said, but even finding a job was difficult without a declaration of “actual innocence.”  (more…)

Beyond DNA

·
Dallas DA, Craig Watkins

By Alan Bean

The Dallas Observer recently published Leslie Minora’s extensive piece on the shift to non-DNA exonerations in Dallas County.  DA Craig Watkins has been accused of grandstanding, Minora says, but his ideological opponents usually overlook the unusual context in which the Maverick prosecutor works:

What his critics ignore is Dallas County’s reputation as a place where prosecutors aimed to convict at all costs. Changing that culture in a conservative, law-and-order minded place like Dallas is difficult. What his critics see as media whoring could just as easily be considered the sort of necessary publicity to change the political culture and — not coincidentally — keep Watkins in office. Watkins, a former criminal defense lawyer, Texas’ first black district attorney and the first Democrat to win the Dallas office since 1986, took a political gamble in establishing the unit. As non-DNA cases increasingly become the unit’s focus, the stakes grow higher as the cases lose the protective hedge of objective, science-based evidence. “I’m sure the day will come when there will be political fallout as the result of a decision we make to exonerate someone with no science. That’s inevitable. That will happen,” Watkins says. But as Duke and others can attest, it’s a risk Watkins is willing to take.

The article notes that Watkins’ Conviction Integrity Unit dealt with the easy, smoking-gun DNA cases first.  But what about the 85% of criminal cases that involve no meaningful DNA evidence?

. . . the sheer number of DNA exonerations — and the efforts to uncover how the courts failed so miserably — have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system: Eyewitnesses are more fallible than jurors might think; forensic evidence isn’t always reliable or interpreted correctly; the way police run lineups can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, those problems may just as easily plague cases in which no DNA exists. Modern science has shown the justice system the tip of the iceberg, but how many innocent men and women are suffering in prison and likely to stay there because they have no evidence to test? Where do law enforcement and innocence advocates, faced with sorting out the guilty and innocent, go from here?

The move to non-DNA exonerations will be difficult, Minora predicts.  Recanting witnesses, ambiguous evidence and gross prosecutorial misconduct may raise concerns about the legitimacy of a conviction; but there is no real substitute for the slam dunk certainty DNA evidence can provide.  How will the public respond to cases that, although riddled with issues that undermine confidence in a conviction, fall short of the sure-fire proof of actual innocence to which residents of Dallas County have grown accustomed?   

Beyond DNA, Difficult Tests for the Justice System is highly recommended.  In an entertaining and revealing section, Minora puts Craig Watkins (the most progressive prosecutor in Texas) against Williamson County’s John Bradley, arguably the most law-n-order DA in the Lone Star State.  Grits for Breakfast reported this morning that the Texas Bar Association has dismissed the grievance filed against Bradley in connection with the Michael Morton case.  This suggests that, here in Texas anyway, Bradley’s insistence that the guilty remain behind bars still trumps Watkins’ fears about wrongful conviction.

DNA leads police to new suspect in Morton case

·
Mark Alan Norwood, 57, was held Wednesday at the Williamson County Jail on a capital murder charge after his arrest at his Bastrop home.
Mark Alan Norwood

Five weeks ago, Michael Morton was released to the free world after DNA evidence made it clear that he hadn’t killed his wife, Christine, twenty-five years ago.  Now Williamson County police have arrested Mark Alan Norwood, a man linked to the killing by the same DNA evidence that cleared Morton.

Tests in 1986 could only confirm the presence of human blood on the bandanna. But forensic testing in June identified the blood and an attached hair as Christine Morton’s.

The lab also found cells that were soon matched to Norwood because his DNA profile was listed in a national felony database after his 2008 arrest in California for possessing narcotics, resisting arrest and possessing a dangerous weapon.

As Melanie Wilmoth noted in a recent post, this is a classic case of prosecutorial tunnel vision.  Convinced they had the right man, the district attorney withheld important evidence from defense counsel. 

Mark Osler’s excellent op-ed on the Hank Skinner case could easily be applied to the injustice perpetrated against Michael Morton.  Prosecutors live in an echo chamber.  Surrounded by people who share their zeal for justice and sealed off from meaningful contact with the defendant, district attorneys and AUSAs have their view of the world reinforced at every turn.  The thought that they may have everything wrong never occurs to them.  

It doesn’t help that the powers of the prosecutor have been growing steadily over the past thirty years while judicial discretion and the influence of jurors has receded.  DAs are widely seen as representatives of the people, and so they are.  But when the people are blinded by fear and ignorance, prosecutor must keep their wits about them.  Do these men and women who wield such incredible power understand the dynamics of tunnel vision well enough to safeguard themselves against it?  I have my doubts.

Man arrested in 1986 Morton slaying has long criminal history

By Chuck Lindell and Patrick George

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

GEORGETOWN — A former carpet layer now working as a dishwasher in Bastrop was arrested Wednesday in the brutal 1986 beating death of Christine Morton, a Williamson County mother whose husband was wrongly convicted of her murder.

Mark Alan Norwood, 57, was arrested without incident at his Bastrop duplex, Williamson County Sheriff James Wilson said. Charged with capital murder, Norwood was being held at the Williamson County Jail on $750,000 bail. (more…)

The passion of the prosecutor

·

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has issued a stay of execution in the Hank Skinner case so relevant DNA evidence can be tested.  The prosecutors in this case remain adamant that Skinner should die with the evidence untested.  Mark Osler (a Friends of Justice board member who teaches law at the University of Saint Thomas in Minnesota) says that what looks like baffling intransigence from the outside springs from the best of motives.  But then, so did the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Osler’s insights originally appeared on the CNN site. AGB

Texas prosecutors won’t stop rush to execution

By Mark Osler, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Mark Osler, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota, is a former federal prosecutor and the author of “Jesus on Death Row,” a book about capital punishment.

 As the nation and the world’s attention turned to the impending execution of Hank Skinner in Texas before a late stay by a Texas court, one question seemed paramount: “Why the rush?” The answer to that question is buried deep inside the psychology of prosecutors and the culture of Texas.

Skinner was scheduled for execution on Wednesday for the 1993 killing of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two sons, until the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the top criminal court in that state) issued a stay late on Monday. (more…)

Balko: Hank Skinner one week away from execution despite untested evidence

· 3 Comments ·

In an update to this story, the Washington Post reports that “Judge Steven R. Emmert denied Skinner’s request in a brief order issued Wednesday and made public Thursday. The order did not explain the judge’s decision.”  Thus far, over 122,000 people have signed a petition asking Texas Governor Rick Perry to intervene.  Radley Balko’s article, written for the Huffington Post, appears below.  AGB

Hank Skinner, Texas Death Row Inmate, One Week From Execution Despite Untested Evidence

Radley Balko

A week from today, Texas death row inmate Henry “Hank” Skinner is scheduled to be executed for the 1995 murders of Twila Busby and her two adult sons. (more…)