Friday Roundup: Innocence and Independence

Posted: July 3, 2009 2:06 pm

Happy Independence Day from all of us at the Innocence Project! While the United States celebrates its independence, 13 people exonerated by DNA testing so far in 2009 are celebrating their freedom and adjusting to life outside prison walls. Learn how you can help them build new lives after exoneration here.

News from around the country this week:

Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis called on Gov. Rick Perry this week to ensure that legislators consider a bill allowing for posthumous pardon in a special session this summer. Cole, who would have turned 49 on Wednesday, died in prison ten years ago while serving time for a crime DNA now proves he didn’t commit.

Editorials around the country continued to express dismay with the Supreme Court’s ruling in William Osborne’s case. Here are examples from the Philadelphia Inquirer the Daily Freeman (NY).

Dale Helmig, a client of the Midwestern Inncoence Project, was denied access to DNA testing this week by the Missouri Supreme Court. His attorneys said they will appeal to the circuit court.

The city of Boston paid a $3.8 million settlement to exoneree Anthony Powell in December, and the Boston Phoenix wrote this week that the city has paid more than $10 million to settle wrongful conviction lawsuits, with several other lawsuits pending.

And the budget crisis in California could lead officials to cut the state crime lab budget by half.

Tags: Timothy Cole, Anthony Powell

 

DNA Testing for Australian Prisoner

Posted: July 2, 2009 2:38 am

Shane Sebastian Davis has been in prison in Australia for nearly two decades for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The Griffith University Innocence Project, a member of the Innocence Network, has sought DNA testing in Davis’ case for seven years, and the state has now agreed to conduct the tests – which could prove Davis’ innocence or guilt. Davis’ attorneys say the post-conviction testing is a historic victory.

Project co-founder, high-profile Gold Coast criminal lawyer Chris Nyst, said Queensland was the first state to allow access to DNA evidence to be re-tested and described the move as a "landmark" development.

"This is the first time DNA innocence testing - outside of a pardon application - will take place in Queensland," Mr Nyst said. "In fact, it's the first time anywhere in Australia an attorney-general has personally intervened to allow such a process."

Read the full story here. (Courier Mail, 7/3/09)

 

Ronald Cotton Marks 14 Years with a Bestselling Book

Posted: July 1, 2009 2:10 pm

Fourteen years ago this week, Ronald Cotton walked out of a North Carolina prison a free man for the first time in more than a decade. In two trials in 1985 and 1987, Cotton was convicted of rape and burglary largely based on the victim’s misidentification. In May 1995, DNA testing finally proved Cotton’s innocence.

After his release, Cotton worked hard to rebuild his life. He took on two jobs to get himself back on his feet. He got married and has a daughter, who today is 10 years old. But Cotton’s remarkable post-exoneration success story did not end there.
    
Two years after his exoneration, Cotton met face to face with the victim in the case, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, who had misidentified him as her attacker. According to an MSNBC article, Thompson-Cannino recalled telling Cotton when they first met that “if she atoned every day for the rest of her life, it would not be enough to make up for the years [he] had lost.” Cotton responded by telling Thompson-Cannino that he had already forgiven her.  In a recent interview on the Today Show, Cotton explained his response, saying “I couldn’t carry on serving my time in the prison system holding grudges and thinking about retaliating against a person that made an honest mistake. I had to proceed on in life regardless.”

Since that first meeting, the two have become close friends and today they have joined together to fight against injustice. They give speeches about their experiences, advocate for reform, and have worked to expose the causes of wrongful conviction. They focus, in particular, on pursuing reforms to eyewitness identification procedures – urging states to mandate changes that are proven to reduce misidentifications. Their advocacy has contributed to successful reforms across the country, including their home state of North Carolina.

Most recently, Cotton and Thompson-Cannino worked with author Erin Torneo to write "Picking Cotton," a best-selling memoir written about their experiences and the need for criminal justice reform. In the book, which was released earlier this year, Cotton and Thompson-Cannino tell  their stories in their own words, discuss the need for improved police procedures, and demonstrate the importance of forgiveness.

Buy your copy of “Picking Cotton” at Amazon.com through this link and a portion of proceeds will benefit the Innocence Project.

Other Anniversaries This Week:

Thursday: Dennis Williams, Illinois (Served 17.5 Years, Exonerated 7/2/96)
Thursday: Kenneth Adams, Illinois (Served 17.5 Years, Exonerated 7/2/96)
Thursday: Willie Rainge, Illinois (Served 17.5 Years, Exonerated 7/2/96)

Tags: Ronald Cotton

 

Scent Lineups and Unvalidated Science

Posted: June 30, 2009 5:16 pm

Dog scent evidence has contributed to at least three wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing, and two new lawsuits in Texas allege that three police dogs working with the Fort Bend County’s Sheriff’s Department implicated innocent people in failed “scent lineups.” Both men have been cleared, but the controversy over the validity of dog scent evidence continues. A new USA Today article examines the Texas lawsuits and the controversy over whether dog scent evidence should be allowed in criminal trials:

The legal challenges are "a first for us," says Randall Morse, an assistant county attorney who is representing (dog handler Keith) Pikett. He says the hounds have worked about 2,000 cases across the country, including the search for Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph.

Defense lawyers say the (scent lineup) technique smacks of forensic voodoo and casts further suspicion on the broader use of scent dog evidence.

"It's a fraud on so many levels," says Jeffrey Weiner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Read the full story here. (USA Today, 06/30/09)

Unvalidated forensic science such as dog scent evidence has been involved in about half of the 240 wrongful convictions overturned to date in the United States. A National Academy of Sciences report released this year calls for the creation of a federal agency to support and oversee forensics to prevent wrongful convictions and ensure public safety .

The Innocence Project supports the creation of the National Institute of Forensic Science
and thousands of people have joined the campaign by signing the Just Science Coalition’s petition calling for federal forensic oversight. Add your name now.

Read more about the three men who were wrongfully convicted based in part on dog scent evidence and then exonerated by DNA testing:

Wilton Dedge, Florida
William Dillon, Florida
James Ochoa, California

Tags: Wilton Dedge, William Dillon, James Ochoa, Unvalidated/Improper Forensics

 

Innocence Denied

Posted: June 29, 2009 4:10 pm

In a new Q&A on the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund blog, Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld talks about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to deny DNA testing to Alaska prisoner William Osborne. While the decision was disappointing, Neufeld also says it represents “a call to action for all of us to pass legislation granting DNA testing in the three states with no laws on the books and improve the existing laws in other states.”

He goes on to discuss the disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos among people exonerated by DNA testing (70% of the 240 DNA exonerees are people of color).

LDF: Can one draw any meaning out of these numbers and what they say about racial disparities in the criminal justice system?

Neufeld: In many ways, the numbers speak for themselves. It’s impossible to look at the racial breakdown of the people who have been exonerated through DNA testing and not see that our criminal justice system disproportionately impacts people of color. Digging deeper, most of the DNA exonerations are people of color who were wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting white people. Two-thirds of the exoneration cases are cross-race sexual assaults, while the Department of Justice says that less than 15% of all rapes are cross-race. There’s a long history of the American criminal justice system treating the rape of a white woman by a black man as a particularly vile crime. One consequence of treating such crimes with particular zeal is that people of color will be wrongfully convicted more frequently.

The DNA exoneration cases also illustrate the intersection of race and class. In case after case, defendants could not afford top-quality lawyers to challenge prosecutors who often over-stepped the line to secure a conviction – and in the vast majority of cases, the defendants were people of color. Years later, when they are exonerated through DNA testing, they are released without adequate financial compensation and little or no services from the state.Read the full post at The Defenders Online.

Tags: William Osborne

 

Supreme Court Delays Decision in Georgia Death Row Case

Posted: June 29, 2009 3:46 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court closed its term today without a deciding on a pending appeal from Troy Davis, who has spent nearly two decades on Georgia’s death row for a crime he says he didn’t commit.

Davis was convicted in 1989 of shooting a police officer in a Savannah parking lot. The central evidence against him at trial was the testimony of several eyewitnesses, most of whom have since recanted, saying the police coerced them into testifying against Davis. Some of the new evidence pointing to Davis’ innocence has never been heard by a court, and Davis’ lawyers were asking the U.S. Supreme Court to order a new evidentiary hearing. The court will not make a decision in Davis’ case until September, but Davis’ advocates are asking local officials to step in this summer.

Davis’ advocates today delivered a petition to the Chatham County District Attorney’s office with 60,000 signatures calling for an evidentiary hearing.

“We have sufficient evidence, we believe, to show that Troy Anthony Davis is innocent," said Prince Jackson, president of the NAACP's Savannah branch. "We are asking that he be given a chance. After all, his life is at stake."

Read the full story here. (Macon Journal, 06/29/09)

Tags: Death Penalty

 

Friday Roundup: Life After Exoneration

Posted: June 26, 2009 2:10 pm

An Alternet story on four Uighur prisoners released from Guantanamo quoted Innocence Project Social Worker Angela Amel on the difficulties of adjusting to life after exoneration.
 
A federal jury awarded exoneree George Rodriguez $5 million in a wrongful conviction lawsuit. A Chicago man, Juan Johnson, was awarded $21 million in a wrongful conviction lawsuit against a detective.

Glyn Vincent wrote on Huffington Post that the five men exonerated after serving years in the Central Park jogger case are the “forgotten victims.”

Editorials and op-ed articles continued to run around the country this week disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision last week to deny DNA testing to Innocence Project client William Osborne. Opinion pieces ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Scripps Newswire, the San Francisco Chronicle and Delaware Online and other publications.

Human Rights Watch researcher Sarah Tofte wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about the injustice of thousands of untested rape kits in California.

Reporter Maurice Possley wrote on The Crime Report about new medical research in shaken baby cases that could call countless convictions into question.

A decision is expected Monday from the U.S. Supreme Court on a habeas corpus petition from Troy Davis, who has spent two decades on Georgia’s death row for a murder he says he didn’t commit.
 

 

U.S. Supreme Court: Forensic Science Has ‘Serious Deficiencies’

Posted: June 25, 2009 1:55 pm

In a 5-4 decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that defendants have the right to cross-examine forensic analysts who handle scientific evidence in criminal cases. In finding that defendants have the right to question analysts, the majority wrote that forensic findings are open to interpretation and could be manipulated. The court also cited a recent report on forensics from the National Academy of Sciences and Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion said: “serious deficiencies have been found in the forensic evidence used at criminal trials.”

The Innocence Project, as part of the Innocence Network, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, urging the court to recognize that forensic evidence can’t be trusted as neutral fact. The majority cited the Innocence Network brief in its opinion.

Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld said today that although today’s decision is an important step forward, the court’s opinion underlines the need for national forensic standards ensuring that science in criminal trials is reliable and fair.

“This is an important decision that will help defendants expose faulty evidence at trial, but it doesn’t resolve serious underlying problems with forensic science. Too often, our criminal justice system relies on evidence that is not rooted in solid science, which is why Congress needs to create a National Institute of Forensic Science.

“Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences called on Congress to create an independent, science-based agency to stimulate research and set and enforce standards long before forensic evidence reaches court. Today’s ruling underscores the need for Congress to take action.

Read Neufeld’s complete statement.

Read the court’s full opinion here. (PDF)

Visit the Just Science Coalition website to sign the petition for Congress to create a National Institute of Forensic Science.

Tags: Forensic Oversight

 

Two Freed in Austin After a Decade Behind Bars

Posted: June 25, 2009 1:17 pm

Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were freed on bond yesterday in Austin, after serving 10 years Texas prisons for murders they say they didn’t commit. New DNA test results from the crime scene point to an unknown male – excluding Springsteen and Scott – and the two were freed by an Austin judge when prosecutors said they needed to delay a pending retrial for several more months.

“It’s wonderful, and I’d like to thank God and my family and my attorney for this opportunity," Springsteen said in a news conference outside the courthouse Wednesday afternoon.

Read more about their case here. (KXAN, 06/24/09)

 

Two Cleared in Ohio as State Senate Passes Reform Bill

Posted: June 25, 2009 1:05 pm

Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen were freed in Ohio in February after serving more than 14 years for sexual assaults they’ve always said they didn’t commit. Yesterday, an Ohio county judge ordered all charges dropped against them.

During a multi-year investigation into this case, the Ohio Innocence Project turned up convincing evidence that Smith and Allen didn’t commit the child sexual assaults for which they were convicted in 1994. Read more about the case in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Upon her release, Smith said she was glad to move on with her life:

“I go find a job and just live my life finally, after all these years, with my children, my grandchildren and my family,” a tearful Smith said during an interview at the Lorain office of her attorney, Jack Bradley.

Read the full story. (Chronicle-Telegram, 06/25/09)

Also yesterday, the Ohio Senate voted 32-1 in favor of a bill addressing several of the most critical reforms to free the innocent and prevent wrongful convictions. The bill expands the state’s DNA access law, requires all lineups to be double-blind, requires recording of interrogations in serious crimes and requires preservation of evidence in serious crimes. It now heads to the state House of Representatives.

“This was a piece of much needed legislation that will bring Ohio up to speed with the best practices in the country,” said Mark Godsey, a UC professor of law and faculty director of the Ohio Innocence Project.

Read more on yesterday’s vote.

Tags: False Confessions, Eyewitness Identification, Evidence Preservation, Access to DNA Testing