TWO YEARS TO RUN DNA TESTS OR CONTACT THE FAMILY: TWO YEARS FOR A MURDERER TO ESCAPE?

When someone dies, time is of the essence as far as collecting evidence goes. But "who cares" say the British police. They are too busy harassing people for offences against political correctness these days

An inquiry has begun after a family who thought their son was missing for two years were told his body had been left unidentified in a mortuary. Two weeks after Sean Hutchinson, 20, went missing, his body was found in the sea off the Kent coast on 8 July 2003. But his West Yorkshire family did not learn of his death until last month, a national newspaper reported.

Hemsworth MP Jon Trickett is demanding answers after DNA to identify the body was not analysed until early this year.
"I am deeply saddened and distressed by the family's situation, their suffering is unimaginable," he said. "On the face of it they have been treated appallingly by both the police and the Coroners' Office. "I want justice for the family in order that no other family ever has to go through the same situation. "Both the police and the coroners' services need to be held accountable for their actions."

Mr Hutchinson's body was released to his family for burial on Thursday. Kent Police said it was holding an urgent internal review to establish the facts of the case and expressed its sympathy to his family. "Clearly the force is concerned with the processes that resulted in the delay in identifying Mr Hutchinson," a spokesman said.

Mr Hutchinson's death is still being investigated and officers urged anyone with information to get in touch. [Two years late]

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GOVERNMENT WHISTLEBLOWERS VICTIMIZED -- AS USUAL

Two security guards who blew the whistle on pornography screenings at QBuild's protective service have been paid to stay home for up to a year to avoid retribution. Now the Queensland Government has ordered the guards to undergo psychiatric testing under Section 85 of the Public Service Act, a move they fear will lead to their sackings. "If they would remove the managers and the other people who were using the pornography and gazetted an apology to us, we'd be back tomorrow," said one of the guards, David Schneider. Industrial law consultant Susan Moriarty said Section 85 was used to victimise public service employees, especially whistleblowers. "I'm still looking for my first client who hasn't had a pre-existing dispute with their departments," she said.

Complaints by Mr Schneider and security officer Steve Rose prompted a CMC investigation last year into on-the-job pornography viewing and distribution at Mineral House. The allegations were confirmed when e-mail accounts were examined. "The inspection revealed the existence of inappropriate and pornographic material/images in a number of accounts," said the CMC, which referred further investigation to the Department of Public Works.

The guards said they were bullied and threatened by staff and supervisors who still worked for the department, some of whom had been promoted. The guards have been on partial-pay stress leave for several months after they reportedly were threatened and harassed at work. In the meantime, the Government will not confirm what disciplinary action has been taken against the nine people accused. Public Works director-general Mal Grierson said an investigation was completed, but disciplinary recommendations had not been implemented because due process had to be followed with the accused. He denied they had been promoted. The CMC, which is overseeing the department's investigation, said only that it was "ongoing".

Ms Moriarty said it was unfair for the Government to force the guards to take the mandatory psychiatric tests before the department had reported to the CMC. "That's unbelievable," she said.

The guards say their safety was put in jeopardy by the porn-viewers because they are supposed to be alert to alarms and provide back-up for security in the field. "We were doing what we were supposed to be doing, and they were watching dirty movies," Mr Rose said. "Now we are the ones being punished with Section 85s."

Mr Grierson said the assessments were routine for workers who had been absent for a long time..... Mr Grierson said he could not control the actions of workers, but harassment in the workplace would not be tolerated.

Mr Rose remained sceptical. "Of course they'd say that, but why didn't they do that from the start?" he said. "All the people who wrote false memos and told lies, they've all been paid off with promotions. We've lost everything. I've had to put my house up for sale." ....

Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg said the workers had been abandoned by Public Works Minister Robert Schwarten and the CMC. "These workers have been subjected to institutional abuse, apparently with the full support of senior management," he said. "Once again we see the victimisation of the messengers and a pig-headed failure to address the reality. "This is just what we saw in the Health Department, and the Department of Public Works is carrying on the Beattie Government tradition."

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MILITARY BUNGLING AGAIN

Military justice is often rough and ready and leads to injust treatment of its own personnel

Army Capt. James Yee had just arrived at the U.S. prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay when he got his first hint of trouble. The man Yee would replace as Muslim chaplain showed him around the high-security base on the eastern edge of Cuba, and gave him a warning. ''This is not a friendly environment for Muslims, and I don't just mean for the prisoners,'' Yee recalled hearing from the outgoing chaplain. ''You need to watch your back.'' The exchange, which Yee recounts in a new book on his experiences at Guantanamo, would prove to be prophetic.

The new chaplain soon grew increasingly disturbed by the treatment of prisoners and what he perceived as military hostility to Muslim personnel at the base. Yee's biggest shock came later, when he was arrested on suspicion of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days. The case unraveled and authorities eventually dismissed the charges. Yee received an honorable discharge from the service and now lives in Washington state, but he was left with deep concerns about the treatment of prisoners and anger over his own treatment at the hands of military authorities.

''What happened to me was a gross miscarriage of justice,'' he said Tuesday in a phone interview from New York, where he was promoting his book, For God and Country, which went on sale this week. ''I don't want what happened to me to ever happen to anyone else.''

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PROGRESS IN CHINA

Teng Xingshan protested his innocence all the way to the execution ground. But it was only this year, 16 years after his execution by gunshot, that the butcher was found to be not guilty of the murder of a waitress. She was alive and in jail. Such miscarriages of justice may become a little less common in China after the Supreme Court decided this week to reclaim the power to review all death sentences. The aim of the decision to strip provincial courts of the right to impose the death penalty is to try to reduce the number of people who suffer Mr Teng’s fate.

Capital punishment must be meted out meticulously and fairly, Chief Justice Xiao Yang, the president of the Supreme People’s Court, said. “The death sentence is the most serious level of penalty for criminals. It is reserved for felons guilty of the most atrocious crimes,” he said.

China executes more people each year than all other countries combined. The actual figure is a state secret, but Amnesty International estimates that at least 3,400 executions were carried out last year and as many as 6,000 people were sentenced to death. The total could be as high as 10,000, according to some estimates. Mark Allison, of the Hong Kong office of Amnesty International, which campaigns for the end to the death penalty, said: “This is a positive step, but it is difficult to judge how many fewer sentences will be carried out, and our call is for complete transparency.” Amnesty is calling for a moratorium on executions in China. With the Supreme Court recovering the power to review such sentences, the number of executions could drop by a third, Chinese officials said.

The Supreme Court said that since 2003 it had rejected 7.21 per cent of death sentences, ordering retrials for lack of evidence. It also said that it changed 22.03 per cent of the death verdicts to life imprisonment. Several wrongful death sentences exposed this year prompted the review of the system. Mr Xiao said: “As few executions as possible should be carried out, and as cautiously as possible, in order to avoid wrongful executions.”

China was outraged this year by the news of the butcher’s wrongful execution. Another case that provoked an outcry was the conviction of She Xianglin, whose wife disappeared in 1994. Three months later her mother identified the body of a woman found in a nearby pond as that of her daughter. Mr She was arrested and swiftly sentenced to death. A higher court in Hubei province sent back the case for lack of evidence, demanding a retrial. Mr She spent the next 11 years in prison. But last March Mrs She reappeared in the village, remarried and with a son. Her wrongly jailed first husband, now 39, was released and received £32,000 compensation. He said that he had been tortured into confessing to the murder.

At present 68 crimes carry the death penalty in China, ranging from killing a panda to tax fraud, smuggling, corruption, crimes against national security, murder and rape. Since 1996 more executions have been carried out by lethal injection, although a bullet to the back of the head or to the heart remains the most common method. In the past the family was often required to pay for the bullet.

Other reforms have been implemented in recent years. For decades, it was common to parade prisoners, posters with their name hanging around their neck, through the town in an open lorry en route to the execution ground, where the prisoners were killed in public. The Government put an end to that practice in 1998. Some reports say that condemned prisoners are now granted a meal of their own choice on the night before their execution, as well as an unlimited supply of cigarettes. No alcohol is allowed, however

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WHO KILLED LEANNE HOLLAND?

One of the most controversial Australian murder cases has recently had
a book written about it. A summary of some of what the book reveals appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on October 23rd and is reproduced below

Two sisters have claimed their father was responsible for a shocking sex murder, despite another man being jailed for life. They say their father - a violent convicted sex offender - was the man who tortured and killed Goodna schoolgirl Leanne Holland in 1991, not her brother-inlaw Graham Stafford. Stafford has always strenuously denied he killed the 12-year-old and family and supporters have campaigned to have him freed.

The sensational new claims are contained in a book by former detective Graeme Crowley and criminologist Paul Wilson, Who Killed Leanne? An investigation into a murder and a miscarriage of justice.

Mr Crowley, now a private investigator, said the sisters revealed:

* Their father knew Leanne and had raped them at the same spot in bushland where her body was found.

* He had photographs of her corpse, showing shocking injuries, which he had either taken himself or came from the official police file.

* A floral skirt left at their house by Leanne's older sister was similar to one the schoolgirl was wearing when her body was discovered.

The man, 51, was jailed in 1996 for sex crimes and served his full seven-year sentence before being released in 2003. He refused to take part in the sex-offender treatment program.

Stafford, who was 28 when sentenced in 1992, will be eligible for parole in 2007. But authorities said he probably would not be released because he won't admit his supposed guilt.

Mr Crowley said evidence he had gathered over the years irrefutably cleared Stafford and should be investigated by police. "The questions raised here will be answered only when there is an open and honest inquiry into the evidence involved in this case," he said. Mr Crowley said the sisters initially contacted police in 1996 with their shocking claim and an officer eventually put the women, then in their 20s, in touch with Mr Crowley. He interviewed them in front of their mother and stepfather and found them "extremely convincing".

"They said they thought their father was involved in her murder ... no doubt," he said. "The women claimed that on a number of occasions he had shown them photographs of Leanne taken after her death and highlighting her injuries. "He threatened them that they would `end up like her' if they said anything about what he did to them. "They also told one of his favourites pastimes was to burn them with cigarettes and lighters. He called them `smilies' because the disposable lighters left a burn on the skin similar to a smile."

Leanne's body showed at least four burn marks - probably caused by a cigarette or lighter - that were inflicted before she died. The killer also left trace marks on her body with a knife and outlined them in her blood. Pathologist Rosemary Ashby told the Supreme Court murder trial the killer had a sadistic fetish and had sexually abused his victim.

Mr Crowley said the sisters told him their father had raped them on numerous occasions. "They said that in the past their father had taken both of them to the bush track, where Leanne's body was found, for sex," he said. The women took Mr Crowley to the exact spot off Redbank Plains Rd.

Mr Crowley said Stafford believed the man, a known police informant, had been placed in his cell soon after Stafford's arrest to tap him for information on the killing. Stafford said he told him nothing but believed police had acted on details from the informant - details which would have been known only to the real killer.

Police have repeatedly ruled out investigating new evidence in the Holland homicide because Stafford had been convicted of the murder and lost two appeals. Court of Appeal president Tony Fitzgerald said in 1997 that the conviction should be quashed and a retrial ordered. But the other two judges on the bench disagreed.


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THE LAPD: NO SURPRISES HERE

The [Los Angeles] police department will not meet a June deadline for completing reforms stemming from a corruption scandal in the 1990s, ensuring continued federal monitoring of the agency. The city agreed to the reforms under a 2001 settlement with the U.S. Justice Department following the Rampart scandal in which rogue LAPD officers beat and framed suspects.

City officials say the extension of federal oversight will cost Los Angeles $30 million to $50 million a year, but police dispute that figure. "I can guarantee the consent decree is going to be extended, but from my perspective that is not a big problem. We are already in compliance with the vast majority" of the settlement, Chief William Bratton said Monday. Delays in reforms resulted from complications in a computerized system that quickly flags problem officers, he said. [And pigs fly too]

The settlement also requires reforms in use of informants, officer discipline and gang enforcement. The department is making good progress in those areas, Bratton said. "When I got here, the department was fighting the consent decree tooth and nail. It was not being embraced. It was not being pushed down in the organization, and it is now fully installed through the organization," he said.

U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess could rule that the city is "substantial compliance" on all or some of the reforms and partly or completely lift the federal monitoring.

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HOORAY! MALICIOUS COP LOSES

Too bad if you're not a lawyer, though

Lawyer Adam Houda has been awarded at least $145,000 for wrongful arrest over a scuffle with a "spiteful" police officer, who unjustifiably accused him of assault. Mr Houda sued the state of NSW after he was arrested in 2000 at Burwood Local Court and charged with assaulting Constable Lance Stebbing. The charge was withdrawn and dismissed six months later.

Today, Mr Houda, 30, was awarded the payout by the NSW Supreme Court for malicious prosecution, wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. It does not include interest and a decision on costs will be made on Friday.

Constable Stebbing had told Mr Houda, who has represented former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib and accused terrorist Bilal Khazal, to "f--- off" in front of a group of people, the court heard today. Mr Houda had told him to mind his own business after he interrupted a conversation the lawyer was having with another police officer about a client of his. Constable Stebbing then walked towards him in a "menacing" way and said "get out of my personal space" and pushed him in the chest into a wall. Mr Houda then raised his hand in front of his chest and came into contact with Constable Stebbing, who kept walking towards him. Mr Houda had replied to him: "Where do you want me to go, you idiot? I have a wall behind me."

Mr Houda told the court that he thought Constable Stebbing must have been "crazy". It was a "reasonable act of self-defence", Acting Justice Harvey Cooper said in his judgement today.

But Constable Stebbing arrested Mr Houda and took him down the staircase of the courthouse, onto the street and down to the police station, where he was detained for one hour. "Constable Stebbing well knew that that offence had not been committed and that he was motivated to do so solely out of spite or ill will towards the plaintiff because the plaintiff had stood up to his unjustified, menacing and rude conduct."

Asked outside court why he pursued the action, which involved a four-week hearing, Mr Houda said: "It's based on principle. The police abused their powers on the day and brought thuggery to the court and I stood up for my rights."

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DESTRUCTIVE AMERICAN DIVORCE LAW

Any man who fathers a child in the USA today should get a medal for heroism. No wonder the birthrate is so low among middle-class whites

(1) The states have failed, since the 1960's, to treat marriage as a real contract. Currently anyone who wants out of a marriage can unilaterally end it without penalty. This is not what was intended when marriage laws were changed in the 1970's. "No fault" divorce was to be allowed only when both parties agreed to it. This would have made marriage more like a real contract, with less interference by the state in the matter of its ending. Instead, marriage has become a non-contract, with no protection for those who invest in it.

(2) Paternalistic "family" courts and new laws have seriously undermined fatherhood. There has long been a huge bias in divorce courts to grant custody of children to mothers. As this bias threatened to diminish, feminists pushed through the Violence Against Women Act, which makes it easy for any mother considering divorce to toss the father out of his own home and claim the family assets, including the children, simply by accusing him of domestic violence. No evidence or formal charge is required, and domestic "violence" need not even be violent. Shared parenting provisions would end this winner-take-all lottery.

(3) Federally funded state child support systems set excessive awards and penalize non-payment harshly, even when the circumstances for non-payment are clearly outside the control of the payer. Child support awards are so high that the children have become a profit center for middle class divorcing moms – an additional financial incentive for them to divorce. As Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez write in the Journal of Socio-Economics, "Strong enforcement…may… lead to the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of divorce." Yet in a striking sleight-of-hand, disbursements under the "healthy marriage" mantra have actually gone less to counseling than to child support enforcement.

Is it any surprise that divorce in families with children is almost entirely instituted by the moms? But young men have gotten the message and are increasingly avoiding marriage and avoiding having children inside or outside of marriage. These men are scolded for their lack of "commitment" by the National Marriage Project, whose interpretation Dr. Horn is using to formulate policy. But no man in his right mind would start a family today if he understood how the federal government subsidizes the stealing of his children and his own incarceration for an assortment of newfangled gender "crimes" they make it impossible for him not to commit.

Exhorting people to marry is pointless so long as marriage is a bait-and-switch carrying financial rewards for those who break it. People will simply not invest in a worthless investment, no matter how much you preach at them. If marriage was a worthwhile investment, we would see more of it.

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POLICE CARELESSNESS AGAIN

For years, Jennifer Thompson wished the worst kind of horrors on Ronald Cotton, the man sentenced to life in prison for brutally raping her. Today, 10 years after DNA evidence exonerated Cotton of the crime, the two call themselves friends and close phone calls with the words "I love you." "He taught me that anger and joy cannot exist in the same heart," Thompson told delegates attending the Unlocking Innocence conference, an international conference on avoiding wrongful conviction. "The one person who brought me to a place of healing was the person I had hated and wanted to see dead."

In 1984, Thompson was a straight-A college student in Burlington, N.C., when an intruder broke into her home and raped her at knifepoint. As the man raped her, Thompson made a decision not to close her eyes -- she wanted to know what the man looked like and tell police. "I looked for distinguishing marks, scars, tattoos. I paid attention to the shape of his eyes, how long his hair was." A police sketch artist worked with Thompson to come up with a likeness of her attacker. After seeing several mugshots, Thompson picked Cotton's photo, thinking he looked most like her picture. The African American had his hair cut short to his head.

What Thompson didn't know was Cotton's photo was three years old. At the time of her attack, Cotton had a thick afro. A week later she picked Cotton out in a police lineup. In 1985, after a two-week trial, a jury convicted Cotton of rape. He was sentenced to life plus 50 years in prison. Ten years later police came to her with startling news: They had arrested the wrong man. DNA evidence and a confession by the real rapist, Robert Poole, exonerated Cotton.....

Now an advocate for the wrongfully convicted and a fierce opponent of the death penalty, Thompson said her experience shows how easily justice can go astray....

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CALIFORNIA COUGHS UP AT LAST FOR AN INNOCENT MAN

A 38-year-old man who served nearly nine years in prison for a Lodi rape he didn't commit was awarded $328,200 in compensation by a state board Thursday, $100 for every day behind bars. The compensation was only the 12th of its kind granted by the state in recent history. Peter Rose, who now lives in Point Arena, was convicted in 1995 of kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old Lodi girl, but his conviction was overturned in 2004 based on DNA evidence. The victim has also recanted her identification of Rose, which had been crucial to prosecutors' case against him.

Rose appealed to the state Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board for restitution after he was released from prison in October 2004. Rose's claim for compensation, by law, had to independently prove his innocence, and show that he didn't do anything that led to his arrest and that he suffered financially. Only 11 others claiming to be wrongly convicted have won compensation since 1981, the earliest year the state has on record. Since then, 55 people have filed claims. The law permitting restitution for the wrongfully convicted dates back to 1941.

Until 2001, the most an innocent person could collect for being wrongly convicted was $10,000. Rose is the sixth person - since the law changed in 2001 - to be granted compensation on the per-diem basis. Rose's road to restitution, even with hefty endorsements of innocence from a judge and supporting biological evidence, was hardly smooth. "It's a very high threshold," said Ray Hasu, a San Francisco attorney, who represented him for free. Hasu filed a 4-inch-thick claim on behalf of Rose, including an investigation by the state attorney general's office.....

Rose's successful claim is the first for the Northern California Innocence Project, which did the legwork to get his conviction overturned. The project is part of the Innocence Network, a national group of law and journalism schools and public defender's offices that help inmates who have been wrongly convicted.

Rose was an unemployed beekeeper in 1994 when the girl told police he grabbed her off a Lodi street, punched her in the face and dragged her to an alley, where he raped her. The victim pointed out Rose on the street to a driver who had given her a ride after the assault. Rose was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Semen from the attack wasn't enough for DNA testing 10 years ago, but more refined methods had developed by June 2004, when Rose won a court order to test the sample. It did not match Rose's DNA. A second test in 2005 also ruled out a man who was the girl's boyfriend at the time. After Rose was declared "factually innocent" by a San Joaquin Superior Court judge in 2004, he was released from Mule Creek State Prison.

Rose's mother took care of his children - one of whom is a stepchild - while he was in prison. Then she was diagnosed with bone cancer, said Rutberg. The day Rose got out of prison, he went home and fixed her sink. He's been taking care of her ever since, Rutberg said.

The law that changed the rate of compensation came after Kevin Green, an Orange County man, was convicted of killing and raping his pregnant wife in 1980. In 1996, DNA testing and a confession from someone else exonerated Green after 16 years in prison. The $10,000 amount seemed to pale next to Green's ordeal, legislators believed. He was awarded $620,000, the single largest compensation amount.

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REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY AFTER INNOCENCE

Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary "After Innocence" confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system. In examining the cases of seven men wrongly convicted of murder and rape and exonerated years later by DNA evidence, the film reinforces the queasy feelings you have while following high-profile criminal trials. The pursuit of justice in those cases often seems secondary to the drama of competing lawyers and to the ferocious desire of prosecutors to win at all costs and protect their reputations. Like many of us, judges, lawyers and prosecutors may often go out of their way to avoid admitting mistakes.

Watching the interviews with those fortunate enough to have been exonerated, it is impossible not to imagine yourself in their shoes and wonder how you would feel if the best years, or decades, of your life had been lost to a wrongful conviction. Overwhelming rage, bitterness and despair would seem natural human responses. But although tears of frustration well up in the eyes of more than one subject, no one in the film seems completely crushed by his misfortune. Bitterness is tempered by gratitude and a personal sense of the miraculous; all seven want to get on with the rest of their lives as best they can.

Reflecting on his time spent in jail, Scott Hornoff, a Rhode Island police officer who served 6 and a half years of a life sentence for first-degree murder, declares that the goal of prison authorities is to break prisoners' spirits; his, thankfully, survived intact, After his release, he went to court to win back his job and his back pay, and he won, but the police department has appealed the decision. Like many in the film, he is now a staunch advocate for the innocent.

Three men in the film - Calvin Willis of Louisiana, Wilton Dedge of Florida and Nicholas Yarris of Pennsylvania - were imprisoned for more than two decades; Mr. Yarris spent most of that time in solitary confinement. The movie observes the three-year struggle that finally led to Mr. Dedge's release in August 2004; the state had opposed his release because his DNA tests were taken five years before the law provided for such testing. Mr. Dedge's case is the film's most flagrant example of embarrassed justice officials throwing up roadblocks.

The film cites research, based on 70 DNA exonerations, that points to mistaken identity as the most common factor leading to a wrongful conviction. It offers a graphic example in the case of Ronald Cotton of North Carolina, who served 11 years for rape and burglary based on the eyewitness testimony of Jennifer Thompson-Canino identifying him in a police lineup as her rapist. When another man confessed to the crime 11 years later, DNA evidence bore out the confession. Mr. Cotton was released, and he and Ms. Thompson-Canino have become friends. Her story, sorrowfully told on camera, illustrates the chilling fact that even the most positive eyewitness identification can be wrong.

The film, written by Ms. Sanders and Marc Simon, was made in collaboration with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic founded in 1992 by the lawyers Barry C. Sheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan. The clinic handles only cases in which post-conviction DNA testing can yield conclusive proof of innocence. Its work has helped exonerate more than 160 people, and it estimates that DNA testing could free thousands more.

The movie addresses the question of compensation after wrongful imprisonment. Unlike paroled prisoners, who have a network of social services to help them re-enter society, the exonerated have little guidance or support. What does society owe these people for what they lost, not only in wages and career opportunities but as compensation for their suffering and humiliation? In most states compensation legislation has not been enacted.

The pain of these stories is mitigated by the movie's choice of interviewees, many of whom seem both humbled and ennobled by their ordeals. The film is careful about what it addresses: racism and the preponderance of African-Americans in prison are left for another film. And the actual prison experiences are not described.

The issue of capital punishment is also largely skirted. But late in the film there is a brief appearance by the former Illinois governor George Ryan, who put a moratorium on the death penalty after 13 death-row inmates were cleared of murder charges, some through DNA testing.

The Innocence Project has expanded into the Innocence Network, a growing nationwide group of law schools, journalism schools and public defender's offices. There is talk of it a new civil rights movement coalescing around it. "After Innocence" leaves you feeling that one is urgently needed.

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CARELESS FINGERPRINT ANALYSTS PUT INNOCENT MEN IN JAIL

A single fingerprint found at the scene of a crime is such powerful evidence that it's almost an automatic conviction. Fingerprints never lie: Juries have been told that for more than a century. But a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine, has documented 22 cases, most involving violent crimes, in which fingerprint evidence turned out to be dead wrong, usually discovered after defendants had served time for crimes they did not commit.

The fingerprints didn't lie. But the experts who matched them with a suspect were wrong, and subsequently had to admit it, according to court records analyzed by Simon Cole, assistant professor of criminology, law and society at Irvine. Cole's exhaustive research argues that the "zero error rate" claimed by fingerprint experts needs serious retooling. His findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology.

The cases include one man who volunteered for hazardous assignments while in prison to earn money to pay for DNA research involving his case. That research eventually cleared him, despite the fact that experts had testified that his fingerprint implicated him in the attempted murder of a police officer.

In another case, a corpse found in the Nevada desert was identified – on the basis of fingerprints – as that of a California woman who later turned up alive.

Most of the cases studied by Cole were covered by the media, partly because they involved sensational events like the Madrid train bombing last year that killed 191 people. Cole suspects there are many other cases, possibly more than 1,000 each year in the United States alone, in which fingerprints have been matched erroneously with the wrong person. Cole isn't saying that fingerprints are not a useful tool for law enforcement. All he's saying is their "error rate" is more than zero, and some way needs to be found to put their reliability into perspective. "To tell the jury that it's positive identification, that it's infallible, that it's 100 percent certain is overstating the value of it," Cole said in an interview. "It may well be that it's right 95 percent of the time, but when it's wrong it's very unlikely for us to know about it. So it's likely to result in a miscarriage of justice."

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A JUDICIAL SYSTEM THAT RESISTS EVIDENCE OF ITS OWN ERRORS

Is it possible there are innocent people sitting in Arizona’s prisons? On death row? According to nationally-known private investigator Paul Ciolino it’s practically a certainty. “As a general rule of thumb, 10 percent of people who are charged criminally are innocent,” Ciolino said. This estimate is based on his decades of experience in law enforcement, and as a private investigator, often working to clear the wrongfully accused.

Ciolino spoke last week at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, telling law students, professors and community members about his work. He takes on both civil and criminal cases, and is often called upon to help prove the innocence of people on death row, with little time to live. “I worked a case in Virginia where we knew the guy was innocent,” said Ciolino. “We had the DNA to prove it and they basically destroyed it in the middle of the night so we couldn’t test it, and the judge let them do it. In Virginia they have a rule if you don’t have newly discovered evidence within 30 days of conviction you can’t bring it in, ever. We’re five years post that and the judge is like ‘I don’t care what you’ve got.’” Ciolino’s client was executed a week later.

This investigator, who works with several Innocence Projects in the United States, believes it is generally misconduct by prosecutors and law enforcement agents that leads to the wrongly accused being convicted. “Police and prosecution misconduct, laboratory fraud, those are the big issues,” Ciolino said. “Almost every wrongful conviction case we’ve ever been involved in, it was pretty clear that the guy in jail didn’t do it.”

“The vast majority of my job is to see if the police are lying. I get the police report, I go see a witness I see what they know.” Ciolino admits that most in law enforcement are honest. But he contends that political considerations influence cases. “A lot of times they’re not allowed to do the right thing. They get direction from above ‘do this’ or ‘do that,’” Ciolino said. “There are not a lot of Lone Rangers in police departments who get to do what they want to do and do the right thing.”


After years of helping the wrongfully accused, Ciolino has advice for those who are innocent and get in trouble with the law: “My recommendation is don’t talk to the government. If you’re going to talk to them there’s always a time and a place, later in a controlled environment where there’s no mistake what you’re saying, what your intentions are, like when you have a lawyer and a court reporter there.”


Ciolino plans to continue taking on tough cases, including those where his clients may be weeks, days, or even hours away from being put to death, even though it is very difficult. “These cases are draining emotionally. You have to find a balance. You can’t fall in love with these clients because they might be executed.” “What keeps me going is a sense of fair play. I hate to see people, especially people with no means, get screwed.”

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Michigan: Wrongful conviction ordeal ends

Court grants Belleville man damages for five years he spent in prison -- spent because of another case of suppressed evidence

A nearly nine-year ordeal ended for 28-year-old Nate Lewis this week when an Ohio court approved a $662,000 settlement for a wrongful rape conviction that sent him to prison for five years. It was a bittersweet victory for the Belleville man who still dreams of playing professional football, a goal he was chasing when he started at the University of Akron in Ohio in 1996. He was convicted in 1997 of raping a fellow student in her dorm room just two months after he arrived on campus. "It's not really what I wanted, but it's better than nothing,'' Lewis said this morning. "You can't put a price on the years I lost.''

Lewis was released from prison in 2002 after a federal appellate court ruled that a judge's decision to exclude passages from his accuser's diary denied him a fair trial. In the diary, the woman wrote that she snapped and blamed Lewis because she was sick of men taking advantage of her. Lewis always maintained the sex was consensual and turned down plea bargains that would have greatly reduced his time in prison. Prosecutors did not pursue a second trial after the conviction was overturned.

The settlement approved Tuesday by the Ohio Court of Claims pays Lewis $412,000, plus $250,000 for lawyers' fees. The payout includes $40,000 annually for lost wages.

Lewis, who works for a car rental company, continues playing semi-pro football for the Southern Michigan Storm, which has an upcoming playoff game in Dayton, Ohio. He said he plans to save the money and is hopeful his football dreams will soon become a reality. The running back - who was recruited from Belleville High to Akron to play football - participated in a skills tests in Indianapolis over the summer. "We'll see what happens,'' Lewis said. "Something has to crack sooner or later for me.'' Lewis said he's always tried to look toward the future since his prison release. "It's over for me now,'' he said. "Thank God.''

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NORTH CAROLINA: 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR AN INNOCENT MAN. WHY?

A public forum held last week to give local folks a chance to sound off on a 20-year-old murder case was cut drastically short when only a handful of residents showed up. A committee appointed by the City Council held the forum last Thursday at City Hall. The seven-person committee is charged with reviewing the actions of city departments - mainly the police - in the investigation of the murder of Deborah Sykes, who was brutally raped before she was killed in 1984. The death of Sykes, who was white, sent racial shock waves through the city after police arrested a 19-year-old black man, Darryl Hunt, for the crime.

Although many in the community believed Hunt was innocent, he was tried and convicted of killing Sykes and spent nearly 20 years in prison for the crime. Hunt was released on Christmas Eve in 2003 after DNA taken from the crime scene was linked to another man.

The committee, which is made up of four whites and three blacks from various walks of life, will put the police investigation of Hunt under the microscope to determine what went wrong. "There were mistakes made," said Ike Black, the vice chairman of the committee. "We hope these mistakes won't be repeated."

The committee will pore over endless stacks of documents, transcripts and other evidence during their probe. The public forum was to be where the committee would get residents' take on the case. But only one resident spoke at the forum, and his comments were about a matter unrelated to the Sykes case. ....

Police Chief Pat Norris was on hand for the forums last year. She was there last Thursday too. Norris, who only became chief two years ago, said her department will be forthcoming in the committee's investigation and use the committee's report, which should be complete next summer, to make changes if necessary. The department has already made some changes in the wake of Hunt's release, Norris said, including changing the procedure it uses for suspect lineups.

By most accounts, the Police Department has taken a public relations blow for fingering Hunt when there was evidence that indicated that he may have been the wrong man. But Norris says she doesn't believe that the damage is permanent. "That happened then," she said. "That is not how the Police Department is conducting business now."

Darryl Hunt and his wife, April, showed up for the hearing. But it was over by the time they arrived. He surmised that some people may have stayed home because they have grown weary of the case. "A lot of people just want to put this in the past. I understand that because I want to also," he said. But Hunt says he wants justice, true justice, before he gets his peace. Hunt and his team of lawyers and supporters have long maintained that Police Department officials twisted and hid evidence that could have exonerated Hunt. The miscarriage of justice that occurred is beyond most people's comprehension, Hunt said. He hopes the committee's review will show some of that.

Hunt has been praised since his release from prison for his poise. He has never expressed anger or hatred, just disappointment. He has started a foundation to help others wrongfully accused of crimes. He also regularly speaks on behalf of a death penalty moratorium that has been proposed in North Carolina for several years. "I still believe that this can make a difference," Hunt said of the committee's review

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SCOTLAND: CASE SO WEAK EVEN THE PROSECUTION GIVES UP

After 18 years in jail for an innocent man!

A man who spent 18 years in jail for murder has been told that the Crown accepted he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice at his trial. George McPhee was jailed for life in 1985 for the killing of Elizabeth "Totsie" Sutherland at her home in Culbokie on the Black Isle. The Crown told appeal court judges it would not seek to support the guilty verdict returned against McPhee. The judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal will give their ruling later.

Mr McPhee, 50, had consistently maintained he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He was freed two years ago pending his appeal to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The review cast doubt on the evidence of Colin Hawkins, who was with Mr McPhee on the day of the murder, and prisoner Trevor Proudfoot who claimed there had been a prison confession. There was also concern over forensic evidence which was denied to the defence by Detective Superintendent Andy Lister, who died five years ago.

Mr McPhee was said to be very disappointed that the judges did not dismiss the case immediately. Mrs Sutherland, a 30-year-old mother-of-two, was known as "Totsie" because she was only 4ft 9ins tall. She was repeatedly stabbed in the chest and had her throat cut. Her body was discovered by her 10-year-old daughter when she returned from school. Mr McPhee had been brought up a few miles from the scene but was living in England at the time of the murder.

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ROUGH JUSTICE IN AFRICA

Beware bitchy women too

The Australian war crimes investigator Peter Halloran is preparing to leave Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, a changed man. The senior Victorian police officer, cleared this week by the country's Court of Appeal of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl last year, said he had been brutalised - along with the girl and her family - partly because of racial and political agendas in one of the world's most corrupt societies.

Now, he says, it is time to tell his side of the story, and to call his accusers to account. "I am very conscious that anger and bitterness do not get you anywhere," he said, "and I will try not to fall into that trap, although there will be plenty of challenges ahead in that regard, I am sure."

The legal fight to salvage his career and reputation has been expensive. His friends have noticed a deterioration in his appearance. But his health, he said yesterday, was good, apart from the psychological stress of an ordeal that started in June last year when UN colleagues outlined the allegations against him.

Since then he has spent time in one of Africa's worst prisons, and he has endured the humiliation of being accused of one of the worst crimes he could imagine: child sex abuse. "Mud sticks to a degree, depending on the people," he said. With his UN passport, Mr Halloran said he could have left Sierra Leone with ease well before now. "But there was never any question of doing that. I had to clear my name here. I had to fight this to the bitter end and when I get back to Australia, I will have do that some more."

Mr Halloran, 57, was charged in August last year with sex offences and jailed for nearly a month before he was freed on bail. The court later acquitted him of two charges, but in February found him guilty of a third charge of indecent assault, sentencing him to 18 months' imprisonment in the notorious Pademba Road jail. This week the appeal court returned a 2-1 verdict that the original conviction should be set aside. The court found Mr Halloran had been the victim of "a miscarriage of justice" when he was originally convicted.

Mr Halloran was investigations commander with a UN-sponsored war crimes tribunal when the scandal broke. He was sharing a house with investigators Mandy Cordwell, Canadian Mountie Ralph LaPierre, and another Victoria Police officer, Sharon Holt. It was Ms Cordwell, 37, who claimed she had seen the girl - the sister of a local employee who was being interviewed by Mr Halloran for a job as a nanny - in Mr Halloran's bedroom. Mr Halloran was not in the house at the time but Ms Cordwell claimed that the girl told her Mr Halloran had been having sex with her. Mr Halloran was charged, first on four counts relating to sex with a minor, later reduced to three, after a statement by the schoolgirl. The girl then recanted her statement, saying the sex never happened and that she had been pressured to make the claims.

Ms Cordwell, who was later criticised by a Special Court for allegedly putting words into the girl's mouth, does not resile from her claims, friends say. She remained at work, but was later suspended without pay for allegedly talking to the media and making unfounded allegations about other senior members of the Special Court. She later resigned and returned to Australia. "I am not bitter about what she has done," Mr Halloran said. . "But I am very disappointed."

He is still trying to come to terms with the decision to prosecute. "[The prosecution] knew they didn't have a case, yet they pursued it," he said. He thinks the fact that he headed a unit pursuing war criminals associated with the Government and others in power had a lot to do with the decision to pursue him.


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OFFICIAL GOONS ON AUSTRALIAN TRAINS

Having a ticket is no excuse

A Sydney rail commuter with a valid ticket was handcuffed by transit officers and made to squat for 15 minutes after he went through a turnstile, a damning report by the New South Wales Ombudsman said. The Ombudsman's annual report, released today, strongly criticised the grey-shirted transit officers who patrol trains on the CityRail network. The report detailed one incident in which a man had a valid ticket but was unable to operate the turnstile, so he went through the turnstile – only to be handcuffed by a transit officer. "(The man) showed the transit officer the valid ticket but (he was) still handcuffed and made to squat for 15 minutes until police arrived – a most extraordinary thing to happen in Sydney in 2005," Ombudsman Bruce Barbour said.

He said transit officers had arrested people, possibly unlawfully, when no offence had been committed. "I don't think transit officers understand their powers," he said. The report also found three-quarters of RailCorp's investigations into complaints about transit officers were unsatisfactory. In many instances, RailCorp failed to pursue obvious lines of inquiry, failed to check the complaint history of the officers involved and did not interview the complainant. "What our review of RailCorp's systems led us to believe is that they're not being properly investigated," Mr Barbour said. "In many cases, no interviews were being undertaken of anybody other than the transit officers."

NSW Transport Minister John Watkins said he had been shocked by the behaviour of some transit officers. "I was disturbed early in the year about some of the reports coming through to me which is why I initiated that review back in March and why we've worked very closely with the ombudsman since that time," he said.

Opposition transport spokesman Barry O'Farrell said the report raised concerns about transit officers' behaviour. "Transit officers should be protecting train travelers from anti-social behaviour, not abusing their role by using excessive force," he said.

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ANOTHER FORENSIC SCIENCE LABORATORY UNDER A CLOUD

This time in Australia

"Under-resourcing and bad management at Brisbane's John Tonge Centre have contributed to a case backlog that will take millions of dollars and more than a year to fix, a damning report has found. Queensland's leading science centre will now be overhauled at a cost of $6.3 million this year after the report revealed it was failing to address a mounting backlog of DNA testing for criminal cases. Managing the changes identified in 65 recommendations will cost a further $2.4 million each year and possibly more as further reforms are decided.

Investigations found staff were forced to breathe in foul odours, more than 100 skeletons remained unidentified, while hundreds of specimens taken from autopsies were being stored in a refrigerated shipping container in the car park.

In March The Courier-Mail revealed major flaws in DNA testing procedures at the John Tonge Centre, which cast doubt over the reliability of evidence in hundreds of criminal cases. At the time the State Government accused the newspaper of a beat-up, but within days then health minister Gordon Nuttall was forced to order the inquiry.

Premier Peter Beattie yesterday released the report while unveiling reforms which included hiring extra scientists to help reduce the backlog, introducing a fee-per-service, restructuring led by a new director and accelerating testing of drug labs. Mr Beattie said the Government would also investigate changing drug laws to speed up prosecution of illegal drug producers. "If we say that possession of certain equipment and other chemicals in itself is another offence, I think we'll take pressure off the testings as well," he said.

Health Minister Stephen Robertson said the extra funding meant the backlog of cases could now be cleared by the end of next year, 18 months later than was initially promised. According to the report, the backlog in major and property crime cases was 12,056 compared to 9359 cases the previous year.

Liberal leader Bob Quinn accused the Government of dragging its heels over problems at the centre. "Police prosecutors and defence counsels have been complaining about delays for years, but nothing was done to address their concerns," he said.

Nationals leader Lawrence Springborg said the Government had promised to fix problems at the John Tonge Centre no fewer than six times. "There's been miscarriages of justice because of this Government's failure to act," he said. "Every time we've raised problems, they have said they're fixing it. We hope this time is different."

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THE BRITISH POLICE CAN'T CATCH REAL COMPUTER HACKERS SO THEY GRAB PEOPLE WHO ARE DOING NO HARM

"I have recently followed the trial of Daniel Cuthbert. This was the gentleman who was accused of “hacking” into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee. He was recently found “regretfully” found guilty under section 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He never even lived in Whitechapel. This was the BBC story a few months ago:

Charge over tsunami 'hacking' bid

A man has been charged over an alleged attempt to hack into a website set up to raise funds after the Asian tsunami.

Daniel Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, east London, has been charged with one offence under the Computer Misuse Act.

Scotland Yard said the charge followed an alleged unauthorised access of the Disasters and Emergency Committee site on New Year's Eve.

Mr Cuthbert is due to appear at Horseferry Magistrates' Court next Thursday.

The disaster fund has raised an estimated 250 million pounds to help victims of the tsunami.

Tens of thousands of people used its web pages to offer money to those caught in the Boxing Day tragedy.

Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.

Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a computer security consultant, regarded in his field as an expert and respected by colleagues and employers alike. He entered his full personal details (home address, number, name and full card details). He did not receive confirmation of payment or a reference and became concerned as he has had issues with fraud on his card on a previous occasion. He then did a couple of very basic penetration tests. If they resulted in the site being insecure as he suspected, he would have contacted the authorities, as he had nothing to gain from doing this for fun and keeping the fact to himself that he suspected the site to be a phishing site and all this money pledged was going to some South American somewhere in South America.

The first test he used was the (dot dot slash, 3 times) ../../../ sequence. The ../ command is called a Directory Traversal which allows you to move up the hierarchy of a file. The triple sequence amounts to a DTA (Directory Traversal Attack), allows you to move three times. It is not a complete attack as that would require a further command, it was merely a light “knock on the door”. The other test, which constituted an apostrophe( ‘ ) was also used. He was then satisfied that the site was safe as his received no error messages in response to his query, then went about his work duties. There were no warnings or dialogue boxes showing that he had accessed an unauthorised area.

20 days later he was arrested at his place of work and had his house searched. In the first part of his interview, he did not readily acknowledge his actions, but in the second half of the interview, he did. He was a little distraught and confused upon arrest, as anyone would be in that situation and did not ask for a solicitor, as he maintained he did nothing wrong. His tests were done in a 2 minute timeframe, then forgotten about.

He was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which was signed in 1989 when perms were just going out of fashion and mobile phones were like bricks and cost 1000 pounds and we were still using green type on a black background. The word “ Computer” was not even defined as they realised that this area was moving at light speed so they wanted to keep it open. Sadly, it has become open to willy-nilly interpretation and the magistrate decided there was intention to access data as stated in section 1(a), although I may be biased, it is an incorrect interpretation.

Cuthbert was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and convicted under Section 1 (a) of this Act. The relevant section of the Act is:

Section (1) of the Act states:

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if –

a. he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

b. the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and


c. he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

As an expert, if he had true intent (as the judge deemed he did, which is an incorrect analysis) he would have been more than capable of “hacking” and gunning that door down with a digital version of a point-blank range AK47, but he did not. He maybe should not have done the tests that are beyond the knowledge of a regular user and a caution would have sufficed, there was no need for a trial and certainly not 10 months of waiting time. The policeman was smug as he got his brownie points and the CPS prosecutor was what one can expect of a CPS prosecutor, patronising, pedantic and uninteresting but sadly successful.

The ../ sequence triggered of the alarm which was set up as “high” for this sort of “attack” at the donate.bt.com website that was set up by the DEC website. This alerted someone that there was something potentially suspicious, this was then passed up to someone who reported it to the police. They found their suspect through the IP address and were able to trace it to his laptop. Well, the Computer Crime Unit (known in the industry as “Muppets”) were very happy they got their man.

Mr Cuthbert was convicted under S. 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. It will be almost impossible for him to work in IT, the security industry being totally based on trust and reputation, as they are all freelancers and rely on contacts. That simply is not right. Justice is not always synonymous with legality.

When someone tells you, “whatever you do, do not press the red button” and you are almost compelled, in just that way, I am feverishly tempted to type in the ../../../ sequence in the Ministry of Defence website, and see what happens. Maybe not".

(Report taken from here)



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CROOKED DUTCH LEGAL SYSTEM SURVIVES CENSURE

How lucky do you have to be in the Netherlands? An innocent man got out of jail only because the guilty man came forward

Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner retained the support of a majority in Parliament after being severely criticised in a debate on Thursday. MPs expressed doubts about whether Donner was the right person to deal with the aftermath of the Nienke Kleiss case in which an innocent man went to jail for the 10-year-old girl's murder. Donner took responsibility for the litany of mistakes made by the police and prosecutors in the case.

The opposition Social Party and the Green-Left Groenlinks were not satisfied by Donner's account and filed a motion of no confidence. But the motion drew the support only of independent MPs Geert Wilders and Hilbrand Nawijn. The three coalition government parties backed Donner, allowing him to keep his job. The minister did not have an easy time during the debate as many parliamentarians questioned whether he was up to the job of reforming the prosecution service.

A review of how the wrong man was convicted of killing Nienke concluded that justice officials made a series of fundamental blunders in the case. One of the main problems was that the court was not told about DNA evidence found on the girl's body which did not match Cees B.

B. served four years of an 18-year sentence for killing Nienke. He was released in January when another man admitted murdering Nienke in Beatrix Park in Schiedam in June 2000. A special commission is being set up to examine other criminal cases for potential miscarriages of justice.


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UNBELIEVABLE SUPPRESSION OF EVIDENCE BY THE PROSECUTION

It's the prosecutors who should be prosecuted

After the murder conviction of Mark Dallagher was reversed by the British criminal appeals court – a conviction that had been based largely on a latent ear print which Crown experts identified as having been made by defendant – the case was scheduled to be retried within two months. The major issue on appeal had been the admissibility of the ear print evidence, strongly supported by the Crown, but urged to be unreliable by the defense. The retrial commenced in June of 2003, but after ten days the trial was abandoned. New discoveries compelled the prosecution to give additional scrutiny to the ear identification evidence. The presentation of additional evidence of guilt was, however, not forthcoming, and, on January 20, 2004, Dallagher walked out of Old Bailey a free man....

The BBC reported that the prosecution offered no evidence when the retrial was scheduled to commence, and Mr. Dallagher was formally found not guilty. Judge Sir Stephen Mitchell told the former defendant that "this most unfortunate saga at long last comes to an end." The judge said he hoped Dallagher would continue to live peacefully in Essex, where he had been living since his release on bail when the re-trial was halted in 2003. After spending seven years in prison on a life sentence, Dallagher was a free man again.

Counsel for Dallagher had discovered recently that the initial comparison of Dallagher’s known ear print with the marks left at the crime scene by Dutch ear print examiner Cornelis Van der Lugt had led to the latter’s conclusion that the two impressions were ‘DEFINITELY NOT" (underlined twice in the examiner’s report) made by Mark Dallagher. Despite this earlier report, the Crown’s "expert" in ear identifications would testify at the trial in 1998 and during the post-appeal evidence depositions and hearings in 2002, that defendant had been positively identified by an ear comparison. The discovery of this earlier report fundamentally damaged the Crown’s case.

But there was an even more bizarre twist in the Dallagher saga. A low copy DNA analysis of the latent ear mark previously said to be Dallagher’s found that the DNA in the latent print definitely could not have come from Mark Dallagher. No wonder the prosecution threw in the towel!

James Sturman, QC, one of Dallagher’s attorneys on appeal, was quoted by The Guardian as stating outside Old Bailey that Dallagher was the victim of "a grotesque miscarriage of justice." He added, "This is another example of the dangers of police following science too closely." As he walked out of court, Dallagher suggested that "the police should now properly investigate the murder of Dorothy Wood so that her family can finally have justice."

Mark Dallagher had, from the start, maintained that he was innocent – no great surprise here! He also asserted, however, that he was handicapped by an ankle injury at the time the murder was to have occurred, and had offered an uncorroborated alibi defense as well. Though the ear print identification was the primary cause of his conviction in 1998, there was also evidence of an unnamed jailhouse snitch to whom Dallagher had supposedly confessed, a confession which the defendant also strongly denied making. Snitch testimony has long been known to be extremely unreliable. It has been used by prosecutors in the trial of many persons who were convicted but later exonerated by DNA.

If we accept the superiority of DNA analysis over most other forensic methods of individualization – and certainly all forensic scientists would concede such superiority over the frequently maligned ear print comparison method – then police let the guilty murderer/burglar get away for seven years while an innocent person languished in prison. As far as we know, that guilty person is still free! At the time of Dallagher’s release, one contemporaneous news account stated that the new DNA evidence obtained by the West Yorkshire police implicates a different suspect.

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UNBELIEVABLE SUPPRESSION OF EVIDENCE BY THE PROSECUTION

It's the prosecutors who should be prosecuted

After the murder conviction of Mark Dallagher was reversed by the British criminal appeals court – a conviction that had been based largely on a latent ear print which Crown experts identified as having been made by defendant – the case was scheduled to be retried within two months. The major issue on appeal had been the admissibility of the ear print evidence, strongly supported by the Crown, but urged to be unreliable by the defense. The retrial commenced in June of 2003, but after ten days the trial was abandoned. New discoveries compelled the prosecution to give additional scrutiny to the ear identification evidence. The presentation of additional evidence of guilt was, however, not forthcoming, and, on January 20, 2004, Dallagher walked out of Old Bailey a free man....

The BBC reported that the prosecution offered no evidence when the retrial was scheduled to commence, and Mr. Dallagher was formally found not guilty. Judge Sir Stephen Mitchell told the former defendant that "this most unfortunate saga at long last comes to an end." The judge said he hoped Dallagher would continue to live peacefully in Essex, where he had been living since his release on bail when the re-trial was halted in 2003. After spending seven years in prison on a life sentence, Dallagher was a free man again.

Counsel for Dallagher had discovered recently that the initial comparison of Dallagher’s known ear print with the marks left at the crime scene by Dutch ear print examiner Cornelis Van der Lugt had led to the latter’s conclusion that the two impressions were ‘DEFINITELY NOT" (underlined twice in the examiner’s report) made by Mark Dallagher. Despite this earlier report, the Crown’s "expert" in ear identifications would testify at the trial in 1998 and during the post-appeal evidence depositions and hearings in 2002, that defendant had been positively identified by an ear comparison. The discovery of this earlier report fundamentally damaged the Crown’s case.

But there was an even more bizarre twist in the Dallagher saga. A low copy DNA analysis of the latent ear mark previously said to be Dallagher’s found that the DNA in the latent print definitely could not have come from Mark Dallagher. No wonder the prosecution threw in the towel!

James Sturman, QC, one of Dallagher’s attorneys on appeal, was quoted by The Guardian as stating outside Old Bailey that Dallagher was the victim of "a grotesque miscarriage of justice." He added, "This is another example of the dangers of police following science too closely." As he walked out of court, Dallagher suggested that "the police should now properly investigate the murder of Dorothy Wood so that her family can finally have justice."

Mark Dallagher had, from the start, maintained that he was innocent – no great surprise here! He also asserted, however, that he was handicapped by an ankle injury at the time the murder was to have occurred, and had offered an uncorroborated alibi defense as well. Though the ear print identification was the primary cause of his conviction in 1998, there was also evidence of an unnamed jailhouse snitch to whom Dallagher had supposedly confessed, a confession which the defendant also strongly denied making. Snitch testimony has long been known to be extremely unreliable. It has been used by prosecutors in the trial of many persons who were convicted but later exonerated by DNA.

If we accept the superiority of DNA analysis over most other forensic methods of individualization – and certainly all forensic scientists would concede such superiority over the frequently maligned ear print comparison method – then police let the guilty murderer/burglar get away for seven years while an innocent person languished in prison. As far as we know, that guilty person is still free! At the time of Dallagher’s release, one contemporaneous news account stated that the new DNA evidence obtained by the West Yorkshire police implicates a different suspect.

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ANOTHER BASIS FOR FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF CHILD ABUSE DISCREDITED

Children who come to a pediatrician's office with genital or anal warts may not be the victims of child abuse as once thought, according to pediatricians at Brenner Children's Hospital, part of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Most pediatricians have been trained to call social services if they discover a child with genital or anal warts to report a possible allegation that child abuse may have taken place. However, new research published in the October issue of Pediatrics, shows that this symptom alone may not indicate that a child has been abused.

"We have seen over the past few years an increase in the number of Human papillomavirus (HPV) cases (the virus which causes anal and genital warts) in adults and in children," said Sara Sinal, M.D., a pediatrician at Brenner Children's Hospital and expert in child abuse cases. "However, we were seeing younger children with this virus and many times had no other signs that abuse was taking place. These children seemed different in many ways from the children we were seeing for suspected sexual abuse who did not have warts."

Sinal and her colleagues also noticed that a child would often go to an ear, nose and throat physician to be treated for oral or laryngeal warts (warts found in the mouth or throat), however the physician treating the child never suspected or reported child abuse. "This is the same virus in a different location in the body and child abuse was never considered," Sinal said. "It made us look at these anal and genital warts so we could determine whether a child could contract the diseases from nonsexual contact. We did not want to call social services to report a child if there was no suspicion of abuse. Having been involved in many child abuse reports, I know how traumatic a report can be for a family."

HPV is a virus which can affect mucous membranes, causing warts to grow in the anal, genital, oral cavities or respiratory locations of the body. It is the most common sexually-transmitted disease in North America. However, it can be spread from mother to child in the birth canal. A person can get warts in their mouth and throat after having oral sex with someone who is infected. It is possible that warts can be transmitted by contact with a hand or contaminated object. The virus can lay dormant for many months and perhaps years before warts appear and some infected patients have no symptoms. Since the virus is a sexually-transmitted disease, many pediatricians often suspect sexual abuse when a child has symptoms.

"We are not ruling child abuse out as a possible cause for the infection in children under the age of four," Sinal said. "Every child with warts needs a thorough evaluation for possible abuse. However, when there are no other signs a child is being abused, we no longer feel it is necessary to report the family to the department of social services for suspected abuse. We are encouraging our colleagues to keep an open mind when they discover HPV in a child."

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UNBELIEVABLE ARROGANCE OF SOCIAL WORKERS: LACK OF EVIDENCE DOESN'T BOTHER THEM

They just KNOW people are guilty even though a police investigation that cost a hundred thousand pounds could find no evidence that could justify putting anybody before a court, let alone win the resultant case. It is the social workers who should be in the dock for the suffering they caused to both the children and their parents

"A critical report into the collapse of a major child abuse inquiry has highlighted failures of health and social work staff to protect the youngsters involved in the case. Social work inspectors launched an investigation after the 2003 case against nine people in the Western Isles was dropped. They had been charged with serious sex offences involving three girls aged under 16 following a police investigation codenamed Operation Haven.

The Social Work Inspection Agency, which was called in to review the handling of the case, concluded that the three children had experienced "severe and prolonged abuse". Social work practitioners should also have acted sooner to protect children, the report said, adding that some of the decisions that were made were "seriously flawed". The report also concluded that health professionals failed to respond appropriately to the potential child protection issues raised by the children's health problem and distress. And it said the Western Isles NHS board did not have the systems in place to support health professionals in protecting the children.

The suspects were picked up in dawn raids on the Isle of Lewis and in Leicestershire, West Yorkshire and Dorset in October 2003. But the following July the Crown Office dropped its prosecution before the case got to trial. [Because of lack of evidence!]

The report said the three children at the centre of the investigation had been neglected and abused over many years. The social work inspectors concluded: "We found evidence of physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, as well as symptoms and behaviour which are strongly suggestive of sexual abuse. We believe that all three children were repeatedly sexually abused.""

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Background from July 2004

The expert who helped discredit infamous claims of satanic abuse in Orkney has branded the failed investigation into similar allegations on Lewis an even bigger disgrace.

Dr Bill Thompson said police and social workers had completely failed to learn the lessons of the 1991 Orkney case, in which nine children were taken into care amid allegations of ritual abuse which were later thrown out of court.

Thompson, the criminologist whose work for Orkney families helped lead to the dropping of the case , said: “The Lewis case is worse than Orkney. Orkney preceded this case but the investigating authorities didn’t learn from the earlier mistakes.”

The Lewis investigation cost more than £100,000 and saw eight people charged with sexual offences against children in October 2003. The charges were dropped at the beginning of July.

Thompson says that the Lewis accusations – involving animal sacrifices, snuff movies, devil worship and the rape of children – were “classic textbook satanic allegations which have been disproved everywhere”.

Thompson says police and social workers should release transcripts of interviews with the children who made the allegations to prove whether or not investigators asked leading questions which encouraged the children to fabricate their stories.

Thompson says that only the release of the transcripts can clear the names of the people who were wrongly accused of satanic sex crimes against children. “People want to kill them,” he said. “They will suffer stigma forever. They need a chance to clear their names.

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SOME JUSTICE DONE AT LAST

Miserly compensation follows pardon -- despite arrogant official

More than a year after receiving a pardon that declared him innocent, Josiah Sutton learned Friday that he will get more than $118,000 in reparations that he feared he never would see. "I have been running into roadblocks since I got out, because I didn't know how to be an adult and people didn't want to hire me," said Sutton, who was 17 when he was wrongfully convicted of a 1998 rape. "I have been through hell and back trying to get things together, but this is enough to get me and my family a foundation and to start living my dreams."

Sutton, 23, served 4 1/2 years in prison before new DNA tests discredited those performed by the Houston Police Department crime lab, which played a large role in securing his conviction and 25-year sentence. The former high school football player was released in March 2003. After months of wrangling with the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, Gov. Rick Perry granted him a pardon on the basis of innocence, rather than a lesser "full" pardon, in May 2004.

Despite the pardon, however, Sutton and his lawyers worried that he would not receive the $25,000 per year of imprisonment that state law provides for those who were wrongfully convicted. Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal refused to write a letter to the state calling Sutton actually innocent — a requirement that was added to the reparations law in 2003. After a year of talks among Rosenthal, Sutton's lawyers and the state Comptroller's Office, which pays the reparations, Rosenthal agreed in August to send a letter saying he did not oppose the payment to Sutton. Rosenthal said Friday that he never questioned Sutton's qualification for reparations, although he has steadfastly refused to call Sutton innocent. "The complainant in the case still believes that he is not innocent and I do not know that she is incorrect," Rosenthal said.

The Comptroller's Office told Sutton's lawyer, Justin Waggoner, on Friday that a check for almost $60,000 had been mailed. "The record was so abundantly clear that his was a pardon on the basis of innocent, that there wasn't any basis for denying him the money," Waggoner said. "I am hopeful this compensation will benefit him, but I certainly wouldn't trade 4 1/2 years of my life for this level of compensation."

Sutton's case has become a symbol of the problems at the HPD crime lab, where errors have been exposed in the work of four divisions, including DNA, ballistics and serology. For nearly three years, police and prosecutors have worked to retest evidence from hundreds of cases. Sutton himself, according to state Sen. Rodney Ellis and other supporters, embodies the problems faced by people who are wrongfully convicted. "Four and a half of the most important years of this young man's life were taken and put behind bars," said Ellis, D-Houston. "He has had a hard time since he came out because he was expected to act like an adult, but was not equipped to be one. He needs counseling and assistance, not just money."

Since his release in March 2003, Sutton said Friday, he has struggled to hold a job and has been told several times, even after he was pardoned, that he was not being considered for certain jobs because of his criminal record. He also has had a hard time keeping a place to live. At times, he said, he has had his own apartment, and at others he has slept on friends' couches or moved in and out of his mother's place, where he currently lives. "I am out of prison, but I am hardly free," Sutton wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to Rosenthal, pleading with him to write a letter on his behalf. "Most of my days are spent worrying about where my next meal will come from and trying to find transportation from one place to the next. My efforts to get my life on track have been filled with disappointment and frustration."

Just after he was pardoned, Sutton's lawyers began applying for compensation under a 2001 state law that allows the wrongfully convicted to receive $25,000 for each year they spent in prison, with a cap of $500,000. They discovered during that process that a new provision, requiring a letter from the district attorney certifying the claimant's actual innocence, had been slipped into the law in 2003. Ellis, the law's author, had not known about the change and worked unsuccessfully to restore the original language in this year's Legislature. Eventually the senator, lawyers and the comptroller agreed that a letter saying Rosenthal acknowledges the pardon and is not opposed to the compensation would satisfy the requirement. Sutton qualifies for $118,749.97. He will receive a second, final installment next year if he has not been convicted of a felony, according to state law.

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WHAT A DISGRACE!

There are plenty of bureaucrats available for everything except freeing the innocent

Justice, it seems, has an expiration date. Luis Diaz last month became one of a handful of Florida prisoners -- and one of 99 nationwide -- exonerated by DNA testing since 2000. But the 2001 statute that helped set him free after he spent 26 years in jail for rapes he did not commit is set to expire next week.

After October 1, when prisoners can no longer petition Florida courts for post-conviction DNA testing, their only hope will be to ask prosecutors (the people who put them in jail in the first place) to reopen their case.

Prisoners in Ohio face a similar deadline at the end of the month. "It is quintessentially un-American for the very people who may have caused this kind of miscarriage of justice to be the people who decide whether DNA testing occurs," says Jenny Greenberg of the Florida Innocence Initiative.

Worse still, the four-year window in Florida that required the preservation of evidence for older cases -- which may have predated reliable DNA testing -- is also closing. And unlike California, which last year passed a law ensuring the preservation of evidence throughout an inmate's incarceration, Florida Governor Jeb Bush last month mandated that law-enforcement agencies need give only a 90-day notice before destroying evidence, which isn't much time given the low literacy rates among inmates and how hard prison protocol makes it for them to reach a lawyer.

Six states have yet to address the issue of requiring the preservation of DNA evidence. And new hurdles could arise at the congressional level, where a bill threatens to restrict many prisoners from filing one last-ditch petition in federal court. All these moves are designed to keep courts from getting deluged with DNA-related requests by thwarting new technology with red tape.

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THE END OF A FRAMEUP

This is the final act in a saga I mentioned on August 21st

If the former Roseanne Catt has one regret, it is that her parents are not alive to see the end of her long legal battle. The woman who became one of New South Wales's longest serving female prisoners has been told prosecutors will not pursue charges against her relating to an alleged plot to kill her ex-husband. The former Ms Catt, now known as Roseanne Beckett, has received a letter from the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions saying that "after careful consideration", it will not pursue five charges against her. She had faced two counts of soliciting to murder, one of malicious wounding, perjury and "attempt to cause noxious things to be taken".

In 1991, a jury found Ms Catt guilty of attempting to murder her ex-husband Barry Catt by stabbing, poisoning and bludgeoning him with a cricket bat and a rock, as well as ordering "a hit". Ten years later, a judicial inquiry was ordered into allegations Ms Catt was framed and she was released on bail on August 6, 2001. With two years to serve of her 12-year sentence, she had already become one of NSW's longest-serving female prisoners. In August this year, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal said she could be re-tried on a number of counts, but left it up to the DPP to decide whether to proceed. The DPP's decision not to pursue a retrial brings an end to the legal battle against her.

Ms Beckett, who reverted to her maiden name after leaving prison, said today her only regret was that her parents did not live to see the resolution of her case. Her father Terence died on September 18 this year, just weeks before she received the letter from the DPP, while her mother Dorothy died in April 2002. "He was 92 and he was tired. He wanted to go to mum," Ms Beckett said. "He said 'I now know that you are going to be okay. I now know that your name is going to be cleared and I don't need to worry anymore because everything is going to be okay'."

Now living in her original home town of Dapto, south of Sydney, Ms Beckett, 58, said she was sure the future would be better. "It's not going to be easy, I know that," she said. "You can't just put 16 years behind you and out of your mind, especially given what I've had to go through, but I know with the very good professional team I have in my team, we will get there. "(I'm) just sad that mum and dad aren't here to enjoy it with me. I'm sad about that, but I know that they are in heaven looking down and are very happy."

Ms Beckett said she believed God had given her the grace not to feel anger or bitterness towards her ex-husband or others who testified against her. She said she also had forgiven two women who were paid to kill her in jail. "I believe justice will prevail, I really do. I believe these people will have to account for what they've done and won't be able to keep doing this to people," she said. "But anger and bitterness, that is something I don't feel. "I feel sad sometimes for the years I've lost and I feel very sad for what my children have had to endure and my family."

One of Ms Beckett's most high-profile supporters, NSW Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon, said she believed there was a case for compensation.


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AN APPEALS SYSTEM MELTDOWN: REPEATED APPEALS FAILED TO FREE AN INNOCENT MAN

And he's still in jail despite a Federal judge finally ruling that he should be freed

A federal judge in St. Louis last week overturned the first-degree murder conviction of Dale Helmig, who is serving life in prison for the murder of his mother, Norma Helmig. Dale Helmig says he did not kill his mother and has filed numerous appeals in state and federal courts contending he did not receive a fair trial.

In the summer of 2003, Mark Thomason, a second-year law student, interviewed many of the jurors who had found Dale Helmig guilty of murdering his mother, Norma Helmig, 10 years earlier. Thomason was an intern in the Kansas City law office of Sean O'Brien, an attorney known for his work in reversing criminal convictions of defendants later found to be innocent. O'Brien had taken on Helmig's appeal, believing he had not killed his mother and concluding he was woefully defended at his trial. No stranger to Helmig's predicament, Thomason had thought the case was "fishy" since he viewed a television program, "Was Justice Denied," produced in June 2000. The show raised questions such as whether Norma's husband, Ted Helmig, could have been the murderer. Ted has said he had nothing to do with his wife's death.

The show also challenged the performance of Chris Jordan, Dale Helmig's defense lawyer. And it examined the circumstances of how a new judge had been substituted at the last minute to preside over Helmig's trial.

These elements intrigued Thomason, who interviewed seven of the 12 jurors. He asked them about Jordan's conduct and whether they were influenced by television coverage that focused on Kenny Hulshof, the special prosecutor and candidate for Congress at the time of the trial in 1996.

Several jurors told Thomason that there was no comparison between what was done in Helmig's behalf and how the state presented its case. Thomason asked one juror if Jordan had done a bad job. "The juror responded, 'I wouldn't hire him to defend me if I was in trouble,'" Thomason said.

And while Thomason didn't know it at the time, it was the remark by Stanley Dahl, a farmer from New Haven, that would change the course of "State of Missouri v. Dale L. Helmig." Dahl told Thomason, almost in passing, that during deliberations jurors asked for a map, which they used to convince a holdout juror to vote to find Helmig guilty. The map had not been introduced into evidence. "More than likely, the map had a role in changing her vote," Dahl said later in court.

Usually the justice system works the way it should. The guilty are convicted; the innocent acquitted. The system is designed to give the benefit of the doubt to the extent that the guilty sometimes go free, too. Prosecutors are supposed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But the justice system is not perfect. Even a Missouri Supreme Court judge has acknowledged that innocent people are probably serving time in prison. Since the justice system is a human system, mistakes can be made and an innocent defendant can be convicted.

A system of state and federal appeals exists to screen cases to uncover those mistakes. And almost as soon as the jury found Helmig guilty in March 1996, he and his lawyer began filing appeals in the state system. Appeals courts are reluctant to reverse what happened at the trial court level and reticent to substitute a new judgment for what the judge on the scene did. When they do find errors, appeals judges often determine they were harmless and didn't affect the outcome of the trial. The Missouri Court of Appeals in St. Louis affirmed the conviction a year later and the state Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.

O'Brien filed a new state appeal in 1998, challenging the conduct of the trial and Jordan's performance. Judge Jack Edwards, who heard that appeal and who had presided over the original trial, rejected those arguments. The Court of Appeals affirmed Edwards' decision in 2001.

By that time, Helmig's case had attracted the attention of Michael Betcherman, a Canadian filmmaker who was preparing a pilot program "Was Justice Denied" for the TNT cable channel. "It was a terrible miscarriage of justice," Betcherman said. Betcherman said one reason he did not believe Helmig murdered his mother was because he would have had to cross the flooding Missouri River twice. He would have had to cross the river to murder her and dispose of her body with no sure guarantee that floodwaters would not cut off his return trip. Norma Helmig lived at the end of a Gasconade River access road about 18 miles from the Osage River bridge where her body was found. She was last seen alive in the early morning hours of July 29, 1993.

High water on the Missouri River had stranded Helmig north of the river in Fulton, Mo., where he registered to spend the night in a motel. There were times when the Missouri River bridge was opened and other times when it was closed because water covered a bridge approach road.

Based on the theory of Osage County Sheriff Carl Fowler, who investigated the death, for Helmig to have murdered his mother, he would have had to drive 54 miles to her home. Then, he would have had to drive the 54 miles back to the motel in Fulton, as long as the Missouri River bridge was not closed by flooding. The sheriff said he did not know how Norma's body got to the Osage River. "Why leave the motel and cross the river not knowing he was going to get back?" Betcherman wondered.

And it was this relationship between the rivers and the roads and where Helmig stayed and where his mother's body was found that required an explanation and a map not in evidence to convince a holdout juror of Helmig's guilt.

On April 22, 2002, O'Brien filed a writ of habeas corpus on Helmig's behalf in U.S. District Court in St. Louis. Guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the writ is an extraordinary legal remedy that challenges the authority of the government to imprison a person.

The writ's use has been curtailed sharply in recent years. In 1996, Congress passed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which substantially limited these kinds of federal appeals. More time limits were placed on when they can be filed and more restrictions were imposed on what types of issues can be raised.

O'Brien faced an uphill climb in reversing Helmig's conviction. Federal courts must defer to state courts unless their rulings are clearly unreasonable. And federal courts must review all evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution. Showing that mistakes were made in state courts under these conditions is very difficult. "This is a case about innocence," was how O'Brien's appeal began. It said the playing field was not level in Helmig's trial, that his lawyer did not competently represent him, that evidence and witnesses that could have cast reasonable doubt on his guilt were not introduced and that publicity hurt his chances at getting a fair trial.

U.S. Magistrate David Noce rejected almost all of the claims. He said he did not find any new evidence showing Helmig was innocent. He pointed out that it is truly extraordinary for a federal judge to overturn the findings of a jury in a state court. And he said some of Helmig's claims could not be considered for technical reasons and that others were without merit.

But Noce did find one serious problem. And it was enough to overturn Helmig's conviction. The jury used a map provided by a court worker or sheriff's deputy that was not in evidence. And the map was crucial to swaying the opinion of a juror who was originally opposed to finding Helmig guilty. "The state map provided jurors with specific facts by which to adjudge relative locations, distances, travel routes, and terrain," Noce wrote. "When the evidence presented at trial did not convince one juror of the petitioner's (Helmig's) guilt, that juror's vote changed after viewing the map."

The judge found that the use of the map substantially affected Helmig's right to due process. He threw out Helmig's conviction and said he should be freed.

Attorney General Jay Nixon now must decide whether to appeal Noce's ruling to a federal appeals court. Another alternative is for Osage County Prosecuting Attorney Amanda Grellner to decide to retry Helmig. Until those decisions are made, Helmig remains incarcerated at the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Mo., where he clings to the hope that someday he'll be released. "I've got more hope of getting out of here than just about anybody here," he said. "Eventually, the right people will make the right decisions. I'm not going to give up. I do believe. I have faith. Eventually, the truth will come out and I'll walk out of here."

Asked whether he murdered his mother, Helmig said: "There is no way I would have hurt my mom. I never raised my hand to Mom in my entire life. I loved her very much and still do."

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