MORE FAKE SCIENCE

Ronnie Lee Bowling sits on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for two murders he claims he didn't commit -- convicted in part through forensic analysis that scientific experts now say is deeply flawed. No eyewitnesses or direct physical evidence tied him to the execution-style slayings of two gas station attendants in Laurel County a month apart in 1989. There were no fingerprints, no DNA. But at Bowling's trial, an FBI examiner testified that tests showed some of the .38-caliber bullets recovered from both bodies -- and from bullets in an attempted murder at a third station in Rockcastle County -- came from the same batch of lead.

More crucially, FBI Special Donald Havekost said, they matched some of the cartridges found in Bowling's mobile home. Havekost told the jury he'd never seen a bullet match in crimes that weren't related. Asked about the likelihood of finding another bullet matching Bowling's, Havekost said, "I'd spend a good part of my life looking and probably never find it." But last year, a National Research Council panel found that FBI examiners repeatedly had failed to tell juries that such bullet matches might be mere coincidence. The bureau responded by suspending lead analysis, which it had used in 2,500 cases over 40 years. Then in March, the first conviction in the nation was reversed based on concerns about the reliability of bullet-lead analysis. Ordering a new trial for a man convicted in New Jersey of murder, an appeals court said "the integrity of the criminal justice system is ill-served by allowing a conviction based on evidence of this quality … to stand."

The prosecutor in the Kentucky case said there was plenty of other evidence to convict Bowling, now 36. But Bowling is staking his life on the argument that he wouldn't have been convicted without that forensic evidence -- arguing on appeal that the new disclosures about such testing demand that he get a new trial. "If there is any truth and justice in this country, my wrongful conviction shouldn't be allowed to stand," he said in a two-hour interview at the penitentiary, where he has been held since Dec. 24, 1992, for the murders of Ronald L. Smith, 28, and Marvin Hensley, 48.

After a yearlong study, a research council panel reported in February 2004 that FBI analysts repeatedly overstated the significance of bullet-lead matches and underplayed the likelihood of a false match. "FBI examiners should not rely on bullet lead analysis to testify in criminal cases about the statistical probabilities that a crime-scene bullet originated with the defendant," concluded the report of the Washington-based council, the operating arm of the private, nonprofit National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.

Bowling cited that report and other attacks on bullet-lead testing in motions seeking a new trial that he's filed in Laurel Circuit Court and U.S. District Court in London. No execution date is pending, although he is entering the last phase of his appeals. One of his lawyers, Vince Aprile, likened bullet analysis to hypnosis and Victorian-era phrenology -- the abandoned belief that intelligence could be determined by the shape of the head. Aprile said the national council's report "exposes it as an insidious endeavor to clothe biased speculation in the impressive robes of science."

But relatives of the victims say Bowling is just grasping for straws. And former Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Handy, who won Bowling's conviction and has since retired, said, "I don't have any doubt that he was the perpetrator." Handy concedes that bullet evidence was important to his case -- he told the jury in his closing statement that the trial came down to "cold, analytical facts … tested by an FBI agent." But he said that stronger proof came from Ricky Smith, owner of the third station, a Sunoco in Rockcastle County. Smith, who is not related to Ronald Smith, testified that three days after Hensley was murdered, Bowling came into his station and opened fire, then fled, leading police on a 32-mile chase that ended with Bowling's capture outside his home in Clay County.

State police who pursued him later found a gun along the road and determined, through traditional ballistics testing, that it was the same weapon used in the murders. Bowling claimed that he hadn't shot at Ricky Smith and that the gun wasn't his. Bullets found at the Sunoco station were too mangled for conventional ballistics tests, in which marks on bullets from the crime scene are compared with marks on test bullets fired from the same gun.

That is where Havekost came in. He testified that one of the bullets from the Sunoco station had the same chemical makeup as five of the bullets found in a partially filled box of ammo at Bowling's home, meaning, he said, that they originated from the same manufacturer's batch of bullet lead. He also said that one bullet from each of the two murders matched and that three of the bullets that killed the second victim, three of the bullets found at the scene of the third shooting, and 16 of the 24 bullets found in Bowling's home all matched.

The FBI did bullet-lead analysis in cases where no weapon was found or where ballistics analysis was impossible. Since 1986, five examiners testified 521 times about bullet-lead tests, the bureau has said, although it's also said it doesn't know where or against whom. The Washington-based Forensic Justice Project, part of the nonprofit National Whistleblower Center, has sued the FBI to get that information, contending the government won't release it for fear it might trigger hundreds of new trials. No one knows how many times bullet-lead analysis has been presented in Kentucky courts, but it figured in the case against Shane Ragland, whose conviction for the murder of a former football player was reversed on other grounds last year by the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Another defendant, Tyron Anton Wilcox, was acquitted of murder in a 2002 trial in Jefferson County in which an FBI examiner presented bullet-matching evidence.

In an interview, Havekost, who retired from the FBI soon after Bowling's trial and now lives in Nebraska, said that if he'd been asked, he would have testified that many people could have bought matching bullets in a rural area like Laurel County. But nobody asked, he said.....

But Bowling said there is nothing that connects him to the Laurel County crimes other than bullet-lead analysis. "The link doesn't exist," he said. "They misled the jury in my trial by presenting evidence that was flawed, unreliable junk science."


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ANOTHER CASE JUST BEGINNING

THREE eyewitnesses ignored!

Rebecca Rengo-Kocher, a respected St. Louis social worker and psychotherapist, didn"t expect to run a nonprofit organization. But she also didn"t expect her testimony to be discounted in a recent court case. And she didn"t expect to see an innocent man sent to prison as a result.

Rengo-Kocher"s experience in the case of Guy Woolfolk compelled her to act by starting the Guy Woolfolk Trust Fund through Social Concerns, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of and addressing issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment. The organization helps low-income, at-risk individuals involved in cases of wrongful conviction. "I know Guy is innocent – he was sitting beside me in my home at the time the crime was committed," says Rengo-Kocher, referring to Guy Woolfolk, who was accused and convicted of a carjacking in 2003. Rengo-Kocher provided one of three alibis for Woolfolk, but he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison despite her testimony. "I simply couldn"t accept this outcome, and I know Guy is only one of hundreds of people who face similar situations," Rengo-Kocher says. "We like to think that our justice system is flawless, but it"s not. And it"s not right to sit by and let an innocent person go to jail in America."

Social Concerns is hosting a public, educational screening of The Hurricane at 7 p.m., Thursday, August 4th at the Regional Arts Commission located at 6128 Delmar Boulevard in the Loop. The film, starring Denzel Washington, dramatizes the life of Rubin Carter, a middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the 1960s. Carter was released in 1985 after nearly 20 years in prison... One Hundred percent of the money raised will go towards The Guy Woolfolk Trust Fund. Packages may be purchased by calling Kim at 314-832-2580 or Meredith at 314-726-1622.

While Social Concerns works to assist Woolfolk"s appeal, Rengo-Kocher says the organization is concerned with issues surrounding social justice and wrongful imprisonment in general. "Guy"s case inspired Social Concerns, but there is a definite need to raise awareness of these cases across the country," she says. "We don"t want another young life to be destroyed this way."

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AUSTRALIAN LEFTIST GOVERNMENT COMPENSATES A JUDGE THEY APPOINTED FOR A WRONGFUL CONVICTION BUT NOT A CONSERVATIVE POLITICIAN

And the judge was let off only because she was found to have legal immunity for what she did!

Pauline Hanson could not expect the Queensland Government to pay her compensation for her wrongful time in jail simply because former chief magistrate Di Fingleton will get a payout, according to Premier Peter Beattie. Both women served time in jail for unrelated matters and their convictions were subsequently overturned. However, Ms Hanson has not been compensated. Mr Beattie last week said Ms Fingleton would receive two years' "backpay" for her wrongful conviction and the six months she spent in jail. He also said she would also receive a formal apology from him and might receive lost future salary payments.

But Ms Hanson, the former One Nation leader whose wrongful conviction for electoral fraud was overturned, said the Labor Party would be seen as a "boys' club" if it awarded compensation to Ms Fingleton, a Labor supporter and worker, and not to her. Queensland Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg has said he would support any move by Ms Hanson for compensation.

Mr Beattie said yesterday Ms Hanson had legal rights and she would be entitled to take legal action on the issue if she so chooses. "But there are differences in her case despite what she said," he said. "The High Court said unanimously that Di Fingleton should never have been charged. "Now, there is no such similar finding in relation to Pauline Hanson."

Ms Fingleton had a conviction for retaliating against a witness overturned by the High Court last month. She had served six months in jail. Ms Hanson's conviction for electoral fraud was overturned on appeal in 2003.

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CANADIAN AUTHORITIES TOO CHILDISH TO ADMIT BEING WRONG

The Crown is going to take another crack at trying Robert Baltovich in the disappearance 15 years ago of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain. The Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General made the announcement yesterday, saying it did so after "very careful consideration." The move angered one of Mr. Baltovich's lawyers, James Lockyer, who said his client should be given an apology instead of a new trial. "It's going to prey on him for as long as it takes to hold this trial," Mr. Lockyer said. He said Mr. Baltovich was already once wrongfully convicted, and it was "typical" in such cases to have the appeals and new prosecutions drawn out as long as possible. "It never ends, they just never, never give in," said Mr. Lockyer, who has represented the victims of a number of high-profile cases of wrongful conviction. "They arrested an innocent man, they prosecuted an innocent man for 15 years and they should just apologize."

Mr. Baltovich was originally charged in the fall of 1990 with first-degree murder. The charge came five months after the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain, a woman with whom he'd had an occasionally rocky relationship. Her blood-stained car was found but her body has never turned up. The original trial, in which Mr. Baltovich was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence, was harshly criticized last December by the Ontario Court of Appeal and a new trial was ordered. The appellate judges accused Mr. Justice John O'Driscoll of Ontario Superior Court of being biased in his instructions to the jury. But the three-judge court also found that Mr. Baltovich could still obtain a fair trial and that a jury "could reasonably convict" him.

The Crown's decision to go ahead finally gives Mr. Baltovich, who has always professed his innocence, the chance to clear his name. But a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General said that the new charges shows they feel their case is solid. "The Crown asks whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and whether it's in the public interest," Brendan Crawley explained. The ministry could have instead chosen to appeal last year's decision, or done nothing.

Derek Finkle, who wrote No Claim to Mercy, a book on the Baltovich case, said yesterday he believes the chances of the Crown getting another conviction are "incredibly low." "We don't know what happened to Elizabeth Bain," he said. "We don't know why she was murdered, we don't know when she was murdered, we don't know how she was murdered." He said that the Crown will have the unenviable task of arguing its own circumstantial case while also trying to discredit the defence's equally circumstantial case pointing to serial killer Paul Bernardo as the real culprit.

(The idea that the suspect then known as the Scarborough Rapist could have been responsible for Ms. Bain's disappearance was dismissed at the time by police, because that suspect was not believed to have killed anyone. As recently as last fall, Crown counsel dismissed the idea because there was no evidence Ms. Bain was sexually assaulted.)

"Things are looking pretty good for the Baltovich camp," said Mr. Finkle, who is also editor of TORO magazine and has written about the case for the magazine. Echoing the sentiment of Mr. Lockyer, the defence lawyer, Mr. Finkle suggested that the new charges show that certain interested parties can't seem to quit. "There's a lot of reputations on the line," he said. "Unfortunately, [Mr. Baltovich] has to go back to the same system and go through the process, which he understandably doesn't have much faith in, to clear his name."

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EXPOSER OF MULTIPLE CANADIAN INJUSTICES HONOURED

Lawyer James Lockyer is slated to receive an honorary degree Monday from the province's legal regulatory body in the city that sparked his passion for defending the wrongly convicted. "On July 30, 1992, there was a conviction in your city which I took on and it just went from there," Lockyer said in a interview discussing his honorary doctorate, which he will receive from the Law Society of Upper Canada during the Call to the Bar ceremony at the London Convention Centre.

Guy Paul Morin was convicted in London of murdering nine-year-old Christine Jessop near Queensville outside of Toronto in 1984. More than two years later, with Lockyer as his lawyer, Morin was exonerated after DNA tests excluded him as a the killer.

Since then, Lockyer, a founding director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, has been involved in such high-profile cases as David Milgaard, Robert Baltovich, James Driskell, Clayton Johnson and Romeo Phillion. He also is involved in the case of Steven Truscott, who at 14 in 1959 was convicted and sentenced to death in Huron County for the sex slaying of 12-year-old Lynne Harper. The Guelph millwright is waiting with Lockyer for his court date before the Ontario Court of Appeal.

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Brief review of the Truscott case: Typical police arrogance at work

THE POLICE INVESTIGATION: It took the police only 24 hours after Lynn Harper's body was found to arrest Steven Truscott. No other suspects were seriously investigated. The police records indicate that there was no attempt to check police records or military records for known sex offenders.

TIME OF DEATH: If there was one thing that convinced the jury of Steven Truscott's guilt, it was the medical evidence. The medical doctors who testified for the prosecution spoke with a certitude that left no room for doubt in the minds of the jury, testifying with inspired confidence that Lynn Harper had died during the half-hour or so that she'd been with Steven Truscott. But the fifth estate uncovered evidence that indicated otherwise.

THE INJURIES: Doctors testified that Lynn Harper was a victim of a "blind, violent rape." The jury was undoubtedly influenced by their graphic description of the extent of her injuries. They also testified that Steven Truscott had huge lesions on his penis. But how accurate was their testimony?

JOCELYN GAUDET'S STORY: Jocelyn Gaudet, a classmate, claimed that on the day before the murder, Truscott had made a secret date to meet her in the bush ... suggesting that his teenage hormones were on the boil.The alleged date would become crucial evidence against him -- painting Truscott as boy on the prowl, desperate to lure any girl he could. But how credible was Gaudet?

GORD LOGAN: If Truscott and Lynn crossed the bridge taking Lynn north to the highway, he could not have killed her in the bush which was south of the bridge. And two witnesses insisted they saw them crossing the bridge ... riding double on his bike. One was Gordon Logan who was 12, fishing in the river. He told police he looked up and saw Steven and Lynn ride by.

Later, when it became crucial to Steven's alibi, the police said he made it up to protect his friend ... that the bridge was too far away to see anybody on it clearly. But the fifth estate discovered police records indicating the opposite.


PHILIP BURNS STORY: Of the dozen of children and adults on the county road that hot June evening, nobody could reliably place Steven in or near the bush where Lynn's body was later found. Then the police introduced some interesting reverse logic ... to prove that Steven and Lynn had gone into the bush, they only had to prove that at some point they WEREN'T on the road. Philip Burns a ten year-old boy was on the road that night and testified that he didn't meet them.


THE FOOTPRINT: The prosecution also made much of the testimony of an alleged footprint - spotted, they said, by one of the searchers, Flying Officer Glen Sage. The crown prosecutor insisted, - the evidence is clear, these were his shoes. Court testimony showed that the - marks -- not even footprints -- were never matched by the police to Truscott's shoes - or any shoes for that matter.


THE BICYCLE TRACK MARK: The prosecution claimed that bicycle tire marks found near the bush were "similar" to Steve's bike. But those marks were probably a month old. The pictures show the ground was parch dry and it had not rained in a month.

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MORE CANADIAN SHENANIGANS

More jailhouse testimony extorted and then believed by gullible courts

A Quebec man who spent more than 20 years in prison for first-degree murder will have his case reviewed. The federal minister of Justice, Irwin Cotler, has intervened in Andre Tremblay's case and has referred it to the Quebec Court of Appeal. Cotler says new evidence shows the man may have been wrongfully convicted.

Tremblay, who is now 61, was released on full parole last year, and is working at a minimum-wage job in Montreal. He was convicted in 1984 of murdering Serge Fournier by setting fire to his house in July of 1982. Through all his years in prison, he continued to claim he was innocent. Now, his claim is being taken seriously.

Kerry Scullion heads the federal Criminal Conviction Review Group of the Department of Justice. He says the Court of Appeal could order a new trial, substitute a verdict, or dismiss the appeal altogether. But, he says, the Justice minister would not have reopened the case unless the evidence pointed to a wrongful conviction. "The conviction was based largely on the jailhouse informant who testified that Mr. Tremblay had confessed to him the deliberate setting of a fire that ultimately killed Mr. Fournier," Scullion says.

But, he says, the informant later testified — twice — under oath that Tremblay did not confess to the murder. The informant also has said he was offered undisclosed advantages in return for testifying against Tremblay.

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Judge throws out Canadian drug-trafficking case


A Montreal man accused of gangsterism and drug trafficking for the Hells Angels motorcycle club has been acquitted. A judge says the prosecution's case against Daniel Comeau was virtually non-existent.

Comeau was among a dozen people charged after a huge police investigation called Operation Apache. It targeted drug trafficking by members of the Hells Angels. Comeau's two brothers and one of his friends were also arrested. Police say they recorded 26,000 telephone conversations as part of their investigation. Eleven of those recorded converations involved Comeau, and Judge Céline Lacerte-Lamontagne says none of them was incriminating. The judge says, while the conspirators used code words to order drugs, and to set up meetings to take delivery, Comeau didn't.

Lacerte-Lamontagne says there was certainly drug trafficking going on, but there's no evidence implicating Comeau. The accused and his lawyers left the courtroom slapping each other on the back. Crown prosecutor Mathieu Paquet says there won't be an appeal. He says all the other accused in the case of Project Apache were convicted, and are serving terms in jail.

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DEFECTIVE FINGERPRINT EVIDENCE UNCOVERED

Only DNA evidence enabled this guy to beat false police fingerprint evidence and a false police identification

A judge freed a Roxbury man from prison yesterday after Suffolk County prosecutors acknowledged that the fingerprint used to convict him of shooting a Boston police officer seven years ago was not his. The stunning reversal occurred two days after prosecutors vowed to retry Stephan Cowans for shooting Officer Gregory Gallagher, even though newly analyzed DNA evidence showed that Cowans was not the shooter. Suffolk Assistant District Attorney David E. Meier said on Wednesday that his office would retry Cowans, relying on "compelling" evidence, including a fingerprint on a glass the shooter used.


But yesterday, Meier reversed himself, telling Superior Court Judge Peter Lauriat that the fingerprint evidence used at trial did not come from Cowans. "I can conclusively and unequivocally state, your honor, that that purported match was a mistake," Meier said, based on forensic testing conducted this week.


Cowans, who had served 6 1/2 years for a shooting he insisted he did not commit, walked out of Suffolk Superior Court a free man. He became the seventh person to challenge a Suffolk County conviction successfully since 1997. Cowans, who was convicted in 1998 of shooting and wounding Gallagher in a Roxbury backyard, said he never lost hope during his years in prison, because he knew he was innocent and was confident that somehow the truth would surface. "I never thought I would never get out," the 33-year-old Roxbury man said calmly after his release, flanked by delighted relatives and lawyers. "I was one who never gave up on myself."


Boston police did the original analysis of the fingerprint lifted from a glass of water from which the shooter drank after he forced his way into a nearby house. But after Cowans's legal team presented new DNA evidence this week showing that he was not the person who drank from the glass or wore the hat and sweat shirt discarded at the scene, the district attorney's office had Boston and State Police specialists reanalyze the fingerprint. DNA analysis of evidence found at crime scenes was not routinely done at the time of Cowans's trial. Meier was told yesterday morning that the new fingerprint analysis showed that the thumbprint did not belong to Cowans, and the prosecutor contacted Cowans's lawyers.


Without comment, the judge threw out the conviction and freed Cowans. Meier said the district attorney's office has no intention of retrying Cowans "given the state of the evidence."


In a late-afternoon news conference at Boston police headquarters, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley and Acting Police Commissioner James M. Hussey expressed regret and embarrassment over the mistake that led to the imprisonment of an innocent man. "Seven years ago, the criminal justice system failed Stephan Cowans," Conley said. "It took seven years for that mistake to be corrected, seven years of Stephan Cowans's life that he can't get back. On behalf of the criminal justice system, we extend a sincere apology to Mr. Cowans."


Conley said there will be a thorough review of "the facts and circumstances of this case, the conviction, and the error. We cannot accept a high percentage of success as sufficient; we cannot accept being right just most of the time." The Boston Police Department has asked the International Association for Identification, the world's largest and oldest forensic group, and the FBI to make recommendations about forming an outside investigative team to review Boston police procedures for analyzing fingerprints, Hussey said....

Hussey said police officials have spoken to Gallagher, now a detective, who was among the witnesses who identified Cowans as his assailant. "He's OK, and he still feels strongly that he's made the right identification," Hussey said. Cowans was convicted in 1998 of shooting Gallagher in the buttocks with the officer's 9mm Glock service pistol. Gallagher had pursued a man acting suspiciously near Rafael Hernandez School on School Street on May 30, 1997. He scuffled with the man and lost his gun.


On Wednesday, at the request of Meier, Lauriat had agreed to suspend Cowans's sentence of 30 to 45 years in state prison, pending a defense motion for a new trial based on a DNA analysis gathered by lawyers for the New England Innocence Project. Cowans had remained in jail while his family tried to raise the $7,500 bail.


The New England Innocence Project, which had taken Cowans's case, sent evidence from his trial to a forensic DNA testing company, Orchid Cellmark in Germantown, Md. Sweat from the brim of a baseball cap lost by Gallagher's assailant in the yard was tested, as well as a sweat shirt the gunman removed in a house he forced his way into on School Street. The lab also tested saliva from the rim of a glass mug in the house used by the assailant. The DNA evidence was all from the same individual, but it didn't match Cowans's, the analysis found....

Cowans, who changed into a brown suit after he was released but still wore the striped white sneakers he had on in court, said there aren't "any words in the dictionary to explain what it was like" to spend 6 1/2 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

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BUT THE STATE IS BEING A DEADBEAT WHEN IT COMES TO COMPENSATION

Six months after Massachusetts agreed to compensate wrongly convicted felons, 10 former inmates who have applied for money have not received a dime, prompting their advocates to accuse Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly of putting up roadblocks. The former prisoners -- two of whom spent about 19 years each behind bars for crimes they did not commit -- have filed claims dating back to January under a law that provides a maximum of $500,000 for erroneous convictions. However, Reilly, who represents the state in such claims, appears to be adopting an adversarial approach, according to lawyers for the former inmates and lawmakers....

Maher, 44, who lives in Tewksbury and works as a late-shift mechanic for a trash company, said he would use the money to buy a house to live in with his 5 1/2-month-old son and his fiancée, who is pregnant with their second child.

He said he cannot understand why nothing appears to have happened with his claim and questioned whether the political ambitions of Reilly, a Democrat considered a likely gubernatorial candidate, could be a factor. ''He's running for governor," Maher said. ''Would [agreeing to an award] make it like he's being easy and giving away money?"

Maher is being represented by Feldman, who also filed a claim for Stephan Cowans, a Roxbury man freed from prison last year after Suffolk prosecutors acknowledged the fingerprint used to convict him of shooting a Boston police officer seven years earlier was not his. He said he was stunned when Reilly filed a motion in March to transfer Cowans's claim to a slower track in the court to obtain more information. Feldman filed court papers pointing out that Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley issued a public apology to Cowans after he was freed from prison and that Reilly was quoted in the Globe as calling Cowans's case ''just a terrible tragedy [that] never should have happened."

The judge rejected Reilly's motion to slow the process as ''inappropriate." Last month, Feldman filed a motion asking the court to grant Cowans's claim as a matter of law. Reilly filed a response in which he agreed that Cowans was entitled to an award but reserved the right to contest the amount. Feldman said Cowans desperately needs money so he can finish his training as a barber, a pursuit he took up behind bars. Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, said he is puzzled that none of the former prisoners in Massachusetts has received any money.

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ROY MEADOW GUILTY

Sir Roy Meadow, one of the country’s leading experts on child abuse, gave erroneous and misleading evidence in the trial of Sally Clark which helped to convict her of murdering her two sons, the General Medical Council ruled yesterday. A disciplinary panel found that Professor Meadow, 72, failed in his duty as an expert witness to explain the limited relevance of his findings when giving evidence in Mrs Clark’s prosecution in 1999.

The paediatrician told the solicitor’s murder trial that the chances of two babies suffering cot death within an affluent family was 1 in 73 million. In his testimony and in evidence to police, the paediatrician also referred to his much-disputed “Meadow’s law” on cot deaths — suggesting that “one in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder”.

After three weeks of evidence at the GMC hearing in London, the fitness-to-practise panel ruled that some of Professor Meadow’s evidence was not balanced and was erroneous in parts. The panel will now decide whether the paediatrician’s actions amount to serious professional misconduct. If found guilty he could be struck off the medical register.

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A Shocking Shortt story

Police fabrication of evidence in Ireland (The Garda are the Irish police). It's not only in Ireland that police can just make things up and be believed


The summer of 1992 was a strange time in north Donegal. The rural backwater was in the throes of a new cultural phenomenon: rave, and the ravers' drug of choice, ecstasy. Clubbers from all over the north-west, from Derry to Tyrone, converged on the county's nightspots for the new techno music. Donegal was, for a while at least, hip, and nowhere more so than the Point Inn on the Inishowen Peninsula, the country's biggest nightclub. Local parents, gardai, politicians and the owner of the Point Inn, Frank Shortt, were all agreed: the drug dealing would have to be stamped out. In April of that year, Shortt, a chartered accountant and restaurateur, then in his late 50s, approached a senior garda and asked that undercover officers be deployed inside the club to catch the dealers. "We knew we were being hit by this tidal wave of drugs sweeping the country. But I suppose we were a bit naive about the guards at the time," he said.

The gardai declined to fulfil Shortt's request, but launched an undercover operation the following July without his knowledge. Inspector Kevin Lennon, a rising star in the force who was later promoted to superintendent, and his most trusted officer, Detective Noel McMahon, organised three visits to the Point Inn, culminating in a highly publicised raid on the night of August 2. Lennon, then attached to Buncrana Station, declared proudly to a local paper two days later that their clampdown on the drug barons had gone down with military-style precision. "It was very major. The lads who took on the operation in question responded magnificently. No batons were used during the operation," Lennon told The Derry Journal.

Frank Shortt, millionaire pillar of the local community, now found himself charged with knowingly allowing drugs to be sold inside his nightclub. A deal, a plea bargain of sorts, was reportedly offered in return for Shortt pleading guilty in the local district court. Shortt pleaded not guilty and was sent forward for trial by jury in Dublin's Circuit Criminal Court. Shortt's lawyers at the time, it has since emerged, were confident the prosecution would fail. But between the district and circuit courts new evidence began to emerge from the gardai. Detective McMahon supplied an additional statement, detailing how he observed the nightclub boss personally witnessing drug deals going on in the Point Inn.

"Even on the eighth day of the trial, I was being told I wouldn't be going to jail," Frank Shortt told The Sunday Business Post. "And then an hour later I was being led off in handcuffs to prison." Shortt, an innocent man, whose innocence eventually would be established as fact in the appeal courts, was sentenced to three years in prison. The first six months in Mountjoy was a living hell. "He was put on antidepressants which he should never have been on and he immediately went downhill," said his wife Sally this weekend. "He went from 12 stone to nine and half stone. He was just shuffling around, his brain was in a useless state. When I visited him he was like a zombie, the drugs, the antidepressants they gave him, had left him cuckoo. I'd go into to see him, and he'd mutter, `Is that you, Sally?' I thought `he's not going to survive six months"'.

Frank Shortt would later stage a remarkable personal recovery in Mountjoy, while the detectives who pursued him would suffer an extraordinary fall from grace. On the face of it, the case they took against Shortt was cast iron, built on layers of eyewitness statements, and corroborated by circumstantial evidence. At the trial, in 1994, Detective McMahon recalled witnessing a rave in full flow, with "lots of furious dancing and people going about openly dealing in what appeared to be drugs". A former member of the Emergency Response Unit, with 20 years experience as a garda, McMahon, working undercover, said he himself bought drugs in full view of Frank Shortt. Superintendent Kevin Lennon organised for marked 10 pound notes to be used for buying the ecstasy. McMahon, the chief witness at the trial, gave evidence about recovering these notes from one of the drug dealers, a youth known as Fringe. Fringe made a statement confirming he had been selling ecstasy. And garda technical experts confirmed that drugs were indeed found in the nightclub.

Lennon and McMahon went to great lengths to record everything. McMahon in particular was a compulsive note taker, with a Nixonesque passion for recording the minutiae of his operations. And like the former US president, he made the fatal mistake of holding on to the records.

Within two years of Frank Shortt's conviction, rumours began to circulate within and outside the Garda Siochana about the activities of Lennon and McMahon. Kevin Lennon was sufficiently scared to try to get his once trusted colleague to sign a statement, declaring: "I do not have anything whatsoever against Superintendent K Lennon . . . I do not know anything that would endanger his career or that I could say about him to endanger his career. I have never known Superintendent Lennon to act illegally while participating in any operation." Lennon would later describe this as an insurance policy in the event of his colleague making allegations about him. Alongside this bizarre letter of satisfaction, Detective McMahon kept other files, one of which was headed, "Lennon shafting me."

The formerly close relationship between the two Buncrana detectives had descended into one of fear and loathing. McMahon not only refused to sign the letter, he also confided to his wife Sheenagh that "he would never let that out of his hands". "He said to me that this was the biggest mistake that Kevin Lennon made and he said that piece of paper was so important to him". This admission was also one of Noel McMahon's biggest mistakes. Three years later Sheenagh McMahon formally ended their marriage and took with her some of the incriminating memos.

When Frank Shortt finally had his day in court last May, the paper trail left by the two gardai had widened to encompass some of the wildest allegations ever levelled at members of the Garda.

Shortt's new legal team, Eoin McGonnigle SC, Des Murphy BL and solicitor John Kelly, pieced together a much wider tale of alleged corruption than merely the alleged framing of an innocent man. They did this forensically, with documents obtained on discovery and new witness statements. Sheenagh McMahon and her husband's chief informant, Adrienne McGlinchey, told the court that evidence was concocted to convict Shortt; that Det McMahon plotted to plant drugs in the Point Inn and that both he and Lennon set up bogus arms finds.

Alcohol was a recurring theme in the story. McGlinchey said she had drunk with the two gardai in Buncrana Garda Station, at a garda's home, at her home, in garda cars and one night when McMahon was so drunk that she had to drive him home. According to McGlinchey, she, along with McMahon and Lennon had driven a Garda surveillance van loaded with explosives to a disused shed in Rossnowlagh and placed the explosives there. An "arms cache" was discovered in Rossnowlagh the following day.

McGlinchey said she was given cash by McMahon to buy drugs and told to plant them in the Point Inn in Quigley's Point, Inishowen. However, she got very drunk in Lifford and failed to contact him. Sheena McMahon recalled seeing her husband, Kevin Lennon and two other officers, Tina Fowley and Brendan Joyce at their home not long before the Shortt case. Her husband told her they were doing a statement for Shortt's trial. She said Joyce was typing at the computer and Lennon was reading from her husband's notebook, saying "Leave that in" or "Take that out". A draft statement, recovered on discovery by Shortt's legal team, appeared to corroborate this story.

The judges found that this was work-in-progress on the final statement composed in McMahon's household. This statement put Shortt in the picture for the first time. Other notes, written earlier by McMahon, had failed to indicate that Shortt was present when the drug deals were happening. One of the revised statements by the detective contained a handwritten note on the back, stating, "if giving evidence -- nasty."

When pressed about this, McMahon said: "I am renown [sic] and laughed at by people that live with me for making notes. I have to make a note of everything or I will forget something. It is a habit I have." It was, in retrospect, a very bad habit. Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman scathingly noted that during the detective's three visits to the Point Inn, McMahon, the self-proclaimed compulsive note taker, had not once made a record in his notes about seeing Frank Shortt witnessing drug deals.

So why did he hold on to these highly incriminating notes? Hardiman suggested that Lennon and McMahon's mutual suspicion of one another led them down this dangerous path of compulsive record keeping. "The statement annotated by the superintendent, and the Advice on Proofs which throws light on the annotations, were in the nature of insurance for McMahon if it were ever suggested that he had invented the additional evidence `of his own motion'. It implicated his superior as well as himself," Hardiman said.

The account of the two marked 10 pound notes was found to be patently spurious. Fringe, the drug dealer allegedly found with the notes and drugs, was searched by gardai outside the nightclub and no drugs or money were found at that stage. He was not questioned about the marked notes in Buncrana Garda Station. The marked notes were later found in his jacket the next day. In his statement to gardai, he said he was given two 10 pound notes from what turned out to be an undercover garda and then paid this money to another dealer to obtain the drugs. So it made no sense that he still had the cash in his possession. The custody record for the night that Fringe was detained in Buncrana Garda Station has gone missing. He was never charged with any offence.

The most dramatic and damning evidence of all about garda conduct during the Shortt investigation did not emerge until day four of the hearing in the Court of Criminal Appeal in May. Unknown to the lawyers for the state, Sheenagh McMahon revealed to the court that she had told the gardai in 2000 that her husband Noel had admitted to her that he had perjured himself at the original Frank Shortt trial. A statement to this effect should have been contained in the garda documents obtained on discovery by Shortt's legal team, but there was no record of it. In fact, the garda investigation team, headed by Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty, had not asked her to include this in her three statements.

Hardiman asked the state lawyers: "The question now is a very simple one; is there in any shape or form a signed or unsigned note or a mention of perjury by Mr McMahon?" Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions replied: "Not any material we have from the Carty Inquiry." Later that day, Gardai discovered that such a memo about the perjury claim did exist. This was taken from an interview on September 15, 2000 which read: "Sheenagh McMahon then spoke about the Frank Shortt case. She stated that her husband had told her that Tina Fowley nearly ruined the case in court. Noel told her that he had committed perjury in the Court. "She stated Kevin Lennon put Noel up to telling lies in the case. Sheenagh said that Tina Fowley could fill us in more on this matter. Noel told her that Frank Shortt did not deserve the sentence that he had received. "She said that Frank Shortt had gone to Superintendent Brian Kenny in Buncrana and had requested him to put gardai into the Point Inn in order to clear the place of drugs." The memorandum added: "Sheenagh McMahon stated that it was probably because of the false evidence given in the Frank Shortt case that Tina Fowley blew the whistle on the McBrearty case."

Sheenagh McMahon's evidence was corroborated by the informant Adrienne McGlinchey who said that Detective McMahon had told her that Shortt was set up, that he had told lies about the case and that he had got someone else to plant the drugs. A sister of the informant Adrienne McGlinchey told the court that Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty had told her they believed Adrienne had manipulated Det McMahon and Supt Lennon. She said Carty had also told her their allegations could never become public because of the damage it would cause the garda. "They just wanted to bury it," she told the court.

Frank Shortt said: "Nothing shocks me any more." He fears that Lennon, McMahon and Fowley -- all now suspended -- will become the fall guys in the saga, and that "a number of other gardai" will escape sanction. He and his wife Sally believe there was a political dimension to what happened, but they insist they are not bitter. "I take no pleasure in them being suspended, they have families too," said Shortt.

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THE KENNY RICHEY CASE

Still in jail after he won his appeal!

Kenny, the son of an US serviceman and a Scottish mother, was accused of starting a fire which killed a two-year-old girl, Cynthia Collins, in Columbus Grove, Ohio, on June 30, 1986. After his trial in January 1987, Kenny was sentenced to death. As far as the US authorities, and even the Scottish public, were concerned, that should have been the end of the story. Certainly, Kenny would have been expected to appeal against the conviction, or at least the death sentence, and to plead for his life. But few Death Row inmates - and there are hundreds of them in Ohio alone - serenely accept their fate.

But thanks to campaigners who took up Kenny's cause, flaws in the case began to appear which have slowly unravelled the prosecution's arguments to the point where their theory of what happened that night in Ohio seems so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. Their story goes something like this: after a drunken party, Kenny was supposed to have decided he wanted to kill an ex-girlfriend and her new lover, who were asleep in the apartment below Cynthia. In order to do this, Kenny, who had his arm in plaster, is supposed to have broken into a nearby greenhouse, stolen some paint thinners, and climbed on top of a shed to get into Cynthia's home. Once inside, he is said to have splashed the paint thinners around, set fire to the apartment and disconnected the smoke detector, with the intention of killing the sleeping couple.

Yet no traces of paint thinners were found on his clothing and arson experts say the burn patterns were more consistent with an accidental fire, such as a discarded cigarette. Indeed, Cynthia had a history of starting fires, as a firefighter at the scene that night told me. Several witnesses also saw Kenny trying to get into the blazing apartment to rescue Cynthia, and he had to be restrained.

All this and much, much more convinced me that a serious miscarriage of justice had taken place in Putnam County, Ohio. The question was, why was it taking so long for the authorities to admit they had got it wrong? There are some vested interests, not least because the assistant prosecutor of the case, Randall Basinger, was running for judge at the time. On top of this, the appeals system for death penalty cases is notoriously slow, and this of course favours the guilty who can string out their existence for as long as possible before the needle of lethal injection pierces their veins. For the innocent, it prolongs the agony of waiting for justice, if indeed justice ever comes.

In January, it appeared that justice had finally arrived for Kenny. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and ordered the state to set him free or retry him. His campaigners were jubilant: the evidence was so compelling that a retrial would be fruitless, they said. Unfortunately, it has been confirmed that the state will not free him without a fight, and a retrial has been ordered which may not take place until next year - 20 years after the "crime" which was no more than a tragic accident. There is no doubt in my mind that if Kenny finally gets a fair trial, and the evidence is heard, he will be freed. But it is clear now that there will never be any admission of culpability from the US authorities responsible for this miscarriage of justice.

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FATAL INDIFFERENCE

Inattention or indifference doesn't do me any harm. The same wasn't true, unfortunately, for Deborah Braillard, a 46-year-old woman who was arrested and jailed on New Year's Day. According to a notice of claim filed by her family's attorney against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as well as Howard Salmon, director of Maricopa County Correctional Health Services, and several others, Braillard was an insulin-dependent diabetic whose condition was ignored or treated with indifference by authorities, plunging her after three days into a diabetic shock that led to her death. "It's beyond outrageous what happened here," said attorney Michael Manning, whose $20 million claim is the first step toward a lawsuit. "Deborah had been in jail about a year before this, and it was all over her record that she was a diabetic. She started getting sick and they knew it, or they should have known it."

This isn't the first time Manning has gone to court for inmates who have died while in county custody. The insurance company for the sheriff's office paid $8.25 million to the family of Scott Norberg, who died in 1996 after a struggle in a restraint chair. Manning was their lawyer. And he has another multimillion-dollar case involving an inmate named Charles Agster, who died in 2001.

Arpaio spokesman Jack McIntyre told me Wednesday, "Manning's usual delivery - and it's the same here - is fabrication, conjecture and flights of fancy. Dead bodies are flights of fancy? I don't know that it works for anything other than to attract media attention." I was told by McIntyre and another department spokesman that the sheriff doesn't control Correctional Health Services. Then again, on its own Web site, Correctional Health Services calls itself "an agency . . . responsible for providing health care services to those incarcerated in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails." Not the Maricopa County jails, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails.

"It was in jail that Braillard's problems became evident," Manning said. In his notice of claim Manning says that Braillard's distress became so intense that she was moved from her cell to another room after other inmates complained about her moaning. MacIntyre, on the other hand, points out that the standard intake form for Braillard, who had been arrested on drug charges, does not list her as diabetic. "It's what she self-reported," MacIntyre said. "We've tried to get the board of supervisors to fund for crystal balls, but they haven't come up with the money."

Manning said that he doesn't believe the form. He said that Braillard never hid her diabetes. He plans to file a lawsuit on behalf of Braillard's daughter and father. "My fervent hope is that someday the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will do something about what goes on in the jails," Manning said.

I wouldn't count on it. County supervisors either ignore horror stories coming out of the lock-up or treat them with the same indifference as the family of Deborah Braillard claims that she was treated. Perhaps because they, too, believe it is "Arpaio's jail." Which would be fine only if all of this wasn't paid for with our money.

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NOT MUCH JUSTICE FOR FATHERS

Fatherhood has changed dramatically in the era of divorce and out of wedlock births, and much attention has been paid to two unfortunate products of this era-the absent father and the deadbeat dad. However, there is another type of father this era has produced, one which has received very little attention-the hero father. According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. Behind that statistic are legions of heroic divorced or separated fathers who fight a long, hard but generally unrecognized battle to remain a meaningful part of the lives of the children who love them and need them.

Some hero fathers move repeatedly to be near their children. In the controversial case of DeBrenes v. Traub, Eric Traub had already moved to new cities twice in order to be near his daughter when he was forced to conduct a lengthy and expensive legal struggle to prevent her from being moved to Costa Rica. As is typical, the court allowed the move. Traub's determination paid off, however, as the now teenaged girl became so set against the move that her mother, to her credit, dropped the request.

Most fathers are not so fortunate. In a recent California Supreme Court case, Gary LaMusga, who operates a business in Northern California, fought for eight years to prevent his two young sons from being moved to Ohio, 2,000 miles away. He eventually won, but his victory was a pyrrhic one because his children had already been moved out of state in violation of court orders. In the strange world of modern family law, even with the new decision his children will not be moved back.

While divorced dads are unfairly stigmatized as stingy, some noncustodial fathers raise their children in their homes but still pay child support to the children's mothers. Many others never ask for child support. In the face of a family court system which usually grants mothers a monopoly of power over children, these fathers must buy or rent their children back. When mothers allow their children to live with their fathers-or send them there because they've become unruly or inconvenient-fathers often won't challenge custodial and financial arrangements because they fear doing so will mean they'll be pushed out of their children's lives.

Other fathers endure physical abuse at the hands of their wives but remain in the relationships because they know that divorce will leave their children alone in the custody-usually sole custody-of an abuser. Decades of research show that women are as likely to abuse their male partners as vice versa, and that heterosexual men make up a significant minority of those suffering injuries in domestic assaults. However, gender politics has kept this research from influencing government and law enforcement policies. Many men know that revealing their wives' violence usually means the wife will claim that she was abused, and the system will side with her. Fathers are commonly arrested, punished or slapped with custody sanctions for their wives' violence.

In one highly publicized case, Dr. Xavier Caro, a Northridge, California rheumatologist, endured years of physical abuse at the hands of his wife Socorro, who once assaulted him so badly he had to have surgery to regain his sight in one eye. Xavier stayed in the relationship for the sake of his kids but his efforts failed, as Socorro later shot and killed three of their four children.

Some fathers face false charges of domestic violence or sexual abuse, which are commonly used as custody maneuvers in divorce. Those most vulnerable to these charges are dads who are their children's primary caregivers. Such charges are often made to separate these dads from their children so a new custody precedent can be set with mothers as the primary caregivers. Falsely accused men often bankrupt themselves fighting to regain access to their children. Meanwhile, many can only see their children in nightmarish visitation centers where fathers are treated like criminals.

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MORE "SCIENTIFIC" FRAUD IN VIRGINA

Eight years ago, in a case that has never been reviewed or audited, the Virginia crime lab made another mistake. But for a series of improbable events, it would not have been revealed. But for the discovery of the errors in the Washington case, it might have been forgotten.

The story begins in the spring of 1997 when two lawyers drove from Fredericksburg to Richmond for meetings with examiners at the Virginia crime lab. Their client, a 44-year-old itinerant house painter named Karl Michael Rousch, was headed for trial in a month for the abduction, rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. This crime, one of the worst, most-publicized cases in Spotsylvania County history, had dominated the local news since the girl’s disappearance the previous September.

Rousch, jailed since the previous November, insisted he was innocent. Tests performed on evidence at the crime lab insisted he was not.

The most damning of this evidence was explained in intricate detail by the lab’s fiber examiner during the lawyers’ meeting with her in April 1997. Three different kinds of fibers found in Rousch’s 1984 Dodge Caravan perfectly matched fibers taken from a blanket in which the body of the dead girl, Sofia Silva, had been wrapped. The lab had also performed a DNA analysis of biological evidence taken from Silva’s body. Those results, while less conclusive than the fiber match, did not exactly buttress Rousch’s claim of innocence.

One of the lawyers, Ben Woodbridge, recalls the lab examiner’s explanation that day: “If there was only one contributor [to the DNA sample], that contributor could not have been Karl Rousch. But if there was more than one contributor, then Rousch cannot be ruled out.”

To a DNA crime analyst, this language denotes a result known as “conditional inclusion.” To the criminal defense lawyers that day, it meant another kind of result: conviction. On the drive back to Fredericksburg, Rousch’s prospects seemed grim. “We thought it was all over,” Woodbridge recalls. “The fiber evidence was just devastating. I mean, [the fiber examiner] was going to get on the stand and say it was a complete match. And now the DNA guy was basically suggesting that Rousch and another person had raped the girl before killing her.”

Because Rousch could not afford to pay a lawyer, Woodbridge and Phillip Sasser had been appointed to his case by the judge. This meant that, in order to get a second opinion on the forensics tests, they had to ask the judge for money to hire an expert. But the judge said no. Then they asked for more time to prepare. The judge delayed the trial until September.

As it turned out, that delay would be indefinite. In a series of unlikely events, both tragic and extraordinary, the state’s case against Rousch turned to vapor. It began with the disappearance, on May 1, 1997, of two Spotsylvania County sisters: Kristin Lisk, 15, and her 12-year-old sister, Kati. The girls had come home from school and vanished, just like Silva. Investigators with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Department regarded this as mere coincidence. They knew Rousch had killed Silva because the Virginia crime lab had proved it. Rousch was in jail. Hence, no connection.

The FBI, brought in to help with the case, was unhampered by such certainty. Soon after the girls’ bodies were found, the agency decided to retest the evidence in the Silva case. The results were unambiguous and dramatic: The three fibers from Rousch’s Dodge Caravan did not match fibers from the blanket. In fact, none of the fibers matched. The Virginia crime lab, in addition to being flat wrong, was not even close. The FBI was so adamant on this point, Woodbridge says, that it eventually became clear to everyone involved that the original fiber analysis was “unconnected to science or fact.”

In the drama caused by this revelation, the lab’s DNA analysis lost all significance. The charges against Rousch were dropped. Not long afterward, the FBI announced the establishment of an undisclosed “forensic link” between the Lisk and Silva murders. The case remained unsolved until June 2002, when police attempted to capture a rape suspect named Richard M. Evonitz in the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes in Florida. Surrounded by police, Evonitz shot himself in the head. In a subsequent search of his car and his South Carolina apartment, police found newspaper articles and notes about the Silva and Lisk cases. A DNA analysis by the FBI crime lab confirmed that the evidence in the cases matched Evonitz.

The Virginia crime lab’s failure to exclude Rousch as a possible suspect in the Silva case was, according to Thompson, accurate. But in explaining the result to Rousch’s lawyers, the lab did not explain that the exclusion was statistically meaningless.

By Thompson’s calculations, the test results indicate that 36 percent of Caucasian-Americans and 24 percent of African-Americans also cannot be excluded as suspects. “That,” he says, “is like saying the suspect has brown hair. So what?”

The lab’s fiber analysis has never been explained. How, at what was then one of the most reputable labs in the country, was an examiner able to pass these results off as science? In 2001, three years after the revelation, a reporter for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star posed a version of this question to Ferrara. He seemed to have no answer. “I still, for the life of me, don’t know what the hell she did,” Ferrara said.

Perhaps, he speculated, the examiner’s ties to law enforcement — her previous career as a state trooper, for example, or her husband’s job as a sheriff’s deputy — had clouded her objectivity. In any event, he said, the incident had ended the woman’s 12-year career at the lab. New policies and procedures were now in place to ensure accuracy and integrity. The lab had learned a hard lesson. But it had emerged improved. “Ferrara said no lab is ever immune from problems,” the Free Lance-Star reporter wrote later. “But if suspicions exist, they need to be addressed.”

Virginia’s next execution, scheduled for July 11, will be that of Robin Lovitt. Sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of a night manager in an Arlington pool hall, Lovitt has insisted since his arrest that he is not the killer. His conviction was based, in part, on a DNA analysis performed by the Virginia crime lab in 1999.

The analysis, performed on two spots of blood on the pair of scissors thought to be the murder weapon, excluded Lovitt as the possible contributor of one of the spots, but not the other. According to Lovitt’s current lawyers, the results also implicate one out of every three white men and one of out of every three black men. Another test, on blood from a jacket, was inconclusive.

In Lovitt’s case, no new DNA analysis is possible. An Arlington County court clerk threw out the evidence in May 2001.

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LAPD FOUND TO BE CROOKED STILL

I don't suppose anyone is surprised

A federal judge on Wednesday declared a mistrial in the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful death case, setting the stage for the rap star's family to file a new lawsuit seeking to link his unsolved 1997 killing to the Los Angles Police Department's Rampart corruption scandal. U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper's ruling came after she expressed concern at a hearing Tuesday that the LAPD had deliberately withheld evidence. Her clerk and attorneys on both sides confirmed the ruling; a written order was to be issued Thursday. "There were only three days of testimony in the trial, which began June 21 but was interrupted when an anonymous tip led to the discovery of large numbers of LAPD documents that hadn't been turned over to family attorneys.

B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace, was 24 when he was gunned down March 9, 1997, while leaving a crowded late-night party at a Los Angeles museum. The rotund New York rapper also known as Biggie Smalls was one of the most influential hip-hop artists of the 1990s. His albums "Ready To Die" and the posthumously released "Life After Death" are regularly listed among the best in the genre. His family's lawsuit against the city and LAPD claimed corrupt LAPD officer David Mack arranged to have Wallace killed at the behest of Death Row Records founder Marion "Suge" Knight, and that LAPD officials covered up Mack's involvement.

Family attorneys, who had requested either a mistrial or default, plan to refile the suit with new allegations against the LAPD and Mack's one-time partner Rafael Perez.

The city had previously asked the judge to continue with trial, arguing that any new documents largely revolved around hearsay. Assistant City Attorney Don Vincent said Wednesday he wasn't sure what to make of the ruling. "It could be good, it could be bad. I don't have any idea," Vincent said. "I'd like to try the case on the merits."

Family attorney Perry Sanders Jr. said the family - including Wallace's mother Voletta and widow R&B singer Faith Evans - didn't want to have to go through another trial but would do so. He said the case would now delve into a corruption scandal in the LAPD's Rampart division dating to the 1990s. "We're about to get to the bottom of Rampart," Sanders said. "We're about to peel the onion back to its rotten core."

Perez was a central figure in the scandal, which involved alleged misconduct or brutality by corrupt officers in an anti-gang unit. More than 100 criminal convictions possibly tainted by police misconduct were reversed. Perez alleged wrongdoing by others after he was found to have stolen cocaine from an evidence room. Perez was the focus of most of the recently discovered documents, which had been sitting in an LAPD detective's desk drawer until late last month. The detective said he forgot about them, a claim Cooper called "absolutely incredible" during Tuesday's hearing.

The documents show in part that Kenny Boagni, who became friends with Perez in prison, told police in 2000 and 2001 that Perez acknowledged working security for Death Row on the night Wallace was killed. Boagni, who on Tuesday refused to be deposed without his attorney present, also told police that Perez said he called Mack on his cell phone before the shooting. Death Row was embroiled in a rivalry at the time with Wallace's Bad Boy Entertainment label, led by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. Death Row's star artist Tupac Shakur - who had traded insults with Wallace on various songs - was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip six months earlier. That killing also remains unsolved. The rivalry was central to the theory advanced in the Wallace suit, which sought unspecified damages. But all evidence presented at trial was circumstantial, with witnesses linking Mack only peripherally to Death Row events.

Now serving a 14-year sentence for bank robbery, Mack became a possible suspect after his first visitor in jail was a college roommate named Amir Muhammad. Detectives had received a tip that a man with a name similar to Muhammad's was the shooter, retired Detective Fred Miller testified at trial. Miller said he found that Muhammad, a Fontana mortgage broker, looked remarkably like a police composite sketch of Wallace's shooter. But eyewitnesses did not identify Muhammad from photos, and the case fell apart.

A later FBI investigation that followed similar evidence also foundered, but the theory became part of hip-hop lore after talkative former LAPD detective Russell Poole shared details about his investigation with filmmakers and writers. The book "LAbyrinth" and documentary "Biggie and Tupac" were released in 2002, the same year the Wallace family filed suit. Also, Sylvester Stallone is set to star in a fictional film on Poole's investigation.

Mack, Perez, Knight and Muhammad have never been arrested or charged in connection with the slaying, and by time of trial were not named in the family's suit. All have denied involvement. Knight's attorney Dermot Givens complained that his client was put in "an indefensible position" because he wasn't being sued but was being implicated in court testimony.

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ASTOUNDING INVENTION OF EVIDENCE

Just luck for the guy that someone came forward with real evidence

The Michigan Attorney General will not appeal the case of a Newaygo County man who was wrongfully convicted in the1979 death of a woman. Larry Souter maintained his innocence, even after 13-years in prison. He was recently released after new evidence came to light, showing someone else killed Kristy Ringler.

It was August 25, 1979, when Ringler was found lying in the road with a head injury at the intersection of M-37 and 8th Street in Newaygo County. She would die later. Police thought her death may have been the result of a hit and run accident, but a prosecutor successfully argued Souter hit Ringler over the head with a bottle.

That crime never happened. Carla Dimkoff came forward recently after learning Souter was convicted. She thinks her father actually hit Ringler with his motor home because she saw damage to the vehicle shortly after it happened. Her father has since died.

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SOME REMORSE FROM ROY MEADOW AT LAST

SIR ROY MEADOW expressed his deep sorrow yesterday for giving misleading evidence in Sally Clark's trial, the first public apology by the paediatrician who has helped to convict three innocent mothers of murdering their babies. In an unexpected outburst of remorse, six years after the Cheshire solicitor was jailed, he compared his feelings to the regret experienced by a doctor whose mistaken diagnosis brings suffering to a child.

Near by sat Frank Lockyer, Mrs Clark's father, who fought two appeals to secure her release after she had served three years of a life sentence for smothering her babies. Mr Lockyer's complaint to the General Medical Council (GMC) has brought Professor Meadow, 72, before a disciplinary panel charged with serious professional misconduct, which he denies. Asked about the apology, Mr Lockyer told The Times: "It is a significant development."

The retired expert's expression of regret came on a day when the credibility of his child-abuse theories was seriously undermined. Under persistent questioning, he admitted that he had no idea of the source of one of his most notorious theories: that "the chance of two cot deaths in a typical family was a million to one". He used that maxim in the prosecutions of both Mrs Clark and Donna Anthony, who was released in April after serving seven years of a life sentence for murdering two babies.

The one-in-a-million figure appears as an anonymous quotation in a paper that he published about 81 cases of apparent cot deaths that were later shown to be murders. But Professor Meadow was unable to remember who gave him the quotation, where or when. He had put an even more sensational statistic before the jury in Mrs Clark's murder trial in 1999. At the time he claimed that the odds of two cot deaths for an affluent, non-smoking, working mother were 73 million to one. He told the trial that this was equivalent to once in one hundred years, or like an 80-1 horse winning the Grand National four years running: "Very, very, long odds indeed."

The figure came from a table in an unpublished draft of the world's biggest study of cot deaths. But Professor Meadow had failed to consult the author of the report, Peter Fleming. Professor Fleming had told the fitness-to-practice hearing that the statistic was only a mathematical exercise to compare different risk factors in cot death and should never have been used in a court.

"That," Robert Seabrook, QC, for the GMC, said to Professor Meadow, "must have had a salutary effect on you?" Professor Meadow replied: "I wish I had known that before I had given evidence."

Mr Seabrook, asked: "Do you accept that your use of this table was misleading and inappropriate?"

Professor Meadow said: "It's self-evident. Misleading and confusing a lot of people, yes."

Mr Seabrook asked: "Is that something you feel profoundly sorry about, Professor?"

Professor Meadow answered: "Yes I do."

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THAT AMOUNT SHOULD MAKE THE BASTARDS THINK:

Pity it comes out of the taxpayer's pocket, though. (Follow-up to my post of June 27th.)

A whistleblower who alleged abuse of inmates at Wakefield prison has been awarded compensation of 477,600 pounds [around a million dollars] after winning a claim for unfair dismissal. The amount awarded to former prison officer Carol Lingard is thought to be the highest for a public sector claim. Mrs Lingard was treated as a "grass" after reporting claims prisoners were being bullied at the high-security jail, an employment tribunal heard.

Prison Service director general Phil Wheatley has since apologised to her. He acknowledged the organisation, the Professional Standards Unit (PSU) - established by new whistle-blowing legislation - and his deputy all failed to deal properly with her allegations.

Mrs Lingard's claims centred on one prison officer, who she claimed had warned a sex offender he could get slashed by other inmates if he was found with images of children. She alleged the officer then attempted to have the material planted in the prisoner's cell. Mrs Lingard alleged the officer had forged another prisoner's records to show poor behaviour and that he was involved in a suspicious assault allegation against the same inmate.

An initial investigation - later described as "poor" and "not professional" by the tribunal - found "no evidence" to support her allegations. Despite approaching John Slater, the prison governor, and the PSU - which briefly investigated her claims - her complaint went no further.

A Prison Service spokesman said on Wednesday: "The service acknowledges that it took an inordinately long time for the information which Mrs Lingard reported to be investigated and the investigations carried out were inadequate." It accepted the tribunal's recommendation there should be a comprehensive review of the PSU.

Mrs Lingard said: "I remain deeply disappointed that despite giving the prison service many opportunities to take responsibility for their actions during the last three years, I have had to fight a very long and hard case at tribunal for this to happen. "I am happy with the award and I am relieved that I can finally begin to put all of this behind me and look to the future."

Her solicitor John Sturzaker said Mrs Lingard was a "respected officer" who had highlighted "serious wrongdoings". "Her concerns and complaints were mishandled appallingly and she felt she had to resign her post," he said. "Mrs Lingard has now been completely vindicated by the tribunal."

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Disabled people who aren't -- but being paid handsomely for it: "A disabled police officer stands guard over Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen at the Rose Garden. An injured firefighter scrambles up mountains and through woods on his TV show, "Northwest Hunter." Another disabled firefighter owns an upscale Portland restaurant, aided by city taxpayers who subsidized his training at the prestigious French Culinary Institute in New York. All have one thing in common: Though clearly able to work, they continue to collect thousands of dollars in benefits each month from the Portland Fire and Police Disability and Retirement Fund. Disability programs in Oregon and most major U.S. cities serve as a temporary safety net for injured police or firefighters while they are unable to work, moving them off benefits and back to jobs as soon as possible. Not in Portland. An investigation by The Oregonian found the city's system is an open checkbook, with rules that allow injured police and firefighters to collect checks until they retire, even if they can earn a living in another job.... one in nine Portland police and firefighters is on disability, and they go out at four times the rate of their peers statewide."

Mealy-mouthed response: "Portlands elected officials said Tuesday they want to take immediate steps to fix problems in the city's police and firefighters disability system even as they plan for more sweeping changes in the $15-million-a-year program in an election next year. All agreed the city must act now to bring more injured police and firefighters back to work and make an expensive, inefficient system run better. Mayor Tom Potter, who also serves as chairman the Portland Fire and Police Disability and Retirement Funds board of trustees, said he is willing to bring Portland's disability system in line with those that care for injured police and firefighters elsewhere in Oregon and in other major U.S. cities. Potter said he was especially struck by findings in The Oregonians two-day series that showed Portland's disability system is more expensive than the workers compensation system that covers firefighters and police employed in other Oregon jurisdictions".


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MORE TORT LAW OUTRAGES

A jury in New Jersey has awarded $850,000 to a man who got drunk on New Year's Eve and passed out in a snowbank. It seems that two local police departments responded to a 1 a.m. call from an anonymous observer who thought he had seen a man collapse outside a restaurant. Police searched the area and found nothing. Nine hours later, in daylight, a passerby found Frederick Puglisi, who was then revived by police and rushed to a hospital. As Mike Kelly reported in the Bergen Record, ". . . police considered charging Puglisi with drunkenness, but opted not to. Ramsey Police Director Joe Delaney said in a newspaper account at the time that Puglisi had probably learned a lesson already." Not quite. Puglisi sued both police departments, claiming that frostbite damage to his right hand was their fault for failing to conduct a more thorough search. The jury had originally awarded Puglisi $1 million but decided to reduce the prize by 15 percent due to his contributory negligence. Another judge later reduced it by half.

So there it is. You get blind drunk, wander outside in 22-degree cold to find cigarettes, pass out in a snowbank and then sue the police for not finding you sooner. Is this a great country or what?

Actually, that's a serious question. If a drunk can get almost a million bucks, how much do sympathetic plaintiffs pull in? In Milwaukee, an 84-year-old man who was paralyzed in a car accident received $17 million. Who was to blame? Well, the driver of the car was a volunteer for the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay organization. He was delivering a statue of the Virgin Mary to an invalid at the time of the accident. Lawyers persuaded the jury that the volunteer was an employee of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and assigned damages accordingly.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, federal prosecutors are racking up indictments against individuals who falsely claimed to have been harmed by the drug Fen-Phen. The Clarion-Ledger reports that Gregory P. Warren recruited clients for Schwartz and Associates -- that is, he recruited people who would claim to have been harmed by Fen-Phen even if they had never in fact taken the drug. Twelve others have already pleaded guilty to filing false claims.

In California, a train conductor who claimed that his drinking problems were exacerbated after a crash won $8.5 million from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company. Patrick Phillips, a 52-year-old conductor, received minor head injuries when a Burlington Northern train crashed into the commuter train he was driving. After the accident, he was treated and released from a local hospital after two hours. But Phillips claimed that his alcoholism worsened in the years following the crash, leading to alcohol-related dementia. Burlington Northern agreed to settle the case out of court.
The tort system is corrupting. By rewarding -- in cold cash -- irresponsibility and a tendency to blame others for unavoidable misfortunes, we are eroding our national character. We are not alone, of course. Great Britain, the home of the stiff upper lip, has plowed new ground.

Walter Olson (overlawyered.com) describes a recent case: "Carl Murphy, 18, of Merseyside, England, has received 567,000 pounds for injuries sustained while criminally trespassing on the roof of a private warehouse in 1996, from which he fell 40 feet, sustaining multiple injuries. Murphy, who has convictions for robbery, burglary and assault, 'received his compensation after suing the company that owned the warehouse. He claimed that if the perimeter fence had not been in disrepair, he would not have been able to gain entry and suffer his injuries.' Although groups representing victims of crime expressed anger at his getting a sum 50 times higher than a murder victim's family could expect to receive from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, Murphy was unapologetic about his windfall, saying he planned to buy 'a few houses and a flash car' and [adding] 'this money is mine now and I'll do what I want.' Murphy 'was expelled from two schools in just over two years after his recovery, and his family blamed the fall for his bad behavior. His mother, Diane, and her partner, Kevin Parsons, both 36, are currently serving three years in prison for setting up a heroin and crack cocaine business from their council house.'"

Source



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ANOTHER CANADIAN COVERUP

An Ontario Court of Appeal judge expressed irritation yesterday over a continuing clamp on information involving the Steven Truscott murder case. Speaking at a media challenge of the secrecy surrounding the case, Mr. Justice David Doherty questioned whether the Ontario government has done all it can to open the case to public scrutiny. "A lot of people could have concerns about sealing everything up in what is the most notorious and well-known criminal case in Canada," Judge Doherty said sharply. "Quite frankly, I think we could use a little more help and a little more urgency from your side."

Mr. Truscott was sentenced to death at the age of 16 for the 1959 killing of 12-year-old Lynne Harper. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released on parole after 10 years. The media have challenged the sealing of a lengthy, investigative report that lay behind federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler's decision last fall to turn down Mr. Truscott's request for exoneration and refer the case to the Court of Appeal for a rehearing.

Late yesterday, Chief Justice Roy McMurtry said the three-judge panel will render its decision on the media request "very shortly." The rehearing is not likely to take place until at least winter. In the meantime, both the federal government and Ontario have opposed the contents of the Truscott investigative report becoming public. Written by former Quebec Court of Appeal judge Fred Kaufman, the report deals with the pros and cons of a host of witnesses and evidence.

Federal lawyer Croft Michaelson maintained yesterday that Mr. Cotler would like to see the information become public, but only if it does not taint the evidence of potential witnesses or harm individuals who are mentioned in it. Depending on the ruling, he said, federal lawyers may edit the report to remove the names of third parties, then release it.

However, Ontario Crown counsel Rosella Cornaviera warned that publicizing the contents of the report could induce several witnesses to change their testimony. "What basis do you have for saying they would not comply with a court order?" Judge Doherty asked, saying the Crown had produced nothing but "vague generalities" to back up its concerns. Ms. Cornaviera said that two or three witnesses are the type who might tailor their evidence.

Association lawyer James Lockyer told the judges yesterday that Mr. Truscott has no objection to the report being made public.

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THE TORT LAW RACKET

In this age of legal shakedowns and kickbacks it is a well known fact that Ralph Nader is owned and operated by the trial lawyers. Therefore it should come as no surprise that recently you may have read about Nader's ongoing plans for an American Museum of Tort Law in his home state of Connecticut. If this becomes reality, he owes it to the American people to also show the dominant ugly side of tort law, the one that is abused and manipulated by those lawyers who have done much less than a "socially redeeming" job. Whether Mr. Nader would be willing to devote the time and resources to such an enormous undertaking as the repulsive side of civil justice is doubtful.

With that in mind we offer our assistance at a modest $1750 hourly consultation fee. Here are a few humble suggestions on how the American Museum of Tort Law should showcase the reckless abuse, gamesmanship and degradation of our legal system by some of these social redeemers.

First, how about a Frivolous Lawsuit Room? Wallpapered in dollar bills representing taxpayers' money wasted on lawsuit abuse each year, this room will be dedicated to every lawyer and litigant that has laughed all the way to the bank. The main exhibit, encased in plastic, would be the veritable holy grail of civil justice, the McDonald's cup that held the coffee Stella Liebeck spilled on herself as she left the drive-through. She sued the company and won an initial award of $2.7 million.

On another pedestal let's place the jar of chunky peanut butter a prison inmate sued California over because he wanted the smooth variety instead. And, among many, many others, we should be sure to include the six-pack of beer a woman sued her supermarket over because she dropped it on her foot, winning more than $400,000.

The highlight of the Frivolous Lawsuit Room, though, will be a huge digital counter which continuously tells visitors how much the legal system has cost them so far that year. As a baseline, the American Tort Reform Association estimates this cost to be $1,200 per person, per year, for a total annual cost of billions.

Surrounding the display would be such threats to humanity as a stepladder and a football helmet, of which 20 to 50 percent of the cost goes strictly to cover liability.

We propose the next room be the Junk Science Room. On the walls, we can display images of all the dubious "experts" on whom personal injury lawyers have relied over the years to manipulate judges and juries. The centerpiece of the room will be a statue of Tara Ransom, a young child who relies on a brain shunt, made of silicone, to keep her alive. Her statue would be a reminder that even though real science has shown no link between silicone breast implants and disease, junk science has all but driven silicone from the market, limiting Tara's access to the only device available to keep her alive.

Elsewhere in the room would be shrines to products like silicone heart valves, pacemakers and vaccines that are too expensive because of avaricious lawsuits. And finally, the room will contain a large, clear plastic empty box, to symbolize all the life-saving products that will never be available because of the risk of lawsuits.

Our final room would be the Class Action Room. At the entrance a sign would read: "Class action suits were intended to help victims." As visitors walk inside they would see case summaries of famous class actions, and a breakdown of what the victims received, and what the lawyers received. One example is the recently-settled class action lawsuit over the size of a computer monitor screen, where each class member received a $13 rebate toward the purchase of $250 in new computer equipment, while the attorneys filing the suit negotiated $5.8 million in legal fees.

Another example would be a class action against the makers of a popular breakfast cereal, over a food additive with no evidence of any injury to consumers. The lawyers who sued the company received fees of almost $2,000 per hour, for a total of nearly $2 million. Consumers received coupons for a free box of cereal. Quarterly, one of these writers receives a check for one penny from a class action suit he barely knew he was part of! The lawyers made over $50 million. The check: uncashable!

In conjunction with this room we should run a side-contest where visitors can attempt to find the socially redeeming work in these cases.

Mr. Nader claims his 7,000 square foot American Museum of Tort Law will be "a major slice of American history." Indeed, lawsuit abuse has, unfortunately, become very much a part of our American legislative, executive and judicial heritage.

We pray that no public funds will be used to build the museum. We think the public has already given more than its fair share. In fact, after everything Americans pay to support lawsuit abuse, the museum admission should at least be free. In addition, how about all visitors who finish the tour receiving a $50,000 all cash rebate from the American Trial Lawyers Association?

Article from here


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YOU CAN BE A SEX OFFENDER EVEN IF YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING SEXUAL!

Fitzroy Barnaby said he had to swerve to avoid hitting the 14-year-old Des Plaines girl who walked in front of his car. She said he yelled, "Come here, little girl," before getting out of his car and grabbing her by the arm. He said he simply lectured her. She said she broke free and ran, fearful of what he'd do next.

In a Thursday ruling, the Appellate Court of Illinois said the 28-year-old Evanston man must register as a sex offender. While acknowledging it might be "unfair for [Barnaby] to suffer the stigmatization of being labeled a sex offender when his crime was not sexually motivated," the court said his actions are the type that are "often a precursor" to a child being abducted or molested. Though Barnaby was acquitted of attempted kidnapping and child abduction charges stemming from the November 2002 incident, he was convicted of unlawful restraint of a minor -- which is a sex offense.

Now, he will have to tell local police where he lives and won't be able to live near a park or school. "This is the most stupid ruling the appellate court has rendered in years," said Barnaby's Chicago attorney, Frederick Cohn. "If you see a 15-year-old beating up your 8-year-old and you grab that kid's hand and are found guilty of unlawful restraint, do you now have to register as a sex offender?"

But Cook County state's attorney spokesman Tom Stanton said Barnaby should have to register "because of the proclivity of offenders who restrain children to also commit sex acts or other crimes against them." In the criminal case against him, Cook County Judge Patrick Morse said that "it's more likely than not" Barnaby planned only "to chastise the girl" when he grabbed her, but "I can't read his mind." "I don't really see the purpose of registration in this case. I really don't," Morse said. "But I feel that I am constrained by the statute." Recognizing the stigma that comes with being labeled as a sex offender, the appellate court said "it is [Barnaby's] actions which have caused him to be stigmatized, not the courts."

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JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED

What's 34 years between friends?

An Oregon woman whose sister was killed in El Dorado County 34 years ago picketed the District Attorney's Office in Placerville on Tuesday, saying authorities are dragging their feet prosecuting the case. Anita McClure stood in front of the office building holding handmade signs that read "6 Postponements in 2 Years! Why?" and "Justice for Betty."

On June 18, 1971, Betty Marie Cloer, was found shot and bludgeoned to death in a field in Cameron Park. But it wasn't until 2 1/2 years ago that authorities got a break in the unsolved case. A "cold hit" within the state Department of Justice's DNA data bank linked DNA evidence from the homicide to the DNA profile of an inmate in the California prison system. Phillip Arthur Thompson was served with an arrest warrant in his prison cell in October 2003 and later charged with first-degree murder. He was transferred from California State Prison, Solano, to the El Dorado County jail in Placerville. But since his arrest, Thompson's preliminary hearing has been postponed a half-dozen times. His latest court date is set for Oct. 4.

The postponements have left McClure frustrated and angry. She said she and other family members are desperate for a resolution to the case. "We feel like we're being victimized every time it's postponed," McClure said Tuesday, as she sat in a folding chair, with three picket signs surrounding her.

Sean O'Brien, chief assistant district attorney, said he doesn't blame McClure for being upset with the delays but noted that the preliminary hearing had been postponed for valid reasons, including changes in Thompson's legal representation and time required to investigate further. "I told her the justice system can be very slow sometimes, especially the more serious the case is," O'Brien said. He added that the judge has to balance the desire for a speedy trial with the defendant's right to have a prepared and adequate legal counsel. O'Brien said the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office expects to have witnesses testify at Thompson's Oct. 4 hearing before Superior Court Judge Douglas C. Phimister. One concern in a case this old, O'Brien said, is to question witnesses before they die. ......

Clothing found at the crime scene was booked into evidence at the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department. Three decades later, the evidence was submitted to the state Department of Justice to see if any matches could be made using the prisoner data bank. Thompson's DNA matched the DNA taken from a semen sample found on Cloer's clothing.

According to California Department of Corrections records, Thompson was first sent to prison in December 1975 on Sacramento County convictions for forgery, assault and receiving stolen property. Since that time, he has been in and out of prison, most recently when he was sentenced in San Mateo County to 18 years to life for kidnapping.

McClure said she was 29 years old when her sister was killed. Now age 63 and suffering from degenerative arthritis, McClure said she isn't sure if she'll be well enough to come from her home in Harrisburg, Ore., to the preliminary hearing in Placerville. She also said she isn't sure if she'll continue to picket the District Attorney's Office. "I'm at the end of my rope," she said.

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Template problem

Well, I found out what went wrong with my previous template. It was of course a blogger.com snafu. Details -- including a workaround -- are here. I think I will stick with this present template, though. I think it is a bit easier on the eyes.