Sheriff and deputy sued after gross miscarriage of justice

In a 31-page civil suit filed Dec. 28 in federal court, the innocent local man who spent 12 years in jail for murder named the current Culpeper County Sheriff and chief deputy as among "the architects" of his wrongful conviction.

Plaintiff Michael Wayne Hash, 31, of Crozet in Albemarle County is seeking unspecified monetary damages in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia Charlottesville Division by his attorneys at Hunton & Williams related to Hash's 2001 conviction for capital murder in Culpeper County Circuit Court.

The civil suit names as defendants former Culpeper County Commonwealth's Attorney Gary Close, prosecutor in the case, Sheriff Scott Jenkins - lead investigator in the case - CCSO Chief Deputy James Mack, investigator in the case, former CCSO Sgt. Bruce Cave, former CCSO jailer Mary Peters Dwyer and Paul Carter, an imprisoned government informant who repeatedly lied on the stand at Hash's trial.

The civil suit requests a jury trial on the matter in the federal court in Charlottesville where it was filed.

Hash was freed from prison in March after U.S. District Court Judge James Turk vacated his conviction in the 1996 murder of neighbor Thelma Scroggins in her Lignum home. In his scathing written reversal, Turk said the Culpeper justice system used "methods that offend a sense of justice" in the investigation and prosecution of Hash representing "an extreme malfunction in the state criminal justice system."

Close, a prominent local Republican who served as commonwealth's attorney from 1991 to 2012, resigned within weeks of Turk's ruling being released. He could not be reached for comment Friday. Jenkins did not respond to several requests for comment.

Hash's attorney, in an email to the Star-Exponent Friday, confirmed that the civil suit had been filed.

"Mike will never be able to recover the nearly 12 years he spent in jail for a crime he did not commit," said lawyer Matthew Bosher. "One of the aims of the lawsuit is to hold the officials in Culpeper accountable for the misconduct that cost him all those years."

Bosher said a trial in the matter had not yet been scheduled.

Hash was 19 when he was arrested in the Scroggins murder for which he was wrongfully convicted by a jury in February 2001 and sentenced to life in prison with no parole. He was 15 when his neighbor was shot four times in the head.

In the civil suit recently filed in Hash's wrongful conviction, it says the named defendants "engaged in a concerted and malicious effort to convict Hash for a brutal crime despite the total absence of credible evidence against him." No physical evidence ever tied Hash to the crime scene and he maintained his innocence from the start. At least five people testified at his trial that he was elsewhere the night Scroggins was killed.

And yet Hash was arrested in 2000 in the crime along with two other local young men even though an initial investigation concluded a single assailant had murdered Scroggins, a 74-year-old retired mail carrier, widow and church organist at Lael Baptist Church. Hash was never a suspect in the initial investigation. The cold case was reopened by former Culpeper Sheriff Lee Hart shortly after his election won on a platform of solving unsolved crimes. Hart assigned Jenkins lead investigator on the case.

Within months, Hash was a suspect, taken into custody at 12:28 a.m. on May 17, 2000 by Jenkins and Mack, according to court records.

Hash's civil suit, which does not name Hart, says the named defendants engaged in multiple "unlawful acts" in wrongfully convicting him of the crime including: feeding witnesses information about the case; coaching witnesses in their false accounts and persuading witnesses to lie by promising them favorable treatment.

"Defendant law enforcement officials also went to great lengths to suppress and withhold the evidence of their own misconduct to ensure Hash's false arrest, unfair trial, wrongful conviction and continued imprisonment after his conviction," the suit says. "As a result of defendants' intentional, bad faith, willful, wanton, reckless and/or deliberately indifferent acts and omissions, Michael Hash was deprived of his federal constitutional rights, was robbed of nearly 12 years of his life and freedom and sustained severe physical, emotional and economic damages."

According to the civil suit, Jenkins had never led a homicide investigation and Mack had never investigated any major crime when Hart assigned them to the Scroggins murder. The civil suit quoted sworn testimony in 2011 from Jenkins on the matter: "James Mack I don't think ever investigated anything more than a petty larceny in his entire career, and he spent four years prior as jail officer under Sheriff Mitchell ... Mack is a black male. He was put in (the Investigations) division for that reason. They wanted a black officer in the division, and that's why he was put there ... He had absolutely, to my knowledge, no specialized training for investigations whatsoever. He was so to speak learning on-the-job training was what it was, assigned with me to this cold case ... I know it sounds horrible and it is embarrassing to think that an office did that, but that's the political nature of the sheriff's office, that people with no knowledge and experience are allowed to be put in positions that can bring horrible results."

Calvin Bruce Cave was assigned to supervise Jenkins and Mack even though he had never investigated a murder, according to Hash's civil suit.

Among the witnesses pursued against Hash during Jenkins' investigation was Hash's cousin Alesia Shelton, serving time in jail for a 1999 shooting. "Deputies Mack and Jenkins offered to 'help' Shelton or to 'shorten her sentence' in exchange for information," the civil suit says, in spite of the fact for most of the initial interview she insisted repeatedly she knew nothing about the Scroggins homicide.

Following a cigarette break outside of the jail, Shelton was recorded as saying, "that's when it hit me," vaguely describing discussions she supposedly had about the crime with Hash and the two other teen aged boys charged in Scroggins murder, Jason Kloby and Eric Weakley. Four days later, Shelton failed a lie detector test revealing she was deceptive on every question implicating Hash - information never disclosed at Hash's trial.

Another key witness against Hash was Weakley, who last year recanted any and all testimony implicating Hash or himself in Scroggins' murder. In a recent sworn statement included as part of the civil suit, Weakley said, "Jenkins and Mack showed me everything you can imagine about the crime. They showed me awful crime scene photos ... Jenkins and Mack talked to me about a lot of other details of the murder such as the location where Ms. Scroggins' body had been found, the position it was in, and how she died."

Weakley, who spent nearly seven years in jail after accepting a plea deal in the Scroggins murder, said Jenkins and Mack "became extremely frustrated" with him in subsequent interviews. "When I would answer questions in a way they didn't like, the investigators would suggest that I was lying or confused," Weakley recently said.

Eventually, he agreed to go along with the story.

Weakley said, "Once I finally said I had been there, Jenkins and Mack made me repeat the story back to them over and over again. They would keep repeating questions until I gave them an answer that satisfied them."

Weakley's attorney subsequently started negotiation with Close to make a deal whereby Weakley testified against Hash and Kloby. Kloby was found not-guilty at trial.

According to the civil suit filed by Hash and his attorneys, Virginia State Police Agent Wayne Carwile disagreed with the decision to arrest Hash.

"I don't believe anything that Eric Weakley said, and the Shelton girl failed the polygraph on issues that were important to a very important investigation, so as far as I'm concerned, she wasn't reliable either," Carwile said in a sworn statement that's part of the civil suit.

Carwile said he warned prosecutor Close that Weakley was entirely unreliable and "just saying things."

Further, according to the civil suit, Jenkins himself admitted under oath he believed Hash's arrest was not "proper" because the CCSO "had a very weak case." And yet "the sham investigation" continued, the civil suit said.

Among other improprieties detailed in the civil suit regarding Jenkins' investigation of Hash were intimidation tactics used on alibi witnesses and the orchestrated transfer of Hash to the jail in Charlottesville so as to expose him to known prison snitch Paul Carter.

"Culpeper officials engaged in extraordinary machinations in order to put Hash in a cell block with Paul Carter," the civil suit says, adding Hash was the only inmate in the last 15 years transferred from the Culpeper jail to the Charlottesville jail.

The cell block in which Hash was placed generally housed black males, according to the civil suit, whereas Hash is white. According to a jail officer quoted in the suit, "it was highly unusual to place a white teenager such as Hash in a permanent housing cell block with all black males."

In an attempt to legitimize the transfer, civil suit defendant Mary Dwyer, CCSO jailer at the time, created a false report on May 24, 2000 stating that Hash was transfered "for administrative reasons" such as being closer to his court-appointed attorney, according to the civil suit.

"Dwyer would later admit in a deposition that moving Hash to be closer to his attorneys was not the 'real reason' for the transfer and that explanation was provided because it 'sounded good' and that her May 24, 2000 report may have been created solely 'because it looks pretty on paper,'" according to the civil suit.

For years, the suit continued, Close denied the true purpose of the transfer until earlier in 2012 when "he finally admitted the real reason for the transfer: to put Hash in 'a jail where there was a snitch.'"

Prior to Carter's meeting with Hash in the Charlottesville jail, the informant was visited by two Culpeper law enforcement officials who fed Carter information about the Scroggins murder, according to the civil suit. Hash denied any involvement in the murder in speaking with Carter.

And yet on June 26, 2000, Jenkins and Mack met with Carter for about 35 minutes and subsequently Jenkins created a false report for the investigation file stating Hash had confessed the crime to the informant, according to the civil suit. Carter struck a deal with Jenkins, Mack and Close that in exchange for his false testimony at Hash's trial the Culpeper authorities would assist in reducing his federal sentence.

The agreement was concealed at Hash's trial. Close, in addition, went on to testify falsely at trial regarding the arrangement with Carter saying none existed. Mack and Jenkins, in earlier appeals by Hash of his murder conviction, also lied about the jail transfer and the promises to help Carter get his sentence reduced, according to the civil suit.

"Also, Culpeper officials have never turned over the letters, that according to Jenkins, Paul Carter wrote to them," the civil suit says. "Gary Close also admits that a box of documents related to Hash's case has 'gone missing.'"

Judge Turk, in his recent analysis of the case against Hash, summarized Close's conduct as follows: "The proseuctor's office engaged in a series of lies and failures to disclose exculpatory evdience to Hash's trial counsel." Turk further characterized Jenkins' and Mack's conduct in the case as rising "to the level of outrageous misconduct because the acts were intentional and not merely negligent."

Original report here




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Federal justice and Aaron Swartz’s death

Anger at Swartz's prosecutors is valid. Anger at the federal justice system in which they acted is needed

Aaron Swartz was not the first brilliant young technologist to commit suicide while facing prosecution by the U.S. government for cybercrimes. In 2008, a young hacker named Jonathan James killed himself when he was named as a suspect in a case brought by the very same prosecutor who zealously pursued Swartz — Massachusetts Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann.

Unlike Swartz, James left a note. “I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control.” He had been incarcerated for cybercrimes as a teenager. Meanwhile Swartz’s family and partner directed some blame for his suicide last week at “a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

Swartz’s defense lawyer Elliot Peters has specifically decried the zealousness with which the prosecutor pursued his client. Heymann, Peters charged this week, “was very intransigent.” Peters said that the prosecutor was seeking “some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron’s case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill.” According to Peters, “[Heymann] was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”

In the wake of a young man’s suicide, these are heavy condemnations, the weight of which should not all fall on one prosecutor, however fervid or objectionable his actions may have been. Heymann’s treatment of Swartz — including the insistence that in any plea deal Swartz would have to face jail time — arises from a context in which federal prosecutions regularly contour without obstruction into the persecution of activists and dissenters. And the conditions for this pattern are provided by a legal system in which the concentration of power is uniquely placed in the hands of prosecutors.

Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced Tuesday that he had an investigator looking into the handling of Swartz’s case. Rep. Zoe Lofgren took to Reddit, the online platform Swartz helped found, to propose legislation, “Aaron’s law,” which aims to stop the government bringing disproportionate charges in cases like Swartz’s under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. However, the structural problems plaguing federal justice go far beyond Swartz’s prosecutors and cyber crime law.

Concentration of power

“When one considers the fact that more than 95 percent of all criminal cases are resolved with guilty pleas, it is very clear that prosecutors control the criminal justice system through their charging and plea bargaining powers,” wrote American University law professor Angela Davis last year. The introduction in recent years of minimum mandatory trial sentencing has provided prosecutors increasing leverage with which to extract guilty pleas — fear of losing a trial on charges with hefty mandatory sentences puts defendants squarely in the thrall of prosecutors.

This proved particularly problematic for Swartz who, as Henry Blodget at Business Insider put it, “had the bad luck to run into a prosecutor who was very passionate about defending the lines that Swartz appears to have crossed.” It is a troubling state of affairs indeed if the vagarious interests of one federal prosecutor, acting outside of public view, can determine so much about an individual’s future. A number of other recent cases illustrate how much difference the particular desires of given U.S. attorneys can make. For example, the four U.S. attorneys in California acted to shut down hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries (despite the state deeming them legal) and bringing substantial federal charges against a handful of dispensary owners who had been following state law.

Compounding the problem of prosecutorial power is a profound lack of transparency. As Davis noted, “charging and plea bargaining decisions are made behind closed doors, and prosecutors are not required to justify or explain these decisions to anyone.”

Black boxes

Federal prosecutors, appointed by the president and thus not accountable to an electorate, decide what, who and how to prosecute through some of the blackest boxes in our judicial system — grand juries. As I wrote in Truth-Out last year, “Ironically, the purported purpose of a federal grand jury is to act as ‘a safeguard to the accused from the improper motivations of government’ – to protect the accused from prosecutorial overreach.” However, as Will Potter, author of “Green Is the New Red,” who has long covered the state persecution of environmental activists, has noted, these closed-door procedures brought by a U.S. attorney “have been used historically against social movements as tools of fishing expeditions, and they’re used to seek out information about people’s politics and their political associations.”

Last year I wrote in Salon about the anarchists in the Pacific Northwest incarcerated without any criminal charges for their refusal to speak to a federal grand jury when subpoenaed. As I noted, grand juries are “rare instances in which an individual loses the right to remain silent. As was the case with the Northwest grand juries resistors, the grand jury can grant a subpoenaed individual personal immunity; Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are therefore protected, but silence is not. In these instances, refusal to speak can be considered civil contempt. Non-cooperators can be jailed for the 18-month length of the grand jury.” In the past year, four individuals who resisted cooperating with the Northwest grand jury have been put behind bars.

As such, federal prosecutors coerce activists into giving up information, while the subpoenaed parties are told nothing about who the subject or subjects of a grand jury investigation might be, or how information gleaned through grand jury hearings might be used. Individuals who refuse to cooperate with this system risk substantial jail time. Again, the federal prosecutors have all the leverage; resistance takes great strength and formidable support networks.

Swartz’s defense attorney told the Huffington Post that Assistant U.S. Attorney Heymann “had harassed several of Swartz’s friends into testifying before a grand jury.” As one anarchist who refused to cooperate with a New York grand jury in 2009 told me, when a group of friends or broader network are targeted with grand jury subpoenas, fear, distrust and despair spread fast, not least because of the secrecy shrouding procedures. And this atmosphere of intimidation is created long before charges are even brought.

Property, life, liberty

Writing in Rolling Stone last May, Rick Perlstein highlighted a disturbing pattern in which federal authorities devote disproportionately more attention to targeting activists, anarchists and Muslims than they do other groups such as white supremacist militias. “The State is singling out ideological enemies,” wrote Perlstein, noting how FBI sting operations regularly focused on entrapping activists and anarchists (like the eight Cleveland anarchists last year who were “unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag” but were guided into a bomb plot by an undercover agent) rather than racist far-right militias deemed currently to be the greatest homegrown terror threat.

Swartz, as I’ve noted, was no anarchist. But his brand of activism — including the sharing of academic articles — fell within the purview of behaviors deemed threatening to the government. Critics of the Massachusetts U.S. attorney who have stressed that Swartz’s alleged crimes had no victims forget that the government has a strong history in doling out harsh punishments when property — intellectual or material — is involved. In all their years of activism, particularly concentrated in the 1990s, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front never injured one human or animal and took pains to ensure this was the case. Nonetheless, acts of property damage alone led then-FBI director Robert Mueller in 2006 to call these environmental activists one of the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.” The recent revelation of extensive FBI surveillance of Occupy activity aligns with this pattern.

A petition on the White House website for President Obama to remove Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (Heymann’s superior) over her office’s treatment of Swartz has garnered more than 29,000 online signatures — 25,000 are needed to require a response from the administration. The desire for retribution over the witch hunt directed at a thoughtful, brilliant, passionate young man is understandable. Whether Ortiz, Heymann and others involved deserve punishment or removal is one thing — perhaps they do. But even if they are ousted, our federal justice system will remain structured around prosecutorial control, secrecy and a troubling ideological bent against the ideas for which Swartz fought.

Original report here




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Last charge dismissed in wrongful conviction

WAUKEGAN, Ill. — Prosecutors in Lake County have dismissed the remaining charge against a Chicago man who spent 20 years in prison before DNA evidence pointed to someone else.

Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim on Monday agreed to drop the aggravated battery charge against Bennie Starks.

“Mentally, it’s a huge burden that has been lifted, to be vindicated [and] for his innocence to be acknowledged,” said Vanessa Potkin, Senior Staff Attorney with the Yeshiva University Innocence Project. The group has been working on Starks’ case since the 1990s.

Starks was convicted in 1986 of raping a 68-year-old Waukegan woman. He's been free on bond since 2006 when an appeals court ordered a new trial after DNA testing pointed away from him. Starks was also convicted of a battery charge in the same 1986 attack.

The rape charge was dismissed last year after an appeals court ruling.

Original report here




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It’s time for Missouri to end policing for profit

Some Missouri schools lack effective air conditioning.

Some Missouri school children shiver at their desks because the budget is tight.

Some Missouri schools share textbooks.

All Missouri schools could use a little more help in their funding: a few new books, a roof repair, another teacher or afterschool activity to help keep kids in school and away from drugs.

Many police cars in Missouri never shut off. They happily burn precious gasoline for hours on end while the officers sitting in them blast the air conditioning or heat. The officers are comfortable, sporting new equipment purchased from the Feds with asset forfeiture funds for pennies on the dollar.

Other Missouri cops dig into fine dining and give each other awards, celebrating the money confiscated through asset forfeiture, money that has largely been returned to department to purchase toys, dinners, awards and serve as a general slush fund. These funds have been misused by law enforcement across the nation. But in Missouri, it is supposed to be different.

In Missouri, the police aren’t supposed to steal from the schoolchildren.

Yet they do.

Columbia, Mo., Chief of Police Ken “Pennies” Burton made regional and national news for describing federal asset forfeiture returns as “pennies from heaven.” Burton recently received permission from the Columbia City Council to spend asset forfeiture money to purchase wearable cameras for his officers.

But Burton’s “pennies” come with a price.

Some assets are confiscated from people who have not been convicted a crime. Those people experience strong-arm robbery at the hands of street gang. There is little to no difference between having your property stolen by criminal and having your property stolen by a cop. The only difference is recourse. If a criminal steals your stuff, you can call a cop.

But when a cop steals your stuff, attempting to stop him is a crime that will result in years as a guest of the Missouri Department of Corrections, which leaves the victim only two choices: hire an attorney or bend over and take it. Hiring an attorney to reclaim your property is pointless – except when there are significant sums involved. It is an expensive long process with the deck stacked against you.

The process is simple. If the cops find a significant amount of property they want to keep, they call in the DEA or other federal agency. The feds seize the property and return a large percentage back to the department. It is just like the old mafia business: Vito brought his idea to the Don. The Don blessed it and Vito kicked a share up to the Don.

If there is a smaller amount, the local law enforcement may simply confiscate it and send it over to the prosecuting attorney for forfeiture. Once the property is forfeited in this manner, 100% of the proceeds are transferred to Missouri schools.

Missouri law requires forfeited funds to benefit the schools.

So, when the police want to throw a party, buy some swag, or give each other awards, they bring in a fed and circumvent Missouri law.

This essentially means that the local and state police departments decided that they are above Missouri law and they should make a profit from their policing. And they do.

Millions of dollars funnel into Missouri law enforcement coffers through this system – Millions of dollars that should be spent teaching our youth.

In Columbia, the city council questioned the distribution of funds. They still approve the theft of money from Missouri schools, but at least they started questioning.

It is an old maxim among detectives and reporters: follow the money. When you find out who profits, you find out who had motive for the crime. It is time to end policing for profit.

Original report here




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Convicted murderer protests his innocence over girlfriend's death in online clip

A convicted murderer has protested his innocence in an unprecedented YouTube video filmed behind bars. Luke Mitchell, 24, is serving a life sentence in a Scottish prison for the brutal murder of his teenage girlfriend Jodi Jones.

But now, in a landmark move, prison authorities have given permission for footage shot in jail to be made public.

Mitchell - who is serving a life sentence for the killing of Jodi Jones who was found dead near her home in Easthouse, Dalkeith, Midlothian, in June 2003 - has always being involved in her murder

The dramatic video clip - which is today being broadcast on the internet - shows Mitchell denying his involvement in Jodi’s murder while wired up to a lie detector machine.

The extraordinary move is believed to be the first time a convicted criminal has ever been seen taking - and passing - a polygraph test while in prison.

Mitchell, who has consistently denied killing 14-year-old Jodi, hopes that releasing the clip onto the internet will persuade the public that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

At the end of last week, he told his mother: 'I want the world to see that I actually went through this process and it backed what I have always said - that I didn’t kill Jodi.'

As revealed in the Scottish Mail on Sunday, Mitchell passed a lie detector test carried out by an independent expert in a prison visiting room last April. As is normal practice, the test was filmed.

Campaigners backing Mitchell applied to the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) to use the footage to help clear his name. Permission from the SPS was required because the clip was filmed within prison grounds.

And last week the governor of Shotts Prison, the top-security jail where Mitchell is being held, gave the go-ahead.

The footage shows Mitchell dressed in a standard prison-issue blue tee-shirt being asked a series of questions - including three key questions related directly to the murder.

Mitchell, jailed for a minimum of 20 years in January 2005, was shown to be telling the truth when he denied being involved.

The convicted killer was interviewed by experienced polygraph examiner Terry Mullins, secretary of the British Polygraph Association, who has carried out a string of lie tests in English prisons although the examination of Mitchell has been his only work in a jail north of the border.

The release of the video is the first time footage of one of his prison tests has been shown publicly.

Mitchell’s mother Corinne said her son was delighted that the public can now watch him passing the test.

Mrs Mitchell, 53, who visited him on Thursday, said: 'He says he has never had anything to hide so he didn’t hesitate when he had the chance to take it. In fact, he had asked for a polygraph since day one.

'Luke told me he believes the test is a crucial indication of his innocence to go along with other issues, such as the lack of forensic evidence linking him to the crime.'

Mrs Mitchell has also passed a lie test, backing her claim that she was with the convicted killer at their home at the time of the murder.

During his polygraph examination, the camera focuses on Mitchell, who tries to remain still throughout as any movement can affect the monitoring process. On the advice of the examiner, he keeps his eyes closed throughout.

Mr Mullins is heard putting a series of questions to Mitchell three times, changing the order on each occasion.

Answering the three questions directly relating to the murder, Mitchell clearly says “No” when asked: “Were you present when Jodi was stabbed?”

In answer to the question: 'Did you stab Jodi on June 30, 2003?', Mitchell responds: 'No' in a strong voice.

He speaks more quietly as he repeats: 'No' when asked: 'Did you know for certain where Jodi’s body would be found?'

The question was asked in light of evidence in court that Mitchell led searchers to Jodi’s body because he knew where it was. He has always claimed his dog alerted him to the gruesome discovery.

After the tests were carried out last year, Mr Mullins concluded that Mitchell had been telling the truth.

He said: ‘I’m certain of the test result. It’s absolute. I can’t believe Luke Mitchell was convicted on the evidence that was available.’

He said Mitchell appeared confident but slightly nervous as he arrived to undertake the test process, which took nearly two-and-a-half hours.

Mr Mullins explained: ‘Most people are nervous because of the unfamiliar technology rather than the fear of failing.

'I spoke to him at length about what happened on the day of the murder, from before leaving school, and up to the next day.

'He got very upset when he began recalling the moment when he found Jodi’s body. During the test I asked him to close his eyes so he could concentrate and not be distracted by the prison officers who were observing through the glass walls of the meeting room. 'At the end I asked him how he thought he’d got on. He confidently said: “I’ve passed”. He was right.’

Mitchell was just 14 when Jodi was brutally murdered near their homes in Midlothian after she had gone out to meet him. He was 16 when he was found guilty after a marathon trial that culminated in 2005.

Jodi was found behind a wall beside a lonely path near her home in Easthouses. She had suffered a slashed throat and post-mortem cuts to her eyelids, right cheek, left breast, abdomen and right forearm. There was also a penetrating wound to her mouth and her hands had been tied.

Mitchell has always insisted he wasn’t guilty of the horrific slaying but failed to have his conviction quashed on appeal.

His case is currently being examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates potential miscarriages of justice and can recommend a fresh appeal.

Polygraph tests are inadmissible in Scottish courts but the report on Mitchell’s test was included in his submission to the SCCRC.

Criminologist Dr Sandra Lean, who has spearheaded the campaign to free Mitchell along with his mother, said the lie test provided important evidence.

'The polygraph result in Luke’s case reinforces what the other evidence has been telling us all along – there is not a scrap of evidence that Luke Mitchell murdered Jodi Jones,' she insisted.

She criticised Mitchell’s prosecution, insisting: 'The case against him was "purely circumstantial" – bits and pieces cobbled together to try to make a justifiable case.

'Yet the real evidence shows the prosecution case to be untenable,' she claimed.

A Scottish Prison Service spokesman confirmed: 'The SPS had no objection to the release of the footage, with the consent of Mr Mitchell.'

Original report here




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Chicago police chief: We’ll shoot licensed civilians with guns

No surprise that most cops are thugs in Chicago. They've even got a thug chief



Chicago’s Police Chief Gary McCarthy. He’s one of those four-star chiefs – four stars needed to match his four-star ego, and proving that he’s superior to single-star chiefs, and even two- and three-star chiefs. We always wondered why he stopped at four stars. If four are good, why not use five, or eight?

Did you know in his younger days, he and his NY State Police Trooper brother, while highly intoxicated and off-duty, shot out street lights outside a bar on St. Paddy’s Day in the 46th Precinct where McCarthy worked. They then nearly started a riot by shouting the “N”-word at locals. Don’t believe it? Check out the link.

Chicago’s illustrious Police Chief, Superintendent or SuperNintendo (whichever you wish to call him) got on a local radio station in Chicago and told it like he perceives it.

He said that citizens licensed to carry could be, and indeed predicted they would be shot by Chicago Police Officers.

Like that happens in 49 other states (or 56 other states if you listen to Barack Obama).

Here’s the words from the Chicago’s Chief Street Light Asssassin, as reported by News in Black:

“I don’t care if they’re licensed legal firearms, people who are not highly trained… putting guns in their hands is a recipe for disaster. So I’ll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we’re going to have tragedies as a result of that. I’m telling you right up front.”

How is that different than police officers are now trained, Mr. Streetlight Assassin?

Here’s what Second City Cop, a blog by and for Chicago Police Officers thought of McCarthy’s remarks:

…Rahm and McShitForBrains continue to push their belief that Illinois residents in general and Chicago denizens in particular, are completely incompetent when it comes to gun ownership. Let’s be real – how often do you think you’ll be running into an actual legally carrying citizen? Those aren’t the people that the police usually encounter. And if you aren’t treating every traffic stop as one where a gun might be on scene in any event, you’re not being the police.

And not to denigrate the Department, but we’ll bet a sizable percentage of Illinois citizens not only know guns better than the police, they can outshoot them 60-to-70% of the time, 99% of the time if we’re talking long guns.

Remember, McKillTheCitizens was documented to have been shooting out streetlights when he carried a gun in New York – is that really the sort of asshole who should be telling citizens they can’t have guns after a year of 500+ homicides, 2,500+ shootings and a January that is already 200% ahead of last years dismal showing?

Original report here




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Charges dropped against dodgy Colo. detective

The Weld County district attorney’s office confirmed Friday that it will no longer be pursuing charges against the detective accused of providing false testimony that may have aided in the wrongful murder conviction of Timothy Masters.

James Broderick was initially indicted on nine counts of first degree perjury on July 27 for making “materially false statements under oath” in the murder trial of Masters in 1999. Masters was convicted in that trial of the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick in Fort Collins.

Masters was released from prison in 2008 when he saw his conviction vacated due to DNA evidence.

In the initial indictment. Broderick was accused of lying under oath. TrueCrimeReport.com, which named Broderick in its “Top 5 police blunders” list in 2010, suggested that if Broderick had not done so, Hettrick’s murder might have been connected to Richard Hammond, a man who lived near the murder scene and would later be charged as a sexual deviant.

Hammond, an eye surgeon, committed suicide soon after being arrested in 1995, when he was accused of secretly filming the genitalia of women at his medical practice. Some media outlets speculated that Hammond’s trade may have gone a long way in explaining the surgical-like mutilation of Hettrick’s body.

On Dec. 19, a court dismissed all nine counts of perjury against Broderick, mostly due to a lack of probable cause. After several attempts at appeal, the Weld County district attorney’s office ran out of options Monday, when the Colorado Supreme Court denied a petition to issue a Writ of Certiorari.

In particular, district attorney Ken Buck pointed to two dropped charges as detrimental to the case against Broderick.
The first: an allegation that the detective lied about a shoe print impression at the crime scene. The second: an allegation that he lied about the color of spray paint on a bridge near the crime scene.

Prosecutors were asking the state supreme court to review the ruling of a district court to drop those two charges. That review never came to pass when the court denied the prosecution’s Writ of Certiorari petition.

“The two counts that were dismissed by the trial court were critical to this case,” Weld County district attorney Ken Buck wrote in a statement Friday. “Without the ability to pursue those charges, we simply do not believe the case (against Broderick) could be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Original report here




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Scum British police again

When Lesley Ross’s car was stolen she reported the theft to the police but didn’t hold out much hope of them finding it. So she decided to turn detective herself.

Her boyfriend took to the streets of Aberdeen in search of the top-of-the-range Audi and Lesley went on Facebook to appeal for help.

Soon, sightings were flooding in every 15 minutes. The Audi was still in the city and one report had it being followed by a police car. Lesley kept up a running commentary online.

The thieves had broken into her house by kicking in a dog flap and stealing the keys.

She said: ‘I can’t believe the power of Facebook. It was amazing. I put up a photo of the car, telling people to phone the police if they spotted it. There must have been hundreds of postings.’
As the hunt progressed, Lesley wrote: ‘Why can’t the cops catch them? They (the thieves) must have been keeping an eye on my house. They have stolen my Range Rover spare keys, too. Are they planning on coming back?

‘Feel sick thinking about it. Hope they wrap the car round a lamp-post and maim themselves.’

At 10.30pm that night, while her boyfriend Ricky Strachan was still scouring the streets, two police officers knocked on the door.

Had they found the car? No, they had come to give her ‘words of advice’ about the way she was ‘handling things on Facebook’.

Lesley said: ‘They were all over my laptop taking screen grabs. The female officer wrote something in her notebook and made me sign it.

‘I asked them to clarify that I was still the victim here and not the criminal. She just said: “We’ve got to make sure we’ve got everything covered.”’

Shortly after the police left, Lesley went back on Facebook to discover her Audi had been torched.

Photos of the blazing vehicle had been posted by a notorious group of local car thieves who call themselves ‘The AberdeenBoyz Stig’ and have their own Facebook page where they boast about their crimes.

Lesley admits she may have been a little intemperate, but can’t believe that the police appeared to be more concerned about her remarks on a social network than finding her car. Sadly, I can believe it.

To add insult to injury, when the officers did finally return three hours later to inform her the car had been burned out — something she knew already — they told Lesley she would responsible for collecting it.

It does seem extraordinary that while the police could find time to warn Lesley about her ‘offensive’ comments on Facebook, they couldn’t actually track down a stolen car which was being driven at high speed through the streets of Aberdeen.

There were enough sightings reported. And if the police could monitor Lesley’s Facebook page, why didn’t they check out the site belonging to the AberdeenBoyz? Presumably this wee gang of local neds is ‘known to police’.

When a motor goes missing in Aberdeen, you’d expect them to be Plod’s first port of call. Yet while Lesley’s car was being torched, the bold Bill were trawling her laptop in pursuit of cyber crime.

A spokesman for Aberdeen police said inquiries into the stolen car were ‘ongoing’.

He added: ‘During the course of the investigation, suitable advice and guidance was offered to one of the owners of the vehicle about the content of some social media posts they had made following the incident’.

What was it the police found so offensive? Was it Lesley’s wish that the thieves wrap the car round a lamp-post and maim themselves? Or was it her asking why the police couldn’t catch them?

Presumably the police were alerted to Lesley’s Facebook page by members of the public ringing in to report sightings of the stolen Audi. Surely they don’t have a squad of officers constantly monitoring the internet in search of ‘offensive’ remarks? Actually, these days I shouldn’t be surprised if they do.

Even so, their priority should still have been dealing with a real crime in progress, not poring over every keystroke on a victim’s laptop.

Mind you, this is typical of the way in which the modern police ‘service’ find investigating exciting new ‘crimes’ much more to their taste than actually going out on the streets catching old- fashioned criminals.

On Tuesday, I wrote that I don’t want to get a reputation for kicking the police gratuitously. Truly, I don’t. But stories like this come across my desk every day of the week, sent in by law-abiding, tax-paying Daily Mail readers who despair at the behaviour of certain sections of the police. Am I supposed to ignore them?

I also hear from plenty of serving and ex-officers who are increasingly ashamed at what The Job has become — an arrogant, insular, incompetent, box-ticking bureaucracy which regards every single member of the paying public as a potential criminal.

Let me reiterate yet again: there are tens of thousands of decent coppers out there trying to do their best every day. But they are hamstrung by the new breed of fast-track, careerist chief officers, who spend their lives playing politics and setting ‘priorities’ which bear no relation to the real world.

We’ve ended up with Keystroke Kops who’d rather investigate imaginary Facebook ‘crimes’ than catch car thieves. It can’t go on. The police are in crisis, from the Met to Aberdeen.

On Tuesday, the first half-hour of Channel 4 News was devoted exclusively to discussing the various shortcomings of the Old Bill, including the allegations that members of the diplomatic protection squad tried to fit up the former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell.

Maybe it’s time for a far-reaching judicial inquiry into the ‘culture, practices and ethics’ of the police.

Original report here




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Former golf club president Christopher Tappin JAILED for 33 months in Pennsylvania prison for plot to export missile parts to Iran

A typical extorted guilty plea. He is almost certainly innocent

A retired British businessman who fought a long battle against extradition has been jailed for 33 months for smuggling arms to Iran by a court in the US. Christopher Tappin, 65, pleaded guilty to selling missile batteries in return for a reduced sentence at the trial in El Paso, Texas.

He is likely to spend six to nine months in the US before being sent back to Britain to complete his sentence, his lawyer said.

In a statement, Tappin apologised for his actions and said he looks forward to returning home to be near his sick wife.

Tappin, from Orpington, Kent, will begin his sentence at Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania, to start by March 8.

He had fought a two-year battle against extradition after originally denying the charge. But in November he pleaded guilty to charges of arms dealing at a court in El Paso.

The plea bargain meant Tappin escaped a possible sentence of 35 years in prison.

Tappin, a former president of the Kent Golf Union, was also fined £7,095.

US District Judge David Briones told a court hearing that Tappin should be allowed to serve his sentence in the UK but the decision ultimately rests with the US Bureau of Prisons.

His lawyer said it would be several months before he could be repatriated. 'The prison system moves incredibly slow, so he will be there for several months,' said a source at the US Justice Department.

His wife Elaine Tappin said she hoped the jailed businessman would have 'the mental fortitude to cope with whatever lies before him in the months and years to come'.

Mrs Tappin, who is seriously ill with chronic Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare auto-immune disease, was unable to attend the hearing.

Following the sentencing, she said: 'Now I can begin to see light at the end of this long dark tunnel - but remain frustrated that Chris' extradition was granted in the first place.

'Being returned to a US prison will be dreadful for him. He is learning to live with the regrets - it is a chastening experience after a 45-year unblemished business career.'

The couple have been married for 38 years and have a son and daughter. Mrs Tappin added: 'I pray that the US and UK authorities between them will expedite Chris' repatriation to Britain - so we, and his friends, are able to visit him in prison.'

She vowed to lobby the Government to change the law in favour of domestic prosecution over extradition, saying that she has been 'dismayed' by the current system.

She added: 'The cost is too often either unnecessary, disproportionate, or both. We cannot change what has happened to Chris, nor to those who have gone before him, but we can take steps to stop unwarranted extradition being imposed on others.

Tappin previously denied attempting to sell batteries for surface-to-air missiles which were to be shipped from the US to Tehran via the Netherlands and claimed he was part of an FBI sting.

Before the 'plea bargain', he faced the prospect of 35 years behind bars in a high-security prison, and no prospect of return to the UK to serve his sentence.

His lawyer in the UK previously indicated her client had little choice but to accept a deal.

Karen Todner, who also represented computer hacker Gary McKinnon, said: ‘The odds are so heavily stacked against a defendant who chooses to plead not guilty and then is subsequently found guilty that the vast majority of people facing trial in the US opt to take a plea agreement.’

The case followed an investigation which began in 2005 when US agents asked technology providers about buyers who might have raised red flags. Those customers were then approached by undercover companies set up by government agencies.

Tappin admitted that between December 2005 and January 2007 he knowingly aided and abetted others in an illegal attempt to export oxide reserve batteries, a special component of the Hawk Air Defence Missile, to Iran.

By pleading guilty, he waived his right to appeal against his conviction or challenge the sentence handed down in this case.

His associates Briton Robert Gibson agreed to co-operate and was jailed for two years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to export defence articles.

He also provided customs agents with about 16,000 computer files and emails indicating that he and Tappin had long-standing commercial ties with Iranian customers. Their US contact, Robert Caldwell, served 20 months in prison.

Tappin was held in prison for two months following his extradition in February, and then granted $1million (£650,000) bail.

Tappin dealt with a front firm called Mercury Global Enterprise, but claimed the batteries, worth around £5,000 each, were going to be used in the car industry.

Other Britons who have been extradited have condemned the US plea-bargaining system for allowing prosecutors to act as ‘judge, jury and executioner’.

Original report here




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Questions Left for Mississippi Over Doctor’s Autopsies

For a long time, if a body turned up in Mississippi it had a four-in-five chance of ending up in front of Dr. Steven T. Hayne.

Dr. Steven T. Hayne performed as many as 1,700 autopsies annually from the late 1980s to the late 2000s.

Between the late 1980s and the late 2000s, Dr. Hayne had the field of forensic pathology in Mississippi almost to himself, performing thousands of autopsies and delivering his findings around the state as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases. For most of that time, Dr. Hayne performed about 1,700 autopsies annually, more than four for every day of the year and nearly seven times the maximum caseload recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners.

During the past several months, in courthouses around Mississippi, four new petitions have been quietly submitted on behalf of people in prison arguing that they were wrongfully convicted on the basis of Dr. Hayne’s testimony. Around 10 more are expected in the coming weeks, including three by inmates on death row.

The filings, based on new information obtained as part of a lawsuit settled last spring, charge that Dr. Hayne made “numerous misrepresentations” about his qualifications as a forensic pathologist. They say that he proposed theories in his testimony that lie far outside standard forensic science. And they suggest that Mississippi officials ignored these problems, instead supporting Dr. Hayne’s prolific business.

For many around the state, the Hayne era is considered to be over and any problems fixed. In 2008, amid growing controversy, the state severed ties with Dr. Hayne, who to this day insists that he was treated unfairly. Mississippi officials have since shown almost no inclination to review his past cases.

The recent lawsuits suggest that in only a limited number of cases did a verdict most likely hinge on Dr. Hayne’s testimony. But without any systematic review, it remains a question as to what that number may be.

“There are hundreds of cases that have to be reconsidered,” said Dr. James Lauridson, a former state medical examiner in Alabama, who provided an affidavit in one of the recently filed cases. Dr. Lauridson said Dr. Hayne was an extreme example of a familiar problem: a forensic analyst with inadequate training who was given far too much deference in the courts.

“After you do that long enough, your initially shaky opinions become way out of the mainstream,” Dr. Lauridson said. “That is what happened to him.”

Dr. Hayne was sidelined by state officials after his analyses — and those of one of his close collaborators — led to several murder convictions that were later overturned or thrown out. But he insists that his work has been intentionally distorted by critics.

“I don’t think I was treated fairly,” he said last month at his house in a gated community overlooking the Ross Barnett Reservoir. “Is that the way you treat people after 20 years of working like a dog?”

A physician and pathologist, Dr. Hayne, now 71, began performing autopsies in Mississippi in the late 1980s. He served briefly as interim state medical examiner though he was not, as state law required, board certified in forensic pathology. From 1989, when he left the interim post, to 2010, the office of medical examiner was unfilled for all but five years. Dr. Hayne, working as a private contractor, almost single-handedly picked up the slack.

By his own count, he performed as many as 1,700 autopsies some years, in addition to having his own pathology practice. Dr. David Fowler, the chief medical examiner in Maryland and a former chairman of the standards committee for the National Association of Medical Examiners, called the number “beyond defensible.”

Dr. Hayne said that state-appointed medical examiners simply did not have his motivation as a fee-based contractor, nor his work ethic. “How many autopsies could they do?” he said. “They could do one or 500, they get paid the same amount. Is there any incentive to do a heavy load?”

That incentive is at the heart of the challenges filed on behalf of prisoners in recent weeks, most of them by the Mississippi Innocence Project. The cases in those filings are not clear cut, and in all of them there is circumstantial evidence suggesting guilt and innocence. But Dr. Hayne’s testimony was key.

In one case, Dr. Hayne performed an autopsy of a young boy and concluded he had been suffocated. Some weeks after the boy was buried, his 3-year-old brother told the police that he had been killed by his mother’s boyfriend. Officials exhumed the body, and Dr. Hayne had a cast made of the boy’s face. By comparing his initial notes of face wounds with the cast, Dr. Hayne testified, he found it probable that the boy had been suffocated by a large male hand. The boyfriend was convicted.

“I saw a very similar case like that on ‘Law & Order: SVU,’ ” said Dr. Andrew M. Baker, the president of the medical examiners’ association and chief medical examiner for Hennepin County, Minn. “I’ve never heard of it in real life.” Dr. Baker said not only was the technique unheard of but so was the ability to speculate from those sorts of wounds about hand size or gender.

Dr. Hayne suggested he was just being innovative. “Maybe we should have published,” he said upon being reminded of the case.

The Innocence Project has been trying to examine past cases in which Dr. Hayne’s testimony was pivotal, as state officials have shown no inclination to order a formal review. (Radley Balko, currently a reporter for The Huffington Post, has also investigated numerous cases.)

In 2009, Dr. Hayne sued the Innocence Project for defamation, and last spring the group paid him a $100,000 settlement. Innocence Project officials cited insurance reasons, though Dr. Hayne’s lawyer hailed it as a vindication.

But in preparing to combat the suit, lawyers for the Innocence Project said they uncovered new information. They said they found details about Dr. Hayne’s academic record and qualifications that significantly contradicted his own accounts, often given under oath.

They also found a 1992 proposal concerning Dr. Hayne drafted by a senior state official. Dr. Hayne was performing 80 percent of the state’s autopsies, the memo said, and would most likely continue to do so even if a new medical examiner were appointed. The state could save on salaries and office costs by giving Dr. Hayne the title, but letting him continue to charge $500 per autopsy as a private contractor.

Though the plan was shelved, and the office remained unfilled for most of the next 15 years, Dr. Hayne maintained his high-volume business and was eventually allowed to use the title of chief state pathologist.

Tucker Carrington, the director of the Mississippi Innocence Project and a professor at the University of Mississippi Law School, said this arrangement explained why Dr. Hayne was allowed to dominate the field for so long.

“What Hayne did was act as anyone would have predicted, which is not as an objective pathologist but someone who is in the marketplace,” Mr. Carrington said. “The state gave him this opportunity and gave him his blessing.”

That blessing was revoked in 2008, when, despite some opposition, Mississippi’s public safety commissioner removed Dr. Hayne from a list of approved forensic pathologists. The state hired a chief medical examiner in 2010.

But many coroners and district attorneys remain staunch defenders of Dr. Hayne and his work; for years, some point out, he was the only pathologist available.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t like Hayne, but from a prosecutor’s standpoint I don’t know anybody who didn’t like him,” said John T. Kitchens, a former district attorney and circuit court judge. “He was always so helpful and useful to law enforcement. And he worked all the time.”

In a conversation that ranged from the fall of the Roman republic to the folly of the Vietnam War, Dr. Hayne remained unbowed. He said that his analyses never strayed outside the acceptable norms of science, that he testified without an agenda and that his findings were either being deliberately misinterpreted or unfairly conflated with the erroneous work of others.

“I think they were thorough, complete and withstood the test of time,” Dr. Hayne said of his reports.

Dr. Lloyd White, who was Mississippi’s state medical examiner from 1989 to 1992, said the problems concerning Dr. Hayne, while extreme, were rooted in the nature of the system in which he worked. Such problems, he said, are not unique to Mississippi, and are able to persist because scientific testimony is too often viewed with uncritical reverence and because the people affected by its misuse usually have little support or sympathy.

“I had a prosecutor one time tell me, ‘These guys may not have done it but they’re bad guys and they have to go to prison,’ ” Dr. White said. “The whole thing kind of rolls downhill from there. And in the interim you can’t help but wonder how many people ended up in prison who didn’t get a fair trial.”

Original report here




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Plead Guilty or Go to Prison for Life

The stark choice given a medical marijuana grower highlights the injustice of mandatory minimums.

Chris Williams, a Montana medical marijuana grower, faces at least five years in federal prison when he is sentenced on February 1. The penalty seems unduly severe, especially because his business openly supplied marijuana to patients who were allowed to use it under state law.

Yet five years is a cakewalk compared to the sentence Williams originally faced, which would have kept the 38-year-old father behind bars for the rest of his life. The difference is due to an extremely unusual post-conviction agreement that highlights the enormous power prosecutors wield as a result of mandatory minimum sentences so grotesquely unjust that in this case even they had to admit it.

Of more than two dozen Montana medical marijuana providers who were arrested following federal raids in March 2011, Williams is the only one who insisted on his right to a trial. For that he paid a steep price.

Tom Daubert, one of Williams' partners in Montana Cannabis, which had dispensaries in four cities, pleaded guilty to maintaining drug-involved premises and got five years of probation. Another partner, Chris Lindsey, took a similar deal and is expected to receive similar treatment. Both testified against Williams at his trial last September.

Williams' third partner, Richard Flor, pleaded guilty to the same charge but did not testify against anyone. Flor, a sickly 68-year-old suffering from multiple ailments, died four months into a five-year prison term.

For a while it seemed that Williams, who rejected a plea deal because he did not think he had done anything wrong and because he wanted to challenge federal interference with Montana's medical marijuana law, also was destined to die in prison. Since marijuana is prohibited for all purposes under federal law, he was not allowed even to discuss the nature of his business in front of the jury, so his conviction on the four drug charges he faced, two of which carried five-year mandatory minimums, was more or less inevitable.

Stretching Williams' sentence from mindlessly harsh to mind-bogglingly draconian, each of those marijuana counts was tied to a charge of possessing a firearm during a drug trafficking offense, based on guns at the Helena grow operation that Williams supervised and at Flor's home in Miles City, which doubled as a dispensary. Federal law prescribes a five-year mandatory minimum for the first such offense and 25 years for each subsequent offense, with the sentences to run consecutively.

Consequently, when Williams was convicted on all eight counts, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 80 years for the gun charges alone, even though he never handled the firearms cited in his indictment, let alone hurt anyone with them. This result, which federal prosecutors easily could have avoided by bringing different charges, was so absurdly disproportionate that U.S. Attorney Michael Cotter offered Williams a deal.

Drop your appeal, Cotter said, and we'll drop enough charges so that you might serve "as little as 10 years." No dice, said Williams, still determined to challenge the Obama administration's assault on medical marijuana providers. But when Cotter came back with a better offer, involving a five-year mandatory minimum, Williams took it, having recognized the toll his legal struggle was taking on his 16-year-old son, a freshman at Montana State University.

"I think everyone in the federal system realizes that these mandatory minimum sentences are unjust," Williams tells me during a call from the Missoula County Detention Facility. But for prosecutors they serve an important function: "They were basically leveraging this really extreme sentence against something that was so light because they wanted to force me into taking a plea deal." Nine out of 10 federal criminal cases end in guilty pleas.

The efficient transformation of defendants into prisoners cannot be the standard by which we assess our criminal justice system. If the possibility of sending someone like Chris Williams to prison for the rest of his life is so obviously unfair, why does the law allow it, let alone mandate it?

Original report here




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Hateful British police harass the victim again

Thief who drove van at farmer let off with £100 fine: But victim forced to defend himself with shotgun suffers police ordeal lasting months

A farmer accused of attempted murder after catching an intruder red-handed spoke of his outrage last night after the thief walked free with a £100 fine.

Unemployed criminal David Taylor was captured when Bill Edwards confronted him on his isolated woodland property.

Mr Edwards, 21, fired his shotgun at a van driven by Taylor as the thief accelerated towards his mother, Louisa Smith, 50.

Taylor was caught after a high-speed chase but it was the farmer who endured a horrendous ordeal at the hands of police who arrested him on suspicion of attempted murder.

Last night Mr Edwards labelled the experience ‘four months of hell’ and attacked the ‘pathetic’ punishment handed out to the intruder.

The former public schoolboy said: ‘It’s completely changed my view of the police. They treated me like a criminal. The police have acted like bullies who have turned someone who was very supportive of their work into someone who wants nothing more to do with them. They can’t protect the public but don’t allow the public to protect themselves.’

Speaking about the sentence, he added: ‘It is hard to find words to describe how ridiculous the sentence is. I’m absolutely disgusted.

‘We have had four months of being treated like criminals only to see the real criminal let off with a measly fine which will be paid for by the taxpayer since he is on state benefits.’

Mr Edwards and his mother feared for their lives during the confrontation on their land on the outskirts of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, last August. It reignited the controversy over how householders can protect their families after a Leicestershire couple were told they would not be prosecuted for shooting at burglars.

Mr Edwards said his family has lost thousands of pounds through theft and damage caused in a number of raids on their land.

They caught Taylor and an accomplice loading stolen metal cables into the back of his Ford Transit after spotting that outbuildings had been tampered with. The thieves jumped into the van and drove it towards the pair as they desperately dialled 999 for help.

Mr Edwards fired his shotgun, which was loaded with lightweight rabbit shot, several times, hitting the van’s windscreen and bodywork. No one was hurt. Police eventually caught Taylor when Mr Edwards gave chase and gave a running commentary on his mobile phone. But the crook was only charged with metal theft.

Meanwhile Mr Edwards and his mother were arrested, held overnight in cells and left on bail for four months. Mrs Smith was arrested on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent.

It is believed police have a recording of the 999 call in which the shots can be heard as Mrs Smith shouts: ‘He is trying to kill us, shoot his tyres.’

But even now the farmer has not had his shotgun and other weapons returned to him which he uses to control pests on his land and as a hobby. Scarborough magistrate Mike Dineen fined Taylor £100 and ordered him to pay £34.99 for damage caused to the farm gate and padlock when he rammed through it to escape.

Taylor left court grinning and sneered ‘lucky you’ at Mr Edwards after finding out the attempted murder allegation had been dropped.

Moments earlier his solicitor Ian Brickman said the thief ‘is in many ways the victim in this’ and was left so ‘traumatised’ he cannot work.

Outside court, Bill’s father Garry Edwards, 67, said the case has been a ‘complete nightmare’. He said: ‘They were victims of a deadly attack and yet some of the police officers treated them as criminals. ‘My son did the absolute minimum needed to stop his mother being seriously hurt or killed.’

Taylor, of Scarborough, admitted theft by finding on August 26. The haul included an electric saw, a mountain bike and furniture as well as scrap metal and wiring. He agreed to pay his total court bill of £234.99 including costs at £10 a fortnight.

A North Yorkshire Police spokesman said no further action will be taken against Mr Edwards or his mother.

Original report here




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Law Enforcers Block Access To Exonerating DNA Evidence

In yet another case, DNA evidence has suggested the innocence of a man who has spent 11 years and counting in maximum security prison for a serious crime. Joseph Buffey, like some 10 percent of the hundreds of individuals exonerated by DNA testing, pleaded guilty in a rape and robbery case that DNA evidence links to another individual. Buffey was persuaded to take a plea by his lawyer, who said he wrongly assumed Buffey had committed the crime, and thought a defendant as young as 19 would get no more than a 10-year sentence. Buffey was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

But what’s most confounding about Buffey’s case is that it took 18 months of litigation by the nation’s top wrongful conviction lawyers to even secure the DNA testing. From the New York Times:

The Innocence Project lawyers got involved in this case after Mr. Buffey sent them a letter a few years ago. When they ran the test on the victim’s rape kit in the spring of 2011 and it showed that it was not Mr. Buffey’s DNA present at the crime scene, they asked to run the results through the West Virginia database of felons to see if another match existed. The judge approved, but the prosecutor refused, saying that the laboratory that had done the testing was not certified by the state. The judge then said he did not have the authority to order the state to violate its own rules.

The Innocence Project offered to run the test again through a certified lab. But the prosecutor turned down the request, saying there was “no good reason to do so” and adding, “the state does not believe such testing will or can prove the defendant’s innocence after his guilty plea.”

The judge ordered the test to go forward. The state again resisted but a month ago backed down.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of defendants are persuaded to take guilty pleas in a system increasingly designed to incentivize deals over trial. And most defendants don’t have the advantage of leading experts on wrongful conviction to litigate an appeal on their behalf. But even those like Duffey who do face immense obstacles to even access available DNA evidence. In a disheartening 2009 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a defendant who was willing to pay for a DNA test at his own expense was not entitled to the test. Allowing William Osburne to prove his potential innocence, Chief Justice John G. Roberts said, risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

The prosecutor in Buffey’s case expressed a similar attitude, saying that even DNA evidence linked to another individual and not Buffey “only tells us that someone else took part.” The victim’s testimony that there was only one attacker casts serious doubt on Romano’s assertion. But whether or not he is right should not have any bearing on a prosecutor’s willingness to provide the defendant, the judge and the jury with definitive, scientific information like DNA evidence.

In a system that study after study has shown is fraught with bias and error, DNA evidence should be a welcome bastion of accuracy.

But because it is the government that investigates crimes, the prosecutors are the gatekeepers to evidence that should be equally available to both parties. And while some individual prosecutors are supportive of greater DNA access, law enforcers have an institutional interest in winning their cases. Only nine states have laws granting defense lawyers access to a national DNA database. As National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers President Steven Benjamin said, “Juries expect the defense to be able to prove that if your client didn’t do it, who did? Science doesn’t belong to the government, but they act like it does.”

Original report here




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Scottish cop under investigation for smashing man's mobile phone after wrongly telling him it is against the law to film in public

Two police officers are being investigated over videos which show them allegedly knocking mobiles out of the hands of members of the public who were trying to film them over separate incidents.

One case in Glasgow shows a man's mobile knocked to the ground and apparently smashed by an officer.

Another video, filmed during an arrest in Edinburgh, shows an officer marching towards the cameraman and smacking the mobile out of the way. The man involved claimed he was arrested immediately afterwards.

The first video uploaded in June 2012 shows a Strathclyde Police officer approach a group of men in Glasgow after a girl in a nightclub claimed they 'annoyed her'.

During the 9 minute-long exchange, viewed by more than 1,300 users, the officer repeatedly tells the group: 'If you annoy somebody then it is a breach of the peace'. The individuals maintained annoying someone isn't illegal but the officer replied: 'If it causes an annoyance then it is an offence'.

After about two minutes the officer says the group 'caused alarm'.

The policeman also stated it is illegal to film people in public at which point one of the group started their own recording. The constable then lashes out knocking the phone out his hand where it can be heard smashing on the ground.

The group can be heard asking 'if it's illegal, what about the paparazzi?' and questioning why photographers can take photos and films in public, but the officer does not answer.

The man, named by others in the video as 'John', said: 'Why have you done that? That's criminal damage - you broke my phone.'

No apology is offered to 'John' and the officer only reveals his number as A403 and that he was based at the Stewart Street station in Glasgow.

A Lothian and Borders Police spokesman said: 'We intend to look in further detail at the circumstances behind this incident in order to determine whether any action is required.'

They were also unable to confirm if the uploader of the video was arrested.

The second video uploaded in September that has 1,045 views shows three Lothian and Borders officers arresting a man in the street.

Two male officers were filmed holding the suspect while a female officer hit his legs with a baton and shouted: 'Get on the floor'.

The policemen then stumble as they struggle to subdue the individual.

The cameraman walks closer to the chaotic arrest as the officers finally pin the man to the ground when another officer appears from the side of the screen and grabs the camera.

The uploader of the footage, known only by his YouTube username as 'p59er', claimed he was detained for filming the incident. A comment beneath the video read: 'I got arrested for filming them. Go figure.'

A Strathclyde Police spokeswoman said: 'We have received no complaint in relation to this incident. 'We have passed on the footage and will look into the matter.

'In general terms, the police have no powers to stop the public filming or taking photographs, but this can very much depend on the circumstances.'

But they were unavailable to comment on what these circumstances may be.

The two Forces behind the two incidents seen on YouTube confirmed they are investigating the footage.

The uploaders of each video were unavailable for comment.

John Scott QC, top defence lawyer and former chair of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said that police need to be reminded of their public duties.

He said that recording devices are a 'useful tool' to help bringing justice, but said they could make an exchange 'more heated'.'

In 2010 a letter was circulated by the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS) that confirmed the public have 'no powers' to stop the public filming them.

The letter, draughted by David McCall, assistant chief constable for British Transport Police, reads: 'I seek your support in reminding your officers and staff that they should not prevent anyone from taking photographs in public.

'There are no powers prohibiting the taking of photographs, film or digital images in public places. 'Therefore members of the public and press should not be prevented from doing so.

'Once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it.'

Original report here




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New York: 2 wrongfully convicted of murder set free

As supporters clapped, Eric Glisson and Cathy Watkins hugged in a Bronx courtroom today.

They are bound by a justice system gone awry. The two, who never knew each other, were first brought together more than 17 years ago, locked up along with 3 others for the murder of a livery cab driver in the Soundview section.

"I describe this as I'm free from the prison plantation. That's how I describe this," Watkins said.

"I'm looking forward. I'm not looking back," Eric Glisson said.
The murder case starting falling apart last spring after Glisson wrote a letter from prison to the US Attorney's Office, which then identified two gang members, federal cooperators, as the real killers.

The Bronx District Attorney's office finally released Glisson and Watkins last month, but insisted they wear monitoring bracelets.

Finally, prosecutors agreed to vacate all 5 convictions, but not to release the other 3 defendants.

What's momentous about this case of murder is that it involved a single eyewitness, now dead, who had lots of reasons to lie.

"As long as you're relying on a crackhead who gets paid, these wrongful convictions are never going to stop," defense attorney Paul Casteleiro said.

"There are plenty of people who are sitting in prison who are wrongfully convicted as we speak," Watkins said.

Watkins isn't sure about her plans, but Glisson, who was taking college classes in prison, is now a full-time student on a scholarship.

Original report here. Good video at link.




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Exonerated man goes to court in bid to prove Burge concealed evidence

Some 30 years since he was convicted of a murder he didn't commit, Alton Logan will be back in a courtroom Monday looking for a measure of justice against one of Chicago's most vilified police officials.

The trial stemming from Logan's lawsuit marks the first time in two decades that Jon Burge, the disgraced former police commander, will be called to testify in court about one of the numerous civil lawsuits filed against him. Though he is expected to plead the Fifth Amendment, he will testify by way of videoconferencing from a federal prison in North Carolina, where he is serving a 41/2-year sentence for lying about torture and physical abuse by his crew of detectives.

Logan, though, isn't alleging he was beaten into confessing to murder by Burge and his men, but rather that they concealed evidence, even from Cook County prosecutors, that would have exonerated him.

Coming just a few weeks after another federal trial exposed how a code of silence among Chicago police protects even wayward officers, Logan's allegations are sure to reopen one of the most painful and shameful chapters in department history.

"The Police Department is probably cringing that this is coming," Arthur Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago, said of the expected two-week trial in the downtown Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. "This is going to be airing dirty laundry, but it is still their dirty laundry."

The trial will recount Logan's remarkable story of exoneration, one that includes a secret confession hidden away for a quarter of a century and links to one of the most infamous Burge cases — the torture of Andrew Wilson, who killed two Chicago police officers.

Though no physical evidence tied him to the murder, Logan was convicted of the 1982 fatal shooting of Lloyd Wickliffe, an off-duty county corrections sergeant who was working security at a South Side McDonald's. He was sentenced to life in prison at 28.

In his lawsuit, Logan alleged that Burge and detectives under his command knew that when Wilson was arrested in the murders of Officers William Fahey and Richard O'Brien, he was in possession of a .38-caliber gun that had been stolen from Wickliffe in the moments before he was killed. Yet Burge and the detectives allegedly failed to disclose this critical evidence to Logan's lawyer or even prosecutors.

In addition, witnesses told the detectives that Wilson had killed Wickliffe, according to court documents filed in Logan's lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks damages from Burge and at least three detectives — George Basile, Thomas McKenna and Anthony Katalinic.

Logan sat in prison for 26 years until a stunning 2008 revelation after Wilson died. Wilson had confessed to Wickliffe's murder to his own attorneys in 1982, but the lawyers were duty-bound by the attorney-client privilege not to go public with the admission until after his death.

The two criminal-defense attorneys, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, could also be called at trial to share that riveting part of Logan's long wait for freedom.

"In serving more than 26 years behind bars, (Logan) was wrongfully deprived of nearly half of his life … stripped of the various pleasures of basic human experience," his lawsuit says.

Since the Burge scandal has unfolded, dozens of African-American men have sued him and the city, alleging torture or physical abuse at his hands or that of the men who worked for him.

All but Wilson's case settled short of trial, according to Flint Taylor, a civil rights attorney who has filed many of the suits and has tracked the litigation against Burge. And by his estimate, the city has paid out $30 million in damages to victims. In addition, the city has spent $16 million in legal fees on the Burge cases, he said.

"It is not just a political question but a moral question," said Taylor, who is not involved in the Logan case. "Why is the city continuing to defend Burge? To make a spectacle of Burge from his prison cell to me is just continuing to highlight the fact that the city refuses to resolve these cases and finally get on the right side of history."

Original report here




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Squad car dreams

Dismal notes of a long-time police reporter:

Almost all accused criminals are guilty. The reasons are two. First, almost all are caught in the act. The driver wobbles across three lanes of traffic, has a half-empty bottle of Beam on the seat, and blows pickled as a gherkin on the Alkasensor. Not a whole lot of doubt here. Or he is found coming out of somebody else’s window with somebody else’s television under his arm. He is probably stealing it. Or he scores 75 on the radar gun in a thirty zone in front of a school. Or he proposes sex to an undercover cop for twenty bucks. Not a lot of mystery here. Unless you have seen female cops.

The second reason is that the DA won’t paper a case he can’t win. He is overworked as it is, and needs to look good by keeping his convictions up. He won’t take iffy cases.

Yet the criminal justice system is crooked from the gitgo. Start with the idea of trial by a jury of your peers. It doesn’t exist, unless you are rich or a celebrity case. Some ninety-five percent of cases are settled by plea bargaining. If everybody asked for a jury trial, the entire system would stop. If you do insist, the judge in all likelihood will be so angry that he will do his best to get you convicted and then give you the max. You pay heavily for exercising imaginary constitutional rights.

It gets worse. Consider plea bargaining. You are walking through a red-light-and-dance-club region and an undercover police woman in a three-inch plastic mini-skirt and fishnet stockings says, “Hi, honey. You sportin’?” You are not. Kidding, you say, “I want to do it in a swimming pool full of raspberry jello. I’ll give you a million dollars.” That’s an offer of a specific amount for a specific act. Bingo. You are arrested for soliciting prostitution. Which you were not. And cops know exactly how to phrase things to avoid an entrapment defense.

You are now screwed though not, alas, literally. Your choice is to fight the charge, with the ensuing publicity, loss of job and marriage plus huge legal bills, or plead to something like public lewdness with a small fine, no publicity, and a criminal record for a sex offense. Try getting a security clearance with that.

The United States is a heavily criminal society, as comparison with Japan or Finland will show. The courts are thus under pressure to do anything, everything, to reduce the burden of law enforcement. As mentioned, plea bargaining is one. Another is rehab. You get caught with a few rocks of crack, not enough to trigger intent-to-sell. The judge can’t just let you go, since that would amount to de facto legalization. The prisons are full and cost money. He sentences you to rehab. It doesn’t work, and he knows it doesn’t work. It does however have a feel of benevolence to it, of not being cold and heartless. It also fuels a lucrative rehab business. I have watched inmates come out, score on the street, and go back in. Such a deal.

The notion of a jury “of one’s peers” is similarly nonexistent in many cases. The usual reason is race. If you are white, and shoot a black intruder in your black neighborhood, you are road kill.

Remember when the LA cops beat Rodney King on video tape and they got off? White jury. Remember when OJ Simpson killed a white woman and got off? Black jury. Trayvon-Zimmerman? Same thing. White friends who have served on mixed juries complain that the blacks can’t understand words like “stipulate,” which makes things worse.

Perhaps worst is that the whole system rests on a wing-nut idea: the “debt to society.” You commit a burglary, get caught, and are said now to owe society five years in slam. This is ridiculous since society is paying your upkeep, but never mind. You are eventually let loose on the grounds that you have paid your debt to society and are now rehabilitated and will start afresh as a good citizen.

This is like letting a cobra loose in a crowded movie theater, where it promptly bites someone. You put it it a cage for six years to pay its debt to society. You then let it loose in the theater again, because it is now a Reformed Cobra and will doubtless teach civics to underprivileged children. Much to your surprise, it bites….

Most criminals are careerists. Crime is what they do. It is all they will ever do. Look at their rap sheets. In and out, in and out. Seven grand theft auto, four rapes, four possession with intent to sell, six assault and battery. I don’t know how many times I’ve covered a woman stabbed thirty-seven times (an actual case) at an ATM by a guy out of parole for something only slightly less gaudy.

But he got out because he told some dumb parole board that he done found Jesus, yes, Jesus mah man now, all I wants is to do de Lawd’s work. Which apparently includes stabbing a woman thirty-seven times. The Jesus business is a staple of prison propaganda.

A major defect of what would be our system of justice if it were a system of justice is that it is not investigatory but gladiatorial. The idea is not to determine guilt or innocence, but to win. By no means always, but often, the cops will lie, the witnesses will lie, and prosecutor and defender will lie carefully within safe limits so as not to get disbarred. Public safety matters no more than truth.

Example: The client of a friend of mine, I’ll call the friend Tom, did something spectacular. Spun across three lanes of Route 66, took out thirty yards of fence, and broke off a tree. I made that up, but it’s close. The cops arrived. He blew a BAC so high he could have been arrested as a container of moonshine. It turned out, as it usually does, that he had a record of this sort of thing.

Ah! But the law in Virginia (so Tom told me) says that if you aren’t actually seen driving the car, you can’t be convicted of drunk driving, and by the time the cops arrived, the guy was out of the car and stumbling about the grass. Tom got him off.

Typical. PDs in particular—public defenders—almost invariably know they are putting criminals back of the street. Hey, it’s their job. Everybody has to eat. Law? What’s that?

Original report here




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The Dark Dangers of Tunnel Vision

Why police and prosecutors suspect the wrong person—and then dig in

The best magazine piece I’ve read this year is by Pamela Colloff, in Texas Monthly, about the murder conviction of Michael Morton and the 25 years he spent in a Texas prison as prosecutors insisted he’d killed his wife, despite the mounting proof that he hadn’t. You really have to read this story for yourself—it’s movie material; it’s that riveting. I want to pull on one thread of Colloff’s narrative, because I’ve seen it in the weave of many other wrongful conviction cases. I’m talking about tunnel vision: the tendency of investigators to seize on an early piece of evidence that appears to implicate the defendant, and to hold on to their belief in his guilt even as other evidence points to his innocence. It’s a problem that by definition emerges in hindsight. What’s scary is how tenaciously police and prosecutors cling to their initial assumptions—and how much this reflects basic human tendencies.

On an August afternoon in 1986, Christine Morton was found lying on her bed, bludgeoned to death. A neighbor had seen her 3-year-old son Eric walking around the family’s front yard by himself; she searched the house and called the police.

When Sheriff Jim Boutwell arrived, he found this note, signed “I L Y,” for I love you, and “M,” for Michael, who was Christine’s husband.

Chris, I know you didn’t mean to, but you made me feel really unwanted last night. After a good meal, we came home, you binged on the rest of the cookies. Then, with your nightgown around your waist and while I was rubbing your hands and arms, you farted and fell asleep. I’m not mad or expecting a big production. I just wanted you to know how I feel without us getting into another fight about sex. Just think how you might have felt if you were left hanging on your birthday.

Colloff explains that based on the note, which established Michael’s anger with his wife in the hours before she was killed, “Boutwell treated Michael not like a grieving husband but like a suspect.” Boutwell read Morton his Miranda rights and began questioning him. Michael answered without emotion, which “did not help to dispel the sheriff’s suspicion that the murder had been a domestic affair.” Colloff continues:

Odd details about the crime scene only reinforced his hunch. There were no indications of a break-in, a fact that Boutwell would repeat to the media in the weeks to come. (Though it was true that there were no signs of forced entry, the sliding-glass door in the dining area was unlocked.) Robbery did not appear to have been the motive for the crime; Christine’s purse was missing, but her engagement ring and wedding band were lying in plain sight on the nightstand. Other valuables, like a camera with a telephoto lens, had also gone untouched.

As Boutwell’s suspicion of Michael deepened, he chose to ignore the physical evidence that pointed to an outside intruder: Fingerprints on a dining room door frame— and elsewhere—that matched no one who lived in the house. A fresh footprint in the fenced-in backyard. And a bandanna, found by Christine’s brother the day after her death, when he searched a construction site behind the Mortons’ home. (Why weren’t the cops the ones searching? Because they’d already zeroed in on Morton.) The bandanna was stained with blood. When the brother handed it over to the police, they failed to test it or to further search the area. They also disregarded a neighbor’s sighting of a man in a green van on the street on the morning of the murder—and, Morton learned much, much later, his young son’s statement to Christine’s mother that he’d seen a “monster” hit Mommy and “break the bed,” when his father wasn’t there.

Two and a half decades later, after the advent of DNA testing and an agonizing, protracted battle by Michael Morton and his lawyers to submit the bandanna to a crime lab for analysis, it became clear that the blood on it came from Christine and an unknown man. Still, the district attorney’s office that had prosecuted Morton refused to admit he’d been wrongly convicted. And then Morton’s lawyers (who include my friend Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project) succeeded in finding a match for the mystery DNA in the FBI’s database. And then it turned out that the man with the matching profile—Mark Alan Norwood—had lived around the corner from a woman who looked like Christine and who’d been bludgeoned to death in her bed in an unsolved murder.

Finally, Michael Morton was released from prison and Norwood went on trial for the two murders for which he’d escaped punishment for so many years. (Ken Anderson, one of the prosecutors in the case, now a Texas judge, is about to go before a state court of inquiry for his alleged misconduct. It’s a rare show of accountability, as Joe Nocera points out in the New York Times.)

In retrospect, it’s clear that police and prosecutors headed off in the wrong direction and then couldn’t see flaws in the theory they’d chosen, or the clues that led elsewhere. The problem isn’t that they started with Michael Morton. Domestic violence statistics show that women are more likely to be killed by their husbands than by someone they don’t know. The problem, rather, is that they ended with Morton.

The same also seems true in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the deaths of his three children, based on the theory that he set the fire that burned down his house and killed them. Read David Grann’s amazing New Yorker exposé about the case, and you come away horrified by the class assumptions and shoddy burn-pattern analysis that prosecutors relied on to convict Willingham.

And in his new book A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris makes a strong case for the wrongful conviction of Jeffrey MacDonald, (yes, the subject of Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer) who remains in prison for the 1970 murder of his wife and two daughters. Once more, the husband MacDonald was the obvious suspect. And like Morton, he appeared unemotional rather than grief-stricken. Investigators didn’t believe his story about a break-in by a bunch of hippies. Feeding their skepticism was a key piece of initial evidence: A coffee table found in the family’s living room lying on its side, which the investigators said couldn’t have fallen that way given its construction. The table was part of the tableaux of disorder MacDonald claimed he woke up to after he’d lost consciousness when he was wounded; if its toppling over was staged, then that called his entire account into doubt.

As Morris tells the story to dramatic effect, a military judge later knocked over the table in a test—and the table fell onto its side, exactly as it had been lying in the crime scene. But for MacDonald, this debunking came too late to halt the snowballing suspicion of him, or to persuade prosecutors to take seriously the confession of a woman who matched the description of one of the intruders MacDonald said he saw.

More common ground that Morton and MacDonald share: Their wives were murdered in placid middle-class neighborhoods, in which fears of a dangerous assailant on the loose was only a source of trouble for local law enforcement. Both Colloff and Morris suggest that arresting the husbands, and sticking with the theory supporting their guilt, helped defuse local tensions and made everyone in the community feel safer.

It’s natural for police and prosecutors to want to ease public fears. And it’s also natural for them to stick with the evidence that supported their preferred explanations. As University of Wisconsin clinical law professor Keith Findley shows in his excellent 2010 article Tunnel Vision, the phenomenon “is the product of a variety of cognitive distortions,” chief among them confirmation bias. In other words, we tend to give weight to evidence that confirms our existing beliefs. “Although such confirmation-biased information is often less probative than disconfirming information might be, people fail to recognize the weakness of the confirming feedback they receive or recall,” Findley writes. He cites studies finding that “police officers who are convinced that a suspect is lying are very resistant to changing their minds” and often “rate disconfirming or exonerating evidence as less reliable or credible than guilt-confirming evidence that supports their initial hypotheses.”

I called Brandon Garrett, the law professor who wrote the book on wrongful convictions and why they happen, and he pointed out that police and prosecutors have no obligation to pursue alternative explanations, or even to follow a particular method of investigation or keep a record explaining the course they’re taking. Which means it’s close to impossible to hold them accountable for their errors. Garrett pointed out that crime labs are different: They write down every step they take. “Even though they have crushing caseloads, they follow that procedure,” he said. And that means we know when there’s a broken link in the chain. Police too, Garrett thinks, should have to record every witness interview they do; perhaps they should also keep notes about how their thinking evolves or doesn’t. Garrett also suggested giving the defense more resources to do their own investigations or requiring police and prosecutors to open their files to the defense. Tunnel vision isn’t going away. But to protect the innocent, we should diminish its dark power.

Original report here




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