ANOTHER COERCED CONFESSION

Nancy DePriest was raped and murdered in her work place in Austin, Texas in 1988. Chris Ochoa pled guilty to the murder of DePriest and his friend, Richard Danziger, was convicted of rape. Ochoa had confessed to the crime and had implicated Danziger. It would be discovered, however, that his confession was coerced and that neither man had anything to do with the slaying or raping of DePriest.

The victim worked at a Pizza Hut in Austin, where she had been tied up with her bra, raped, and shot in the head in the wake of an early morning robbery. She was still alive when the police arrived but died later that night. The police began investigating local Pizza Hut employees on the theory that a master key was used to gain entry.

Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger were roommates who also worked at an Austin area Pizza Hut. They were observed by a Pizza Hut waitress eating and drinking beer in what she surmised to be a toast to the victim. Police questioned Ochoa and Danziger in November 1988, and the two subsequently became the main suspects.

In their interviews, the police noted that Danziger seemed to know much about the crime that was not public knowledge.

Ochoa was questioned separately and the police reported that he had confessed his involvement in the crime, pointing to Danziger as the assailant who shot DePriest after they robbed the restaurant. The state offered to give him a life sentence if he agreed to plead guilty and testify against Danziger at trial. Under threat of receiving the death penalty and by the advice of his attorney, Ochoa agreed to their terms. At trial, Ochoa changed his story and claimed that he, not Danziger, had shot DePriest. Consequently, prosecutors charged Danziger with rape instead of the murder.

Ochoa testified that the two had planned to rob the Pizza Hut, had tied up and raped DePriest, and that he had shot her because she recognized him. Danziger presented an alibi defense, claiming to have been with his girlfriend that night. He could give no reason for why Ochoa would testify against him. The only forensic evidence that linked Danziger to the crime was a pubic hair found near the blood in the restaurant that, when microscopically examined, was consistent with Danziger's pubic hair. There was semen evidence collected but the crime laboratory reported that the amount was very small. Though no experts testified that the semen could link Danziger, one expert claimed that the semen on a vaginal swab was compatible with Ochoa. Both men received life sentences.

Years later, letters were sent to the police, then Governor Bush's office, and the District Attorney's Office. The letters revealed detailed knowledge of the crime. The author of the letters, Achim Marino, was in prison on other convictions with three life sentences. He had apparently undergone a religious conversion while attending an Acoholics/Narcotics Anonymous program whereby he was obligated to confess his responsibility for the DePriest murder. He also wrote that he did not know either Ochoa or Danziger and did not know why they would confess to a crime that he had committed. Marino also stated that he had sent confessions to other offices, including a newspaper and the ACLU, but that his letter had not been answered.

After police received another letter from Marino that contained a detailed description of the scene, they began investigating the case again. Marino's letter told them how to locate items that were stolen from the Pizza Hut, which the police obtained. Investigators approached both Danziger and Ochoa again. Danziger had sustained injuries to his head while in prison and was housed in a mental institution. Ochoa gave them the same story he had told at trial.

Ochoa went on to contact the Wisconsin Innocence Project, headed by Keith Findley and John Pray. Students there began investigating his claim of innocence. The prosecution had some of the evidence that was purportedly contaminated tested, but excluding Ochoa and possibly Danziger as well as inculpating Marino.

Forensic Science Associates had retained a sample from testing performed at the time of the trial in 1989. Using newer testing methods, FSA was able to exclude both Ochoa and Danziger as sources of the spermatozoa. Chris Ochoa and Richard Danziger were exonerated and released from prison in 2001.

Ochoa was greeted by the Wisconsin Innocence Project staff and students who helped him prove his innocence. Ochoa now states that his confession and implication of Danziger were the results of police pressure and fear of the death penalty, citing periods of time when they harassed him and threatened him with the consequences of not confessing.

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BRITISH POLICE COVERUP

The Metropolitan police have blocked attempts by independent investigators to obtain sensitive files about the role that Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner, played after the shooting of an innocent Brazilian man on the London Underground. Well-placed sources say the Met has declined repeated requests by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to disclose hundreds of pages of internal papers. The documents give the Met’s private assessment of the botched counter-terrorist operation that led to Jean Charles de Menezes mistakenly being killed by Yard marksmen at Stockwell Underground station last July. The IPCC wants the Yard files handed over before it reviews Blair’s response to claims by the de Menezes family that he made false or misleading statements after the shooting.

The fresh legal tussle has reignited claims by the de Menezes family that the Yard is attempting to cover up its true culpability for the shooting. This weekend Harriet Wistrich, the family’s solicitor, said: “Every time the police attempt to resist providing information in relation to the shooting it creates the impression they have something to hide. If they’ve nothing to hide, why not come forward with it?”

The papers include discussions about how much compensation the Met thinks it should pay to the de Menezes family; the risk that individual officers might face murder or manslaughter charges; the vulnerability of Blair and the Met to an action for civil damages; and whether Special Branch officers altered surveillance logs to cover up the mistaken identification.

De Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, was shot eight times by two Scotland Yard marksmen on a train at Stockwell. The shooting happened on July 22, the day after four suspected Islamist suicide bombers tried to detonate bombs on three Tube trains and a bus.

At the inquest into de Menezes’s death 10 days ago, John Cummins, the senior IPCC investigator, said publicly he had experienced no obstruction from the Met in his inquiry. But behind the scenes, the IPCC has pressed for the Met files at two meetings in the past three weeks. The commission has told Blair it is entitled to them under section 17 of the 2002 Police Reform Act, which gives it the power to demand “all such information and documents” it judges necessary to conduct its inquiries. The Met has declined to surrender the files. Scotland Yard bosses insist the papers are “legally privileged” and they are under no legal obligation to disclose them. One senior source said the discussions had been “cordial” and did not amount to a dispute. He said: “Quite properly, if you are under suspicion and you take legal advice you expect those conversations to be privileged. “But the IPCC thinks section 17 trumps everything. They think they are entitled to everything they want. We’re saying as a point of principle here, no, they are not.”

Behind the scenes, the tension between the Met and the IPCC has been simmering since the day of the shooting. Part of the IPCC’s own file on the killing of de Menezes, showing police blunders, was leaked last September. The file showed how an undercover officer who was supposed to be watching for a suspected terrorist to emerge from a house in Tulse Hill, south London, was relieving himself at the time de Menezes appeared.The disclosures infuriated Blair and led to renewed calls for his resignation. The Crown Prosecution Service has said it hopes to decide by Easter whether any officers will be charged with murder or manslaughter.

Last December the IPCC began a second inquiry after the de Menezes family complained that Blair had misled the public over the shooting. Senior Yard insiders fear this new inquiry could potentially force Blair to resign. It is focusing on comments Blair made at a press conference a few hours after the shooting at which he said: “I understand the man was challenged and refused to obey.” That statement turned out to be false. In a separate statement, cleared by at least three senior officers, the Yard’s press bureau said of de Menezes that “his clothing and his behaviour at the station added to suspicions”. The Met now accepts that there was nothing suspicious about his clothes or behaviour.

A spokeswoman for the IPCC said: “Our investigation is progressing and we are working with the Metropolitan police to ensure we have access to all the necessary material.”

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Dramatic twist in Australian murder case

Maybe they'll let the poor guy out of jail yet

The Leanne Holland murder case has taken a dramatic new turn, with claims by a leading scientist that police scrapped a report that would have demolished their evidence. Brisbane forensic scientist Russell Luke was asked to examine crucial evidence used to convict Graham Stafford of the schoolgirl's horrific 1991 sex slaying. He says his report would have discounted much of the prosecution evidence. But police investigators, who consulted the former Queensland Health entomologist when the case was sent to the Court of Appeal in 1997, never asked for his report. "I had serious questions about much of the evidence," Mr Luke said yesterday.

Stafford's 1997 appeal was lost on a majority verdict, despite Court of Appeal president Tony Fitzgerald finding he should get a new trial.

"My report would have said that much of the forensic evidence should have been totally ignored . . . it should not have been part of the police case," Mr Luke said. "To put it bluntly, some of the evidence was woeful."

Prosecutors said Stafford killed Leanne - his fiancee's sister - on the morning of Monday, September 23, 1991. They said he hid her body in the boot of his car for two days and then dumped it in bush at Redbank Plains in Ipswich on September 25.

Police asked Mr Luke to look at evidence relating to the time of death - determined from the growth rate of maggots on her body - and a lone maggot allegedly found in the back of Stafford's car. The lone maggot, the same species and age as those found on the body, was one of the key pieces of evidence. Police relied solely on circumstantial evidence to convict the then 28-year-old.

Stafford had an air-tight alibi from 4pm on September 23 onwards. But a book by former detective Graeme Crowley and criminologist Paul Wilson, Who Killed Leanne?, said the 12-year-old, of Goodna in Brisbane, was actually killed on September 24. The authors provided evidence that showed police gave scientists wrong weather data to calculate the maggot growth. The correct temperatures would have put the time of death back 24 hours, clearing Stafford.

Entomologist Beryl Morris, who gave evidence for the prosecution, later agreed the new figures changed the time of death to the next day. Mr Luke also concluded the correct figures would have put the time of death back 24 hours. He questioned other aspects of the police case:

* Why was the lone maggot found in the boot longer and fatter than maggots found on the body 36 hours later, and how did it manage to survive so long without food and moisture?

* Why didn't police remove the live lone maggot in the boot when they claimed to have first found it, instead of 24 hours later?

* Why was there no written, photographic or videotape record of the initial find?

* Why did police not DNA-test the gut content of the maggot to confirm it had come from the body?

* Why didn't the boot have more maggots, a smell, blood or other body fluids or other conclusive evidence the body had been there for two days?

"It would have been very hard, if not impossible, to get that dead smell out of the boot - out of anything," said Mr Luke, who investigated more than 40 cases for police. "They have used that maggot to try to prove that the body was in the boot. "But the maggot evidence is tarnished . . . it should have been ignored, thrown out. "I would not have gone near that - it's just crazy." Mr Luke said maggots need food and moisture to survive and, once removed from the food source, quickly shrivel and die. "Given the period of time that elapsed . . . it just doesn't add up."

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The Failure of Government Justice

By T. Norman Van Cott, a professor of economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana

It's often a heartbreaking story. It's also a repeating story. Details change, but the essentials remain the same. What is it? It's people on parole and probation committing yet more crimes. Thousands each year. Those foisting these parolees and probationers on us pollute our social environment just as owners of poison-spewing factories pollute our air and water. Criminal justice system employees get a pass on their pollution. Not so with factory owners. Curious.

My community, Muncie, Indiana, recently experienced this social pollution. According to newspaper reports, a Mr. Ronald Hatfield was sentenced to 28 years in prison for armed robbery in 1987. Notwithstanding 77 write-ups for conduct and disciplinary infractions while in prison, Hatfield was released on August 2, 2004. That's 11 years short of 28. On December 16, 2004 — 136 days after his release — Hatfield killed a convenience store clerk during, that's right, an armed robbery. For this crime, Hatfield received life in prison, without parole.

Hatfield is the tip of a criminal iceberg. US Department of Justice statistics indicate that parolee and probationer populations are "fluid." Of the approximately 750,000 parolees at the end of 2003, for example, 492,000 entered parolee status that year, while 470,000 exited. Eleven percent of exits returned to incarceration because of at least one new offense. Twenty-eight percent were reincarcerated due to parole rules violations. (Nine percent absconded!) Therefore, the rock-bottom, bare minimum estimate of parolee crimes in 2003 was about 51,700 (11% of 470,000). The corresponding figure for probationers was 109,000. Probationers' recidivism rate is lower, but probationer exits in 2003 were 4.6 times parolee exits.

Who is responsible for Hatfield's unserved 11 years? What about the unserved sentences that led to the 160,000 crimes in 2003? Parolees and probationers don't magically appear. To say the "system" controls early releases — that releases are mandated by rules, and hence beyond human discretion — is silly. That's the first defense of bureaucratic minions everywhere. Such rules are not unchangeable; they, and whatever discretion is built into them, are crafted by living and breathing people.

Who bears the costs of these early release crimes? In Hatfield's case, it's hard to see beyond the convenience store clerk and her family, isn't it? That burden is large and intense, no doubt like that experienced by thousands of other victims of parolee and probationer crime. At the risk of trivializing these costs, however, we can easily argue that all of us incur costs because pollutants like Hatfield make our social environments less attractive.

What about those living and breathing people who sign off on these early releases? Do they bear any personal liability? No. That's the problem. They are usually government employees. You know what that means: de facto job tenure, longevity-based promotions, and lock-step salary increases.

By way of contrast, imagine what would happen to owners of a factory that spewed pollution into a river. Indeed, suppose it's the White River that flows through Muncie. They would be financially liable for dead fish and other environmental damage. How do dead convenience store clerks measure up against dead fish?

Governments maintain records for parolees and probationers who return to prison, abscond, or successfully complete their parole and probation. This means that the ingredients already exist for incentivizing the production of early releases. Tie compensation of criminal justice system employees to successful early releases, while at the same time exacting financial penalties on employees who produce failed early releases. One could even introduce gradations into the penalties based on the reason for failure — new crimes, breaking rules of parole/probation, or absconding.

Better yet, why not privatize the parole and probation industry? You can bet a privatized process would have incentives akin to this. Centuries of experience teach us that personal liability makes people more attentive to the consequences of their actions. Application of this principle to the parole and probation process doesn't guarantee that Mr. Hatfield's victim or others like her would still be alive. But it does mean that heartbreaking events like it would be less likely to occur.

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MORE OVERCONFIDENT FORENSIC "SCIENCE"

Britain's Roy Meadow is not alone

On the morning of December 29, 1991, the body of the thirty-six year old victim was found, nude, in the men's restroom of the Phoenix, Arizona bar where she worked. She had been fatally stabbed, and the perpetrator left behind little physical evidence. There were no fingerprints, blood at the scene matched her type, and saliva on her body came from someone with the most common blood type. There was no semen and no DNA tests were performed.

The only hard evidence investigators had were bite-marks on the victim's breast and neck. Upon hearing that the victim had told a friend that a regular customer named Ray Krone was to help her close up the bar the previous night, police asked Krone to make a Styrofoam impression of his teeth for comparison. On December 31, 1991, Krone was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault.

At his 1992 trial, Krone maintained his innocence, claiming to be asleep in his bed at the time of the crime. Experts for the prosecution, however, testified that the bite-marks found on Ancona's body matched the impression that Krone had made on the Styrofoam and a jury convicted him on the counts of murder and kidnapping. He was sentenced to death and a consecutive twenty-one year term of imprisonment, respectively. Krone was found not guilty of the sexual assault.

Krone won a new trial on appeal in 1996, but was convicted again, mainly on the state's supposed expert bite-mark testimony. This time, however, the judge sentenced him to life in prison, citing doubts about whether or not Krone was the true killer.

It was not until 2002, after Krone had served more than ten years in prison, that DNA testing would prove his innocence. DNA testing conducted on the saliva and blood found on the victim excluded Krone as the source and instead matched a man named Kenneth Phillips. Phillips was incarcerated on an unrelated sex crime and, although he had lived a short distance from the bar where the victim worked, he had never been considered a suspect in her murder.

On April 8, 2002, Krone was released from prison and on April 24th, the District Attorney's office filed to formally dismiss all charges against him. Murder and sexual assault charges have since been brought against Phillips. Ray Krone spent more than a decade in prison, some of it on death row, before DNA testing cleared his name. He is the 100th former death row inmate freed because of innocence since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976. He is the twelfth death row inmate whose innocence has been proven through postconviction DNA testing. Prior to his arrest, Krone had no previous criminal record, had been honorably discharged from the military, and had worked in the postal service for seven years.

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BRITAIN'S ROY MEADOW DISGRACE

You can be totally irresponsible and negligent but as long as you act "in good faith", you are OK? A pompous ass repeatedly puts innocent people in prison and there is no redress?

Since the Court overruled the General Medical Council and reinstated Professor Sir Roy Meadow it has been 12 days and counting. Yet the implications have not yet been fully understood. You can get away with being wrong, the judgment seems to say, as long as you were wrong in good faith. You should not be disciplined by your professional body, even if that body deems that you have broken its rules. Pull up the drawbridge.

The GMC drew a different distinction when it found Sir Roy guilty of serious professional misconduct. It agreed that Meadow had not intended to mislead. But it judged that his conduct in plucking a grossly misleading statistic from a study (that there was a 73 million to 1 chance of suffering two sudden infant deaths, as Sally Clark did), while withholding the conclusion of that study (that one cot death makes another more likely) was incompatible with what the public expects from a medical practitioner. Many of us would agree. We would concur with the judges in the Clark appeal who “rather suspect that with the graphic reference by Professor Meadow to the chances of backing long-odds winners of the Grand National year after year, this (evidence) may have had a major effect on (the jurors’) thinking”. Quite.

As the Royal Society of Statisticians pointed out rather huffily at the time, a simple telephone call to its office would have exposed the faulty logic. But the call never came. The lawyers never cross-examined Professor Meadow on that statistic. So he was not the only one to make a mistake. There is genuine concern that paediatricians have been discouraged from giving expert opinions by the prospect of being singled out for disciplinary action. But any expert giving an opinion that could lead to wrongful conviction must surely let that opinion be tested.

To what extent should good intentions exonerate harmful actions? Who should judge where good faith ends and perjury begins? “Good faith” was not a defence that cut much ice with those who this week suspended the four probation officers who let Damien Hanson slip through the system to murder John Monckton. Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said on Tuesday that “it is absolutely essential that corporate responsibility is accepted”. If only things were so clear-cut in the world of child protection.

The recent blurring of the lines over Professor Meadow have weakened accountability but not abolished it. Angela Cannings and Sally Clark would still have their convictions quashed. But there are many other parents professing their innocence who have never ascended to High Court niceties. They are still stuck beneath the glass ceiling of the Family Division. It is a one-way glass: they can see out, but no one else can see in. To whom do they turn?

I was talking recently to a mother who was accused of satanic abuse as part of the Western Isles case two years ago — long after the whole notion had been denounced as a myth by a government inquiry. Her husband was charged with offences against children he had not seen for many years. He was not allowed to see his own children for a year, even to telephone them for months, and was told that if he returned home the children would be taken away. This woman has evidence that the social worker involved spent several years trying to trump up charges, all of which were proved false. But her complaints are still doing the rounds of agencies in Scotland, while the social worker continues to work and organisations purporting to support satanic abuse “survivors” receive government grants.

This is a familiar story. In England parents who complain find that the ball always seems to bounce back to the social services department they are complaining about. Each seems to have a different internal procedure. Some minor complaints are sometimes upheld and filed away in personnel files; others can inspire quite aggressive reactions. William Bache, a solicitor who acts for many parents accused of child abuse, believes that too many child abuse allegations are made after parents have complained about a service. “And with hospitals, one is left with the uneasy feeling that some accusations are made to pre-empt an allegation of negligence.” This is another dimension: doctors can put social workers under pressure to make snap decisions on cases they do not fully understand if a child comes in with head injuries or breathing difficulties.

The great conundrum about the world of child protection is that so many people seem desperate to cover their backs, when so few ever face any sanction for making mistakes. It is hard to find an equivalent to the suspension of those four probation officers.

After the Clark ruling, the Government announced a review of 28,866 Family Division cases where children had been removed from their parents following accusations of harm. The review took less than nine months: the local authorities that were asked to review their cases responded rapidly. Fewer than 20 cases were reopened — resulting in another hard-to-believe statistical ratio. Did this really prove that the system works? Or that those bodies knew that they would lose their insurance if they admitted liability?

The system is in turmoil. The restructuring of Cafcass (the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) has led to waves of experienced practitioners leaving. Some have become self-employed and are trying to instil commonsense from the outside. Many of those that remain are desperately inexperienced. The Victoria Climbie tragedy has struck fear into every heart.

One of the most telling glimpses in Lord Laming’s Climbie report was the excuse of one of the doctors who saw the girl several times but failed to notice the horrific signs of abuse that eventually killed her. She was “working very hard chasing bits of information about three potential cases of Munchausen’s”. No doubt that doctor was acting in good faith to prove Sir Roy Meadow’s pet theory. But is good faith enough?

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Juror: New evidence would have cleared convicted Australian child-killer

The jury foreman in one of Queensland's most controversial murder cases believes convicted child-killer Graham Stafford would have been found not guilty if all the evidence had been put forward. Brisbane truck driver Peter Hobbs told a radio station this week he now did not believe Stafford got a fair trial. Mr Hobbs felt "sick" about the verdict.

Stafford, then 28, was jailed for life for the brutal torture and sex slaying of Ipswich schoolgirl Leanne Holland, 12, in 1991. He strenuously denied killing Holland, the sister of his then-fiancee.

State Attorney-General Linda Lavarch has also thrown a new lifeline to Stafford, inviting him to apply for a pardon. "It is open to Graham Stafford and his legal advisers to petition for a pardon if they have matters over and above those that have already been canvassed by our courts," she said. "If it is compelling, then we will certainly make recommendations to the Governor."

Sensational evidence in a new book by criminologist Paul Wilson and former police detective Graeme Crowley has thrown doubt on Stafford's conviction. Mr Crowley spent more than a decade investigating the case as a private investigator. In their book, Who Killed Leanne? An investigation into a murder and miscarriage of justice, the authors say:

* A leading Queensland forensic expert disputed that Stafford could have killed Leanne at her home and hidden her body in the boot of his car for two days.

* Crucial evidence put forward to the jury about a maggot found in the car boot and those found on the dead girl's body, was significantly wrong.

* Tyre tracks at the crime scene did not match those from Stafford's car, as put forward as evidence by prosecutors at the 1992 trial.

* Leanne was seen alive after the time police said she had been killed.

Mrs Lavarch this week read the Crowley-Wilson book and described it as "quite a compelling read".

Mr Hobbs contacted Brisbane radio station 4BC after reading Who Killed Leanne? and spoke about the decision by 11 men and one woman to convict Stafford. "I actually felt sick . . . from the evidence in the book, I would have had a totally different perspective on the whole case," Mr Hobbs told presenter Greg Cary. "It is heartbreaking to know that Graham Stafford is in jail for possibly doing nothing wrong." Mr Hobbs said he was concerned by new evidence regarding the possible time of death. The authors say experts were given wrong temperatures to calculate the growth of maggots on the body - the correct figures would have put the time of death 24 hours later.

Leanne was allegedly bashed to death on the morning of Monday, September 23, 1991. Stafford had an air-tight alibi from 4pm that day onwards, with new evidence in the book suggesting she actually died on September 24. "Yeah, after that time he has an alibi. Just reading the book and seeing exactly . . . if she wasn't killed until Tuesday, then, hey, end of story - he's innocent," Mr Hobbs said. He said evidence put to the jury was that "there was a lot of blood in the house, a lot of blood in the boot of the car, a lot of blood everywhere". Mr Hobbs said: "But reading the book, it turns out there wasn't much blood at all. "After reading the book, it is laughable to say he got a fair trial. If that evidence was not 100 per cent, that's where the problem lies." Mr Hobbs was asked whether, if the new evidence had been put in the trial in 1992, he would he have come up with a different verdict. "Undoubtedly, undoubtedly, it would be just totally different."

In 1997, Court of Appeals president Tony Fitzgerald said an appeal by Stafford should be allowed after new evidence was presented, but his two colleagues disagreed and the majority ruled. Stafford will be eligible for parole next year, but is unlikely to be freed because he has not admitted his supposed guilt.

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BRITISH GOVERNMENT FINALLY NOTICES A PROBLEM

Tony Blair is demanding tougher supervision of offenders by the Probation Service amid alarm at killings by criminals released from jail early. His move follows a finding that most risk assessments on sex offenders are not completed satisfactorily when they start supervision in the community. The Chief Inspector of Probation has said that monitoring of less serious offenders has fallen to "unwise levels".

Mr Blair has told colleagues that he is very worried. A source said: "He does not feel enforcement is working properly, and wants the Probation Service to be much tougher on acting against those who break the terms of their licence."

Failings by the Probation Service will be outlined in a report out tomorrow. The service was supposed to be monitoring Damien Hanson when he murdered the financier John Monckton at his Chelsea home. Similar cases are causing alarm.

Reports by the Home Office and the Chief Inspector of Probation have highlighted failings in the way the Probation Service assesses the risk that offenders may pose. As well as corners being cut because of costs a risk-assessment computer program is not being used properly.

The Home Office said: "We began addressing these issues in June to drive up the quality of assessment and the management of dangerous offenders."

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BRITISH PROSECUTORS COP IT IN THE NECK

A judge launched a withering attack on the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday after throwing out a case in which Sir Paul McCartney's brother, Mike, had been accused of sexually assaulting a waitress. Mike McCartney, 62, was alleged to have touched the 16-year-old's bottom while attending a family party at a pub in the Wirral, Merseyside, in September 2004. The girl claimed he had placed his hand over her trousers and then moved it from her thigh to her bottom. Her allegation was supported by another waitress of the same age. Mr McCartney insisted that he had merely touched the girl's back in a "fatherly" gesture while asking her whether there were any more tempura prawns.

Three days into the trial Judge Elgan Edwards, the Recorder of Chester, ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove that the incident was of a sexual nature. Having directed the jury to find Mr McCartney not guilty, he said: "This defendant has not been acquitted on a technicality, he leaves the court without a stain on his character. "This case was a misunderstanding from the word go and should never have been prosecuted." The judge went on: "A great deal of public money has been wasted and a great deal of court time wasted.' "Two young girls have had the agony of waiting for 17 months to give evidence and the defendant, a man of exemplary character, has had the matter hanging over his head as well. It is quite inexcusable and makes a mockery of legal proceedings."

Mr McCartney, a photographer and one-time member of the 1960s band The Scaffold, described the experience as "a living hell". Flanked by his wife, Rowena, and son, Sonny, he said: "It is a monstrosity that a wholly innocent man has been publicly named and linked to a charge of sexual assault, which to the ordinary person means rape. "It has been made crystal clear by this judge that I am totally innocent and have been from day one." He added: "I want to thank my family, including my big brother, who has been a rock of support during this attempt to soil our family name."

Mr McCartney said he was launching a campaign to change the law so that both the accused and the alleged victims of sex crimes would be granted the same anonymity in court. His solicitor, Stephen Taylor, said Sir Paul was delighted that his brother had succeeded in clearing his name. "I have spoken to him and he said it was great news."

Judge Edwards took the unusual step of ordering the Crown Prosecution Service to pay the entire costs of the case, which are estimated at 100,000 pounds.

The CPS claimed that the case could not have been dealt with any quicker. However, a spokesman acknowledged that lawyers had requested additional witness statements in January 2005. The final decision to prosecute was not taken until May 20 last year.

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DRISKELL HITS BACK

I noted this case on May 24, 2005 under the heading: "AMAZINGLY CROOKED CANADIAN JUSTICE". Perhaps the judicial crooks will eventually be made to suffer some consequences this way


James Driskell and his mother have filed a lawsuit seeking $20 million in damages and compensation for the time Driskell spent in prison on a conviction that was later quashed. The federal justice minister quashed Driskell's murder conviction last March, after he had served more than 13 years in prison. The Manitoba government then stayed the charges against Driskell.

The lawsuit names 21 people, including Winnipeg police officers, the RCMP and Crown prosecutors. "Driskell has suffered loss of liberty, humiliation and disgrace. He is entitled to substantial damages. So, too, is his mother, Florence, who tirelessly championed his freedom and who also suffered damages," the suit states. Last year, Driskell said he was not interested in seeking compensation, but his lawyer says he's changed his mind. "I suspect Mr. Driskell assumed someone would say they were sorry and write him a cheque," said lawyer Harvey Strosberg. "That not having happened, the only remedy is to go to court, which he's done."

The province is planning to hold an inquiry into Driskell's case; it's expected to start this spring. The defendants in the lawsuit have 30 days to file a statement of defence. Driskell was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Perry Dean Harder and sentenced to life in prison in 1991. Harder had been shot several times in the chest in September 1990 in Winnipeg. Police alleged Harder had implicated Driskell in a series of break and enters, but Driskell denied any involvement in Harder's death.

In 2005, then justice minister Irwin Cotler quashed Driskell's conviction, saying he believed a "miscarriage of justice" had likely occurred in the case. Cotler said he based his decision on a number of factors, including new DNA evidence that showed hairs found in Driskell's van did not belong to the victim – as the Crown argued at trial – as well as problems with key witnesses, and Crown and police disclosure of information that could have helped Driskell's defence. The Manitoba government stayed the charges, saying the Crown's case had been undermined and weakened and it was not likely Driskell would be convicted again. The stay does not officially exonerate Driskell, but means he will stay out of prison.

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THE ARIZONA JUSTICE SYSTEM SHOWS THE WAY

Isn't it wonderful to be protected by your caring government regulators? They register liens but what steps do they take to see if they are justified? No significant steps it seems

A financial setup orchestrated by a convicted criminal has left more than a thousand homeowners in Arizona and California facing illegitimate liens on their homes. The liens are being used to force people to pay thousands of dollars to a California collection agency. In order to get the liens lifted, homeowners are told by the agency that they must pay credit-card debts that, in many cases, have already been paid, written off in bankruptcies or aren't actually owed. An Arizona Republic investigation found that Pacific States Credit Co. has filed more than 600 such liens in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties, as well as hundreds more in several counties in southern and northern California over the past two years.

The owner of Pacific States, Jeff McCoon, has a criminal record for defrauding businesses in Colorado, where he is wanted for arrest, accused of violating the terms of his probation. He also is awaiting trial in California on 148 felony counts of attempted extortion, forgery and filing false documents over liens he filed against homeowners in Orange County.

But authorities in Arizona were unaware that McCoon has been operating here since 2004, filing liens, threatening people with lawsuits, demanding payments for questionable debts and, in at least one case, forcing someone to sign over the deed to his home. Steve Wilson, spokesman for the Arizona Attorney General's Office, said the allegations raise serious concerns. "If they are true, we want to look into the case," he said.

McCoon, who lives in Oakhurst, Calif., a small farming community near Modesto, did not respond to repeated interview requests at his business. The phone number for Pacific States is answered by a message for another McCoon business, a corporation registered in the Bahamas as Sierra Consumer Acceptance.

John Brewington of Phoenix, who filed a complaint about McCoon with the attorney general this month, said authorities need to act fast. "I think anyone who has ever had a debt is at risk from this guy," said Brewington, whose friend was hit with a lien. "In fact, anybody in the community is at risk. . . . I would strongly suggest that every person check their credit and check their property records."

Liens, which can ruin credit and prevent owners from selling or refinancing, cloud title to property. Someone trying to sell or refinance a house is often required to pay off a lien before the transaction can be completed. Liens are traditionally filed in cases in which real estate was used as collateral but can also be filed against homeowners for failure to pay income taxes and by contractors who are owed money for work on a home.

McCoon, however, has been filing liens based on credit-card debt, records show, even though legal and financial experts say typical credit-card debt is not secured by real estate. County records, court documents and letters from Pacific States show that McCoon has filed liens and then demanded payment for credit-card debt, along with payments for penalties and interest.

Court records show that liens sometimes were filed against people who never owed debt or against people who had discharged the debt years earlier in Bankruptcy Court.

Phoenix homeowner Kim DeGeorge said she didn't learn that Pacific States had filed a lien against her home until she tried to sell it last month. "We had no idea. We didn't know until the first contract on our home was about to be signed," she said. The lien was based on a Bank of America Visa card, which had been written off when the DeGeorges filed for bankruptcy. The lien stalled the sale for a couple of weeks. "We called and called and called," DeGeorge said. "Finally, I left a message saying I was getting a lawyer." A few days later, the lien was terminated. "We didn't know what we were going to do. My husband wanted to pay it off and try to get it back later, just so we could sell the house," DeGeorge said.

Court records in Orange County, Calif., show that McCoon sent demand letters to escrow officers, offering to release the liens upon payment via wire transfer into his bank account. He also sent homeowners documents titled "summons and complaint," along with copies of the liens, giving some the impression that they were being sued. But records showed the "summons" was never filed with the court. "He doesn't give people an opportunity to prove the debts are valid. He files the liens as an opening salvo," said Leslie Young, Orange County deputy district attorney. "Eight of our victims never owed anybody any money in their lives." Young has charged McCoon with 148 felony counts stemming from liens he filed against 144 homeowners in Orange County from 2003 to 2005.

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SCOTTISH COVERUP

The FBI has been accused of demanding a cover-up of forensic mistakes in the case of a former police officer cleared of perjury because publicity would dent confidence in Scottish justice as the Lockerbie trial began. Two American fingerprint experts who helped to clear Shirley McKie of perjury in 1999 say they were approached by the FBI and asked not to publicise their concerns about inaccurate evidence given by the Scottish fingerprint service because it "might taint the people involved in Lockerbie".

Yesterday Ms McKie's family and supporters again called for the Scottish Executive to hold a public inquiry into the case.
Ms McKie was wrongly accused of leaving her thumbprint at a murder scene in 1997, when she was a Strathclyde Police detective, and was charged with perjury when she insisted that it was not hers. She was cleared in 1999 with the help of international fingerprint experts who proved that the print did not belong to her.

The doubts raised about the professionalism of the evidence-gathering of the Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) came at a bad time for the Crown. In 2000 the Scottish justice system was under scrutiny as the trial started in the Netherlands of two Libyans over the Pan Am bombing. Tam Dalyell, the former MP, said: "I now strongly believe that there has to be a proper inquiry to establish the facts."

David Grieve, of Illinois State Police, and Pat Wertheim were two of the fingerprint experts who helped Ms McKie. Mr Grieve told Scotland on Sunday. "I was asked not to mention anything about the case because we had to think about the higher goal, which was Lockerbie." He also said that the FBI had been visited by officials from the SCRO, which has denied that the McKie case was discussed. Mr Grieve said: "I was given a lecture on the importance of not embarrassing a sister agency which had cases pending of international significance. I know the reference was to the Pan Am bombing."

This month the Executive paid Ms McKie 750,000 pounds in an out-of-court settlement for what it called an "honest mistake" by the SCRO "on the basis that the misidentification was not done maliciously".

The Scottish Executive said that there had already been two inquiries: "We don't see a third would shed any new light." A spokeswoman added that there had been "significant improvements" to the fingerprint service at the SCRO. The Crown Office said: "The SCRO were not involved in any way with fingerprinting of the Lockerbie case."

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DATABASE DANGERS

A law student was arrested for “stealing” Christmas cards that he had sent to relatives more than five years before when he was 15. The cards had been recovered and fingerprints found on the envelopes were stored on computer by Lancashire Constabulary. Then David Atkinson, 21, of Thornton Cleveleys, was arrested – mistakenly – on suspicion of criminal damage. His fingerprints and DNA were taken.

Another man surrendered to police on the criminal damage matter and Mr Atkinson was released without charge. However, his fingerprints were matched to the Christmas card crime — and he was rearrested. It was only after a shaken Mr Atkinson refused to admit that crime, urging police to look into the theft more closely, that his innocence was proved. The cards were addressed to members of his family.

Mr Atkinson said: “The potential incompetence, laziness, or overenthusiasm of an individual officer means an innocent citizen can never truly have confidence in the giant police database.” A police spokesman said: “This was investigated thoroughly and dealt with locally to the satisfaction of both parties.”

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MORE ON THE CORRUPT JUSTICE OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Swigging a mid-strength beer and munching pizza on Monday night, Andrew Mallard quietly contemplated his freedom after almost 12 years behind bars. There were no high fives or whoops of joy, just a wander outside to look at the night sky unimpeded by prison walls. "I haven't seen the stars for so long," he mused. "Once you're locked in your cell, you can't see much." Just eight hours earlier, Mallard was spending another mundane day of musters and lock-downs, inmate number HO923173 in the maximum security Casuarina Prison. The jail had been his home since 1994, when he was charged with the murder of Perth jeweller Pamela Lawrence in a bloody case that has become infamous in the west.

At her retirement village cottage, his elderly mother Grace and his steadily loyal big sister Jacqui wept with relief. John Quigley, a prominent former police union lawyer turned Labor MP, and I swapped telephone calls with the pro bono legal team from Clayton Utz and eminent barrister Malcolm McCusker, QC, who also worked on the case for free. A documentary team, filming the final scenes for an ABC television special, captured the long-awaited first moments of freedom.

Monday's release came quickly but the road has been long: failed appeals and an exhausting struggle to find new evidence culminated in the discovery in 2002 of a police briefing that showed several key pieces of evidence were not disclosed to the defence at trial, including a forensic test that showing a wrench drawn during Mallard's long police interviews could not have caused Lawrence's injuries. The case was reopened by Attorney-General Jim McGinty but a long [Corrupt Western Australia] Supreme Court appeal was dismissed in 2003. That decision was overturned last November in a unanimous ruling by the High Court, which quashed Mallard's conviction.

Robert Cock, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had been hell-bent on retrying Mallard, claiming police and prosecutors had done no wrong and had nothing to hide. That was until mid-morning on Monday, when he telephoned McCusker to inform him the murder charge would be withdrawn because there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

The dramatic end to Mallard's incarceration places him alongside Western Australia's other famous wrongful conviction cases: the Mickelberg brothers, John Button and Darryl Beamish. Most of the key players in those other mysteries were either retired or dead. In Mallard's case, the police and prosecutors have since risen to the top echelons of the state's justice system.

After being handed a life sentence in 1995, Mallard disappeared down the Supreme Court dock stairs, yelling his innocence and promising, "You have not heard the last of this." He was right. Mallard's name now evokes bitter passions in the Perth legal community, publicly pitting Quigley and the eminent McCusker against Cock, who claimed on Monday that Mallard was still the prime suspect, despite conceding he had no case.

It has divided the legal clique of Perth, where senior lawyers and judges tend to speak about each other in terms of which year they graduated from the same law school and which college sporting team they represented together. Long-held concerns in defence circles about the cosy relationship between the office of the DPP and police, and the number of ex-crown lawyers appointed to the Supreme Court bench, are the talk of Perth's legal hub at St Georges Terrace. Now that the murder charge has been dropped, all eyes are on a Corruption and Crime Commission investigation, which was launched after a stinging parliamentary speech by Quigley following the High Court decision in November.

Before entering parliament, Quigley spent 20 years defending police against allegations of corruption and illegality. The outspoken Labor MP's passionate belief in Mallard's innocence turned him from police protector to accuser. He claimed in parliament the controversy amounted to a prima facie case of perverting the course of justice and lined up two assistant commissioners: David Caporn, who runs counter-terrorism and state protection, and Mal Shervill, the boss of specialist crime. Shervill led the investigation into Lawrence's death. Caporn, who would later lead the Claremont serial killer taskforce, was a head detective.

Before the stormy afternoon of June 23, 1994, when Lawrence was bludgeoned to death in the leafy suburb of Mosman Park, Mallard was one of Perth's many homeless drifters with mental health problems and a penchant for marijuana. He was known to police for petty crimes and, on the morning of the murder, had been in the lock-up for breaking into the apartment of a friend's ex-boyfriend. Detectives arriving at the bloody scene after the mother of two's death found no jewellery or cash stolen, although they were in full view. Lawrence's husband, who had found his dying wife on the shop floor, told police a wallet from her handbag was gone.

Police decided it was a case of robbery gone wrong. Mallard was one of 136 names on their list of suspects who vaguely fitted a description given by a schoolgirl who'd seen a man in Lawrence's shop. They began checking alibis and kept returning to suspects whose stories did not check out. Mallard, who was under assessment in Graylands Psychiatric Hospital at the time, was deemed to be dishonest because his alibis kept turning out to be stories from days other than the day of the murder.

He had no history of violence and did not know Lawrence but his odd behaviour led detectives to seize Mallard's clothing, including his only pair of shoes. One drop of blood was found on a boot. It appears detectives were misled by an early laboratory report that suggested it was Lawrence's blood type. It was actually Mallard's own blood from a cut finger.

Regardless of the blood result, police believed Mallard was suspiciously lying about his alibi. On June 10, 1994, without a lawyer or family member, Mallard followed Caporn, the day he was released from Graylands, into a police interview room, where he stayed for eight hours. What happened in that room is contested by both sides. The DPP's explanation on Monday for dropping the case surrounded the detective's handwritten, unsigned confession, which was admitted at Mallard's 1995 trial but would not be permitted under today's evidence rules.

After that marathon interview, Mallard was released in the dead of night with no money or accommodation. Unknown to him, his trial lawyer or the 1995-96 appeal lawyers, Caporn had ordered an undercover detective to befriend Mallard and attempt to find evidence, particularly the murder weapon. That officer, codenamed Gary, watched Mallard smoking marijuana (Mallard says Gary supplied the marijuana) and attempted to gain a confession. The secret operation found nothing. A summary of the investigation, among the uncovered evidence found in 2002, revealed that some police believed Mallard was acting strangely but had doubts about his guilt.

A week later, after a sleepless night in which he was bashed outside a nightclub under the watch of the undercover operation, Mallard was again interviewed off-camera and he drew a Sidchrome wrench. He then went on video for about 20 minutes to clear his name and confirm that he had told the police his theory of what the killer would have done. That video, supported by Caporn's corroborating notes, was the key to a successful prosecution.

The five judges of the High Court found the conviction a miscarriage of justice because those confessions were unreliable and significant forensic evidence was withheld from the defence. They were critical of the fact that the police held back a raft of evidence (the prosecution knew of some of it) helpful to Mallard's defence.

In addition to the wrench test and undercover operation, witness statements had been changed to remove crucial facts and a forensic scientist had been asked to alter his report on how the killer could have disposed of the murder weapon. It is not known what information the police made available to the then director of public prosecutions, John McKechnie, QC, or the trial prosecutor, Ken Bates. McKechnie is now a Supreme Court judge and Bates a senior prosecutor who acted as DPP when Cock was recently on sick leave with cancer.

Cock has said he hopes any non-disclosure by the DPP's office was an oversight and not deliberate. He has also said he believes the police have done nothing wrong and could not see why the CCC investigation was necessary. Cock told the court on Monday he still considered Mallard the prime suspect in the murder despite the lack of evidence to proceed against him. He has been supportive of the police refusal to reopen the case in the face of evidence provided by McCusker relating to other suspects, including a report from an internationally renowned forensic expert.

It is almost impossible to find senior criminal counsel without some link to this case or its main players. McCusker, Mallard's lawyer, is also the parliamentary inspector of the CCC. Safely ensconced in his mother's retirement village after a fitful night's sleep on a comfortable bed, the lanky, bespectacled Mallard is still coming to terms with his release. Yesterday, as furious words were hurled from both sides, the quietly spoken Englishman vowed to make his supporters proud. His first instinct is to flee the state, wary of police and a system he has grown to mistrust, but he is determined to clear his name before going anywhere. "I need it to be proved irrefutably that I am innocent and that the murderer is still out there," he says. "I have waited a long time. The whole truth will come out in the end."

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Further comment:

"State Attorney-General Jim McGinty yesterday conceded the case had revealed an "untidy and unfortunate" series of events, saying it was up to the state's corruption watchdog to continue its investigations into the handling of the police inquiries and prosecution. "Nobody can feel satisfied with the way in which the Mallard case has unfolded," Mr McGinty said. "It was an horrendous murder. Nobody has been brought to justice for it and now we have got allegations of improper or corrupt behaviour by police and DPP prosecutors. "I think there is no doubt that this particular case casts a shadow over the way in which the police conducted the investigation and perhaps the way in which the DPP prosecuted this case." Mr McGinty urged police to vigorously investigate any further information that became available.

Police Deputy Commissioner Chris Dawson was quick to defend his officers yesterday, saying it was important the case did not become a measure of police competence in homicide investigations. Contradicting his statement on Monday evening that police had no intention of re-opening the case, Mr Dawson said unsolved murder cases were never closed."


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Australian man free after decade in jail

No evidence of guilt and a crooked prosecution



After spending more than a decade behind bars for the murder of a Perth jeweller, Andrew Mallard last night walked from prison a free man. The 42-year-old was released from maximum security Casuarina Prison after prosecutors withdrew a murder charge against him yesterday afternoon. A calm, smiling and relieved Mr Mallard emerged from prison flanked by family and supporters, eager to head home in a limousine ordered for the occasion. "I just want a good night's sleep, free from officers jeering in the port and keys jangling and all that sort of thing," he said. "I have been preparing for this for some time - nearly 12 years actually."

Outraged at an assertion in the West Australian Supreme Court that he remained the prime suspect in the 1994 murder of Pamela Lawrence, Mr Mallard's sister Jackie accused police of conducting an inept investigation, claiming evidence was presented three years ago that should have set her brother free. "The police should now do their job properly, as they should have in the first place, and find out who really did this," she said.

Two appeals failed before Mr Mallard's conviction was quashed by the High Court in November. He was due to face trial later this year, but at a hastily convened sitting of the Supreme Court yesterday, Director of Public Prosecutions Robert Cock QC withdrew the prosecution.

Lawrence, a 45-year-old mother of two, was found dying in a pool of blood in her jewellery shop in the western suburb of Mosman Park on May 23, 1994. The High Court ruled Mr Mallard's conviction after a 10-day Supreme Court trial in 1995 was a miscarriage of justice because the prosecution failed to disclose, or had suppressed, important evidence.

Mr Cock said the reason for withdrawing the prosecution related to the admissibility of alleged confessions made by Mr Mallard during several interrogations - including an eight-hour unrecorded interview - in 1994. Mr Cock said because of retrospective 1996 laws at least some of the police interviews should have been recorded on video. The court was told Mr Mallard - an itinerant suffering bipolar disease - alleged he had been induced to do one of the interviews, was assaulted, verbally intimidated and fed detailed information about the case; allegations denied by police.

Mr Cock said Mr Mallard's alleged confessions were complex and there were other obvious difficulties with the case, including no forensic evidence linking him to the murder. "It does not leave us with a case upon which there is a reasonable prospect of obtaining a conviction," he said. He said Mr Mallard remained the prime suspect, promising the prosecution would be pursued if further evidence came to hand.

Deputy Police Commissioner Chris Dawson stood by the investigators. "There is no information which suggests that these officers acted corruptly or maliciously," he said. [Only a cop would believe it]. There were no plans to reopen the investigation. [i.e. The guilty guy will never be found because the police are too stiff-necked to seek him]

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FRENCH JUSTICE BLIND TO ANTISEMITISM

Muslims can't commite hate-crimes, apparently. Post taken from Unsealed Room

Amidst all of this hullabaloo surrounding cartoons, the story of the extremely horrific kidnapping, torture and murder of a young man named Ilan Halimi in France has gotten lost.

The story is horrific in several ways -- not the least of which is the fact that the French authorities have had the audacity to prematurely claim that anti-Semitism didn't play a role in the crime, when it so obviously did.

It all started on January 21, when a good-looking young woman walked into a cellular telephone store, started flirting with Halimi, and they made a date. It turned out that she was bait, used by a gang to lure Halimi into a kidnapping.

The woman had been sent by the gang, which calls itself "The Barbarians." A police source said the gang is a group of childhood friends who grew up in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. The gang includes Muslims of North African descent and is headed by Youssef Fofana, who has escaped police capture so far. According to Marin, the gang had made six similar abduction attempts in the past.

After overpowering Halimi, the gang brought him to an apartment in a high-rise in Bagneux. They contacted Halimi's family and over the next three weeks demanded ransoms ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 euros. According to reports, at one point they agreed upon a deal and set a meeting place but the kidnappers backed out and eventually ended contact.

On Monday, several weeks after he was seized, Halimi was found tied to a tree, naked and burned all over his body. He died on the way to the hospital.

"They acted with indescribable cruelty," the judiciary police chief leading the investigation said. "They kept him naked and tied up for weeks. They cut him and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him alight."

Late Thursday night, a SWAT team stormed an apartment building and arrested 12 members of the gang suspected in the kidnapping. Another was arrested in Belgium.

The fact that they caught the perpetrators is good. The fact that the Paris public prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told the media that "no element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action" is outrageous.

How about these elements?

According to Halimi's father, two of the previous kidnapping targets before his son were Jewish. And what's more, he told the media that:

"When we said we didn't have 500,000 euros to give them they told us to go to the synagogue and get it," Rafi said. "They also recited verses from the Koran."

Now, I really don't think the grieving father has any reason to make this up.

Add to that the fact that there are many simpler methods of murdering a standard kidnap victim -- but holding him prisoner naked? Setting him on fire and tying him to a tree? If this was a white gang and the victim was black would anyone be questioning if it was racist?

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that anti-Semitism just might have played a role in this. Instead, it seems we've got Inspector Clouseau on the case.

Surprisingly, this story hasn't gotten major play even in the Israeli media until today when the arrests were made -- we've all been too busy and the papers stuffed to the brim, not only with the Danish cartoon saga, but with Hamas, the Israeli election campaign and the Olympics.

It's nowhere to be found in the international media, not in the U.S. press and not on the wires. Only the Jewish and Israeli press, and one British paper.

I heard about it several days ago, only because my in-laws are French, and the affair has understandably shaken the French Jewish community to the core. We had a large wave of French Jews immigrating to Israel last summer. Something tells me that this summer we're going to have another one.



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MORE BRAINLESS "HOMELAND SECURITY", IT SEEMS

Frisking white-haired grandmothers, confiscating nail clippers and allowing thousands of illegal immigrants to stream in across the Mexican border is about the limit of their talents

An Algerian-born pilot wrongly jailed in Britain on accusations that he trained the Sept. 11 hijackers won the right Friday to challenge for compensation. An appeal hearing at London's High Court granted Raissi the right to challenge a government decision that he was not eligible for compensation.

Lotfi Raissi, 32, was arrested near London's Heathrow Airport shortly after the 2001 attacks, having been indicted by a federal grand jury in Arizona. United States prosecutors described him as a prime suspect in the 9/11 case, claiming he offered pilot training to the hijackers.

But a British judge refused to extradite Raissi to face trial and released him from custody, claiming there was no evidence to link him with terrorism.

The former commercial pilot was told last year by Britain's Home Office interior ministry he was not eligible for compensation for his 4 month detention, as he waited for the decision on a U.S. request to extradite him. "My life has been destroyed. I chose to become an airline pilot, I worked hard for it and I starved for it," Raissi said outside court, following the hearing. "But the reality is that because of my profile of being Algerian, Muslim, Arabic and an airline pilot, I suffered this miscarriage of justice." He said he hoped British Home Secretary would take the court's decision "very seriously and think again."

Raissi was arrested on Sept. 23 2001 and held until February 2002, when he was released on bail pending the outcome of the extradition hearing in April that year. Appeal judge Duncan Ouseley ruled that a compensation scheme for those wrongfully held in British custody should apply to extradition cases and said Raissi was entitled to a full hearing.

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ANOTHER LEGAL COVERUP

A man wrongly convicted of killing his girlfriend says a ban on West Australian barristers talking to the media on the record could have meant his case may never have been resolved.

At a meeting of the WA Bar Association last night, the state's 165 barristers were told they were no longer able to talk to the media on the record without permission from the association president. They will still be allowed to brief journalists off the record to ensure accurate reporting. The Bar association's president, Ken Martin QC, said the decision was designed to prevent American-style media circuses developing in WA.

John Button, who served five-and-a-half years of a 10-year prison term after being wrongly convicted of running down his teenage girlfriend Rosemary Anderson in 1963, said the decision was another method for the legal fraternity to cover its mistakes. A court quashed Mr Button's conviction in 2002 after the author of a book unearthed evidence that another man, known serial killer Eric Cooke, had killed Ms Anderson.

Mr Button says it was the media who secured his release, by working alongside QC Tom Percy. "To say they are not allowed to talk ... to me, this is a gag, and another way of the system covering up its mistakes," Mr Button told ABC radio. "Rather than admit it and fix it, they would rather close all the gates to any sort of discussion - the last thing they want is for the public to know the whole truth. "I believe it was the media that secured my release ... Tom (Percy) did a fantastic job, but if the media had not come onside and worked alongside him, we would never have got there, purely because of the corruption in the system."

Mr Martin said recent examples had prompted the changes to the rules - but he did not say what they were. "Regrettably, there is an American tendency creeping into WA and Australia to try and have OJ Simpson circus-like side trials before the media," he told ABC radio. "That is a bad thing and we want to try and stop that. "I am not going to go into specific cases, but I think we all know situations where people start talking about the merits and demerits of their case publicly before their case has even been tried."

Last night's changes are understood to have been prompted by comments made by Perth lawyer Mark Trowell after he was asked to become involved in the case of Schapelle Corby, convicted in Bali for drug smuggling. After Mr Trowell was reported as saying Corby's Indonesian legal team intended to bribe appeal judges in Denpasar, senior WA silk Wayne Martin complained about him to the bar association.

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Background on the Button case:

Somewhere in the world there's always an expert on any subject, no matter how arcane," says Bret Christian. In 1999, Christian, the publisher of independent suburban newspapers around Perth, Australia, needed to shed light on a murder that had taken place on February 9, 1963. The murder weapon was either a 1962 Simca Aronde, a homely French car with the rounded look of the early '50s that in its time and place was considered sporty for its 1500cc engine, or a 1961 Holden, an Australian GM car.

On the evening of the murder—John Button's 19th birthday—Button's girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, had stomped out of the house after an argument and was headed home. She walked from Redfern Street, the Buttons' leafy lane of working-class cottages, to the busier Nicholson Road, which ran under a railway embankment. Button followed in the Simca, stopping several times to beg forgiveness. At length, he broke for a smoke at a gas station and watched Rosemary disappear under the embankment. From there, she turned onto Stubbs Terrace, then a poorly lit haven for auto-body shops. When Button resumed his pursuit, he soon found her unconscious along Stubbs Terrace. He took her to a nearby doctor, who called an ambulance.

The police suspected Button, because of the argument and a damaged grille on the Simca that he attributed to an earlier fender-bender. They interrogated him, and punched him up a bit, says Button, and then wrote a confession, which Button signed. Button served five years' hard labor for manslaughter.

Unknown to Button until after his trial, another man, Eric Edgar Cooke, had confessed to the same murder. Cooke was a serial killer who had terrorized Perth since 1958. His 20 murders and assaults on young women included six hit-and-runs. After he was nabbed for a shooting, in August 1963, Cooke, a small man with a harelip and cleft palate, whose father had beaten him with the regularity of sunrise, confessed the rest. The police, heretofore stymied, embraced the confessions, except regarding Anderson and another murder where conviction had been achieved. (The Kennedy assassination, which had occurred two days earlier, pushed Cooke's trial off the front pages, says Christian.) But the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the two men's subsequent appeals.

His sentence served, Button worked desperately to prove his innocence. A break came in 1991, when his brother met a journalist, Estelle Blackburn, at a dance. Blackburn poured her life into Button's case, spending six years writing a book, Broken Lives. She dug up "fresh evidence" that enabled reopening the case under Australian law: a Vespa rider who claimed Cooke had chased him, and a man who had seen Button place the unconscious Anderson in his car, but who was not called as a witness at the trial. Christian published Blackburn's book in 1998 but worried that it lacked "the killer piece of evidence she needed [for Button] to win in court." These witnesses' stories were vague, and Christian feared presciently that the prosecutor would "tear them apart."

One day, examining a photo of an Australian Chrysler Cooke had used to run down two girls, Christian was struck by the damage, which was far greater than that on Button's car-and these girls had survived. That dialectic led Christian to seek an expert on car-and-pedestrian crashes.

All leads led to William Russell "Rusty" Haight, who is 45 and lives in San Diego with his wife, Catherine, a fitness trainer, his children, and 10-year-old son Connor's pet snakes, which he tolerates out of paternal love. But he works all over the country, at hotels-such as the Clarion Resort Fontainebleau in Ocean City, Maryland, where groups such as the Maryland Association of Traffic Accident Investigators hold conferences-as well as on large expanses of nearby tarmac.

Haight, who was three when Anderson was killed, is an expert in vehicle accident reconstruction. That art is the bastard child of engineering principles and methods of police investigation and analysis, he says. It's not about putting Humpty Dumpty back together, but rather, understanding exactly how he came apart.

Haight is renowned for being his own crash-test dummy. He holds a Guinness World Record for the most car crashes, now approaching 800. The crashes have involved speeds up to 53 mph, but his most serious injury was a minor cut caused by an airbag. He also ranks 24th on Men's Journal's list of the 25 toughest men in America, behind 50 Cent, but ahead of Hillary Clinton. No kidding....

The crash testing went like clockwork. One by one, Rusty drove the Simcas into the dummy, dubbed Matilda, at speeds ranging from 27 to 39 mph. Each time, Matilda slammed the hood before cartwheeling above the roof, leaving the classic pedestrian-crash-damage pattern that was absent from Button's Simca....

News accounts drew two more witnesses out of the woodwork, whose testimony would bolster the case, most notably, Trevor Condren, the police crash examiner who had inspected the Simca following the murder and had said at the time that it could not have killed Anderson. He had been prevented from testifying at the original trial. Now, in court, Condren identified the Simca in a photo, noting that there had been no blood, fabric, or skin on it.

In court, Christian says, "Rusty was so good at his work that while he was giving this incredibly detailed scientific evidence he was chatting up the girl who was running the tapes for the court transcript." Rusty played a major role in Button's exoneration. The Supreme Court summary credits the crash tests for raising doubts that Button's Simca hit Anderson, and for corroborating Cooke's account from Button's 1964 appeal. After Button's lawyer read Eric Cooke's 1964 affidavit describing how he ran down Anderson, the video of Rusty driving the Holden into the dummy eerily echoed Cooke's account.

On the last day of the appeal, in his summary, the Crown prosecutor stuck to the original story that Rosemary Anderson had been carried for some distance on the front of the car. But the judges began quoting Rusty's evidence to the contrary. It then dawned on Button's supporters that they had won the case.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)

ALWAYS KEEP YOUR ATM RECEIPTS!

You may need them to defend yourself against crooked police

A federal jury awarded $18 million to a teacher who claimed a sheriff's detective falsely accused him of kidnapping and assaulting a girl and hid evidence that would have exonerated him. Wednesday's award was the largest ever against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The jury could decide that plaintiff Raul Ramirez deserves more money when the trial enters its punitive phase Thursday. Because the county is not insured, the award, if upheld, would be paid by the department at a time when Sheriff Lee Baca is complaining that underfunding is forcing him to release jail inmates early and preventing him from placing enough deputies in jails to improve security.

Ramirez, 29, a teacher at Charles R. Drew Middle School in Compton, was arrested after a student there identified him as the man who kidnapped her at gunpoint in May 2002 as she waited for a bus, drove her to another location and demanded that she perform a sex act. The 16-year-old girl managed to escape.

A jury found Ramirez not guilty after he produced ATM receipts and cell phone records showing he was miles from the scene when the crime occurred. A judge later made the rare finding that he was "factually innocent." Ramirez, of Bellflower, then sued the Sheriff's Department, alleging that Detective Frank Bravo built a false case against him. According to Ramirez's federal complaint, Bravo knew Ramirez did not match the victim's description of her assailant but withheld that information until just before trial. Ramirez's attorney also alleged Bravo did not disclose the existence of the girl's backpack, which did not bear Ramirez's fingerprints. Bravo "arrested Mr. Ramirez and basically shattered his life based on the unreliable eyewitness identification of a teenage girl who was mistaken," said Ramirez's attorney, Michael Artan. "Then he hid evidence that would have exonerated Mr. Ramirez."

Bravo, a 20-year veteran assigned to the Century Station in Lynwood, could not be reached for comment by the Los Angeles Times. Assistant County Counsel Roger Granbo said the county was disappointed by the verdict. Sheriff's officials believed they were not liable because prosecutors thought the case against Ramirez had merit, he said. "The district attorney knew the problems with the case and the positive aspects and made an independent decision to prosecute," Granbo said. The largest previous award against the sheriff's department was $15.9 million, which a jury ordered paid to 36 people who had been arrested at a Cerritos bridal shower six years earlier.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)

TEXAS JUSTICE IS BECOMING AS PERVERTED AS BRITISH JUSTICE

The victim as offender. I would have thought that defences of either provocation or self-defence would have succeeded. The ignoramus concerned seems to have got off Scot-free



An Australian woman charged with assault after trying to shush an American moviegoer who was on a mobile phone has been fined $176. Pauline Clayton was in Texas on holidays when she decided to catch Australian actor Heath Ledger's movie Brokeback Mountain last week. Halfway through the picture, a woman film patron took a mobile phone call, and began talking. Annoyed by the disruption, Ms Clayton, a former Sunshine Coast councillor, put her finger to her mouth, signalling to the woman to shush, then touched her on the shoulder twice.

The other woman then stood up and started shouting expletives at Ms Clayton before storming out of the cinema. Police arrived and escorted Ms Clayton out of the theatre. The maligned woman told officers Ms Clayton had been "invading her private space" and accused the Australian of assault. Police subsequently arrested Ms Clayton and charged her with assault.

Ms Clayton was fined $176, the Seven Network reported today. Seven showed vision of a smiling Ms Clayton leaving what appeared to be a court building but it was unclear whether she had paid the fine. "If I don't have a traffic violation or touch anyone again in 90 days, there's no conviction," she said.

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India: Man released after 38 years, no trial

A man who was accused of murder and languished in prison for 38 years after becoming lost in India's bureaucracy was reunited with his family today after finally being freed by a Supreme Court order. Jagjivan Yadav, 70, was greeted by around 700 people as he arrived in his village in Uttar Pradesh state, but said the only member of his family he recognised was his wife. "I can hardly recognise anyone. They say they are my relatives, but I do not remember," he said. The only person Yadav recognised was his wife, Patto Devi. Devi said she had thought her husband was dead, having lost touch with him after his arrest for the murder of a woman in 1968.

Among the welcoming crowd were people whose evidence had led to his arrest, but one, Deo Dutt Yadav, said police had forced him to testify against Yadav. After his incarceration, Yadav's family fell upon hard times and his wife went to live with her brother.

His trial on murder charges had opened briefly but the authorities forgot about him after he was moved to another city for a medical check-up. Thirty-five years later he was transferred to a prison in Faizabad district, 150 kilometres southeast of state capital Lucknow, where his case came to light when a local official sought information about the status of the trials of all inmates. The Supreme Court took note of the case after a few lawyers rallied for Yadav's release, and he was granted bail on Monday. Yadav's lawyer said he would seek compensation.

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