Interesting News story

[Bill Schade]

This was a story in today's paper

http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/study- ... em/1231151

"In half of the 873 exonerations studied in detail, the most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Forty-three percent of the cases involved mistaken eyewitness identification, and 24 percent of the cases involved false or misleading forensic evidence."


I suspect we will hear more about this

[Pat]

In doing research into fabrication of fingerprint evidence, I found thousands of cases of fabrication of latent print evidence in the literature. Contrast that with the few dozen erroneous identifications. Dishonest people are a far greater problem in our discipline than honest mistakes.

[Bill Schade]

Lets not forget Dishonest Lawyers!

Here is a story that makes my blood boil!

Wonder if we will see a Frontline show on Legal Misconduct and dishonesty.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/crime/2012/ ... r-justice/

[Boyd Baumgartner]

You can find the actual registry here: http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoner ... llist.aspx

they code and define forensic contributions as:

False or Misleading Forensic Evidence (F/MFE)—A forensic analyst or other forensic expert presented evidence that was either (1) based on unreliable or unproven methods, (2) expressed with exaggerated and misleading confidence, or (3) fraudulent.

I've contacted them to see what role fingerprints played in the cases coded as such.

So I'd say the questions of the day are:

Does the common contention between the Habers/Cole's of the world regarding certainty by an Examiner rise to (2) as listed above?
Is this biased towards pro prosecution testimony? Meaning is the same unproven methods or exaggerated certainty /confidence, fraud criteria standard apply to the defense experts as well with the meta-ethical understanding that justice is also concerned with preventing guilty people from going free as well?

[Tazman]

Then there's the case of Todd Willingham.

He was charged in the 1991 arson deaths of his wife and kids. In 1994, he was convicted and sentenced to death. The only evidence was flawed arson analysis that concluded the fire was not an accidental electrical fire, but an intentionally set arson fire. Other than that erroneous conclusion, there was absolutely no evidence of arson and even less that Todd Willingham himself was a killer.

Arson investigators today know that the evidence was erroneous. It was based on snap judgement of burn patterns, judgement that was not based on experiment and validation, but only on what it looked like to the investigator at the scene. That conclusion would never get into court today.

Todd Willingham was executed in 2004. Interestingly, the evidence was to be examined by the Texas Forensic Science Commission prior to his execution. The TFSC was to determine whether there were grounds for appeal. Three days before the TFSC was to meet to discuss the case, Governor Rick Perry replaced three members of the Commission who he knew were good scientists. He replaced them with strict law and order political hacks who he knew would uphold the "science" that had convicted Todd Willingham. Rick Perry also later denied Willingham's appeal for clemency.

Google Todd Willingham. It's not just dishonest law enforcement people. Nor dishonest lawyers and judges. Here was a governor willing to abandon good science and honest forensic review just to prove how tough on crime he is.

[Neville]

Well we all know our science is based on unreliable or unproven methods, Mr Cole said so therefore it must be true because he is a solicitor, an officer of the court and all that, all fingerprint evidence must therefore fall in that 24% area.

Funny thing is I have heard defence council lying through their teeth in court making up stories for their client to suit the evidence as it comes out. I had personal experience of the defence telling the jury (in summing up, so I had no right of reply) that I had taken her clients fingerprints from the record and applied them to the chrome exterior door hand of the car as I was the only person who had access to his fingerprints, can someone explain to me how I managed to get a white powder lift from a black printers ink impression on paper??!! and that at a time when he hadn't yet been identified.

So I wonder would this case be down to unreliable methods.
Yes the justice method.

[Bill Schade]

Here is the editorial from todays issue of the Tampa Bay Times. I'm a little surprised at how balanced it is.

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editori ... 231294.ece



Bold change needed to reduce wrongful convictions

Published Monday, May 21, 2012
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No one wants to see an innocent person wrongfully convicted of a crime, but it happens all too frequently. How to make it happen less often is the charge of the Florida Innocence Commission, which was established by the Florida Supreme Court in 2010. The commission met Monday in Tampa and will continue its hearings today. When the commission wraps up its work at the end of June, it should be prepared to propose serious reforms. Wrongful convictions are finally getting attention, but only bold changes will reduce the number of innocent people going to prison.

The commission is made up of prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement and other professionals in the criminal justice community who have come together to examine the causes of wrongful convictions and offer potential solutions. The agenda in Tampa includes reviewing issues such as the excessive caseloads that prosecutors and public defenders carry, which put a premium on speed over accuracy. It's easy to see how this can lead to conviction errors. Overburdened prosecutors don't have the time to evaluate a defendant's claims of innocence, and defense attorneys can't provide a full defense.

Florida's commission is coming at a time of greater national interest in the issue. DNA evidence that proves innocence has identified serious deficiencies in the way criminal cases are handled. A new national registry of exonerations exhaustively details nearly 900 exonerations, including 32 in Florida, and provides information on nearly 1,200 more. The group of nearly 900 wrongly convicted collectively spent more than 10,000 years in prison — an archive of wrecked lives. When the criminal justice system gets it wrong, innocent people are denied their liberty. Their families are left behind often without a father or provider. Crime victims don't get justice because the real perpetrator went free, possibly to offend again. Everyone loses.

Because more attention is paid to offenders on death row and those convicted of serious crimes, their cases are more likely to be reviewed and mistakes found. The archive includes more than 100 who had received a death sentence and been wrongfully convicted. But there are undoubtedly legions of other, lesser crimes where a wrongful conviction has occurred. That is why it is essential that known exonerations are studied to determine what they reveal about the problems within the system.

Here is what we know: The most common causal factors that contribute to wrongful convictions are perjured testimony or false accusations such as from jailhouse snitches, mistaken eyewitness identification, and the toleration of official misconduct by police, attorneys or judges. Other factors are misleading forensic evidence and false confessions. This is consistent with the archive's analysis of the cases, as well as the research Florida's commission is examining.

Last year, the commission's interim report made recommendations to police agencies on how to conduct lineups that don't influence eyewitnesses. It was an important step, but without more far-reaching and substantial recommendations from the commission, there won't be real change. This is Florida's opportunity to better its system of justice.