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FBI To Review Use of Forensic Evidence In Thousands of Cases
NotSanguine writes in with a story about a review of the forensic evidence in thousands of criminal cases to see if any defendants were wrongly convicted. "The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday.
The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery."
The question is which.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Did they suddenly work out that lie detectors were a fraud?
Seriously, the FBI have been an international laughing stock for decades for that one.
its a good job the USA doesn't have the death penalty for those crimes!!!
oh... wait
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Perhaps in some exceptions will this lead to a mistrial. The general idea will be that those people are locked up. because they are guilty. Stupid reasoning? Sure it is, but that is what many years of CSI and other shows and movies have learned us: There is no need for due process. The people looking for the bad people are judge, jury and executioner.
What is even more worrying is that it happened in thousands of cases and nobody picked up on it.
Not the defense. Perhaps because they were lied to.
Not the judge. Who should know that.
And how many cases were settled outside court? MAFIAA and logfiles anybody?
Where I used to work, police came regularly asking for evidence. Whenever they came without any official papers (i.e. a court order) we told them we would keep it aside till they had it. This because of two reasons.
1) We did not wanted to get sued. (Never happened with us)
2) We wanted to get the bad guys as well. Not having the proper proof could mean dropping the case. (Had that happen at least once that I know off. Somebody gave evidence and the bad guy could walk.)
3) They could not come because of personal vendetta against somebody or some protocol or organisation. (Have seen them trying that as well. And no, we did not give in. We even escorted them out of the building. Pity they were not in uniform, because that would have been hilarious.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have three words for you: Cameron Todd Willingham. Convicted and executed on the basis of junk science. Actually, that's not true. The "expert" testimony was an insult to junk science even. There was no science involved, just pure speculation and mythology dressed up as "scientific".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This gives plenty of time for new evidence to be discovered...
And prosecutors, with the power and budget of the state behind them, fight tooth and nail to prevent that new evidence from ever being considered in court. On the other side, you have an (often uneducated) inmate with a prison library.
Yeah, that's fair.
Seriously though, the prosecutors who make this mistakes, and their successors, have a vested interest in never letting mistakes be revealed to the public, and sometimes go to absolutely ridiculous lengths to prevent DNA from being considered.
And that is why audits like this that the FBI doing are important and necessary. It should bring to light any discrepancies or irregularities, as the people that generally do these kinds of audits are separate from the people that processed the evidence and prosecuted the suspects.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Hope they reexamine the Leonard Peltier conviction.
This isn't Soviet Russia where a kangaroo court declares you guilty and they pop you in the head as soon as you walk out of the courtroom
No, this is America, where the majority of inmates never had a trial and just pleaded out on the advice of their lawyers. No, we are not the USSR yet -- the USSR was one of only two countries in the history of the Earth to have a larger prison population than the United States.
We have due process
Coupled with a legal system that makes so many activities crimes that most people cannot live their lives without breaking the law. The US government has actually lost track of how many laws are on the books -- we don't even know the number of laws, let alone what the laws actually say. Our criminal code only expands, it never contracts -- and unsurprisingly, our prison population keeps expanding.
Palm trees and 8
...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.
I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable
In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.
Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.
And yet, the state has managed to murder several people who were proven innocent posthumously. And it WAS murder since executions are only for the guilty.
The truly horrifying part is the way in other cases where the wrongly accused happens to still be alive prosecutors often fight tooth and nail to proceed with the execution on procedural grounds in spite of irrefutable evidence of innocence. They show their true colors in that, clearly they have no interest in justice, they're just psychopathic serial killers who have found a legal way to do it.
When we have people like that willing to lie cheat and steal if necessary to make sure the 'wheels of justice' grind the defendant/victim without regard for actual guilt, I would say we better stick strictly to reversible penalties. Note that custodial sentences are only somewhat reversible.
Simple solution: If somebody is convicted wrongly and executed, execute those responsible. I would call that fair. This will include the jury, key witnesses and the prosecutor. Maybe then they will make sure they are right....
Actually this is the only condition under which I would reluctantly agree to the death penalty.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just because someone "admitted" guilt as part of a plea bargain doesn't mean they are actually guilty. Plea bargaining itself is a form of coercion, it's like putting a gun to someone's head and telling they you'll shoot them if they don't confess and give up their conspirators. Plenty of people have gone on to recant their pleas. The Norfolk Four is an example you may be aware of. Most sensible people realize that plea-bargaining for easy convictions is a deeply flawed way of getting "justice". It puts innocent people behind bars and gives guilty people lighter sentences.