After a Vallejo, Ca., man’s body was discovered four years ago in a ditch, seven people were sent to prison for their roles in his death — based in part on an autopsy by Dr. Thomas Gill, then the county’s forensic pathologist. During the case, the accused men and their lawyers were unaware of one crucial fact, reports California Watch: Another pathologist had reviewed Gill's work for the county sheriff and declared his conclusion “unreasonable.”
Prosecutors failed to disclose this contradictory autopsy review to the defendants. To dismiss the plea agreement and get a new trial, defense attorneys would have to prove that the review could have made a fundamental difference in their case, said Gabriel Chin, a law professor at University of California Davis. In this case, “it sounds like it may well have,” he said. Gill, 68, has repeatedly resurrected his career in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Northern California, and Kansas City, after autopsy errors undermined criminal cases and led to misdiagnosed causes of death. The California State Bar called the doctor “incompetent” in a 2006 report on a botched homicide investigation.
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Federal prosecutors acknowledged errors in the scientific evidence that helped send Santae Tribble of Washington, D.C., man to prison for 28 years for murder and took the extraordinary step of agreeing to have his conviction overturned, reports the Washington Post. U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen stopped short of declaring him innocent. Tribble, 51, was found guilty of the 1978 murder of a taxi driver. His case was featured last week by the Post, which said that Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to convictions of innocent people.
In Tribble's case, prosecutors and the FBI lab were incorrect in linking a hair found near the murder scene to Tribble. Three former senior FBI lab experts and a national civil liberties group joined calls for the Justice Department to review testimony in all convictions nationwide that depended on FBI hair evidence before 1996. U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) urged the Justice Department to review its handling of 250 questionable convictions identified by the Post, most of which relied on hair comparisons. "Obviously, if there are problems in D.C., there are problems across the country,” said Virginia Sloan, president of The Constituion Project. “To think this kind of testimony or potentially flawed evidence is limited to a particular location makes no sense.”
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Top Maryland law enforcement officials are pushing back against a Court of Appeals decision that prohibits DNA collection from suspects charged — but not yet convicted — of violent crimes, saying the ruling will allow dangerous criminals to go undetected by authorities, the Washington Post reports. Gov. Martin O'Malley, police chiefs, and prosecutors are urging the state’s attorney general to challenge the ruling, which found that swabbing criminal suspects for DNA samples after they are charged is a violation of the suspects’ constitutional rights.
Police and prosecutors say the case could jeopardize the convictions of 34 robbers, burglars, and rapists whose genetic samples were taken after they were charged in separate cases. They also said it will hamper detectives’ ability to solve cold cases.“It really sets Maryland back in the crime fight,” said Col. Marcus L. Brown, superintendent of the Maryland State Police. The case puts Maryland at the center of a brewing national debate that raises the question of how to balance privacy rights and public safety. Federal and state courts across the country have issued mixed opinions on when DNA collection is legal. The governor’s office says 26 states have legislation similar to Maryland’s. The issue seems destined to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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In 2009, Detroit prosecutors discovered more than 11,000 boxes of potential evidence in rape cases left completely unprocessed. Row upon row of what are called "rape kits" remained untouched on shelves in a police evidence room for years. No DNA evidence was extracted; no DNA evidence was used to catch or prosecute the assailants, reports NPR.
Since then, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy has led the effort to sort through those 11,000 rape kits and to find the funding to get them processed. "I don't know if they were just forgotten, I don't know if they were ignored, I don't know if they were deliberately put there," Worthy says. She arranged for a federal grant of one million dollars, but says that didn't allow her team to do much more than sort the evidence, match them up with police reports, and begin a database. To process all of the kits, Worthy estimates, would cost about $15 million.
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By Paul Bieber
Arson cases are often based on forensic evidence presented in court as irrefutable science, but which in fact has either never been tested or already been proven to be unreliable, writes to Paul Bieber, director of The Arson Research Project.
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The Harris County, Tx., Institute of Forensic Sciences aids law enforcement in solving property crimes by testing evidence for "touch DNA" - microscopic skin cells containing DNA that naturally rub off when an object, like a car steering wheel, is touched, says the Houston Chronicle. The technology can be used even if the suspect is wearing gloves because there's a high likelihood the skin cells were transferred onto the gloves when the perpetrator was slipping them on.
"It was a pretty incredible tool for us to have to identify some of these suspects," said Sgt. Terry Wilson of the Harris County Sheriff's Office auto-theft division. "These (burglary of a motor vehicle) cases are some of the hardest cases for law enforcement to solve because there's almost never any eyewitnesses. There's very rarely any good evidence left behind, fingerprint evidence and things like that, and once we started recovering some of this DNA, it was pretty exciting there for a while." Since 2008, the institute made more than 3,000 matches to crime suspects in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System database, or CODIS, a national database used to store DNA profiles. Of those, about 75 percent were for property crime cases.
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An Ohio death row inmate hopes the state parole board will permit him to argue that a mysterious "man in red" could have started the 1990 fire that killed...
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A fired former Austin Police Department crime lab scientist has alleged to District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg that some drug cases were processed "without any analysis being conducted at all," reports the Austin American-Statesman. Lehmberg asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to review the charges.
Assistant Police Chief Sean Mannix defends the lab, saying the charges came from an "angry former employee." One crime lab official said a review of two cases indicates no drug testing was performed before a "preliminary report" was emailed to prosecutors. The former employee said that "rush" cases were "analyzed without regard to laboratory protocols." Defense lawyers suggested that the "rush" cases were required to meet prosecutors' accelerated prosecution schedule under the so-called Rocket Docket. Defense lawyer Amber Vazquez Bode said that following protocol is essential in such cases because it ensures accuracy. "It's a pretty big deal if in fact a substance was not crack cocaine and you are sitting in state jail for a year," she said.
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Powerful California state Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi says a brain tumor contributed to her shoplifting $2,500 in clothing from a Neiman Marcus store, McClatchy Newspapers report. Hayashi's attorney, Douglas Rappaport, said a brain tumor impaired her decision making but that it is being treated with medication and it no longer affects her. Medical experts said it would be very rare for a brain tumor that does not require surgery to influence behavior so significantly.
"My gut feeling, as a constituent, is that it's a BS excuse in order to get out of her crime," said Brian Morrison, president of the Castro Valley Chamber of Commerce. Hayashi, 45, pleaded no contest to misdemeanor shoplifting. She was sentenced to three years of probation and nearly $200 in fines, but reduction of the charge from a felony makes her eligible to continue as a lawmaker. Hayashi said yesterday she had "unintentionally walked out of a store" with unpaid merchandise. "My medical condition may have complicated the situation," Hayashi said. "However, I want to be clear that I take full responsibility for my actions."
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Since Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins took office in 2007, incidents of wrongfully convicted men being released from Texas prisons have become almost commonplace, thanks to his office's Conviction Integrity Unit, established in 2007 to review potential wrongful convictions, says the Dallas Observer. Out of 17 exonerations in Dallas since 2007, there were only four cases without biological evidence.
Watkins faced a backlog of about 500 cases involving DNA evidence that had previously been denied testing and that would, in many cases, prove guilt or innocence. In the first couple years of the Conviction Integrity Unit's existence, DNA-based exonerations rolled out every few months. Most were old sexual assault cases in which semen from a rape kit was still available for modern-day tests. With many staff changes, public defender Michelle Moore worries that the unit's gears are sticking and cases that could be moving forward more quickly are stalled. "I think I see the tendency now to be overly cautious and it's to the detriment of the innocent man," she says. The sheer number of DNA exonerations — and the efforts to uncover how the courts failed so miserably — have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system: Eyewitnesses are more fallible than jurors might think; forensic evidence isn't always reliable or interpreted correctly; the way police run lineups can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, those problems may just as easily plague cases in which no DNA exists.
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ProPublica and PBS "Frontline" say they have identified more than three dozen cases in which the alleged neglect, abuse or even murder of senior citizens eluded authorities. But for the intervention of whistleblowers, concerned relatives and others, the truth about these deaths might never have come to light. Often, the system errs by omission. If a senior dies under suspicious circumstances, there's no guarantee anyone will ever investigate, and autopsies on the elderly have become increasingly rare.
ProPublica, in concert with other news organizations, has been scrutinizing the nation's medical examiner officers, which are responsible for probing sudden and unusual fatalities. It has found that these agencies -- hampered by chronic underfunding, a shortage of trained doctors and a lack of national standards -- have sometimes helped to send innocent people to prison and allowed killers to walk free. Concerning the deaths of the elderly, it found that when treating physicians report that a death is natural, coroners and medical examiners almost never investigate; that in most states doctors canfill out a death certificate without ever seeing the body, and that the rate of autopsies of seniors declined by more than half between 1972 and 2007.
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The issue of how prosecutors may use crime lab reports at a trial made its third appearance at the Supreme Court yesterday since a 5-4 ruling in 2009 said such reports may not be used in criminal trials unless the analysts responsible for creating them provide live testimony, reports the New York Times. In June, also by a 5-to-4 vote, the court said that only the analyst who did the work, rather than a colleague or supervisor, would do.
The new question for the justices is whether expert witnesses could offer opinions linking defendants to crimes based on lab reports that had not been admitted into evidence. Justice Antonin Scalia, leading a movement to breathe new life into the Sixth Amendment's confrontagtion clause, said that expert testimony may not be used to smuggle evidence into a criminal trial without testimony from those who created it. The clause gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Justice Stephen Breyer said yesterday there were good reasons to make an exception to the usual rules for reports from accredited, independent crime labs. The alternative, he said, was “a sea change in normal criminal law practices” that could require testimony from 10 analysts in a single case, pushing “the system in the direction of relying on less reliable eyewitness testimony rather than more reliable technical laboratory DNA-type evidence.”
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Day after day, inside a tightly guarded federal lab in suburban Washington, D.C., chemist Arthur Berrier probes packages of dangerous new synthetic drugs in search of secrets he can share with criminal investigators before the substances kill or seriously harm someone else, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It's a game of catch-up. As soon as he tips off law enforcement to the kinds of chemical compounds turning up in the drugs, another form of them emerges.
Drug makers can choose from an almost endless menu of chemicals to concoct, putting the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at a disadvantage as it tries to help states crack down. "They're keeping ahead of us," Berrier said. Hardly anyone saw the scourge coming. Wild names and strange mixes of substances in the drugs are constantly changing, quickly rendering state or federal bans against them weak or moot. Enforcing new laws against synthetic drugs -- sometimes sold as "bath salts" over the Internet by shadowy foreign companies or at local stores -- is difficult. Berrier is one of 46 chemists working in this nondescript facility in a Virginia suburb. It's one of nine DEA labs around the country, but this is the one where chemists spend all of their time using science to help the government take down drug kingpins and warlords.
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By Julia Dahl
Was JFK really killed by a lone assassin? Did the Casey Anthony jury pay proper attention to the forensic report? A top medical examiner says American pathologists sometimes miss—or ignore―crucial evidence.
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From DNA to gun casings, our justice system is reliant on science to help prove guilt or innocence. A new training manual helps forensic experts prepare to appear in court.
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