Friday Roundup: Opposition in Mississippi and Updates on Exonerees
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood opposes a House bill that would require people performing autopsies in the state to be nationally board certified. Tucker Carrington, director of the Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law, said: “If I mess up some guy’s case, there has to be some organization that can take my license. How can a bill be any less controversial? It is just asking that people be licensed.”

Two former Duke lacrosse players who were cleared of sexual assault accusations almost three years ago have moved on with their lives. Collin Finnerty resumed college at Loyola in the fall of 2008 and played lacrosse for the past two seasons. He is being considered for the Tewaaraton Trophy, awarded to the nation’s top lacrosse player each year. Reade Seligmann also resumed college in the fall 2008, enrolling at Brown and continuing to play lacrosse. He also became involved in the Innocence Project, most recently working to organize a symposium of experts on eyewitness identification.

Joshua Kezer, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit before being exonerated in 2009, will be featured on CBS’s “48 Hours Mystery” this Saturday, March 13, at 9 p.m. Kezer was accused of murdering a 19-year-old woman he had never met in 1994.

On Thursday, Innocence Project client Jeffrey Deskovic testified at a Connecticut Judiciary Committee hearing against a bill that would limit appeals for people sentenced to death. Since his exoneration in 2006, Deskovic has advocated against the death penalty, noting that if he hadn’t been a minor when he was wrongfully convicted he might have been sentenced to death.

Tags: Layla D’monte, legal aid, Barrister

Texas Man Set to Be Executed Despite Untested DNA
In an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck joined others in calling on Texas Gov. Rick Perry to order a stay in Skinner’s case so that DNA testing can proceed. Skinner’s attorneys made a similar request in a letter to Perry last week.

Scheck was joined in the op-ed by Cory Session, whose brother Timothy Cole was exonerated posthumously in Texas last year, and Rodney Ellis, a Texas state senator and the chairman of the Innocence Project Board of Directors. They wrote:

In Tim Cole’s case, solid science came too late. Perry was right to pardon him, but he would do well to learn from this case and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

One such person might be Hank Skinner, who is set to be executed March 24. Skinner has requested DNA testing for 10 years, and there is no good reason for state officials to continue blocking these efforts.

We don’t know whether Hank Skinner is guilty or innocent. But we know the governor has the power to step in and delay the execution so DNA testing can be done to resolve this case once and for all – before Skinner is executed.

Read the full op-ed here.

Last week, former Texas prosecutor Sam Millsap wrote in the Houston Chronicle that Texas should conduct testing in Skinner’s case in order to avoid the possible “horror of executing an innocent man.”

Calls for testing in Skinner’s case come after months of worldwide attention to the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 despite evidence of his innocence. Since Willingham’s execution, several independent scientific studies have determined that the forensic analysis used to convict him was wrong. A 16,000-word story in the New Yorker magazine last year went on to discredit all of the evidence used against Willingham, including the forensic analysis, the informant’s testimony, other witness testimony and additional circumstantial evidence.

Learn more about Hank Skinner’s case.

Learn more about Willingham’s case.

Seventeen people have been proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in the United States after serving time on death row. Learn about their cases here.

Tags: injustice, Barrister, pro bono

Eight Years of Freedom
Eight years ago this week, Arvin McGee was exonerated through DNA testing after spending more than 12 years in Oklahoma prisons for a crime he didn’t commit. After his release, he would fight the city of Tulsa in court for years before settling a civil suit. One city councilman would later write that his case was “flubbed from beginning to end” at an enormous cost to McGee and to taxpayers.

McGee was charged with the 1987 rape despite inconsistencies in the evidence against him. The victim’s description of the perpetrator differed significantly from McGee’s appearance, and she picked a different man in the first photographic lineup. At a second lineup almost four months after the crime, she took almost 15 minutes to identify McGee.

Significantly, McGee was suffering from an injury that rendered him physically unable to commit the crime. The victim had been carried over the perpetrator’s shoulder, but McGee was awaiting surgery for a hernia operation, and it was extremely unlikely that he would have been able to carry the victim. Eyewitness misidentification is the single most common cause of wrongful convictions.

Despite these issues, McGee was charged with the crime, based mainly on the second identification. He would be tried three times before he was ultimately convicted of rape, kidnapping and forcible sodomy and sentenced to over 200 years in prison. The first trial ended in a mistrial, and the second in a hung jury.

McGee spent almost 13 years in prison before the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System took his case and arranged for DNA testing on the remaining biological evidence. These tests excluded McGee. A second round of testing ordered by Tulsa County prosecutors on the rape kit recovered from the victim produced the same results, which implicated another Oklahoma prisoner. The other man was charged with the crime, but his case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.

Due to the conclusive evidence of McGee’s innocence, Tulsa prosecutors joined with his attorneys in seeking his release. McGee, who was 27 years old when he was wrongfully convicted, was 39 on the day he was freed in February 2002.

Read more about McGee’s case and the role of eyewitness misidentification in causing wrongful convictions.

Other Exoneree Anniversaries This Week:

Charles Chatman, Texas (Served 26.5 years, Exonerated: 2/26/08)

Tags: injustice, law, pro bono

The Many Faces of Forensic Science
In 1985, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were sentenced to death in Illinois for the murder of a ten-year-old girl. They were convicted based mainly on admissions they allegedly gave to police. Biological evidence didn’t play a role in their trials. The case was far from over, however, and science would play a central role in the years ahead.

Ten years later, DNA testing helped set the two free. Cruz and Hernandez were exonerated when DNA evidence uncovered by the Medill Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions implicated another man, since identified as Brian Dugan, in the crime.

In November of last year, Dugan was convicted of the murder and sentenced to die. A column in today’s Daily Herald examines the case’s 27-year history and considers the number of victims it has left in its wake. The case has also left a fascinating trail of forensic science, from DNA to the emerging practice of functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans (fMRI, which examines brain activity.

In considering Dugan’s punishment, jurors heard testimony on his mental condition from psychologists and from a neuroscientist who works with fMRI. As Michael Haederle writes in Miller-McCune magazine this week, neuroscientist Kent Kiehl testified that magnetic scans of Dugan’s brain showed the impact of his mental illness and suggested that he didn’t feel emotion like others, possibly disqualifying him for the death penalty. It may have been the first time fMRI was used in a capital sentencing hearing.

Other supporters of fMRI suggest that someday the technique could be used in court as a sort of lie detector. This case and others have spawned questions about whether fMRI should be admitted in a courtroom before the practice has been vetted by an independent agency.

The history of wrongful convictions in the United States is replete with new forms of science, and further research is needed to validate existing and new forensic techniques. A groundbreaking report from the National Academy of Sciences last year found that no forensic discipline other than DNA analysis has been subjected to the kind of rigorous scientific evaluation needed to develop reliable information. Unvalidated and improper forensic testimony can have a devastating impact on a criminal case, misleading jurors and contributing to injustice.

Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld is speaking about the impact of the NAS report and the need for a federal forensic entity this week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Forensic Scientists’ in Seattle.

Learn more about forensic oversight and call on Congress to create a federal oversight agency.

Tags: , Miscarriage of Justice, legal aid

Faulty Science and the Wrong Man on Death Row
In 1995, Kennedy Brewer was sentenced to death in Mississippi for allegedly raping and murdering his girlfriend’s three-year old daughter. Although his conviction was overturned in 2001 after seven years on death row, he would spend another five years in jail, and two years free on bond, before he was finally exonerated two years ago this week.

Pictured, from left to right, are Innocence Project Staff Attorney Vanessa Potkin, Brewer, Mississippi exoneree Levon Brooks and Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld.

Dr. Michael West, a bite-mark analyst who has since been discredited, provided critical testimony for the prosecution. West was brought into the case by Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical examiner who lacks proper board certification and whose work has also been discredited. At trial, West told the jury that Brewer had bitten the girl 19 times using only his upper two teeth, and that marks on the victim’s body conclusively matched Brewer’s dental records. In fact, experts say that the marks weren’t even caused by human teeth.

West’s procedures and findings have come under fire in numerous cases. He claims to have invented the “West Phenomenon,” in which he donned yellow goggles, and, using a blue laser, identified bite marks, scratches and other marks that only he could see. West also claimed to have conclusively identified a perpetrator from bite marks on a bologna sandwich. That conviction was later overturned. In 2001, a defense lawyer sent his own dental mold and photographs of bite marks on a victim’s breast to West, along with his $750 retainer. West produced a video for the lawyer in which he concluded that the mold and photos were a definite match.

In its 2009 report on forensic science, The National Academy of Sciences criticized the relatively new field of forensic odontology, because there is no widely accepted way to measure the reliability of bite marks, no national database to compare samples and a lack of extensive peer review and research. To remedy these problems, the NAS recommended the formation of a national entity to supervise and support forensic science, including bite mark analysis. Learn more about improper and unvalidated forensic science and read the full NAS report here.

Citing West’s original testimony, the Mississippi State Supreme Court affirmed Brewer’s conviction and death sentence in 1997. DNA testing performed in 2001 showed that he could not have committed the crime and led to his conviction being overturned. Prosecutors, however, said they intended to retry him.

Brewer remained in jail awaiting the promised trial until 2007, when he was freed on bond — with a trial still pending. The next year, an Innocence Project investigation led to further DNA testing, which implicated another man as the perpetrator. The real perpetrator then confessed to committing the crime, and a similar crime for which another man – Levon Brooks – had been wrongfully convicted as well.

Brewer says he’s not angry about the injustice he suffered and instead wants to focus on moving on with his life. He met his future wife in a program after his exoneration, and plans to get married this April. Brewer also has two children and a grandson. He currently works at a food processing plant in Brooksville, Mississippi.

Tags: law, pro bono, legal aid

Friday Roundup: Freedom and Reform, from Coast to Coast
Gregory Taylor was freed in North Carolina this week after serving 17 years in prison for a evidence shows murder he didn’t commit, and we posted Ted Bradford of Washington to our database as the nation’s 251st DNA exoneree (and the first in Washington state). Their cases underline the need for reforms nationwide to help free the innocent and prevent wrongful convictions.

A comprehensive package of reforms with bipartisan support in Ohio has stalled just short of the finish line. Activists across Ohio are sending emails to their representatives this week urging a vote on the bill. If you’re in Ohio, send your letter here. If you’re not, ask your friends in Ohio to take action now.

New York City will begin recording complete interrogations in a pilot project in some precincts. Innocence Project Policy Analyst Rebecca Brown told WNYC that surveys of 238 police departments found that the reform is well received among law enforcement:

“They find that these are airtight confessions that they can use in court,” Brown said. “Nobody will question them. It prevents disputes about how officers conducted themselves. It creates a record of statements made by the suspect. It permits officers to concentrate on the interview rather than being distracted by the note taking.”

A Pennsylvania editorial called for DNA testing in the case of Innocence Project client Scott Oliver.

The Innocence Project of Texas filed a pardon application this week on behalf of Timothy Cole, who died in prison in 1999 while serving time for a rape DNA now shows he didn’t commit.

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who served 20 years in New Jersey prisons before he was cleared based on evidence of his innocence, is in Australia this week speaking about issues surrounding wrongful convictions.

Artist Dan Bolick’s portraits of exonerees are on display this month at Penn State University.

There’s plenty of interesting conversation on the Innocence Project’s Facebook page this week — share your views and connect with fellow advocates here.

Tags: legal, Innocence Project, pro bono

Freddie Peacock’s Long Journey to Exoneration

By Maggie Taylor, Senior Case Coordinator

Yesterday, I had the honor of sharing an incredible day with a person who had previously lived in my mind as handwriting, case documents and a very memorable name – Freddie Peacock. I first heard Freddie’s name in 2005 when I evaluated his case for potential acceptance at the Innocence Project, and I was thinking of his letters yesterday as he finally achieved the exoneration he sought for so long.

In two weeks I'll celebrate my sixth anniversary with the Innocence Project, where I work in the intake and evaluation department. My job, and the job of eight wonderful colleagues in my department, is to help determine which cases the Innocence Project can accept. To do so, we reconstruct a case as best we can through documents: from the often-heartbreaking letters of prisoners and from lab reports, police reports, trial transcripts and other legal documents. We examine a case from every angle, looking for two things: a viable innocence claim and biological evidence that, if tested, should tell us if the person asking for our help is innocent. Our jobs, though fascinating and challenging, focus almost exclusively on lives on paper.

When Freddie first wrote to us, his request was different from many of the pleas we read. He needed our help to restore his good name. When I worked up Freddie's case in 2005, it was compelling not only for the biological evidence that could prove his innocence, but because he had been out of prison since 1982, and still fought for exoneration. In fact, Freddie had been off parole since 1992, and before that had voluntarily remained on parole because he thought he would have a better chance of proving his innocence.

He existed in my mind for years as a compelling story but he came to life when I met him on Wednesday. We arrived at his apartment on Wednesday afternoon and were greeted by Freddie, his sister Edith and his longtime friend and advocate Bill Marshall. Freddie, now 60, is a very tall man, with a genuine smile and brown tortoise shell glasses. Edith had just taken Freddie to the barber and they were planning his court outfit. Freddie picked up the tie he planned to wear the next day and handed it to Bill, who put it around his own neck, tied it, and put it on Freddie to check the length.

Freddie sat quietly as staff attorney Olga Akselrod and Cardozo student Jess Smith walked him through what would happen on exoneration day. As Edith, who was to be the family's official spokesperson at the press conference, prepared for difficult questions, we heard about how Freddie's wrongful conviction had affected the family. She talked about how worried she had been when Freddie went into prison. She feared Freddie's mental illness would make him a target of violence, and I thought about the scores of other inmates with mental illnesses who write to us for help.

The courthouse the next day was flooded with reporters and camera operators. The hearing was brief. Edith cried with relief as soon as the judge began signing the paper vacating Freddie's conviction. Olga asked for just three or four minutes to talk about Freddie's ordeal on the record; the judge granted two. No apologies were offered to Freddie. At the end of the hearing the judge wished Freddie luck, and we filed out of the courtroom just ten minutes after we had entered. Edith turned to her friend Jeanette, who had accompanied her, and said how glad she was it was all over, Jeanette silently tucked Edith's hair behind her ear.

At the press conference Olga praised Freddie for his spirit and tenacity in proving his innocence. She noted how terrifying it is to keep reaching out for relief to the same system that wronged you. Innocence Project Co-director Peter Neufeld pressed for laws mandating the recording of interrogations to help prevent false confessions, like the one Freddie allegedly gave police over three decades ago. Freddie sat with his head down, staring at his hands in his lap, as his sister described the burden of his wrongful conviction.

After the press conference we called the Innocence Project office so the staff and students could congratulate Freddie, an Innocence Project ritual. When Freddie said hello he was greeted with applause and cheers. He beamed, and laughed, and his sister told everyone on the line, “Y'all are family now.” I've been one of those voices cheering from the other end of the line on many occasions, and it was great to see that call from the other end, how happy it seemed to make Freddie and his sister.

Freddie’s family held a party after the hearing in the rec room of Freddie’s apartment complex. Freddie's family and friends gathered for lasagna, chicken, fruit and sandwiches. Freddie joked with everyone and talked about basketball with Peter, who noted that he and Freddie were the same age and had the same basketball heroes. Freddie's pastor, who was out of town and couldn't make it to the exoneration, called in with congratulations. Freddie cut a white sheet cake with blue roses that said, “Congratulations, Freddie, it's been a long journey.”

Tags: legal, Miscarriage of Justice, Barrister

Politics Delay Reform in Ohio

A bill that would address the causes of wrongful conviction and help innocent parolees seek exoneration is stalled in the Ohio House of Representatives, seven months after passing the Senate.

The measure would require that law enforcement agencies preserve crime scene evidence and conduct “blind” identification procedures — in which the administering officer doesn’t know the identity of the suspect. It would also open a path for people on parole to seek DNA tests that can prove innocence.

Although the bill has bipartisan support and the Governor has said he will sign it if passed, the Columbus Dispatch reports that progress seems to be delayed by a legislative logjam.

The delay has frustrated supporters, including Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project.

“All parties, including prosecutors, police, Democrats and Republicans, worked for years to create a consensus bill. It's a shame it's being delayed at this point,” Godsey said, noting that the bill would help prevent convictions of innocent people.

Read the full story here. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/5/10)

If you live in Ohio, sign up for Innocence Project email updates today to receive breaking news and actions relating to this issue in the weeks ahead.

Tags: , legal, Barrister

Friday Roundup: Ringing the Liberty Bell

Here are some of the stories we didn’t get to on the Innocence Blog this week. For breaking news, follow us on Twitter @innocenceblog.

James Bain served 35 years in Florida prisons for a rape he didn’t commit before DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project of Florida led to his exoneration in December. On Monday, he will ring the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia in a celebration of one of his heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oklahoma State Sen. Constance Johnson filed a bill yesterday that would create a commission to study the causes of wrongful convictions and recommend reforms to address them.

A wave of drug-related crime has led to a spike in demand for forensic tests in Mexico. Educational opportunities for aspiring forensic analysts are expanding as well.

British exoneree Sean Hodgson could receive several million Pounds in compensation after serving 27 years in U.K. prisons for a crime he didn’t commit. He spoke with the BBC this week about the challenges of life after exoneration.

A new paper from University of Houston Law Center Professor Sandra Guerra Thompson explores how state courts across the U.S. have handled evidence of eyewitness misidentifications.

Tags: Miscarriage of Justice, Layla D’monte, pro bono

Sunday on Lifetime: "The Wronged Man"

“The Wronged Man,” a moving new Lifetime film, tells the story of Calvin Willis’ wrongful conviction in Louisiana and the fight to free him. The movie premieres on Lifetime Movie Network Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET.

Watch a trailer here and find Lifetime Movie Network in your local listings.

Calvin Willis served more than 21 years in Louisiana prisons for a child rape he didn’t commit before DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project proved his innocence and led to his exoneration. For 15 years, a paralegal named Janet “Prissy” Gregory advocated on Willis’ behalf, filing appeals for a new trial and raising money to pay for DNA testing. Gregory is played in the film by Julia Ormond. Willis is played by Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Pictured above is a scene from the film with Ormond (left), Tonea Stewart (playing Momma Newton, the grandmother who raised Calvin) and Ali.

Learn more about Willis’ case. Watch an Innocence Project video of Willis' reunion with long-time friend and fellow exoneree Rickie Johnson.

Airing with the film is a new Public Service Announcement featuring Julia Ormond on wrongful convictions and the work of the Innocence Project. Watch the PSA here.

Tags: legal, Innocence Project, pro bono