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Truth in Justice
Newsletter - December, 2005 - January, 2006
RECENT CASES
Don't
thank the legal system for Clarence Elkins' exoneration. The
"system"
failed him at every turn of an 8-year, nightmare saga. Thank
Elkins
himself. Elkins nabbed the cigarette butt discarded by another
inmate,
Earl Mann, and sent it to his lawyer. Mann's DNA matched that of
the
person who raped and killed Elkins' mother-in-law and raped his
niece.
Even then, Summit County
prosecutors scraped the ground, looking for some way to keep Elkins in
prison. Only when the Attorney General and Governor became
involved
did the Summit County prosecutor decide to throw in the towel, free
Elkins and charge the real killer.
A St. Louis, Missouri woman was viciously attacked
and
raped in her own home. Stephen Judd was arrested and,
inexplicably confessed, but DNA tests excluded him. Then a cold
hit matched the DNA of James Fujimoto, who had never been a suspect in
the attack. Kudos to St. Louis police and prosecutors who did not
prosecute Judd anyway, based on his false confession, and were
rewarded by getting the right man.
On March 13, 1986,
Pittsburgh, PA police came by Olivia Doswell's, to have
a word with her son. There'd been a rape nearby, and, though Mr.
Doswell bore no resemblance to the description given police, the victim
and a witness picked him out of a photo array, triggering a cascade of
injustice: an arrest, a conviction, and a 12- to 24-year sentence. But
Doswell never strayed from his story of innocence. And on Aug. 1, 2005
he was
freed - exonerated by DNA evidence.
Ironically, his honesty - the persistent claim of innocence - cost him
more than guilt would have. He refused to confess to gain leniency or
parole, and served at least six years more than he would have if he'd
confessed. He also refused to harbor anger, adopting an attitude of
such peace that he has become a model of forgiveness, his story
broadcast worldwide.
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INNOCENT IMPRISONED
It was one of the most
terrifying crimes ever to hit
Kaukauna, WI, a community of 13,000. On June 25,
2000, Shanna Van Dyn Hoven, a 19-year-old UW-Madison
student, was stabbed to death as she jogged by a quarry near her home
about 6 p.m. Prosecutors
said Hudson stabbed Van
Dyn Hoven, a stranger, in a fit of misplaced rage, and that they caught
him red-handed, covered in her blood. Newly uncovered evidence,
however, appears to support Hudson's contentions -- and raises more
questions about the conduct of the police and the prosecutor, Vince
Biskupic.
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The
murder of 67-year-old M. Geneva Long of Susquehanna Township, PA left
many questions
unanswered, including the guilt of the man who was convicted in her
death. Journalist Pete Shellem takes an in-depth look at the
evidence of David Gladden's innocence in this 3-part series.
Police
were convinced that Michelle Moore-Bosko, a young Navy wife, was raped
and murdered by eight men in her small Norfolk, VA apartment in 1997
while
her husband was away at sea. And five of them confessed. But
Bosko's apartment showed no signs of mass attack, and the DNA left
behind matched only one man: Omar A. Ballard, a convicted sex offender,
who gave details of the killing and said he acted alone. The
four
others who confessed -- Danial
J. Williams,
Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek E. Tice and Eric C. Wilson,
all Navy sailors -- later recanted but were
convicted anyway, and three of them are serving life sentences. Three
of "the Norfolk Four," as their attorneys call them, plan to ask
outgoing Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) for clemency. The fourth sailor's
request is pending.
Six mangled lead slugs,
supposedly fired from a rusty, Smith &
Wesson .38 special found in his mother's home near Dora, Alabama sent
Hinton to
Death Row in 1986. Police recovered the spent slugs from victims of a
string of robbery/murders at fast-food restaurants in the Birmingham
area in 1985. It was the only evidence they had, but Jefferson County
prosecutors used that evidence to help
convince a jury Hinton committed the crimes and should be put to death.
But the questions loom large. How were state
forensics
experts able to match the six slugs to each other and to test bullets
fired from the same gun when national experts were unable to replicate
their findings? Why won't the state's experts work with the national
experts to resolve their differences? How could Hinton have clocked in
to work at midnight and been assigned his tasks at 12:10 a.m. on the
night of the Smotherman shooting, yet driven to Quincy's 15 miles away
in just four minutes?
There
are basically four reasons Gregory Bruce Dunagan feels he is
serving a life sentence for murder in the Texas penitentiary: 1) his
criminal record from an incident when he was 18 years old, 2) a setup
by a lying jailhouse informant, 3) sloppy police work and 4) an
ineffective job by his defense attorney at trial. Yet even if the
state offered him
time served and agreed to let him out of prison, Dunagan says, "I would
tell them to
go to hell, because I'm not guilty."
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DEATH PENALTY ISSUES
Texas
executed its fifth teenage offender at 22 minutes after
midnight on Aug. 24, 1993, after his last request for bubble gum had
been refused and his final claim of innocence had been forever
silenced. Four
days after a Bexar County jury delivered its verdict, Cantu
wrote this letter to the residents of San Antonio: "My name is Ruben M.
Cantu and I am only 18 years old. I got to the 9th grade and I have
been framed in a capital murder case." A
dozen years after his execution, a Houston Chronicle investigation
suggests that Cantu was likely telling the
truth.
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HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS
Nationally American
prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many
were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by
prosecutors' threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by
false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors, who exchanged
dropped charges or reduced sentences for false testimony against
defendants. Not
all the wrongfully convicted are poor. Some are wealthy and
prominent people targeted by corrupt prosecutors seeking a celebrity
case in order to boost their careers. Paul Craig Roberts holds a
mirror to One
Nation Under Prosecutors
Colorado - and every state No firm numbers exist on the use
of jailhouse informants in criminal trials, but experts say it is
common, especially in high-stakes cases such as murder trials in which
prosecutors are under pressure to get a conviction. Offering people deals in
exchange for testifying is "tantamount to bribery," says Rob Warden,
Director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful
Convictions. Colorado Springs' Ronnie Archuleto could be the
poster child for lying
jailhouse snitches. |
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Canada Think our neighbors to the north are
immune to the same systemic flaws that have led to an epidemic of
wrongful convictions in the US? Think again. The legal
systems of Canada and the US have common roots, and common
pitfalls. North
of the Border
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POLICE/PROSECUTOR/JUDICIAL
MISCONDUCT
Wisconsin: Newly
uncovered evidence in the Kenneth Hudson case appears to support
Hudson's contention that he was framed for the murder of Shanna Van Dyn
Hoven in 2000. But this isn't the first time questions have been
raised about the conduct of the
prosecutor, Vince Biskupic. Biskupic's
Tactics
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FALSE ALLEGATIONS OF CHILD ABUSE
Brandy Briggs,
accused by Dr. Moore of shaking her baby son to death,
followed her lawyer's advice in 1999 and pled guilty to injury to a
child. Subsequent review demonstrated that the child died of
natural
causes coupled with medical malpractice, and was neither abused nor
neglected. Now the Texas
Criminal
Court of Appeals has thrown out Briggs' conviction based on her
lawyer's Deficient
Performance.
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JUNK SCIENCE
CNN Presents:
Reasonable Doubt: Can Crime Labs be
Trusted?
A joint investigation
by CNN and the Center for Investigative Reporting examines the lack of
standards, quality controls and training at many of the nation's
forensic laboratories and raises serious doubts about some forensic
scientists.
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GSR -- or BSR?
A New Scientist investigation has
found that someone who has never fired a gun could be contaminated by
someone who has, and that different criminal investigators use
contradictory standards. What's more, particles that are supposedly
unique to GSR can be produced in other ways.
(2/13/2003)
Scientist
Mary Jane Burton was
devoted to her work in the Virginia Forensic Science Lab. She
"invented" rape kits and put them together for police use on her own
time.
When crime novelist Patricia Cornwell referred to "the lab", she
mean Mary Jane Burton. Mary Jane's habit of preserving a swatch
of test material in case files was one of the practices that led to her
forced retirement in 1990. She died in 1999. Since her
death,
two innocent men have been cleared of rapes they didn't commit because
of the very practice her supervisors disapproved. Mary Jane
Burton's legacy is one of freedom and of hope.
UPDATE (12/15/2005): The legacy goes on. Two More Men Cleared
Thanks to Mary Jane Burton.
UPDATE(12/25/2005): Only 10% of the
first 300 cases ordered reviewed by Gov. Mark Warner have been
examined, resulting in 2 more exonerations. "It's
pretty clear there's going to
be other exonerations. I can't imagine we got the only two out of all
those cases," said Paul B. Ferrara, director of the Virginia Department
of Forensic Science. Virginia Slogs through
DNA Tests
RECOMMENDED READING
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Surviving Justice:
America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated
by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen
Beverly Monroe spent
seven years in prison for murdering her companion of thirteen years; in
fact, he had killed himself. Christopher Ochoa
was persuaded to confess to a rape and murder he did not commit, and
served twelve years of his life sentence before he was freed by DNA
evidence. Michael
Evans and Paul Terry
each spent twenty-seven years in prison for a brutal rape and murder
they did not commit. They were teenagers when they entered prison; they
were middle-aged men when DNA proved their innocence.
The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others
who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. There are
countless others—thousands by all estimates—who are in prison today for
crimes they did not commit. These are the stories of some of the
wrongfully convicted, who have managed, often by sheer luck, to prove
their innocence. Their stories are spellbinding, heartbreaking,
unimaginable, and ultimately inspiring. After reading these deeply
personal accounts, you will never look at the criminal justice system
the same way.
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Wilkie
Collins' The Dead Alive : The Novel, the Case, and Wrongful Convictions
by Rob Warden
Wilkie Collins
might well be the first author of a legal thriller. Here
is the lawyer out of sorts with his profession; the legal process gone
awry; even a touch of romance to soften the rigors of the law. And
here, too, recast as fiction, is the United States' first documented
wrongful conviction case. Side by side with the novel, this book
presents the real-life legal thriller Collins used as his model-the
story of two brothers, Jesse and Stephen Boorn, sentenced to death in
Vermont in 1819 for the murder of their brother-in-law, and belatedly
exonerated when their "victim" showed up alive and well in New Jersey
in 1820. Rob Warden reconsiders
the facts of the Boorn case for what they can tell us about
the systemic flaws that produced this first known miscarriage of
justice-flaws that continue to riddle our system of justice today.
Click HERE for
Chicago Sun-Times review.
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INNOCENCE PROJECTS
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Innocence
Projects provide representation
and/or investigative assistance to prison inmates who claim to be
innocent
of the crimes for which they were convicted. There is now at least one
innocence project serving each state. Most of these
innocence projects are new and overwhelmed
with applications, so waiting time between application and acceptance
is long. Wrongfully convicted
persons should not be dissuaded from applying to Innocence Projects
because
of this, but should have realistic expectations regarding acceptance
and
time lags. Check the list for the innocence project in your area;
we update it regularly.
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LINKS
The links pages at Truth in Justice are frequently
updated. Be sure to check them for resources, "must" reading,
websites of inmates with compelling innocence claims and more.
Start at http://truthinjustice.org/links.htm
SITE SEARCH ENGINE
There are now over 1,200 pages at Truth in Justice. The site
search
engine on the main page can make it faster and easier to find what you
seek.
And remember, YOU can make a difference!
Sheila and Doug Berry
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