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Truth in
Justice
Newsletter
Wrongful Conviction News from March - May, 2009
Owen Barber pulled the trigger ten times
and told a Northern Virginia jury that his friend Justin Wolfe had
hired him to do it. Barber cut a deal with prosecutors and got 28
years. Wolfe got the death penalty. Did Barber tell the truth—or is an
innocent man awaiting execution?
UPDATE - 5/11/09: The US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on May 11th, 2009 ordered a federal district-court judge to re-examine Barber’s recantation. The judge, Raymond A. Jackson of the federal district court for eastern Virginia, previously had dismissed the new evidence in the case, but a three-judge panel found errors in that decision. While the panel did not order Jackson to hold an evidentiary hearing, it noted that Barber’s testimony was key to Wolfe’s prosecution—a fact that it said “strongly suggests” the need for a fresh investigation. Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers. In the past, lawyers opposed to the death penalty often provided the broad outlines of cases to reporters, who then pursued witnesses and unearthed evidence. Now, the lawyers complain, they have to do more of the work themselves and that means it often doesn’t get done. They say many fewer cases are being pursued by journalists, after a spate of exonerations several years ago based on the work of reporters. 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. Related
Links
Davontae Sanford, a developmentally disabled 16-year-old, sits in prison after his lawyer says he was coerced to confess to killing four people in a rumored drug house on Detroit's east side. Now, an admission from a confessed hit man could finally win him a new trial. Gary Richard of Houston, TX has spent over 20 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit, thanks to the defective lab work of Christy Kim and the perjured testimony of boss, James Bolding. Simple serology tests excluded Gary, a secretor, since the rapist was a non-secretor. Prosecutors concede Gary should be released, but they continue to deny his innocence. DNA tests on evidence from the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Illinois have excluded Juan Rivera, the man who authorities say confessed and is serving a life prison sentence for the crime. Rivera wept when he heard the news. UPDATE: May 8, 2009 - Juan was convicted of Holly Staker's rape and murder yet again, even though DNA excluded him. Prosecutors cited Juan's confession, which Juan says was coerced, as proof of his guilt. Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful Convictions said: "We are committed absolutely to Juan Rivera. We believe in his innocence and we are going to do everything we can to bring justice in this case."
$2.6 Million in Payoffs.
For
years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre, PA operated like a
conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer,
given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to
juvenile prison for months for minor offenses. The
explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench. In
one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two
Pennsylvania judges have pled guilty to taking millions of dollars in
kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention
centers.
But that's just the beginning. The two former judges, now admitted felons, are cooperating with federal law enforcement officials as they continue their probe into corruption at the courthouse Conahan used to run. The U.S. Attorney's Office is, in fact, investigating possible case fixing in Luzerne County's uninsured and underinsured motorist cases and has been for some time. So you think it's just bad kids and adult criminals who were abused? Everybody suffers. Better late than never. As part of a criminal justice review unprecedented in county history, the Santa Clara County, CA public defender's has launched a massive project to revisit 1,500 or more sexual assault convictions dating back two decades to determine whether innocent people may have been put behind bars. Members of Valley Medical Center's Sexual Assault Response Team have been videotaping examinations of patients since 1991, but prosecutors failed to inform defense attorneys in cases involving those patients that such critical evidence existed. Under pressure to answer for the failure, District Attorney Dolores Carr has since revealed there are 3,300 such tapes in existence, and this week she vowed to inform defense attorneys of each case involving a medical-exam videotape where a defendant was convicted. No more turning a blind eye. About 14 years ago, Dane County (Wisconsin) Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter allegedly got a call that attorneys for Ralph Armstrong say would've blown the murder case against their client apart — if only they'd known about it. A proposed rule pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court would require prosecutors who receive such explosive information to reveal it to the defense — and possibly to investigate it. The current Supreme Court rules for prosecutors require only that exculpatory evidence be turned over to the defense before trial. What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander. Ever wonder what that old adage means? Here's an example. In Wisconsin--as in every state in the U.S.--cops and prosecutors are allowed to use deception when conducting an investigation. When Madison, WI defense attorney Stephen Hurley used deception to build his client's defense, the prosecutor cried foul and filed an ethics complaint against Hurley. But referee Judith Sperling-Newton said Hurley's actions were allowed. She also noted a double standard between prosecutors and defense attorneys - who are all governed by the same Supreme Court rules.
4/2/09
-- The
29-year-old murder case against Ralph Armstrong appeared in jeopardy
Thursday after a judge found that a Dane County prosecutor failed to
notify the defense of a reported confession by Armstrong’s brother in
1995. Reserve Circuit Court Judge Robert Kinney also found that
Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter violated a court order in
2006, resulting in destruction of key DNA evidence. Armstrong Hearing, Day
2.
New York: Nineteen years ago, police in Huguenot, NY forced 17-year-old Kevin Keller to sign a confession to the murder of Elaine Ackerman. Kevin spent 18 months in jail before the local court suppressed the confession and threw out the state's shaky case. Then, in early 2009, a DNA cold hit was made, identifying James Babcock as Ms. Ackerman's rapist/killer. Will Keller finally clear his name? Illinois: When Johnny Savory was 14, Peoria, IL police and prosecutors used his coerced, false confession to convict him of murdering two of his friends. When he was re-tried, the state trotted out two prison snitches who claimed Johnny confessed the murders to them, and again got a conviction. The snitches have recanted, Johnny has been paroled, but he continues to seek his own exoneration and the real killer's identity. Hoping DNA will do it. Virginia: A top state lawyer defending Virginia death sentences has been accused of misconduct by the Virginia State Bar, an agency of the Virginia Supreme Court. The Virginia State Bar alleges that Katherine Baldwin Burnett, senior assistant Virginia attorney general and director of the office's capital litigation unit, made false statements during a bar hearing in April 2006 and interfered with another lawyer's access to evidence. Scaring jurors into silence after the trial is over. Wisconsin: Records show that over the past four years, Michael Froehlich, the son of Outagamie County (Appleton) Circuit Judge Harold Froehlich, has been arrested more than a dozen times for allegedly making threatening phone calls, drunken-driving related offenses, resisting arrest, battery, false imprisonment and threatening a sheriff’s deputy. During that time, Froehlich has been criminally prosecuted just once — in 2008 — after he was caught driving drunk for the third time with a 0.361 percent blood-alcohol level, more than four times the legal limit. Is there a quid pro quo here between the judge and the DA? (See Morphing DNA, Disappearing Evidence.) There's just something fishy about it. Illinois: A Cook County judge ordered a new trial for convicted murderer Victor Safforld on May 22, 2009 after finding three Chicago police detectives once supervised by disgraced former Cmdr. Jon Burge likely beat him into confessing. "... I have a more complete history of the behavior of these detectives," Circuit Judge Clayton J. Cranesaid. "That evidence is staggering. That evidence is damning." False Allegations of Child Abuse False Allegations of Sexual Abuse In 1989, Larry Murphy
of Yadkin, NC was convicted of sexually molesting his daughter.
In 2002, Julie Murphy, as an adult, recanted her allegations against
her father. Although Larry was convicted based on Julie's word
alone, her recantation is not enough to free him.
In 1980, a teenage girl saw Donald Burke on a city street and identified him as the man who had raped her more than a year earlier. To his horror, Donald, who has asserted his innocence from the first day, was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. He was released in 1999, but wears the Sex Offender scarlet letter, a badge of shame he has not earned. He wants DNA to set him free. Link: "By the time he was taken off to prison in 1994, payouts for such claims against priests promised to surpass the rosiest dreams of civil attorneys.... By the end of 2004, the Diocese audit showed a total of $22,210,400 -thus far- in settlements." The Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2005. Friends of Fr. Gordon MacRae
California. The Santa Clara County district attorney has opened the door to the possibility of wrongful convictions by failing to objectively investigate crime lab errors, the national Innocence Project has charged. The group, in a national report, singled out the local prosecutor for failing to hire an outside agency to investigate a formal complaint that followed the 2007 discovery that Jeffrey Rodriguez had been wrongly convicted of robbery based on faulty testimony from a crime lab analyst concerning a stain found on the defendant's pants. The problem with investigating yourself ... United States. A first-of-its-kind study has found that forensic experts produced flawed evidnece in the trials of 82 men wrongfully convicted of rape or murder in the 1980s. Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, and Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, examined 137 trials in which transcripts exist and forensic experts testified for the prosecution. In 60% of the cases, they gave testimony overstating the evidence. California. Arron Layton, a toxicologist who did lab work on criminal evidence in thousands of cases, has admitted to fraud, forgery and perjury. Riverside County authorities have ordered the review of 3,000 cases that were handled by toxicologist Arron Layton. It's believed Layton handled evidence for hundreds of cases in San Diego County, where District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is "circling the wagons." Protecting convictions. Texas. Gary Richard of Houston has spent the last 22 years in prison, thanks primarily to the lab work of Christy Kim -- an analyst who never lets the prosecution down. Kim said Richard was the man who abducted and raped a woman in 1987. The rapist was a non-secretor. Richard is a secretor, so he could not have been the rapist. Business as usual. Nebraska. David Kofoed, the commander of the Douglas County (Omaha) crime scene investigations unit is facing federal and state charges over accusations that he planted evidence in the car of two wrongly accused suspects in a Nebraska couple's murder. He was just making the evidence fit the coerced confession. Evidence tampering. Illinois. When the U.S. government hired Michael Sheppo to help eliminate a crushing backlog in untested DNA evidence, he had all the right credentials. He's one of the federal officials responsible for eliminating the national backlog of 350,000 DNA samples in need of testing, and his claim to fame was that he had eliminated a 1,000 DNA specimen backlog in Illinois. But he didn't. Under Sheppo, the Illinois lab released false figures and fired two lab employees in retaliation for criticizing an ethically questionable contract. Sheppo knows how to make backlogs disappear. Texas. Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy and bloodhound trainer Keith Pikett has been sued in federal court for the second time in less than a year over a scent line-up involving his dogs. The dogs were trumped by DNA in the most recent case, and by the guilty plea of a rapist/murderer in the earlier case. So why continue such blatantly bogus tactics? The dogs are generating income.
Curtis
Severns has been in federal prison since 2006. Convicted of
intentionally starting the fire in his gun shop, he has 25 more years
on his sentence. Severns has maintained his innocence all along. As in
many arson cases, he was convicted almost exclusively by the testimony
of fire investigators who relied on assumptions that some of the
leading arson experts in the country now say are false. In fact, new
evidence and a Texas Observer investigation reveal that Severns remains
in federal prison in Beaumont for a crime he didn’t commit.
A
Waco, TX attorney has launched an innocence project at Baylor
University, choosing one of the most gripping cases in McLennan County
history as the group’s first assignment. Since February, Walter M. Reaves Jr. and
three Baylor Law School students have been poring over evidence from
the 1988 trial of Ed Graf. The Hewitt resident was convicted of killing
his two stepsons by burning them alive in a storage shed behind their
home. He is serving a life sentence in a Gatesville prison.
Graf's conviction was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Deciding someone’s guilt on such measures
is not prudent, Reaves said. Once someone is painted as a criminal,
almost any action they take can be construed to fit that theory, he
said, even though there may be innocent explanations for it.
UPDATE - May 29, 2009 - The Texas Observer's Dave Mann takes an in-depth look at the evidence in Ed Graf's case. Victim of Circumstance?
*
Survey and analyze the range of
“Arson”
convictions that in fact involved accidental fires,
* Forward meritorious cases to a blue-ribbon Fire Science panel, led by Center Advisory Board member John Lentini, * Report to scientists and practitioners the depth and extent of the problem and develop targeted remedies. The Arson Screening Project will not provide legal representation. It will, however, offer an assessment of the science used to gain a conviction which can be employed in trying to persuade prosecutors, lawyers, and courts that a given case is worthy of review. The Project is not designed to assess “whodunit” cases; it is designed to offer a scientific analysis of whether the crime of arson was committed, not to identify arsonist or rule out a defendant in case where a fire was set. If you believe you or a client have a case that would benefit from authoritative review, click HERE for further information and the application form. <>
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