Innocence Blog

Friday news roundup

Posted: June 27, 2008 4:16 pm

Below are the stories on criminal justice reform, wrongful convictions and forensic science that we didn’t get to on the blog this week:

Crime lab reform, investigations and funding were in the news this week. The Houston Police Department Crime Lab resumed DNA testing after a six month suspension due to discovery of misconduct. A new Michigan State Police budget set aside $1 million for crime labs to ease backlogs across the state, outsourcing to private labs has helped Florida’s state lab cut its backlog in half since 2005, and a Wisconsin state lab has added two dozen analysts and tripled its space to decrease backlogs.

The U.S. Supreme Court had a busy week on criminal justice issues, issuing a decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana overturning state laws that allow the death penalty for child rape, and in Indiana V. Edwards, in which the justices decided 7-2 that mentally ill inmates can be denied the right to represent themselves at trial.

An Indiana judge denied DNA testing access to Roosevelt Glenn, who has been in prison for nearly two decades for a rape he says he didn’t commit. Glenn is represented by the attorneys at the Indiana University School of Law’s wrongful conviction clinic.

South Carolina legislators approved a bill to allow prisoners claiming innocence to seek DNA testing through the courts. The bill will now go to the governor – who could sign it into law or veto it. If the bill becomes a law, South Carolina will be the 44th state with a DNA access statute.