Innocence Blog

The weekly roundup

Posted: July 3, 2008 8:30 am

Here are some of the stories we were following this week, but just didn’t get around to blogging about.

The Innocence Project filed for DNA testing in the case of client Robert Conway, who has served nearly two decades in Pennsylvania prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit.

New evidence surfaced in Texas, suggesting that Lester Leroy Bower is on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, but he hasn’t been able to get DNA testing approved in the case. He is scheduled to be executed this summer, and the blog Grits for Breakfast asked how prosecutors “could even consider opposing DNA testing of old evidence before they put a defendant to death this summer who's claiming actual innocence.”

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice issued a report calling the state’s administration of the death penalty "dysfunctional" and "close to collapse." Read media coverage here and download the full report here.

Funding was approved for a new state crime lab in Missouri, an upstate New York county planned a new $30 million crime lab, and Massachusetts children got a hands-on experience with forensics when a state lab investigator visited a local library.