Manhattan District Attorney Creates Wrongful Convictions Unit

Posted: March 5, 2010 2:30 pm

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., announced Thursday that he is setting up a Conviction Integrity Unit to re-examine closed cases where claims of innocence have been made and to establish standard procedures for new cases to prevent wrongful convictions.  The unit will consist of three components: a Conviction Integrity Committee, a Conviction Integrity Chief and an outside Conviction Integrity Policy Advisory Panel.

The committee will review practices and policies related to case assessment, investigation and disclosure obligations, with a focus on potential errors such as eyewitness misidentifications and false confessions.  Comprised of senior members of the DA’s staff, the committee will also lead the investigation of post-conviction cases with credible claims of innocence. The head of the new unit will be Bonnie Sard, a senior Assistant District Attorney, who will report directly to Vance and the office’s General Counsel. The outside advisory panel will consist of 10 leading criminal justice experts including Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck. The advisory group will advise the DA’s office on how to prevent and address wrongful convictions.

Scheck told WNYC:

“I think it’s just part of an overall movement that’s going on across the country with prosecutors who are aware that these mistakes can happen, and there are better ways that we can go about evaluating them to make sure that we get it right.”
Read the full story here.

Vance said in a press release:

“As prosecutors, it is our duty to bring our best efforts to bear in every case to ensure that only the guilty are convicted.  And if we have any reason to believe that we have prosecuted or are prosecuting someone who is actually innocent, we must take prompt steps to investigate the matter and see that justice is served.”

Read the full press release about the panel and its members here.

Other coverage of the Conviction Integrity Unit:

Albany Times Union (3/5/10)

The New York Times (3/4/10)

1010 WINS (3/4/10)

Tags: New York

 

Your Chance to Help an Exoneree

Posted: March 4, 2010 2:30 pm

With the tenth-annual Innocence Network Conference coming up next month, many exonerees and advocates will be gathering together in Atlanta to reflect on the year and discuss wrongful convictions and criminal justice reforms to prevent further injustice.

This year, there is unique opportunity for our supporters to help people who have been exonerated after serving years or decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Without spending a dime, you can help send exonerees to Atlanta in April for the conference.

The Innocence Network conference is the only event all year where exonerees from around the country gather to network, receive support from one another, learn ways to cope and transition back into the world after prison, and find ways to prevent future wrongful convictions. This year has brought in the most requests for financial assistance for travel to the event. 

You can donate points through your credit card program or miles through your airline frequent-flier plan, and we will use all of the donations to help exonerees attend this important event. American Express Rewards Points are particularly easy to process, but we can also work with other credit card and airline programs.
Without donations of points or miles, we will have to say no to some of these requests.

Help us make this conference the best one yet for as many exonerees as possible. Donating points or miles only takes a minute, and it can have a profound impact on the exonerated.

To use your points or miles to help exonerees, please email info@innocenceproject.org and a staff member will get back to you quickly to make arrangements.

Learn more about this year’s annual Innocence Network Conference here.

 

Exoneree Inspires Students in New York

Posted: March 3, 2010 5:00 pm

Fernando Bermudez, who was freed in November after serving 18 years in New York prisons for a murder evidence shows he didn’t commit, addressed 200 students at Ardsley High School in Westchester, NY, yesterday.  The audience, which included the school’s forensic science, criminal justice and other classes, heard first-hand how the justice system failed Bermudez.

According to the Journal News, Bermudez told the students:

“I believed that the truth would set me free at trial. I honestly believed that,” Bermudez, 41, said Tuesday to students at Ardsley High School. “I believed in the American justice system, but I lost and sunk deeper into the system.”

…

Bermudez said prosecutors rely too heavily on unreliable eyewitness testimony, even when there is little supporting evidence.

Students questioned why prosecutors ignored three friends of Bermudez who testified that he was not involved in the incident.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough,” Bermudez said.

He told the students about his case and told them that they should always guard their rights.  His speech was inspiring to students and emotional for others who were angry to learn that the criminal justice can fail in such a profound way. 

Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of shooting a teenager outside a New York City nightclub in 1991.  In November, a judge today tossed out his conviction and charges saying he had proved his actual innocence.
Questionable eyewitness testimony led to his wrongful conviction, and the Innocence Project filed friend-of-the-court briefs in his case, highlighting the problematic identifications.

Learn more about eyewitness misidentification here.

Find out how you can host an exoneree speaker here.

Tags: New York

 

After Posthumous Pardon in Texas, a Resolve to Help Fix the System

Posted: March 2, 2010 4:00 pm

This week, Timothy Cole became the first person in Texas to be exonerated and fully pardoned posthumously as a result of DNA testing. The heartbreaking case begs the question: How many others are there, and how can they be prevented?

DNA testing more than two decades after Cole’s wrongful conviction finally cleared him in 2008 and pointed to convicted rapist Jerry Wayne Johnson, who had already confessed to the crime in letters to court officials, as well as other rapes dating back several years.

A year ago, in an unprecedented legal move, Cole’s family and lawyers appeared in an Austin courtroom in pursuit of a posthumous ruling to clear his name. According to advocates for the wrongfully convicted, the strategy was unique in Texas and rare in the U.S.  The Innocence Project served as co-counsel with the Innocence Project of Texas in that hearing. A judge declared Cole innocent, and he was exonerated.

On March 1, 2009 Texas Governor Rick Perry fully pardoned Cole. The development gives comfort to his family, but it is also a painful reminder of an innocent man’s life lost.

Cole’s mother said the pardon was a long time coming.

“I am so happy,” Ruby Session, Cole’s mother, said from her home in Burleson. “I just know that Tim is up there smiling.”

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to recommend the posthumous pardon for innocence.

Under state law, Perry had to wait for the board’s recommendation before he could sign the pardon.”There was overwhelming evidence. It was very clear that he was wrongly imprisoned,” Perry said after a campaign event in San Antonio.

He called Session to tell her the news.

“It was really awesome,” the governor said, adding that he and Session have formed a warm relationship over the past year or so.

Cole’s family is eligible for state recompense, which amounts to just over $1 million based on his 13 years of wrongful incarceration

Read the full Dallas Morning News story.

Texas leads the country with 40 wrongful convictions that have been overturned by DNA testing—only half of the exonerated in Texas received compensation for time spent behind bars. 

Eyewitness misidentification, which contributed to Cole’s wrongful conviction, is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.  Faulty forensic science also played a role in Cole’s wrongful conviction. Eyewitness misidentification was a factor in 33 of Texas’s cases and unvalidated or improper forensic science contributed to 17 of the wrongful convictions.

A growing number of Texas legislators, led by State Senator Rodney Ellis (who also serves as chairman of the Innocence Project Board of Directors) are determined to improve the state’s criminal justice system to prevent more wrongful convictions.

Ellis said more work remains to be done to guard against similar situations, such as pushing to require every law enforcement agency in Texas to have written eyewitness identification procedures based on best practices.

“While this is the first posthumous pardon in Texas,” Ellis said in a statement, “we have a long way to go if we are going to make sure it is the last.”

Read the full Houston Chronicle story.

Cole’s family said they will continue working to make sure other people don’t suffer the same injustice he did.

During the 2009 Legislature, Cole’s prom night picture was posted at legislative committee hearings as relatives traveled repeatedly to Austin on behalf of bills designed to correct flaws in the state’s criminal justice system. Even amid her euphoria over the pardon announcement, Ruby Session said there is still much to do.

“We will be doing this work as long as I’m able,” said Session, who is scheduled to undergo surgery this week for an arterial aneurysm. “We’re on the forefront of a new day in the criminal justice system.”

Read the full Star-Telegram story.

Read more about Texas exonerees here.

Coverage of Cole’s pardon:

Houston Chronicle (3/1/10)

BBC News (3/2/10)

BBC News (3/2/10)

Fort Worth Star Telegram (3/1/10)

Associated Press (3/2/10)

AOL News (3/2/10)

Tags: Texas, Timothy Cole

 

Timothy Cole Officially Pardoned

Posted: March 1, 2010 3:30 pm

UPDATE: Today, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed the official pardon for Timothy Cole, marking the first posthumous pardon in Texas history. 

In a statement, Perry said: “I have been looking forward to the day I could tell Tim Cole’s mother that her son’s name has been cleared for a crime he did not commit,” Gov. Perry said. “The State of Texas cannot give back the time he spent in prison away from his loved ones, but today I was finally able to tell her we have cleared his name, and hope this brings a measure of peace to his family.”

Read more here.

Original post:

Timothy Cole was wrongfully convicted of rape more than two decades ago and died in prison in 1999, at the age of 39.  Last year, DNA testing proved his innocence, and now the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is recommending that he be fully pardoned.  If the governor follows through, Cole’s case will be the state’s first posthumous pardon.

On Friday, the board notified the Innocence Project of Texas that it voted to recommend clemency. The board forwarded its decision to Gov. Rick Perry for his signature. In an e-mail to The Associated Press on Saturday, Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle wrote, “Gov. Perry looks forward to pardoning Tim Cole pending the receipt of a positive recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles.”

Years after Cole’s death, an investigation by the Innocence Project of Texas led to DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene. The test results proved Cole’s innocence and implicated another man, Jerry Wayne Johnson, who had begun writing letters in 1995 confessing to the crime. Last year, the Innocence Project served as co-counsel at an unusual court hearing to clear Cole’s name after his death, and a judge declared him innocent.

Cory Session, who has been fighting to clear his brother’s name for years, said he anticipates that the governor will sign Cole’s pardon in March during a ceremony in Fort Worth. Session said he hopes that his brother’s case helps people understand that just because people come into court underfunded and underrepresented, it does not necessarily mean that they are guilty. “The question is: How many more Tim Coles are out there?” he told the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

Last year, the Texas Legislature passed the Tim Cole Act, increasing compensation to people who have been wrongfully convicted from $50,000 to $80,000 for each year of imprisonment.

Eyewitness misidentification and unvalidated forensic science led to Cole’s arrest and wrongful conviction when he was a 26-year-old Army veteran studying business at Texas Tech in 1985. The victim in Timothy’s case, Michele Mallin, has since come forward to raise awareness about misidentifications, forensic science reform and wrongful convictions. Mallin has joined Cole’s family in working to posthumously exonerate him.

In an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle last year, Mallin urged Congress to create a federal entity to strengthen forensic science nationwide. “I put my faith in the criminal justice system, and it failed me,” she wrote, “I have learned a great deal over the last year — about myself, about Cole and about our system of justice. One of the most troubling things I’ve learned is that juries often hear evidence that is not as solid as it sounds.”

Learn more about unvalidated and improper science – and sign the petition calling on Congress to take action – here.

Read more on Timothy Cole’s case here.

Tags: Texas, Timothy Cole, Exoneree Compensation

 

Friday Roundup: What We Can Learn from 250 Exonerations

Posted: February 26, 2010 5:20 pm

The 250th DNA exoneration was a landmark moment in the American criminal justice system, and public awareness of the problem seems to increase by the day.

Writing in the Texas Observer, Dave Mann pointed to the Innocence Project’s report on the first 250 DNA exonerations and examined “who gets exonerated and why.”

The Cape Cod Times explained why the lessons of exonerations like Freddie Peacock’s should lead to criminal justice reform.

Gregory Taylor was freed in North Carolina last week after serving 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.  The Associated Press chronicled his first day of freedom.

And after Taylor was exonerated, the phones at the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission started to ring off the hook, as other states sought information on reviewing possible wrongful convictions.

But despite increasing awareness, prisoners across the country continue to struggle in their quests for a new day in court.

The Wisconsin Innocence Project is seeking a new trial for client Terry Vollbrecht, who was convicted of a 1987 murder he says he didn’t commit.

A Louisiana judge denied a new trial this week for John Floyd, who is imprisoned for a 1980 murder he says he didn’t commit.  Floyd, 60, is represented by Innocence Project New Orleans.

The Georgetown Voice published a feature story this week profiling the work of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project in Washington, D.C.

Missourian Ken Kezer celebrated the first anniversary of the day he was freed from prison after serving 16 years for a crime evidence shows he didn’t commit.

Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld spoke at the annual meeting of the American Society of Forensic Sciences this week in Seattle, and Texas State Senator (and Innocence Project Board Chair) Rodney Ellis received the Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Austin.

 

The Many Faces of Forensic Science

Posted: February 25, 2010 5:32 pm

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: Forensic Oversight

 

Eight Years of Freedom

Posted: February 24, 2010 5:40 pm

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: Arvin McGee

 

Forensic Oversight Badly Needed, Experts Say

Posted: February 23, 2010 5:05 pm

From Maine to California, crime lab backlogs and budget shortfalls are threatening to derail court systems and jeopardize fair justice.

MSNBC reports today on the state of the nation’s crime labs and the impact of the National Academy of Science’s 2009 report calling for federal forensic oversight.

There are serious questions about the credibility of nearly every kind of crime lab analysis, the conclusions of which often rest on unproven science filtered through the subjective judgment of technicians whose training and certification vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

And with crime labs struggling under backlogs that already reach back years in many cities and states, budget cuts driven by the recession are threatening to make credible crime scene analysis a lost art, law enforcement officials and forensic specialists say.

Read the full story here. (MSNBC, 02/23/10)

News of injustice caused by unvalidated or improper forensics has almost become a weekly event. Last week, Gregory Taylor was freed in North Carolina after serving 17 years in prison for a murder evidence shows he didn’t commit. He was convicted in 1993 based in part on misleading forensic analysis of a substance found in his truck.

To call on Congress to take action on forensic reforms, and to read weekly forensic news updates, visit the Just Science Coalition website.

Tags: Forensic Oversight

 

Advocates Seek Innocence Commission and Compensation Reform in Florida

Posted: February 22, 2010 6:10 pm

Efforts to pass significant wrongful conviction reforms are gaining steam in steam in Florida.

We reported earlier this month that State Sen. Mike Haridopolos had asked the Florida Supreme Court to form an innocence commission, which would review exonerations in the state and recommend measures to prevent future injustice.

Another effort is underway to repeal a so-called “clean hands” provision, which restricts exoneree compensation only to people who had a felony conviction before or during their wrongful incarceration.

The Miami Herald last week called on the state legislature to remove the clean hands provision from the law, saying that a minor felony shouldn’t lead an exoneree from missing their due compensation. The Herald also made a strong call for the creation of an innocence commission.

Another editorial last week, in Florida Today, also called on the state Supreme Court to create an innocence panel, saying “one wrongful conviction is too many, but the growing number in Brevard (County) and across Florida is a plague that can’t be ignored.”

The Innocence Project of Florida, a member of the Innocence Network, is advocating on behalf of both of these reforms. Visit the IPF blog here.

Tags: Innocence Commissions, Exoneree Compensation