Search Term(s):
Blog Tags:
Order by: Date Relevancy
Your search returned 10 entries.
Exoneree: Don't execute an innocent man
Posted: August 7, 2007 10:54 am
Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the United States to be exonerated by DNA testing after receiving a death sentence. He was misidentified by five eyewitnesses in a Maryland murder case and served eight years behind bars before he was exonerated. In an article yesterday on the Huffington Post blog, Bloodsworth compares his case with that of Troy Davis in Georgia, who is scheduled to be executed despite recantations from eyewitnesses who testified against him.
Had DNA testing not been available, I would still be in prison today. In Troy Davis' case, along with the vast majority of criminal cases in this country, DNA or other biological evidence is not available; hence eyewitness testimony holds tremendous importance in establishing guilt or innocence. Unfortunately, eyewitness testimony is highly subjective and susceptible to numerous forms of contamination from poorly conducted police lineups, to the lack of careful documentation of the identification, which increases possible manipulation of witness certainty.While Troy Davis awaits execution mounting evidence casts a large shadow of doubt his conviction. The flaws of our broken criminal justice system in Georgia now threaten to take the life of a man based solely on highly suggestive, unreliable evidence.Read more about the Troy Davis case. (Amnesty International)
Read the full post here. (Huffington Post, 08/07/07)
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth
Testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee calls for improvement in forensic programs
Posted: January 24, 2008 5:03 pm
Peter Neufeld told members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that the federal government has purposefully stripped a forsenic law of its meaning by not funding DNA testing or implementing oversight of crime labs. Three men exonerated by DNA testing echoed Neufeld’s statements.
"It's fear," Anderson, of Hanover, Va., said of the bureaucratic resistance to clearing the way for such analyses. DNA evidence exonerated Anderson in 2001 of a rape conviction, after he was sentenced to 210 years in prison and served 15. "No one wants to admit a mistake has been made."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said he will grill the new attorney general next week on why some $14 million Congress has set aside for those analyses has not been spent.
Read the full story here. (Associated Press, 01/23/08)Read more about yesterday’s testimony, and download the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report – issued last week – on major shortcomings in forensic oversight.
More news coverage:
Dallas Morning News: Wrongly imprisoned Dallas inmate joins push for forensic funds
Tags: Marvin Anderson, Kirk Bloodsworth
As executions resume in U.S., so does the risk of executing the innocent
Posted: May 7, 2008 3:15 pm
Last night, Georgia ended a seven-month national moratorium on executions when William Lynd was executed by lethal injection. The de-facto moratorium came about while the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of lethal injections. The court ruled last month that lethal injections could continue.
Meanwhile, Levon Jones was released from death row last week in North Carolina after his lawyers revealed new evidence of his innocence and showed that he received an inadequate defense at trial. Several death row inmates across the country are seeking to prove this innocence in the courts – including Innocence Project client Tommy Arthur, who has been seeking DNA testing from death row for years, and Georgia inmate Troy Davis.
Innocence Project client Paul House is still waiting in legal limbo for a decision after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the jury in House’s case may have acquitted him. House has been in prison for 22 years – much of it on death row – for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Prosecutors in his case said this week they would retry House, who remains in jail awaiting a new trial or his release. Read the full story here. (Tennessean, 05/07/08)
An article in today’s New York Times considers the state of legal representation for indigent Americans charged with capital crimes.
Georgia’s new public defender system came under attack by politicians and was recently forced to cut more than 40 positions.And CBS reported on Monday that 14 executions are scheduled across the U.S. in the next six months and five states are considering expansions to the death penalty – allowing them to execute people for crimes other than murder. Meanwhile, five states are seriously considering repealing the death penalty. Watch the CBS News video here, featuring an interview with Kirk Bloodsworth, who spent 8 years on death row before DNA proved his innocence of a Maryland murder.
That system, established after a series of lawsuits, was patterned after one North Carolina put in place in 2001, which was considered a national model. But not many other states have followed suit, said Robin Maher, director of the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project.
“I wish I could say that things have gotten a lot better, but in fact I can say with confidence that things have changed not much at all,” Ms. Maher said. “We are seeing the same kinds of egregiously bad lawyering that we saw 10 or 15 years ago, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate funding.”
Of the 36 states that allow the death penalty, only about 10 have statewide capital-defense systems, one of the practices recommended by the Bar Association.
Read the full story here. (New York Times, 05/07/08)
Tags: North Carolina, Kirk Bloodsworth, Death Penalty
15 years of freedom for Kirk Bloodsworth
Posted: June 27, 2008 11:32 am
Tomorrow marks the fifteenth anniversary of Kirk Bloodsworth’s exoneration in Maryland. After serving nearly nine years in Maryland – much of it on death row – for a crime he did not commit, Bloodsworth became the first person exonerated by DNA testing in the U.S. who had spent time on death row.
Today, Bloodsworth works to ensure that others don’t suffer the same fate he did. In addition to being a public advocate, Bloodsworth is a Program Officer for The Justice Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to criminal justice reform. Through his work, Bloodsworth helped get the Innocence Protection Act – which includes the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Grant Program – passed in 2004.
Although the program was authorized to provide up to $25 million over five years to help the wrongfully convicted pay for post-conviction DNA testing, access to both the grant money and to DNA evidence has not yet reached those in need. As of January, when Bloodsworth wrote a blog for the Huffington Post, Congress had approved $14 million in funding for states to conduct post-conviction DNA testing under the Bloodsworth program. The Department of Justice, however, had never approved any state applications, and therefore had not sent a dollar of grant money in the over three-year life of the law.
But recent congressional attention to this program (from both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees) may pave the way for progress. The Innocence Project is working with all parties to help make sure these critical funds reach states that need and deserve them.
In addition, seven states – Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota – have no state laws guaranteeing DNA access, and many other states have access laws with problematic stipulations. In Arkansas, a person cannot apply for DNA testing if a direct appeal is available. In Idaho, a person must apply for testing within one year of being convicted. If that had been the case in Maryland, Kirk Bloodsworth would still be in prison.
Sign the Innocence Project’s petition for universal DNA access.
Read more about Kirk Bloodsworth’s case here.
Other exoneration anniversaries this week:
Monday: David A. Gray, Illinois (Served 20 years, Exonerated 6/23/99)
Tuesday: Verneal Jimerson, Illinois (Served 10.5 Years, Exonerated 6/24/96)
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth, David A. Gray, Verneal Jimerson
Maryland Panel Calls for Repeal of Death Penalty
Posted: November 13, 2008 1:16 pm
Citing the risk of executing an innocent person and several other concerns with the administration of capital punishment, the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment yesterday voted 13-7 to recommend repealing the state’s death penalty.
The panel was created by the legislature in May and Gov. Martin O’Malley appointed a wide range of legal experts and observers to review the state’s practice of capital punishment and determine whether the death penalty is good public policy. Last night’s vote came in advance of the presentation of a full report to the governor and legislature next month.
Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck testified before the panel in September, telling members that states with capital punishment risk executing the innocent because the root causes of wrongful convictions have not been remedied. DNA exoneree Kirk Bloodsworth also testified, telling the panel that he is “living proof that Maryland gets it wrong.”
And commission chairman Benjamin Civiletti told the Washington Post why he voted to recommend abolishing capital punishment:
"I don't have a firm opinion on the morality of the death penalty," said Civiletti, who served as attorney general under President Jimmy Carter (D) and was tapped by O'Malley (D) last summer to lead the panel. But he said he opposed execution for "pragmatic" reasons, among them that "it's haphazard in how it is applied."
Read the full story. (Washington Post, 11/13/08)
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth, Death Penalty
Friday Roundup: Identification, Videotapes and Crime Labs
Posted: January 23, 2009 5:10 pm
In a week that saw a new U.S. President take office, criminal justice reform was in the air, from Georgia to Texas and New York to Denver.
Last week that the Dallas Police Department announced that it will improve the way it conducts lineups, and an editorial in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times urged all police departments in Texas to follow Dallas’ lead and begin using double-blind sequential lineups, which are proven to reduce misidentifications.
As we reported on Wednesday, the organization that trains Georgia’s police officers will be expanding its identification trainings this year.
Officials in Suffolk and Nassau Counties in New York have announced that they will begin videotaping all custodial interrogations in homicide and serious robbery cases. They will join 15 other counties in the state and more than 500 jurisdictions nationwide that routinely tape interrogations.
In crime lab news, Illinois officials pledged to cooperate with each other on reducing the state’s backlog of 1,230 cases awaiting blood tests. And prosecutors in Colorado support a new bill aiming to limit the reach of a law passed last year requiring law enforcement agencies to preserve crime scene evidence.
We reported yesterday on appeals by the Innocence Project and Texas attorneys to delay Larry Swearingen’s execution in Texas until proper DNA testing can be conducted. Another death row inmate, Charles Raby, is seeking a new trial based on DNA evidence that he says proves his innocence.
Kirk Bloodsworth, who was exonerated in 1993 with the Innocence Project’s help, served eight years behind bars – much of it on death row – for a murder he didn’t commit. He told an audience at Utah State University this week about the struggle to survive in prison and his life after exoneration.
A Washington state man spoke out this week about spending 11 months in jail awaiting trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Glenn Proctor was misidentified by an eyewitness and arrested for a shooting last January; he waited nearly a year before he was cleared by forensic evidence. His case highlights how lives are disrupted and police investigations derailed by misidentifications, even in cases that never become a wrongful conviction.
The Innocence Project Northwest, based at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, announced this week that it had founded the new Integrity of Justice Project with a gift from the RiverStyx Foundation. “The IJP will work to foster a collaborative partnership among prosecutors, law enforcement, defense lawyers, the courts, and others to identify best practices and procedures that can improve the accuracy of determinations of guilt or innocence,” wrote clinical director Deborah Maranville.
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth, False Confessions, Evidence Preservation
Maryland Man Pressed for DNA Test and Made History
Posted: June 25, 2010 2:19 pm
In 1992 DNA testing was no longer the nascent technology it had been at the time of Bloodsworth’s original trial, but it was still uncommon. Bloodsworth pressed for a test of the semen sample on the victim’s underwear that had been recovered at the scene of the crime, contacting Attorney Robert E. Morin about the idea. Morin paid the $10,000 out of his own pocket to have the test conducted. A year later, the results came back. The semen on the victim’s underwear was not Bloodsworth’s. He was innocent.
Bloodsworth was freed in June of 1993, going down in history as the first person sentenced to death and then exonerated through DNA testing. Since his exoneration, 16 more former death row prisoners have been exonerated through DNA testing. It was Bloodsworth, and his attorney Robert E. Morin, who led the way to freedom.
After his exoneration, Bloodsworth joined with author Tim Junkin to write a memoir: “Bloodsworth: The True
Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA. Buy it on Amazon.com here.
Other Exoneree Anniversaries This Week:
David Gray, Illinois (Served 20 Years, Exonerated 6/23/99)
Verneal Jimerson, Illinois (Served 10.5 Years, Exonerated 6/24/96)
Kevin Green, California (Served 15.5 Years, Exonerated 6/20/96)
James Giles, Texas (Served 10 Years, Exonerated 6/21/07)
Armand Villasana, Missouri (Served 7 Months, Exonerated 6/21/00)
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth
Exoneree Anniversary: Kirk Bloodsworth
Posted: June 28, 2012 1:40 pm
Tags: Kirk Bloodsworth
Nation's First Death Row DNA Exoneree Fights Capital Punishment in Maryland
Posted: February 6, 2013 2:30 pm
Tags: Maryland, Kirk Bloodsworth
Maryland Senate Votes to Repeal the Death Penalty
Posted: March 6, 2013 4:15 pm
Tags: Maryland, Kirk Bloodsworth, Death Penalty