The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that defendants have the Constitutional right to examine witnesses from forensic labs that provide evidence in their criminal cases.  The cases below underscore how important that ruling was for justice.

CLG News
December 18, 2009

Inquiry Condemns Oversight at State Police Crime Lab -- Analyst, undetected for 15 years, falsified test results and compromised nearly one-third of his 322 cases

18 Dec 2009 -  NYTimes.com - The New York State Police’s supervision of a crime laboratory was so poor that it overlooked evidence of pervasively shoddy forensics work, allowing an analyst to go undetected for 15 years as he falsified test results and compromised nearly one-third of his 322 cases, an investigation by the state’s inspector general has found. The analyst’s training was so substandard that at one point last year, investigators discovered he did not know how to operate a microscope essential to performing his job, a report released Thursday by the inspector general said. -- Access the entire article at this link:  Report Condemns Police Lab Oversight

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/nyregion/18statepolice.html

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Innocence Project – Innocence Blog
Posted:  December 16, 2009

Forensics in the Gates Case

Donald Eugene Gates was freed in Arizona after serving nearly three decades behind bars for a Washington, D.C., crime he didn’t commit. An examination of the forensics behind his wrongful conviction makes a strong case for federal forensic reform to prevent injustices like this in the future.

FBI forensic analyst Michael Malone testified at Gates’ trial in 1982 that hairs found at the scene of the 1981 rape and murder were “microscopically indistinguishable” from Gates’ hairs.  His statements vastly overstated the possible conclusions that could be drawn from a hair comparison. Unlike some other forensic disciplines (DNA testing, blood type testing), hair comparison analysis can only reveal potential similarities between specimens, not the statistical likelihood that two specimens might share common characteristics.

Although Malone’s forensic conclusions have been challenged in other cases and a 1997 Justice Department review discredited his work, no formal review of his convictions has ever been conducted. The Judge who presided over the Gates case recently ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to conduct such a review.  See more at this link:  D.C. Case Underscores the Need for Forensic Reform  http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/2298.php 

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MARY’S COMMENTARY

Scientific testimony can be faulty, unlike one might expect from watching television shows.  Most often, mistakes happen because of poor equipment or human error.  Occasionally medical examiners actually conspire with district attorneys or police to deliberately introduce false testimony at trials.  Invalid scientific evidence has caused some people to be wrongly convicted or sentenced to death like Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for his children’s arson murders when there was actually no proof of arson.  The scientific methodology that was initially used in the fire investigation at Willingham’s home and presented to his jury was faulty.  See the article at this link: Cameron Willingham’s Wrongful Execution – and Others http://freespeakblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/cameron-todd-willinghams-wrongful.html

Another notable case is Philip Workman’s murder conviction in Tennessee. The former chief medical examiner in Memphis, Dr. O.C. Smith, apparently tried to shed doubt on damaging scientific testimony the doctor gave against Workman as the condemned man’s execution date drew near.  Dr. Smith was indicted for staging his own kidnapping.  The medical examiner was found in the stairwell at his office with barbed wire wrapped around his head and with explosives and notes secured to his person with duct tape. The notes read, “Dr. Smith lied about bullet trajectory in the Philip Workman’s case.”  Other witness testimony against Workman also fell apart, but he was executed without a new trial in 2007 despite the doctor’s alleged antics.  Learn more about Mr. Workman at this link:  Philip Workman, Innocent Man Executed?  http://www.nowpublic.com/world/philip-workman-innocent-man-executed

In September 2008, Detroit closed its police lab after an audit found serious errors in many cases that probably caused wrongful convictions.  See more in this article:  Supreme Court’s DNA Deliberations - http://www.nowpublic.com/world/supreme-courts-dna-deliberations-mary-neal

Increasing budgets for indigent defense and investing in better forensic laboratory equipment and highly skilled personnel would decrease wrongful convictions, thereby saving taxpayers wasted money on punishing innocent people with lengthy prison sentences or execution.  According to an article published in Buffalo News by Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., eyewitness testimony, lab tests, and even defendants’ confessions cannot always be trusted.  In fact, Dr. Fraser reports that 50% of wrongful convictions result from invalid forensic evidence.  See more information at this article:  I Didn’t Do It Your Honor!  http://freespeakblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-didnt-do-it-your-honor.html

NYTimes.com offers informative articles about the unreliability of forensic evidence at the link below.  One is entitled: “DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show,” by Andrew Pollack.  He reports, “With fabricated blood or saliva, you can just engineer a crime scene,” said the lead author of a new study.   NYTimes.com forensic science articles - http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/forensic_science/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=forensic&st=cse 

Excerpt from my article, “I Didn’t Do It Your Honor!”   Innocent people will continue to fall through the cracks occasionally and be imprisoned for crimes while the guilty go free. No measures will prevent every single wrongful conviction. But we can stop all wrongful executions very easily. Instead of costing money to do this, it would save around $90,000 per condemned inmate per year: End capital punishment, and no one will be wrongly executed. Just say . . . DEATH TO THE DEATH PENALTY!

Mary Neal
http://wrongfuldeathoflarryneal.com/

Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI

Supreme Court debates Miranda Warnings again
Chicago Law Enforcement Examiner 

On Monday, the Supreme Court began debating on whether the Miranda warning rights should be made clearer for criminal suspects. The case that has brought this debate to the highest court is Florida v. Powell.
It all began with Kevin Dwayne Powell being arrested for having in his possession a firearm that he freely confessed to buying off the street. Powell signed a Miranda statement waiving his right to a lawyer. Powell's lawyer, Deborah Brueckheimer said that the warnings Powell was given from the Tampa, Fla., police was not clearly explained to him.


The Miranda Warnings stems from a landmark case of (Miranda v. Arizona 1966) a 25-year-old man by the name of Ernesto Miranda. He was mentally handicap and arrested for kidnapping and rape. In the police station, he was positively identified as the offender and after two hours of interrogation, he signed a written confession. Miranda was sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison and his conviction was upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the state's decision (5-4) and established that the Fifth Amendment had been violated because the majority stated that privilege against self-incrimination requires that a criminal suspect in custody or in any other manner deprived of freedom must be informed of his or her rights.
Now the Supreme Court will debate whether the police should be even more clearer in administering The Miranda Rights.

It has been over 43 years since this landmark case was decided and the debate continues today. Maybe the Court should just allow every suspect to have an attorney every time they are arrested, this will alleviate the back and forth nonsense of whether police officers are clear or not clear enough in telling every suspect that they have the right to keep their mouth shut.
http://www.examiner.com/x-10377-Chicago-Law-Enforcement-Examiner~y2009m12d7-Supreme-Court-debates-Miranda-Warnings-again

More evidence that innocence does not matter enough in criminal justice.

The Conspiracy Charge Traps Women
By Tri-State Defender Newsroom

The cost of incarceration — Part III
By Patrice Gaines
NNPA News Service

“The Cost of Incarceration” is an eight-part occasional series written by Patrice Gaines, former Washington Post reporter; author and co-founder of The Brown Angel Center, a program in Charlotte, N.C. That helps formerly incarcerated women become financially independent.

Charlie Mae Mays is 77. She has been diagnosed with lung cancer but it is in remission.

Of course, that makes her happy. But she measures her life in terms of whether or not she will one day see her daughter walk out of prison free.

[Her oldest daughter Michelle, was arrested on] the policy of charging people with “conspiracy.” ... She is one of thousands of women some call a victim of a law that created the “girlfriend problem.”

“Women romantically involved with drug-involved men often get caught in the conspiracy net cast by the war on drugs, many times receiving harsher sentences than the drug kingpins,” says Nkechi Taifa, senior policy analyst for the Open Society Institute (OSI), a private grant-making foundation that aims to shape public policy regarding issues such as human rights and social reform.

This kind of prosecution of women does not allow a judge or jury to take into consideration the reasons why a woman may remain silent or stay with a drug dealer.  The court ignores factors such as domestic violence, economic dependence, or disability that makes one reliant on someone to provide financial support.

Michelle West was a single mom with a nine-year-old daughter. She once dated and lived with Olee Wonzo Robinson, a man police said was a drug dealer. West and her family say he was physically and verbally abusive to her. Finally, she left and moved in with her mother.

“She was trying to go on with her life,” her mother remembers.

 A couple of years later police came knocking. Michelle says they threatened her with drug charges if she didn’t cooperate in their investigation of her ex-boyfriend. She was petrified because her ex had warned her he would kill her daughter and mother if she ever talked to police, she says.

West was convicted of charges that include conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and aiding and abetting in drug-related homicide. Witnesses testified that West did whatever Robinson ordered her to do. She denies having anything to do with a murder or drug dealing. One of the informants who testified against her was the triggerman in the murder and received immunity for his testimony. West maintained her innocence. Still, she received the same sentence as her ex-boyfriend.

The policy of using “conspiracy” charges allows drug laws to punish not only the kingpin but his girlfriend, who may have had nothing to do with his drug business or could have done something as small as drive a boyfriend to drop off drugs. The number of women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate of men since 1985, according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. African-American women are incarcerated at a rate eight times that of white women and represent 30 percent of all females incarcerated under state or federal jurisdiction.

A large percent of these women charged with conspiracy in drug cases have histories of physical and sexual abuse and/or untreated mental illness. Court documents show that while West was incarcerated and awaiting trial she reported Robinson sent her threatening letters and made threatening calls. The administrator of the jail testified that he had seen West in tears, expressing great concern over the safety of her daughter.

Today, West, 48, says by email, “The FBI gave me an ultimatum to cooperate with the government – a risk that would have been a death sentence to my daughter – or go to trial and face life.”

In the late 1990s the story of Kemba Smith, a Hampton University college student, grabbed media headlines. Smith had been in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer. When the boyfriend was murdered, the government held her accountable for the $4 million drug ring; although there was no evidence she ever sold, handled or used drugs. In 1994 she was sentenced to 24.5 years in prison.

Smith gave birth to a son while incarcerated and served 6.5 years. In December 2000 President Clinton granted Smith clemency. She has since earned a college degree and is married and living in the Midwest.

“It still troubles me that I know women that were there (in prison) while I was there and they are still there,” said Smith, who is also a motivational speaker who does advocacy work focused around drug policy reform. “My situation is no different than theirs except I had the public outcry.”

There are signs that a change in conspiracy laws could happen during the Obama administration. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) has introduced the “Fair Sentencing Act of 2009.”

 “In addition to focusing on major traffickers as opposed to bit players in the drug trade, the Durbin bill also addresses mitigating factors such as whether the defendant acted on impulse, fear, friendship, or affection,” said Nkechi Taifa of OSI. “This helps to eliminate concerns such as ‘the girlfriend problem’…”

“The thing about conspiracy is it is so un-American in many ways,” said Jennifer Seltzer Stitt, director of Federal Legislative Affairs at Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). “People are being hauled in with no evidence or very little.”

If the legislation passes, it’s long overdue, said Dean Dannye Holley, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University. He remembered that 30 years ago, when he got out of law school, one of his first cases was representing a woman who lived with a drug dealer.

“This (conspiracy charge) is a common practice, especially in minority neighborhoods… where so often drug cartels are gang-related and dominated by males who have females associated with them,” said Holley.

But even a new law may have no affect on Michelle West’s sentence. Still, Miquelle West, the daughter Michelle left behind, believes any shift in attitudes could help her mother.

The recollection of their abrupt separation still makes Miquelle, now 27, emotional.

 “It was May 3, 1993. My mother dropped me off at school and said, ‘I’ll see you later.’ I never saw her on the streets again,” said West, a fashion stylist who lives in New York.

“I remember my mom telling me that when I was born that they used to give babies shots in their foot and she said she felt my pain when they did it,” said Miquelle. “I understand, because now I feel that way. I feel her pain.”

Charlie Mae Mays was so distraught she didn’t even have the strength to walk on the day of Michelle’s sentencing, so her daughter “Pete” insisted she stay home. Now, Mays says, “I want to live to see her walk out free.”

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How did black women get an incarceration rate that is eight time higher than white women?  The conspiracy charge in the war on drugs is used to arrest girlfriends of drug dealers, regardless of their innocence, and give them same sentence as their romantic partners.  The women are apparently "guilty by association." This helps keep prisons full and provide prison workers - at tremendous cost to taxpayers ($50,000 per woman per year plus foster care costs for children left behind), the women, their children, and their communities.  Children who are separated from their mothers at an early age often develop separation anxiety disorder and feelings of rejection.  This can lead to mental illness.  Therefore, taxpayers keep on paying in future decades for the greed of prison profiteerism.  The prison cost is currently over $50 billion per year, and 2/3 of inmates were not convicted for violent crimes.   In fact, 1.25 million prisoners are actually mental patients who should be in treatment, not prison. 

STOP THE PROLIFERATION OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX THAT ROBS SOCIETY OF MONEY NEEDED FOR EDUCATION, JOB AND RECREATIONAL PROGRAMS FOR THE YOUTH, AND OTHER SOCIAL CONCERNS.  END SLAVERY IN THE U.S.A.  REMOVE INNOCENT WOMEN FROM PRISON. GIVE MOMS BACK TO THEIR CHILDREN AND ELDERLY PARENTS WHO NEED THEM.

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