wrongful convictions

For two months, the Philadelphia Police Department has had a new policy to stop false confessions, including putting strict limits on how long suspects can be held for questioning and preventing witnesses from being taken from a crime scene to a detective division for questioning, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. There have been a couple hiccups. The PPD issued a three-page clarification about the new interview and interrogation policy, including that it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment to temporarily detain people found at a crime scene even though they can refuse to be taken to a detective division, the Daily News further reports.

The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey reports that the exoneration of 25 people across the country who were mistakenly linked to crimes through bitemark evidence has led to some questioning whether that type of evidence should ever be allowed in court. I covered one such case in upstate New York: Roy Brown's conviction of a woman's brutal murder on the basis of bitemark evidence was overturned.

"Critics says a key drawback of bite-mark analysis is its subjectivity, which lends itself to bias," the Press also reports. Other issues include that human skin "is not a reliable medium on which to record bite marks." the Press further reports.

Vermont is considering two pieces of legislation to seek the prevention of wrongful convictions. One bill would require blind lineups "in which the officer conducting them doesn’t know which participant is the suspect and therefore can’t influence the witness," The Rutland Herald reports. The other bill would call for taping police interogations in homicide and sexual-assault interrogations, the paper further reports.

A best practice developed by the Innocence Project to ensure accurate eyewitness identification could be running afoul of the First Amendment. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports on local law enforcement's use of witness identifiation affidavits that direct witnesses to crime not to talk to the media; these affidavits were recommended to try to avoid wrongful convictions. Seth Miller, of the Innocence Project of Florida, told the newspaper that cases that receive a lot of media coverage can taint witnesses' opinions and potentially lead to wrongful convictions. But an attorney who practices in the area of media law said having law enforcement tell witnesses not to talk to the press violates their First Amendment rights.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police is urging law enforcement agencies "to adopt new guidelines for conducting photo lineups, videotaping witness interviews and corroborating information from jailhouse informants, among 30 recommendations," The Washington Post reports. The Post further reports that more than 20 states record interrogations statewide, and another 850 law enforcement agencies voluntarily record interrogations.

Four wrongfully convicted women were freed today after being convicted of ritualistic sex abuse, The Huffington Post reports. Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project and writing in the Huffington Post, said the exonerations were possible because of Texas' "new law, known locally as the 'Junk Science Writ,' allows inmates to overturn their convictions and seek new trials when outdated and/or unreliable forensics were used by the prosecution to convict them." Other states should follow Texas' lead, Godsey argued.

California has enacted a law to make it easier for the wrongfully convicted to get compensation for the time they spent imprisoned, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Under a prior statute, defendants who were let go had to prove their innocence before they could get compensated for their wrongful imprisonment. Only 11 of 132 people released from California prisons since 2000 because they were wrongfully convicted were able to get compensation through the prior system, according to the Union-Tribune.

The New York Times' Jim Dwyer makes the point that confessions, but not entire interrogiations, are recorded in New York. But it's documenting entire interrogations that could stop people being wrongfully convicted after they give false confessions. Dwyer writes: "They’ve been recording confessions for years — true confessions, false confessions, they pretty much all look the same. But after so many people who confessed were proven innocent with DNA tests, we now know that it’s not the confession part that tells you whether to believe someone — it’s that first 12 hours in custody, or whatever it was before the camera went on, that tells you how he or she got to 'I did it.'" Cops can feed details to innocent suspects that only the murderer would know. Then the innocent suspects feed it back to them.

The family of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed by the state of Texas for allegedly killing his three children by setting his family home on fire, is seeking a post-death pardon for Willingham due to "outdated arson forensics and possible prosecutorial misconduct," the Austin Chronicle reports. In 2009, the New Yorker wrote an extensive and amazing piece on the Willingham case and whether an innocent man was executed. It is well worth a read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

In another Innocence Project development out of Alaska, the Alaska Department of Law has asked law enforcement in that state to ask for an independent review of a Fairbanks murder, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported. The Alaska Innocence Project asked for the exoneration of the four men convicted in that killing. The full report: http://www.newsminer.com/fairbanks_four/state-seeks-independent-review-o...