- Highlights from the career of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, newly pardoned by President Trump [Jon Gabriel/USA Today, Phoenix New Times thread on Twitter] Still vividly remembered: the Thomas-Arpaio raids on elected officials, judges, and journalists who’d crossed the sheriff [samples here and here from our coverage; Terry Carter, ABA Journal]
- Fran and Dan Keller, freed from Texas prisons after 21 years in Satanic abuse hysteria, finally getting official declaration of innocence (+ $3.4 million) [AP/CBS, Michael King, Austin Chronicle]
- Cops fired even for outrageous misconduct often win reinstatement, investigation finds [Washington Post] “Police Won’t Say Whether Cops Caught Fabricating Charges Were Disciplined” [Ed Krayewski, Connecticut]
- “A Rogues’ Gallery of Bad Forensics Labs” [C.J. Ciaramella]
- You can come back above ground now: NYC dismisses 644,000 stale arrest warrants for minor offenses [James C. McKinley, Jr., New York Times]
- Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) turn U.S. Department of Justice into regulator without accountability [James Copland and Rafael Mangual, Manhattan Institute]
Posts Tagged ‘forensics’
Crime and punishment roundup
- Dairy Queen manager charged with involuntary manslaughter following suicide of teen employee reportedly bullied on the job [AP, Missouri]
- Court orders new trial: carpenter, in school to argue against son’s school suspension over knife, had displayed knife he carries as part of work [Lancaster Online, Commonwealth v. Goslin]
- Desires for retribution aside, hanging homicide rap on dealers after overdoses unlikely to solve opiate problem [Mark Sine and Kaitlyn Boecker, Baltimore Sun]
- “Man wrongly convicted with bite mark evidence confronts bite mark analysts” [Radley Balko]
- Judge Neil Gorsuch and over-criminalization [C. Jarrett Dieterle, National Review]
- Debate over DoJ oversight of city police forces continues [David Meyer Lindenberg, Fault Lines (report on Chicago) and more]
Prosecution roundup
- Fourth Circuit will review forfeiture case of “pre-conviction, pre-trial restraint of untainted property” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- “Voodoo Science in the Courtroom: The U.S. has relied on flawed forensic-evidence techniques for decades, falsely convicting many” [Alex Kozinski, WSJ; ABA Journal] “Highest court in Massachusetts throws out another shaken-baby syndrome conviction” [Radley Balko on Boston Globe]
- Federal judge Andrew Hanen gets results! “Justice Department orders more ethics training for lawyers” [Politico, earlier]
- Like settlement slush funds, contingency-fee prosecutions divert money from the public fisc to influential private players [Margaret (“Peggy”) Little, CEI]
- California appeals court: Orange County district attorney’s office’s war on a judge was legal but represented “extraordinary abuse” [C.J. Ciaramella]
- “New Jersey Bill Would Punish Eating, Drinking While Driving” [Reason]
White House panel questions validity of criminal forensics
“Much of the forensic analysis used in criminal trials isn’t scientifically valid, according to a draft report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The report… raises questions about the use of bite-mark, hair, footwear, firearm and tool-mark analysis routinely used as evidence in thousands of trials annually in state and federal courts.” [Gary Fields and Kate O’Keeffe, WSJ]
Prosecution roundup
- Deferred prosecution agreements are a powerful new tool of the administrative state, with a tendency toward lawlessness [James Copland and Rafael Mangual, Manhattan Institute] Expected judicial deference to corporate prosecution deals: sign of a broken system [Scott Greenfield citing my April piece]
- Secrecy more common in criminal prosecutions: sealing of cases and documents, “gag orders… ex parte presentations, in camera submissions” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt]
- “In my heart, and in my approach to law, I saw rights as a challenge, as something to be overcome.” Confessions of an ex-prosecutor [Ken White (of Popehat), Reason] “Enforcement Gone Amok: The Many Faces of Over-Enforcement in the United States” [John Beisner et al, U.S. Chamber]
- Hunt County, Texas resident Kent Grady challenges county’s hiring of contingency-fee lawyers to go after him on environmental fines that via statutory per-day multiplication could turn a wrongly placed woodpile into a liability of $2 billion [WSJ editorial via Chamber Institute for Legal Reform]
- “Don’t Ask Us to Turn In Our Own Executives, Business Lobby Warns” [Bloomberg on Yates memo]
- “Scientists Looking To Fix The Many Problems With Forensic Evidence” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt]
Massachusetts forensic labs that test drug evidence
It appears they have their own very special quality standards [Lowering the Bar, earlier here, here, etc.]
Crime and punishment roundup
- Judges generally aren’t supposed to jail defendants over petty fines and fees they’re unable to pay, but many do anyway. How one Texas judge resists [Ed Spillane, Washington Post]
- Maryland legislature passes amended version of asset forfeiture bill I spoke favorably of at Annapolis press event in January [Tenth Amendment Center, background]
- Child services hair-sample forensics: “This Canadian Lab Spent 20 Years Ruining Lives” [Tess Owen, Vice]
- Cato’s 1995 Handbook for Congress urged repeal of Clinton crime bill, but Congress didn’t listen [Tim Lynch, Newsweek and more]
- “The main thing going through my head was, ‘I’m never going to get a job again.’” Public shaming as punishment [Suzy Khimm, The New Republic]
- Judge Alex Kozinski publicly names prosecutors in Washington state he thinks may have violated a defendant’s rights [Matt Ferner, HuffPo]
Crime and punishment roundup
- Unfounded prosecution of Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped [Austin American-Statesman, Eugene Volokh, earlier]
- Mens rea: “The American Civil Liberties Union has discovered yet another civil liberty it isn’t interested in defending” [Robby Soave/Reason, Scott Greenfield]
- Speaking of lack of mens rea: accidentally damaging a lamp in a federal government building in D.C. could send you to jail for 6 months [40 USC §8103(b)(4) (more) via @CrimeADay]
- North Carolina cyberbullying statute criminalizes posting “personal… information pertaining to a minor” with “intent to intimidate or torment.” Constitutional? [Eugene Volokh]
- Even as doubts mount about the science behind shaken-baby prosecutions, convictions continue [Kelsi Loos, Frederick News-Post; Maryland dad gets 20-year sentence; earlier here, etc.]
- Like Clinton, Bernie Sanders in 1990s backed three-strikes, longer sentences, funds for prison expansion [Mitchell Blatt, The Federalist]
- “Most of the crime lab scandals… have occurred at crime labs that were already accredited.” [Radley Balko]
Roanoke man pardoned on arson conviction
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted an unusual absolute pardon to Davey Reedy, released six years ago after many years of imprisonment on an arson murder conviction after a house fire that killed his two small children. The case is one of dozens in which forensic methods formerly used for evaluating arson have been re-examined as poorly based and unreliable. “According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 38 people have been exonerated before Reedy for arson-related crimes since 1991.” [Washington Post; earlier]
From the Post’s Christmas Day story:
After his release in 2009, he has settled back in the Roanoke area with his family. The day McAuliffe called to tell him of his exoneration, Roberta Bondurant said, he was coordinating a volunteer project.
“He’s at a place and time in his life where he’s at peace with himself,” she said. “It doesn’t help him at all in the time he has left on this planet to hold bitterness for anyone who made a mistake along the way.”
About that bite mark evidence, never mind
After Steven Mark Chaney had spent 25 years in Texas prison for murder came the belated oops: never mind about that “one in a million” bite mark testimony we convicted you on. He’s out pending retrial. [Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post via Radley Balko, who adds more cases on bite mark forensics]