There's been another wrongful conviction and exoneration in Texas. Ronald Taylor was released from prison yesterday after serving 12 years for a rape he didn't commit.

Taylor was convicted of rape in 1995 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. The victim picked him out of a lineup but acknowledged she only caught a glimpse of her attacker's face.

During his trial, a crime lab analyst testified that no body fluids were found on the victim's bedsheet. This summer, the Innocence Project paid to have a New Orleans lab retest the bedsheet. Semen that lab found matched the DNA of a man already in prison.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal apologized to Taylor in court Tuesday, and several council members echoed his regret.

Taylor is the third person exonerated due to faulty lab work by the Houston Police Department.

In another nice piece of reporting, Solomon Moore examines the slow progress that states are making to address the problem of wrongful convictions -- a problem that states generally refused to acknowledge until DNA evidence made clear that mistaken or knowingly false accusations often lead to erroneous guilty verdicts.

All but eight states now give inmates varying degrees of access to DNA evidence that might not have been available at the time of their convictions. Many states are also overhauling the way witnesses identify suspects, crime labs handle evidence and informants are used. At least six states have created commissions to expedite cases of those wrongfully convicted or to consider changes to criminal justice procedures. ...

Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia passed legislation this year to create tougher standards for the identification of suspects by witnesses, one of the most trouble-ridden procedures. ... Two states, Vermont and Maryland, passed laws this year to improve crime lab oversight to eliminate errors and omissions.

More than 500 local and state jurisdictions, including Alaska, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have adopted polices that require the recording of interrogations to help prevent false confessions, according to the Innocence Project.

Unfortunately, progress has been halting and inconsistent, at best.

More...

Claude Jones was executed in Texas in 2000.

Today, several organizations, including the Innocence Project and Texas Monthly, filed motions seeking to prevent the state from destroying a hair that could be subjected to DNA testing, the results of which might show Jones was not the killer.

The Texas Observer, the Innocence Project, the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas Innocence Network filed motions in state court in San Jacinto County, Texas, today asking for a temporary restraining order that would prevent officials from destroying the only piece of physical evidence in the case – a hair from the crime scene – and seeking a court order to conduct DNA testing that could determine whether the hair matches Claude Jones, who was convicted of murder in 1990 and executed on December 7, 2000.

More....

It looks like the unidentified (and unindicted) co-ejaculator theory is alive and well in Mississippi.

After being exonerated by DNA evidence, Kennedy Brewer was freed on bond after serving 15 years in prison for a rape and murder. The DA now says he will retry him:

“I perceive that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child,” Mr. Allgood said. “Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn’t make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death.”

This case has lots of red flags, including a jailhouse snitch and a suspended forensic dentist who testified about about bitemarks, itself a junk science.

Brewer is represented by the Innocence Project which reports that Mississippi has the second largest (after Louisiana) number of incarcerated residents per 100,000:

"If the system's failure rate is a mere one percent, 215 people in prison in Mississippi are innocent," the project says.

TalkLeft has frequently called attention to the problem of false confessions. Donald Connery writes today about three Connecticut convictions that were the product of untrue statements made during police interrogations. Two of the innocent confessors have been set free, but the judge in Richard Lapointe's case has, in Connery's view, shown little interest in finding the truth.

I heard Judge Stanley T. Fuger proclaim, "I don't know anything about this case." Worse, he seemed determined not to know anything. He told the lawyers at the beginning that he would read no briefs at the end. He refused to look at a just-arrived DNA report favorable to Lapointe. After just three days of testimony, he abruptly announced that he had heard enough.

A Lapointe supporter asks:

"How could he do it? It was a highly athletic murder. Boy Scout knots were tied around her neck and arms - Richard could hardly tie his shoes," said Perske, who has been making the hourlong trip from his house to visit Lapointe at least once a week for the past 17 years.

Lapointe's case is another example of the injustice that follows when "confessions" aren't recorded. The jury never heard the the interrogation tactics that were employed against the mentally disabled man, and therefore had no basis for deciding whether his incriminating statements were coerced.

Update: Judge Gertner to the Justice Department: Wrong again!

A federal judge today ordered the government to pay $101.7 million in the case of four men who spent decades in prison for a 1965 murder after the FBI withheld evidence of their innocence to protect an informant.

Once again, our Justice Department is taking a position in court that has very little to do with justice. FBI agents allegedly knew that a witness in a state murder prosecution was being untruthful when he accused four men of participating in the murder, but they kept quiet because they wanted to protect an informant who was actually involved in the killing.

Two of the wrongfully convicted defendants and the families of two others who died in prison are suing the FBI for their decision to withhold evidence of their innocence.

The government argued that federal authorities had no duty to share information with state officials who prosecuted Limone, Salvati, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco. Federal authorities cannot be held responsible for the results of a state prosecution, a Justice Department lawyer argued.

Accountability? Not in this government. Fortunately, an excellent federal judge, Nancy Gertner, is hearing the case. She'll soon decide whether the federal government should be held responsible for its conspiracy of silence.

With an IQ in the 50’s, Floyd Brown, who can’t spell his own name, couldn’t have produced the confession that purportedly links him to a murder. He says the police pounded on a table and yelled at him until he signed it.

No physical evidence ties Brown to the crime, notwithstanding unethical police efforts to manufacture evidence against him.[More ...]

Three important wrongful convictions bills has passed the state Senate and now been cleared by the Assembly Public Safety Committee in California:

One bill, aimed at reducing the number of false confessions, would mandate electronic recording of interrogations of suspects in homicides and violent felonies who are in police custody. Another would require corroborating evidence for the testimony of jailhouse informants, who have been shown to lie sometimes to receive reduced sentences or other benefits. A third bill calls on the California attorney general, in consultation with other key stakeholders in the criminal justice system, to develop new guidelines for lineups presented to eyewitnesses to see if they can identify suspects.

All three are desperately needed. Releasing the innocent imprisoned makes it easier to find the guilty perpetrator. So, will Gov. Schwarzenegger come up with some new excuse to veto the bills if they pass, or will he finally see the light of day and sign them into law?

Similar measures passed both houses last year, but were vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since then, the legislation has been modified to address the governor's concerns, said Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor who is executive director of the justice reform commission.

Jimmy Ray Bromgard was convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence and released from prison.

Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath continues to assert he believes Bromgard to be guilty.

It's not even a case of the unidentified co-ejaculator.

In most of the cases where prosecutors have refused to believe in an exoneration, they have cited evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime to argue that the DNA was left by a second, unidentified offender. It is rare for a prosecutor to dispute a DNA exoneration when there is no evidence -- as in Bromgard's case -- that more than one person committed the crime.

More....

It was an ugly, brutal crime, the murder of two young children, one of whom was raped and the other had nails driven into his skull. Byron Halsey served 19 years in prison for the crime. But, he didn't do it. DNA proved it and yesterday, a New Jersey Judge ordered him released.

Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, the Manhattan legal clinic that revived the case, said: “It’s a miracle that Byron is here with us, because if ever there was a case where there was a risk of executing an innocent man, it was this case. Because the facts of the case were so horrible.”

Here's what the DNA showed:

An unethical prosecutor and a fraudulent lab chemist put Curtis McCarty on death row in Oklahoma, not once, but three times. After 21 years in prison, he's now been exonerated:

The Innocence Project details the case and says:

“For anyone who believes the death penalty is being carried out appropriately in this country, and anyone who believes that prosecutors and government witnesses can always be relied on to pursue the truth, this case is a wake-up call,” said Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of the Innocence Project. “Three separate times, an innocent man was sentenced to die because of the actions of an unethical prosecutor and a fraudulent analyst.”

McCarty is the 201st person in the United States exonerated through DNA evidence – and the 15th of those 201 who has served time on death row. McCarty is the ninth person to be exonerated by DNA evidence in Oklahoma and the third to be exonerated from the state’s death row.

As for the prosecutor, it was Bob Macy of Oklahoma City.

As TalkLeft reported here, Alan Crotzer spent more than 24 years -- more than half his life -- behind bars for crimes he didn't commit. Having been responsible for the wrongful incarceration, one might think that Florida would want to compensate the man.

[F]or the second time in as many years Florida's Legislature has failed to pass a bill that would give Crotzer financial compensation for his wrongful conviction .... Though the House passed a measure that would have given Crotzer $1.25 million, the state senate didn't act on the bill in the recently ended legislative session.

It took the state more than 24 years to correct Crotzer's unjust loss of freedom. Will it take another 24 to recognize his entitlement to financial justice?