by TChris

A homeless man leans against a pickup truck, smoking a Camel. Inside the truck, police find a Camel pack that's full of methamphetamine. The homeless man has $300 in his pocket. The man must be a drug dealer, right?

A jury said yes, but the judge who presided over Paul Magnan's trial isn't so sure.

A judge threw out the conviction -- which had been Magnan's third strike -- earlier this month, finding that Magnan's attorney ignored his innocent explanation for the money: His mother had wired him several hundred dollars a week before his arrest, so he could fly to visit her.

Prosecutors neglected to dislcose "that the woman sitting in the pickup truck, talking with Magnan at the time of his arrest, was someone police suspected in a separate incident of selling methamphetamine." Confronted by the Mercury News, the Santa Clara County district attorney's office said it was dismissing the meth case, while defending its decision to hide evidence from Magnan.

by TChris

It isn't surprising that a prosecutor seized upon DNA testing proving that Roger Coleman wasn't wrongfully executed as evidence that wrongful convictions aren't a serious problem. The self-righteous belief that the government rarely makes a false accusation, that the police never cheat, and that appellate courts inevitably restore freedom to those few who are wrongly convicted, is common among prosecutors. Delusional, but common.

Joshua Marquis, who wrote this op-ed, only needed to click TalkLeft's "Innocence Cases" link to realize how frequently the innocent are convicted. He could also have considered appellate decisions like this one (click "opinion" to open a pdf), released six days ago by the Seventh Circuit, describing how the police decided to arrest a man for bank robbery because he resembled the image of the robber captured on a surveillance camera, and because the man was having some financial problems, without first checking his alibi and without regard to glaring differences between his appearance and the description of the robber that witnesses provided.

by TChris

Kenneth Marsh received $756,900 from California’s Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board for the 21 years he spent in prison for a crime that never happened. The record award represents the state’s acknowledgement that Marsh is innocent, and a board member, San Bernardino County DA Michael Ramos, actually apologized to Marsh for the government's error. Unfortunately, the facts haven’t deterred Jay Coulter, the retired prosecutor who obtained the guilty verdict, from continuing to smear Marsh’s name.

Coulter … said Thursday he remains unconvinced that Marsh is innocent. Coulter said the evidence did not fit Marsh's version of what happened.

Marsh was convicted of beating his girlfriend’s child to death. He maintains that the toddler hit his head on a fireplace hearth after falling from a couch. During the trial, prosecution experts testified that the fall could not have killed the child. The compensation board concluded that new evidence supports Marsh’s version.

by TChris

In 1982, Alan Crotzer was sentenced to 130 years in prison for armed robbery and rape. A victim picked him out of a lineup. He's been serving that sentence for more than half his life.

One of the actual perpetrators admits that Crotzer is innocent, and Florida prosecutors, to their credit, acknowledge that new DNA testing casts "significant doubt'' on his guilt. They've agreed not to oppose a motion to vacate Crotzer's sentence.

Congratulations to the Florida Innocence Initiative for its work on Crotzer's behalf.

by TChris

In April 2004, TalkLeft pointed to evidence that a New York homicide detective used deceit to obtain a confession from a 17-year-old kid, Martin Tankleff, who was convicted of murdering his parents despite the lack of significant evidence against him beyond the confession that Tankleff promptly repudiated. This follow-up story in June 2004 discussed new evidence that implicated another individual in the killing.

In the last year-and-a-half, Tankleff’s lawyers have presented a compelling case that Tankleff is innocent. At the very least, it should now be apparent that there is substantial doubt about Tankleff’s guilt.

Mr. Tankleff's lawyers make these claims: a botched initial investigation produced a false confession, new evidence identifies the real killers, the police detective in the case lied about his ties to one of the killers, the district attorney has connections to the killers, and prosecutors ignored evidence, coerced defense witnesses and shielded the real culprits.

Objective observers recognize that Tankleff doesn’t belong in prison, given the newly-developed evidence.

"Real, raw, terrifying tales of 'justice'". That's how John Freeman in the Minneapolis Star Tribune begins his review of the recently published Surviving Justice.

The 13 men and women featured in "Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated" were sent to prison for crimes they did not commit. Some languished for years on death row. Others were sentenced to life in prison. And yet they consider themselves fortunate. Thanks to their own calls for help and sheer dumb luck, the judicial system grudgingly admitted mistakes and set them free.

One by one, these interviews pinpoint lingering problems in our criminal justice system, from the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts and polygraph tests to the need for better public defenders. Along with students from the University of California graduate school of journalism, editors Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers have written helpful guides to these issues. Their description of how snitches work is fascinating and eye-opening, and their brief description of the rape epidemic in prisons is frightening.

by TChris

Bryn Mawr College student Janet Lee invented an unusual method of stress relief. She filled condoms with flour, then squeezed them. Flying can be stressful, so she brought three flour-filled condoms with her to carry on a flight. This turned out to be an unfortunate idea, as airport screeners searched her luggage and found the condoms, which they assumed to be filled with cocaine -- an assumption Philadelphia police claim was confirmed by field tests. Lee spent three weeks behind bars on drug trafficking charges before the error was discovered.

How did flour test positive for opium, cocaine, and another drug, when later lab tests confirmed that the white powdery substance was exactly what it appeared to be: flour? The city has refused to release records that might reveal what went wrong.

Lee's lawyers, former prosecutors David Oh and Jeremy Ibrahim, say that either the field test was faulty or someone fixed the results.

Lee filed suit this week against the city for her wrongful arrest.

by TChris

The North Texas Innocence Project will bring together faculty and students from six universities who will join defense lawyers in investigating the possible innocence of convicted inmates.

The project will be based primarily at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, with 40 criminal-justice and law-school students working with lawyers on the cases. The UT-Arlington students, who have been meeting for almost a year, have identified a murder in Tyler, a sexual assault in Dallas and a robbery in Fort Worth for further review.

Under the direction of licensed lawyers, the local students will work with law students from Texas Tech University, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston as well as journalism students from the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

Innocence projects are always needed. This one had the support of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which successfully urged the Texas legislature to provide funding.

The Washington Post reports that two more Virginia inmates convicted of rape, one of whom served 20 years before being released, have been determined to be factually innocent based on new DNA testing. The testing in one of the cases produced a "cold hit" to the true perpetrators.

The revelations are the result of modern-day testing Warner ordered more than a year ago of biological samples that had been collected in thousands of violent criminal cases dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Those samples were collected before leaps in the forensic science.

Now that those tests have revealed that two more innocent men were jailed, Warner is ordering all of the files and others in state custody-- about 660 boxes that contain thousands of cases from 1973 through 1988 -- to be examined for cases that can be retested using the latest DNA technology.

The testing was conducted during a random sample review of 31 cases purusant to an order issued by Gov. Warner last year. In other words, it weren't requested by the inmates, who had since served their time and been released. Kudos to Governor Warner for ordering testing on more cases today.

In his statement released this afternoon, Gov. Warner says it's the morally correct thing to do:

by TChris

TalkLeft has frequently written about Wilton Dedge, who spent 22 years in Florida prisons for a rape he didn't commit. The Florida legislature finally did the right thing by passing a bill that awards Dedge $2 million as compensation for his mistaken incarceration.

Robert Clark Jr. of Georgia is about to be a free man, after serving 24 years of a life sentence for a rape DNA now shows he did not commit. In his case, the DNA not only freed him, it found the guilty person.

Kudos to the Innocence Project who took his case and got the conviction vacated. You can read the details here.

Update: 5/27/2009: Since this post was written, the state of Missouri appealed the granting of the writ and got the order granting bail reversed. The 8th Circuit reinstated Dale's murder conviction and the U.S. Supreme Court denied cert. America's Most Wanted will feature Dales' case Saturday, May 30, 2009.

*****

This is the best news I've heard all day. Dale Helmig, who has spent 8 years in prison in Missouri as a result of being convicted of killing his mother, may be out of jail as early as tomorrow.

His attorneys claim the murder trial was tainted by an incomplete police investigation, an inept defense and a prosecutor looking to score political points in an election battle for Congress. That now-former prosecutor, Republican U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof, has rejected any link between the campaign and trial. But a judge in September reversed the conviction after hearing arguments that a highway map jurors used during deliberations contradicted evidence they had seen in court while considered whether Helmig had time to dispose of the body.

The overturning of the conviction is largely due to the work of a law student at the Illinois State University Innocence Project which made a documentary about Dale's case.