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FBI To Review 27 Death Penalty Cases for Faulty Forensic Testimony

Anna Fitzpatrick — July 23, 2013 @ 3:33 PM — Comments (2)

A review of more than 21,000 cases has revealed twenty-seven death penalty cases in which the FBI’s forensic experts may have exaggerated the scientific conclusions that could be drawn from a so-called “match” between a hair found at the scene of a crime and hair of the defendant. It is not known how many cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions, or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues.

The discovery of the more than two dozen capital cases promises that the examination could become a factor in the debate over the death penalty. Some opponents have long held that the execution of an innocent person would solidify doubts about capital punishment. But if DNA or other testing confirms convictions, it would strengthen supporters’ arguments that the system works.

At least three Florida men, including DNA exonerees Wilton Dedge and William Dillon, were convicted based on, among other things, testimony provided by John Preston, who claimed that his dogs could perform feats of forensic detection far beyond the abilities of other investigative dogs. Preston testified in each case that his dog picked up the scent of the defendant at the scene of the crime, testimony that all but sealed their fate. By now, though, his claims have been thoroughly discredited by experts in the field of scent tracking, media reports, multiple state supreme courts, police training manuals, and law review articles.  This leads to the question of why Preston was ever considered reliable in the first place and why more was not done to do a re-review of all cases in which Preston and fraudulent dog handlers like him have testified.

Advocates for defendants and the wrongly convicted called the FBI’s reexamination of possibly faulty forensic conclusions a watershed moment in police and prosecutorial agencies’ willingness to re-open old cases because of scientific errors uncovered by DNA testing. “We didn’t do this to be a model for anyone,” said FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman. “When there’s a problem, you have to face it, and you have to figure how to fix it, move forward and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” FBI Laboratory director Chris Hassell has said that the review will be used to improve lab training, testimony, audit systems, and research.

The review is a huge step forward to improving the criminal justice system and the rigor of forensic science in the United States. Faulty forensics and science is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions, and a revised approach to forensics could help to reduce that number of miscarriages of justices before the occur. Hopefully we’re not far off from reforms in other leading causes, such as eyewitness identification or snitch testimonies.

Innocence Project of Florida,policy,Science, , , , ,


NCIP Secures Overturned Conviction for George Souliotes

Jessica — April 24, 2013 @ 10:39 AM — Comments (0)

Last week The Northern California Innocence Project won more than a decade long legal battle for the release of George Souliotes. The NCIP Press Release stated that a California judge overturned his conviction and ordered his release on April 12, 2013 unless the prosecution not only files for a re-trail but also takes the steps to do so within the next 30 days.

Souliotes was convicted in 2000 for a triple murder and arson when a fatal fire in 1997 occurred on a separate property of his in Modesto, California. The fire claimed the lives of three residents. Unfortunately, Souliotes fell victim to a wrongful conviction due to faulty fire science and ineffective counsel at a second trial.

Arson forensics have developed with the progression of technology. The advancement of fire science has allowed for many cases involving arson to be reconsidered. Regarding Souliotes case, an article in The Los Angeles Times stated,

“For decades, fire investigators believed accelerant-propelled arsons left signs: melted steel, glass etched by tiny cracks, certain patterns and markings.

But when the theories were finally tested, scientists learned the conditions also were found in accidental blazes.”

The science provided as evidence in Souliotes’ trial resulted in his conviction and sentencing of three life sentences without parole. Souliotes served 16 years of his sentence before a judge ordered for his release this April. For Souliotes, faulty science was not the only reason the prosecution secured a conviction; the counsel that Souliotes received in his second trial was inadequate in their defense.

The Wall Street Journal describes Souliotes’ counsel claiming,

“His [Souliotes] first trial resulted in a hung jury, after his defense counsel provided a vigorous defense including expert witnesses. At his second trial, however, Souliotes’ defense counsel failed to present a case, called no expert witnesses, and called none of the other fact witnesses who established Souliotes’ complete lack of motive at the first trial.”

With evidence pointing away from arson along with evidence of ineffective counsel, Souliotes’ case began unraveling as the NCIP took on the case to fight to overturn the conviction. The Wall Street Journal continued with a statement from one of Souliotes’ lawyers, Jimmy McBirney stating, “Mr. Souliotes has always maintained his innocence, and the evidence has now proven it. There is absolutely no basis for a retrial, and we look forward to seeing him set free.”

Pictured below is NCIP Press Release photo of Souliotes and the legal team that helped  him gain his overturned conviction. Congratulations to George Souliotes on his release and The Northern California Innocence Project for their success and their hard work on the Souliotes case.

George Souliotes and his counsel

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Shining the Spotlight on Exonerations – Upcoming TV Shows

Jordan — December 06, 2012 @ 1:55 PM — Comments (1)

TV is still arguably one of the most influential media on public opinion. We consider the almost monthly exonerations that are happening nationwide indications of a governmental willingness shifting towards accepting new science. TV shows are acknowledging this movement and presenting it to the public. Just in the next week, three shows will profile numerous exonerees, including our very own William Michael Dillon.

On Sunday, December 9, CBS’s “60 Minutes” is scheduled to air a piece examining the exonerations of the “Dixmoor Five” and the “Englewood Four,” two Chicago-area cases where juvenile defendants were wrongfully convicted of rape and murder largely on the basis of false confessions. The cases were handled jointly by the Innocence Project, the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the University of Chicago Law School Exoneration Project and cooperating private attorneys. The piece will likely also explore the resistance by State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to the free the young men even though there was compelling DNA evidence pointing to other men with violent criminal histories in both of the cases.

On Monday, December 10 at 9 p.m. (EST) on Investigation Discovery’s new show “I Didn’t Do It” will highlight Dillon’s story.”I Didn’t Do It” is a six episode series that covers one case per episode. This episode will explain how the police made Dillon a suspect, the court wrongfully convicted him, and how the justice system resisted his release.

BET aired its first episode of its weekly show, “Vindicated,” this past Tuesday. This will air every Tuesday at 10:30 p.m. (EST). This Tuesday, Dec. 11, it will continue to cover the story of exoneree Tim Cole, who it began talking about in its premiere episode. Cole served in the military and was a student at Texas Tech when he was wrongfully convicted. He died in prison in 1999, so his family, friends, and involved law enforcement and legal teams speak about his story on the show. “Vindicated” will cover the stories of Herman Atkins, Darryl Hunt, Arthur Carmona, Thomas Haynesworth, Timothy Atkins, Charles Chatman, and Joyce Ann Brown in episodes through Jan. 22.

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Shaken-Baby Syndrome: The United Kingdom’s Reforms (P. 2)

Jordan — November 20, 2012 @ 1:33 PM — Comments (0)

This is the second of a three-part series discussing Shaken-Baby Syndrome.

Process of Reevaluation

The first modification to make the assessment of shaken baby syndrome (SBS) cases sound more credible was Meadow’s Rule. Developed by Sir Roy Meadow, British pediatrician, it said that two or more childhood deaths in the same family should arouse suspicion of foul play rather than sudden infant death syndrome. So basically it judged with suspicion by numbers.

One death was a tragedy; two caused suspicion of the caretaker; three deaths meant the caretaker probably murdered them and was likely guilty. It convicted so many people that its trust was highly elevated; it seemed indelible. Meadow’s rule affected a fourfold increase in child abuse convictions from 1978 to 1988.

However it also, like the triad of symptoms (retinal bleeding, brain swelling, and brain bleeding), determined a conviction with a rule and not a consideration of the case. Solicitor Sally Clark appealed and was found innocent of the murder of her two children. This caused judicial reviews of the Meadow’s Rule. Much of her innocence was founded upon the fact that a pathologist failed to release post-mortem exams he had performed on the children which revealed one of them died of natural causes. The faulty assumptions of the Meadow’s Rule stole the attention of the jury and the prosecutors.

Angela Cannings was convicted at the Winchester Crown Court (UK) for the death of her two infants. She and the defense disputed claims that she smothered the two babies. She was their sole caretaker, so they proposed sudden infant death syndrome as an explanation and provided numerous experts of their own to prove their claim. The Court of Appeal issued this final statement on the verdict:

“[If] the outcome of the trial depends exclusively or almost exclusively on a serious disagreement between distinguished and reputable experts, it will often be unwise, and therefore unsafe, to proceed.”

Attorney General Goldsmith called for the review of every infant death case since 1994 (297 and 88 involving SBS) due to the outcome of Cannings’ case. This review began in July 2005 with three appeals cases that had already been initiated.

The Three Appeals (UK)

All three were heard together to keep the focus on the new medical evidence present in each shaken baby case and whether or not it proved each person was or was not guilty.

Lorraine Harris’ was the only conviction that was overturned. The symptoms and cause of death of her son matched the triad of symptoms, so the prosecution found the case to be clear cut. But the new scientific evidence presented by the Court of Appeals showed that his injuries did not take much force to cause and that they were the result of a bleeding disorder.

Raymond Rock was determined to have sufficient evidence of unlawful killing. However, his conviction for murder could not stand alone on the triad of symptoms. So his conviction was reduced to manslaughter. The Court altered his sentence to seven years, six of which he’d already served. He was able to get out of jail soon after.

In the third review, Alan Cherry’s conviction for manslaughter was upheld.

The Court also rejected the argument that the triad of symptoms could occur without a baby being shaken. Lord Justice Gage, Mr. Justice Gross, and Mr. Justice McFarlane after these three appeals all agreed that the triad of symptoms was unsafe for determining convictions. In each of these cases, the prosecution presented experts that argued the triad of symptoms could only have resulted from some measure of violence.

This panel of three judges determined that convictions based on this triad of symptoms were not presumably always the result of violence but could just as well be the result of the child falling or having a health problem resulting from a traumatic birth or a health disorder. The panel, however, still maintained that some sort of external harm must trigger these symptoms to arise even if they’re present because of the child’s health problem.

Active Discussion of Reforms

The UK’s Royal College of Pathologists gathered in 2009. They agreed that the triad of symptoms makes defendants appear clearly guilty but stressed that future trials must consider other evidence to appropriately determine the actual guilt of the defendant.

In 2011, the Crown Prosecution Service issued a document of legal guidance on shaken-baby cases. Its main stipulation is that “appropriate supporting evidence (which in certain circumstances can be found in the absence of certain factors) should feature in the case analysis.”

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Shaken-Baby Syndrome: US Resists Conviction Reform, Unlike England

Jordan — November 08, 2012 @ 1:09 PM — Comments (1)

This is the first of a three-part series discussing Shaken-Baby Syndrome. Subscribe with our RSS feed or find us on Facebook or Twitter to catch the next two.

Student fellows working under Prof. Alec Klein with The Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University are assessing why the United States criminal justice system’s treatment of shaken-baby syndrome (SBS) cases has a dangerous potential of leading to wrongful convictions. The team has begun fact-checking almost 1,400 SBS-related cases in the US in which the convicted person has continually maintained their innocence—noble work for which they are already receiving some resistance. They are also compiling a public database for the additional cases to avoid any further backlog.

Medical experts and criminal justice professionals disagree over the science behind SBS, because it is relatively new. Irish barrister Alison Enright is a visiting scholar at Medill. She is comparing the United Kingdom’s assessment of shaken baby syndrome with that of the US.

In the UK, the three symptoms that suggest SBS—retinal bleeding, brain swelling, and brain bleeding—are not enough to prove  attempted murder or assault by the caretaker. The US courts have been basing their convictions of shaken-baby cases on the existence of this evidence.

A press release from Medill quotes Enright, saying:

“Despite the growing international recognition of the dangers and flaws inherent in prosecutions based on the triad of injuries, the United States continues to adhere to the classic shaken-baby syndrome prosecution paradigm, raising a real possibility that miscarriages of justice continue to occur and innocent people are being wrongfully convicted.”

Why Is The Triad of Symptoms So Convincing?

Linking these three symptoms to one possible cause has enabled prosecutors to use emotion to easily sway the jury. During the trial of nanny Louise Woodward, prosecutor Gerard Leone told a fact-void story of what he thought happened, describing in bone-chilling detail what he thinks Woodward did to the child. Arizona man Drayton Witt’s conviction for shaking his son was recently tossed. He said during the trial that he was likened to a gorilla and that he would have been able to see the child’s face as he shook him.

The Medill team has taken interest in Dr. Norman Guthkelch’s altered view of SBS. His research (“Infantile Subdural Hematoma and its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries” from the British Medical Journal) assisted in the establishment of SBS. However, Dr. Guthkelch now feels researchers that built off of his findings have taken them too far:

“In reviewing a number of cases where the alleged assailant has continued to proclaim his/her innocence, I have been struck by the high proportion of these in which there was a significant history of previous illness, and of abnormalities of structure and function of the nervous system. Yet these matters were hardly, if at all, considered in the medical reports.”

Guthkelch doesn’t like the term shaken-baby syndrome because it sounds definite.  Prescribing the presence of these three symptoms as nothing other than violence towards an infant has caused courts to be closed-minded about the possibility that these same symptoms can show up for other reasons. Jurors and judges have often not looked for “damage to the neck and cervical spinal cord or column” to complement the existence of the triad of symptoms. According to Enright, experts suggest that additional injuries to the spinal cord would prove violence.

Guthkelch thinks that using the triad of symptoms is a strange use of science to convict, because it uses scientific evidence to make suspects guilty by association. It then uses the same evidence to “to prove (the perpetrator’s) intent.” All too often prosecutors make up hypothetical and overly dramatic stories during the trial to emotionally sway the jury.

Conflicting Viewpoints in the Medical Field

Dr. Robert W. Block, the president of the Academy of American Pediatrics and board-certified child abuse pediatrician serving on an advisory committee for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, is in the position to have quite a say in the US’s assessment of the topic. A Daily Herald article quotes him saying:

“(Researchers challenging the validity of a SBS diagnosis) ignore that our clinical diagnosis is not made in isolation. It’s made after a great deal of conferencing with law enforcement and child welfare workers, family interviews, and after putting together timelines and considering all other diseases…My opinion is that the other side is not representing a scientific argument.”

However as history has taught us, case must be considered individually. In part 2 of this series, I will mention a case in which Attorney General Lord Goldsmith of the UK called for the review of 297 infant death cases. The UK’s progression in their treatment of SBS cases in comparison to that of the US is what Enright seeks to point out in her research.

The US compared to the UK

The US and UK have generally agreed that the triad of symptoms existed in each SBS case. By making this connection, they shrouded the existence of the symptoms in the righteous, untouchable glow brought on by the label of “science,” like they have for many other archaic scientific determinants that led to false convictions—fingerprints, lie detectors, hair follicle examinations, footprint comparisons, and even poor observation and assumption in blood testings.

We now, especially of late, know that all of these and SBS are barely science. Both countries have taken it to the extreme and convicted solely based upon the existence of this triad of evidence.

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Damon Thibodeaux: The 300th DNA Exoneree in the U.S.

Jordan — October 09, 2012 @ 10:00 AM — Comments (0)

As of Friday, the efforts of the Innocence Project made Damon A. Thibodeaux the 300th person in the US that DNA evidence has assisted in exonerating. DNA exonerees collectively total 4,013 years of wrongful imprisonment. Thirty-three of them were under 18 when they were arrested.

Thiboreaux walks out of prison

Damon Thibodeaux is the 300th DNA Exoneree. ~courtesy of Fox

The Innocence Project released a statement about Thibodeaux’s exoneration. In this quote, they try to look for the positive outcomes of all the innocent years spent in vein:

Fortunately, there are simple, common sense reforms that can prevent wrongful convictions and make sure law enforcement is focused on identifying the true perpetrators of crime. We owe it to the 300 men and women who have been exonerated to pass these reforms to help make sure that our criminal justice system is as accurate as possible. Fixing the system protects everyone because it ensures that the innocent go free and the real perpetrators are locked up and unable to commit other crimes.

People commonly assume that those who plead guilty must be guilty. Why would they say they did a crime they did not do? However, 28 of the 300 DNA exonerees pled guilty to the crimes they were convicted of despite their innocence. Thiboreaux is one of them.

In considering the textbook-botched job multiple parties did on Thibodeaux’s case, we can be thankful that he was saved from death row. He will no longer spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, waiting to be killed in accordance with Louisiana’s assessment of the murder and rape of his 14-year-old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne. Without the efforts of the Innocence Project and his attorneys he would have died because of eyewitness misidentification and police interrogation in the form of threats, lies, and a forced false confession.

2007-2012: The Period of Reinvestigation

The Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office agreed to investigate what caused Thibodeaux’s imprisonment when his legal team and the Innocence Project brought evidence of his innocence to the District Attorney’s attention.

“I didn’t know that I had done it, but I done it,” Thibodeaux confessed to police in 1997.

They interrogated him for almost nine hours to glean this confession. Before he was convicted, he tried to retract his confession. However, the same judge that recently exonerated him would not hear his retraction and sentenced him.

Thibodeaux has now said: “At that point I was tired. I was hungry. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I was willing to tell them anything they wanted me to tell them if it would get me out of that interrogation room.”

The eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen a man pacing around the area where Champagne’s body was found identified Thibodeaux as that man. But the trial did not reveal the two defeating details of this identification. The news broadcasted Thibodeaux’s picture the day before on TV, and he was already in custody when the witnesses claimed to have seen him.

The Cord on the Tree

The victim was found with a piece of red electrical cord around her neck. It had been burned off of a larger piece of cord found on the tree above where police found her body.

During the interrogations, police used leading questions to provoke an exhausted suspect to admit to actions that agreed with the evidence from the crime scene. They revealed non-public details about the crime with these questions. So Thibodeaux revealed in his confession that he knew details that presumably only the police and perpetrator knew about, which lead to the jury’s conclusion that he must be the perpetrator.  It is sneaky and effective method, as it has been for plenty of other innocent people sent to prison.

He should not have known about the cord in the tree. Thibodeaux, in his confession, said he used a gray speaker wire from his car to strangle her. Even though he messed up the details, this was still enough for a conviction.

The cord tested positive for having blood on it in the original investigation, but it was not DNA tested. When later tested, it revealed the presence of male DNA that did not match that of Thibodeaux.

Outdated Science

Not only did he take a polygraph—which is a highly questionable assessment of the truth for how easy it is to tell the exact opposite truth—he was told at a later time that he failed the test.

The prosecution’s expert knew that he had been threatened with the death penalty during interrogation and confessed in spite of it. The defense never found out. The police also only recorded 54 minutes out of the 8 1/2 hour interrogation.

Read The Sky Valley Chronicle’s article on Thibodeaux’s release.

exoneration,post-conviction,Science,Uncategorized, , , , ,


An Unusual Collaboration: The Innocence Project and NYPD

Jordan — October 02, 2012 @ 5:20 PM — Comments (0)

The National Institute of Justice—an agency of the United States Department of Justice—awarded $1.25 million jointly to the Innocence Project (in New York) and New York Police Department to diminish the time it takes to find existing DNA evidence. Much of the this evidence today cannot be found due to being lost amongst the large backlog within the NYPD evidence storage units.

The sum of $1.25 million will be distributed over two years starting October 1, 2012. The Innocence Project will hire a new employee to sort through some 800 convictions in New York City where there is reason to believe the existing DNA evidence could prove innocence.

Another portion of the money will go to the NYPD. They will search through their evidence storage units and assign bar codes to the evidence of each homicide and sexual assault case. Hopefully, making it easier to locate evidence, particularly evidence from these older cases. The office of the Chief Medical Examiner will receive another portion to cover the DNA testing as needed for these cases.

NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, “Through this grant, the N.Y.P.D. is proud to join the Innocence Project in its noble work to restore actually innocent persons to society.” The New York Times finds that:

“The alliance is somewhat unusual in that the Innocence Project’s goal is to undo convictions that can be the result of faulty police work.”

It is unusual, but it’s the sort of cooperation what we hope for. No one wants an innocent person to go to prison. We applaud NYPD’s willingness to correct mistakes, potentially their mistakes. We see this alliance as a huge step in the right direction.

Police departments around the nation are beginning to realize the impact of poor record keeping and organization of evidence. In May, we wrote about the SAFER Act (Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry). The proponents of this registry realize that it costs from $800-$5,000 to reanalyze a rape kit. Therefore the evidence must be organized before SAFER supporters can calculate what it will cost to evaluate every untested kit.

It is important to the victim, the prevention of future victims, and those convicted of the crimes that all DNA evidence in existence is known about. SAFER’s public registry model intends to amass the kits on a website. This will not only prove to the public the dire need for better organized evidence storage units, it will make it easier for those imprisoned for a crime to find if untested DNA evidence from their crime exists.

Hopefully these steps will ensure that another innocent person will not have to wait an extended time as law enforcement locates evidence in their case, like Alan Newton who was exonerated in 2006 after waiting 11 years for officials to locate “lost” evidence.

Here’s the New York Time’s report on the funding.

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Less Than Half a Year Tarnishes a Young Life

Jordan — August 16, 2012 @ 3:13 PM — Comments (0)

K’vaughn Hines, 19, spent more than four months in prison charged with first-degree rape and other related charges. He was charged in a gang rape near the Greenbelt Metro Station in Maryland on December 17, 2011.

During the investigation, DNA testing excluded him as the perpetrator. It cleared his record as of June 29. So now he can go back to living his old life, right? Turns out, not at all.

Like catching a disease early, reliable evidence prevented the horrible effects wrongful imprisonment could have had on Hines’ young life; yet, it still has made a significant impact on the way he has to go about his life. Probably for the rest of his life.

During the five months of imprisonment and house arrest, Hines lost his job, apartment, and dog. While in prison, he faced death threats and fights. In coming to grips with the potential of life imprisonment, he pondered suicide. Some of his family members and friends did not believe in his innocence. Some of them are still wary, even with the affirmation of DNA evidence. Some people just cannot look at him the same way.

Hines is facing the challenge of rebuilding his life. He is working again and living with his grandma.

Obviously, we would hope that no one is ever wrongfully arrested.  But in the event they are, we are thankful, as this story shows, diligent and thorough criminal investigations, including DNA testing, move us closer to the accurate and just result earlier in the process. We hope that DNA testing will be used to prove innocence before even a month in prison unjustly corrupts an innocent life.

Read the full article from The Gazette.

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Corrections to Past Failures of Hair Analyses

Jordan — August 03, 2012 @ 9:43 AM — Comments (0)

The First of Thousands More.

Klark Odom is one of two men exonerated in the last two months in Washington D.C. Odom’s innocence was one of many that spurred the FBI’s reinvestigation of 18,000 convictions that depended on the results of hair analyses conducted by their lab. We applaud the FBI for undertaking such a review.

As we have seen in other wrongful conviction cases, assuming that any department, agency or person is infallible can, and does, lead to wrongful convictions.

Odom became the 293rd exoneree in the United States with the U.S. Attorney’s joint motion for vacating his conviction, ending his lifelong parole and registration as a sexual offender, and enabling him to apply for wrongful imprisonment compensation.

The judge granted both motions on Odom’s birthday, July 13.

Continued Investigation Leads to Exoneration of Oklahoma Man.

The Innocence Project helped exonerate Oklahoma man Sedrick Courtney after 16 years in prison and a year dealing with the constraints of parole. He married his wife four months ago. Even his mother-in-law said, “I knew he was innocent. You could just tell.”

The original hair tests of samples from the two criminals’ ski masks were inconclusive, as they were too short for comparison to Courtney’s hair samples. However, the technician jumped to the conclusion that one bleached red hair, found in the evidence, was close enough to one taken from Courtney’s head.

It seems the jury gave more weight to this misguided lab technician’s assertion than to three alibi witnesses that vouched for Courtney during his trial. The victim’s recognition of Courtney’s “voice and a brief instance when he lifted a ski mask” also was given too much weight by the jury .

For years, the Tulsa Police (TPD) told his attorneys that evidence from the case had been destroyed. When the Innocence Project came to his assistance in 2007, TPD continued to maintain that the evidence had been destroyed. But last year, the evidence turned up in the Tulsa courthouse. Subsequent DNA testing revealed that the hairs were not Courtney’s, thus proving his innocence.

Had the evidence not been found, Courtney would still be walking around with a false conviction on his record, taking off work to comply with parole constraints. Organization is an important aspect to assuring justice. We cannot rely on getting lucky by having evidence simply show up.

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Solitary Confinement: Re-assessing, Re-evaluating, Re-thinking

Anne — July 27, 2012 @ 4:27 PM — Comments (1)

Note: This is the first of a three-part series on solitary confinement.

Dr. Craig Haney, the nation’s leading expert on inmate mental health, and a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, recently testified before a U. S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights on the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners. Inmates in long-term confinement, according to Haney, suffer mental breakdowns from the lack of human contact that can lead to a multitude of mental, physical and emotional conditions, including psychosis, mutilations and suicide. Solitary confinement for most inmates, Haney testified, “precipitates a descent into madness” and can cause “profound, psychological damage.”

The increase in solitary confinement in the United States (since the late 1970s), according to statistics provided by Haney, is the result of the “confluence of three unfortunate trends”: mass imprisonment, the shift in responsibility for housing the mentally ill to the nation’s prison systems, and the abandonment of the notion of rehabilitation. Haney, who is also chair of UCSC’s Legal Studies program, estimated that 80,000 of the nation’s 2.3 million inmates in prisons and jails are in long-term solitary confinement. A great number of inmates have spent the majority of their prison sentences in solitary confinement, a legal and administrative practice that separates designated inmates from the prison’s general population.

Professor Haney was invited to testify by Subcommittee chairman Senator Richard “Dick” Durbin, D-Ill, at the first-ever hearing on the constitutional, fiscal, and public safety consequences of solitary confinement. Since 1971, Haney has conducted groundbreaking research into the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners. His work has been cited in numerous scholarly journals and publications. Since 1971, he has been a leading proponent of mental health issues affecting prison inmates.  As a graduate student, he was one of the principal investigators in an academic undertaking that became known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE).” He and fellow researchers placed a group of psychologically healthy college students in a prison-like environment, randomly assigning half to the position of prison guards; the other participants were designated as prisoners.

The researchers in the SPE carefully monitored participants’ behavior during the designated period, eventually ending the experiment, however, upon their observation that the otherwise “psychologically healthy volunteers in the simulated prison [setting] rapidly deteriorated into mistreatment and emotional breakdowns.” Thus began Haney’s prolific research into the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners who have been incarcerated for extended periods of time. Since the SPE, Haney’s work has extended into the effects of capital punishment as well. In 2011, his research was cited numerous times in the majority opinion when the United States Supreme Court upheld a ruling ordering California to release 46,000 prisoners in an effort to relieve the state’s overcrowded prisons.

While a great portion of Haney’s testimony before the Subcommittee centered upon the effects of solitary confinement, he also addressed the state of  prisons’ mental health workers, individuals who are assigned the task of treating inmates who have mental health issues.  Oftentimes the workers are (themselves) stressed and too overburdened to render effective care with respect to noticeable improvements in inmates’ mental health issues. Such inadequate  healthcare not only harms prisoners, Haney testified, it also “endangers the public once those prisoners are released” from prison. Without adequate mental healthcare as well as available, external counseling, prisoners, once released from the confines of a structured environment, are oftentimes present and “untreated” in the public domain.

Many times, according to statistics  provided during the hearing, non-treated inmates (or inadequately treated inmates) commit crimes which cause their return to the familiar, institutional environment of incarceration. A vicious cycle of re-institutionalization becomes, in many cases, the norm. An overburdened healthcare system speaks not only to an inadequate system of governance–as it relates to prison reformation–it also articulates a much broader statement in terms of the responsibilities of government in being fiscally accountable to those who work in conditions as presented in California’s (and other states’) prison facilities.

Haney’s testimony before the Subcommittee concluded on multiple points of note. According to Haney, we put “far too many people in prison, we pay far too little attention to what happens to them while they’re there, we keep them there for far too long, then we disregard what happens to them when they try to make the difficult transition to come out into the free world.” In April 2012,the National Academy of Sciences appointed Haney to a panel to study the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the United States.

Others testifying on issues related to solitary confinement included the Honorable Charles Samuels, Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons; Christopher Epps, Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections; and former inmate Anthony Graves, who was released from Texas death row in 2010, after spending 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Ten of the 18 years Graves spent on death row were in solitary confinement. He is the founder of “Anthony Believes,” an organization dedicated to the health and well-being of individuals consigned to death row and solitary confinement. His front-line advocacy has garnered national attention on issues related to solitary confinement and prison reformation.

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