Posts Tagged ‘law enforcement’

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Free, But with a Cloud

Anne — April 01, 2013 @ 10:08 AM — Comments (0)

With a college degree in hand and a healthy outlook on the future, Nicole Harris envisioned in December 2004 that she was on the brink of something big. As the single mother of two young sons, her college graduation was fostered by a network of family members and supporters whose pride in her accomplishments seemed endless. With a degree in psychology she hoped to land a job in her chosen field, and a subsequent move back to her hometown of Chicago would allow her to rejoin her family as well as explore opportunities for employment in her discipline. A few months after graduating, however, her plans for the future went terribly awry. The attainment of a college degree suddenly became a secondary treasure as she found herself charged in the strangulation death of her youngest son, Jaquari, age 4.

Harris steadily maintained her innocence regarding any involvement in her son’s death, but her protestations fell on deaf ears. Her son’s death, insisted prosecutors, resulted from her frustrations due to her son’s constant crying. According to authorities, Harris wrapped a fitted bedsheet cord around her son’s neck and strangled him.

Convicted of the crime by a Cook County jury, Harris spent seven years (of a 30-year sentence) in prison before the 7th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated her conviction in October 2012. On February 25, 2013, she exited the Dwight Correctional Center a “free” woman.  ”This isn’t just a legal victory,” said Alison Flaum, an attorney with Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Conviction, which joined forces with the law firm Jenner & Block to defend Harris.  “They saw this case for the miscarriage of justice that it was.” Harris has always maintained that her son died accidentally and that she had nothing to do with his death.

Harris’ case  is troublesome, however, on so many levels and in so many ways:

  • Even though she knew she was innocent, she confessed to the crime following a 27-hour interrogation which, she said, included threats and manipulation by police investigating the case.
  • Police initially confronted Harris in a hospital chapel, where she had gone following her collapse after being told that her son had not survived. In such an emotional state, it is no stretch of the imagination to presume that authorial figures often engage powers of persuasion and similar techniques in an effort to elicit false information from vulnerable suspects. 
  • Harris’ oldest son, Diante, then 5, told investigators that he was alone in the home with his brother when he witnessed Jaquari wrap the cord around his neck while he (Daquari) was playing. Authorities, however, dismissed the brother’s claim.
  • The trial judge barred Diante from testifying, deeming him incompetent, presumably, because Diante believed that “Santa Claus, Spider-Man and the tooth fairy” were real figures and not imaginary figures.
  • According to reports in the case, prosecutors noted that Diante told investigators that he was asleep when his brother died.
  • Various reports indicate that Nicole Harris was at a nearby laundromat when the incident occurred, having instructed both young boys to remain in the home during her absence.

In overturning Harris’ guilty verdict, the judges wrote that if Diante had been allowed to testify, his testimony “would have changed the entire tenor of the case [and supported her oldest son's claims that his brother's death was accidental].”

Although Harris has been released from the Dwight Correctional Center and can begin the journey to rebuild the life she left behind in 2005, her legal battles are far from over. The State has appealed the October 2012 ruling and has asked the U. S. Supreme Court to review the case. Additionally, Cook County prosecutors could still move to retry the case. On February 25, 2013, the date of Harris’ release, a representative from the State Attorney’s Office said that a decision to retry the defendant had not yet been made.

In the meantime, Nicole Harris has maintained a positive outlook, insisting that she knew that prison wasn’t her “final destination,” that “eventually we’ll have full victory, and it’ll be all over.”

Through all that she has endured, she is certainly due the future she envisioned when she earned her college degree and stepped forward into a life of promise.

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Witness Misidentification: Costs, Causes, and Cures

Chelsea — January 09, 2012 @ 10:39 AM — Comments (0)

Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions web site states that, “erroneous eyewitness testimony — whether offered in good faith or perjured — is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. criminal justice system. According to The Innocence Project’s site, eyewitness misidentification plays a role in over 75 percent of cases that are overturned by DNA evidence. Looking at these numbers, it seems a bit ridiculous that the justice system would consider eyewitness testimony to be sacrosanct pieces of evidence, and yet they are.

Why exactly is it that witness misidentifications are so prevalent? The answer, frankly, is simple, and can be seen in social science research that has been conducted over the past 30 years. The Innocence Project makes a comparison between the human mind and tape recorders, asserting that the human mind is clearly not capable of taking in, processing, and recording exact details and events the way that a video camera or tape recorder can, and for that reason alone human memories should be taken as possibilities, not facts. Further, witnesses often experience some level of victimization as a result of being so closely involved with crime, and anyone who has been a victim of a crime can attest to the way that victimization affects one’s memory.

For a more engaging way to see the flaws of human perception and memory, watch this video. If you read ahead before watching, you’ll cheat yourself out of the experience!

Don’t read ahead…watch the video first.

Did you notice the moonwalking bear? I know I certainly did not when I first watched the video, but after viewing it again I cannot imagine how I missed it. If the human mind isn’t able to notice something so different while sitting in a calm, controlled environment, then how can it possibly be expected to register events under the stress undergone when watching a crime take place?

All of these things said, however, witness identifications and testimonies can be useful and powerful tools of the criminal justice system, if used correctly. There are a variety of steps that could be taken to decrease the probability of misidentification. Most of these measures could be implemented easily and with little to no cost to law enforcement, the legal system, or taxpayers.

Use of a double-blind procedure in orchestrating lineups could seriously cut down on accidental or intentional influencing of witnesses. This double-blind would ensure that neither the administrator or the lineup nor the witness would know which individual was the suspect. There is also a lineup protocol currently endorse by Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the MacArthur Justice Center that, in addition to using a double-blind procedure, presents suspects sequentially as opposed to placing them all side by side. This method is said to reduce the tendency of witnesses to make relative judgements about the suspects, which can often lead to misidentifications.

These methods are incredibly simple to implement and cost little-to-nothing to implement. If law enforcement agencies nationwide were to adopt these methods, they could seriously decrease the largest cause of wrongful convictions. In April of last year the Florida Senate passed a bill known as the Eyewitness Identification Reform Act. This bill would have implemented the above procedures and would also have instituted the use of educational materials and training for law enforcement officers regarding how to conduct a lineup, as well as a standard set of instructions for eyewitnesses before viewing the lineup. Unfortunately, the bill stalled and was ultimately withdrawn from consideration in the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, there is not a similar bill being proposed during this legislative session. I guess the citizens of Florida will have to wait until next year.

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Withholding Evidence and Mississippi Burning

Susan — September 07, 2011 @ 10:58 AM — Comments (0)

The Kentucky Innocence Project and Louisville Metro Police are working together to free Kerry Porter who has served 15 years for a murder he did not commit.

Says KIP lawyer Melanie Lowe Stratton “It’s hard to believe because I think we want to believe that our justice system does the right thing and works…It’s not worked for Kerry.”

Kerry Porter was convicted of the 1996 killing of Tyrone Camp. However, suspect Francois Cunningham revealed information that implicated another man in Camp’s murder when he agreed to talk to detectives about his own double murder charge. Cunningham’s statements that a friend of his, Juan Leotis Sanders, recruited him to murder Camp, but then did the deed himself when Cunningham turned down the offer, came to light just this week. Sanders subsequently led police toward Porter. Unfortunately, the police followed that wrong path. Not only did they follow the wrong path — the police and assistant attorneys from the commonwealth and U.S. attorney’s offices withheld this exculpatory evidence given to them in March 2010 from Porter and his attorney.

Lowe Stratton indicates that KIP that has been working on this case since 2007 is waiting for DNA testing results in addition to those already performed that do not implicate Porter. Lowe Stratton hopes for Porter’s timely release once those results, due within a month, are received.

Read more about this case at courier-journal.com and wave3.com.

The campaign for attorney general in Mississippi is heating up. Incumbent AG Jim Hood is facing Steve Simpson, former prosecutor, circuit court judge, and head of the state’s department of public safety. During his tenure in this last position, Simpson fired longtime state medical examiner Steven Hayne butting heads with Hood in the process and ending Hayne’s controversial 20-year “near-monopoly on the autopsy referrals Mississippi prosecutors and coroners send to forensic pathologists.” Hayne and forensic dentist Michael West (widely considered to be a fraud as reported by Huff Post Politics) had testified in numerous trials and were subject to accusations of expert witness “guns-for-hire”. Two of the convictions that relied on West’s since discredited bite mark testimony were subsequently overturned resulting in the DNA exonerations of Kennedy Brewer who was almost executed and Levon Brooks who served over 30 years combined.

The political problem for Hood who has defended both Hayne and West arises because many convicted on West’s testimony are still serving sentences; one man sits on Mississippi’s death row. And the case against the two men is widening. Hood now claims that his office is looking into 20 cases that may have been tainted by West’s testimony although he refused to release any specific information when asked.

This race is one to watch! 

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Wising Up and Owning Up

Susan — July 05, 2011 @ 2:49 PM — Comments (1)

The Florida Innocence Commission issued an interim report last week verifying the harm that ensues from witness misidentification. According to this report, it is the major contributor to wrongful convictions and was a factor in nine of 11 identified cases in the State while accounting for 77 percent of 261 specific wrongful convictions across the nation. This begs the question as to why law enforcement is so reluctant to change photo identification procedures to help prevent this tragic phenomenon that results in untold misery, not only for the wrongly accused, but for future victims of the true perpetrator.

The Commission pointed out some simple, cost-free steps police departments can take to help ensure accuracy in photo ID procedures such as presenting photos one at a time, using a method in which the presenter does not see the photo being presented, limiting the photo presentation to subjects similar to those with characteristics the victim/witness described, and informing the viewer that a photo of the perpetrator of the crime may not be there. These are logical, easy-to-adopt methods. So why would the police fail to use them as means to better ensure accurate witness identification?

One can also question why law enforcement/prosecutors are so often reluctant to admit an error – frequently in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that indeed a mistake has occurred and the wrong person was convicted. I hasten to point out there are exceptions to this rule like former Washington, D.C. Prosecutor J. Brooks Harrington who readily admitted and sincerely regrets mistakes made by his office. Harrington resigned shortly after dropping charges against a wrongly convicted man only to find out many years later that another of his convictions resulted in an innocent man, Donald Gates, spending 28 years in prison.

One of the first lessons most of us teach our kids is to resist the temptation of denial, admit their mistakes, and make it right. Not only is it the moral thing to do, it builds character to admit a mistake. What’s more, others tend to support those who acknowledge an error. Politicians’ ratings go up, such as John F. Kennedy experienced after he took the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Hospitals are learning that owning up to errors in patient treatment can deflect malpractice lawsuits. It’s a win-win. Everybody feels better.

So why do some law enforcement officials remain mired in denial of the error of their ways? Is it just their inability to accept blame, especially if coercive tactics used by the police added to the miscarriage of justice? Are they afraid they’ll look bad in the public’s eyes? Or is it just overwhelming guilt?

I’m just asking the questions. I don’t have the answers. I encourage those who do to provide them.

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Brief on November Innocence Commission Meeting

Seth — December 02, 2010 @ 9:00 AM — Comments (0)

On Monday, November 22, the Florida Innocence Commission met to dig into the issue of eyewitness misidentification.  The Commission heard from a number of witnesses, including Professor Gary Wells, the godfather of scientific research into witness memory and eyewitness misidentification.  The Orlando Sentinel reports:

To prove how vulnerable eyewitnesses are to making errors, Wells showed the panel a video of a man dropping a bomb down a building’s air shaft. He then showed them a lineup of six suspects and asked panel members to pick the bomber.

About one-quarter of them picked a suspect, and each was wrong. That’s because the bomber wasn’t among them.

Wells has studied eyewitness misidentification for more than 30 years and has worked with law-enforcement agencies across the nation to minimize those mistakes.  His conclusion: Eyewitnesses get it wrong 20 percent of the time.

Obviously, where people who have an intent to subvert justice taint witness identification procedures, we cannot have any confidence in the identifications made in those procedures and there just isn’t much we can do to stop such bad faith.  But the vast majority of the time, you have both law enforcement personnel and witnesses who are acting in good faith to try and identify the true perpetrator of the crime, yet they still get it wrong despite their best efforts.  Dr. Wells’ work has tried to figure out why and the answer has as much to do with the fallibility of human memory as how lineups and photo arrays are prepared and administered to witnesses.  The St. Pete Times notes:

The problem with eyewitness identification comes down to this, said Iowa State University psychology professor Gary Wells: Memory, like physical evidence, can be tainted. One way that happens is through the standard police lineup. Traditionally, a witness will look at half a dozen mug shots at the same time and try to identify a suspect. People tend to pick the person who most resembles the culprit, Wells said, even if the actual criminal isn’t depicted. He said witnesses should get just one photo at a time. Studies show that forces people to dig deeper into their memories. People are also influenced by cues they get from those showing the photos, he said. Detectives may unknowingly give nonverbal cues. Or they’ll say things.

For example, “Now, take your time” might mean the witness is looking at the wrong face. In one case, a witness said detectives applauded when she picked their suspect. That kind of affirmation can create an inflated sense of certainty in the mind of a witness, who will take it to trial.

The solution? Don’t let detectives conduct the lineup, Wells said. Give the photos to someone who doesn’t know which depicts the suspect.

Many law enforcement agencies, large and small, urban and rural, around the country are performing witness identification procedures with the new, suggestion-proof methods proposed by Dr. Wells, with wonderful success.  A representative from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office even testified at the meeting that his agency is performing sequential, double blind lineups and photo arrays and seeing more accurate outcomes leading to swifter justice.

So what is not to like?  Well, for some on the Commission, whether Florida will adopt a policy that conforms with the national trend and the available science comes down to economics.  Some say that smaller agencies would have to use already limited manpower to do lineups and would have to make both the preparer of the lineup and the administrator of it available for depositions, court hearings, and trial, which could be an expensive proposition.  But there are ways to prevent this such as drafting a statue that requires sequential double blind administration with exceptions for impracticability that allows the agency to simply blind the administrator through other means, such as use of laptop computer technology or the folder-shuffle method.  Ohio has enacted a statutory mandate that does just this.

Others, like the Florida Police Chiefs and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, favor just letting law enforcement agencies individually figure out what is best.  This is obviously a bad idea as it would create a lack of uniformity and, in turn, a lack or justice from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.  Plus agencies have already had the opportunity to create policies with examples in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts as good guides.  Yet, in response to two public record requests sent by IPF to over 350 law enforcement agencies in Florida, only 37 agencies that responded even had a written policy on eyewitness ID procedures, and an even smaller fraction of those were even close to what Dr. Wells and the rest of the scientific community have suggested as a best practice.

Lastly, we have the obligatory idiotic statement from an ignorant prosecutor (from The St. Pete Times):

Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant state attorney for the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office, said he is troubled by what he sees as an unfair assumption.

“It suggests that your law enforcement is dishonest. And I’m sorry, but I’m not ready to accept that,” he said. “I’m not saying mistakes don’t happen, because they do. But I’m not ready to believe your cops are all crooked.”

This is the typical straw man.  No one has even suggested law enforcement is dishonest.  That was not the tenor of the Commission meeting at all.  Bartlett should call up the Sheriff’s office in neighboring Tampa and ask them whether they proactively implemented the widely-accepted best practices because they thought their own sergeants and deputies were dishonest.  Or maybe they did it because the best practices diminish unintentional suggestiveness that seeps into ID procedures even when everyone is well-intentioned.  Considering Bartlett was not even at the Commission meeting to hear the testimony, he probably should have not even opened his mouth to save himself the embarrassment.

In any event, it appears that the Commission is poised to do something positive in this area and we will keep you informed as the result comes more into focus.

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Orlando Sentinel Does Multi-Part Series on Innocence Issues

Seth — November 16, 2010 @ 11:22 AM — Comments (0)

Rene Stutzman of the Orlando Sentinel is in the midst of a multi-part feature news series entitled Stolen Lives.  It appears that each month, for some indeterminate period of time, the paper will address a different issue related to wrongful conviction.

In the first article last month, the Sentinel featured James Bain, an IPF client who was released from prison last year after 35 years of wrongful incarceration.  DNA tetsing proved his innocence of a 1974 rape of a child in Polk County, Florida.  It is a great article and has this great video of Jamie talking about his wrongful incarceration and his release:

Just this Sunday, Stolen Lives continued with an article on the leading cause of wrongful convictions, eyewitness misidentification, which features the story of Florida exoneree Alan Crotzer.  The article also details a number of well-accepted components of a witness identification procedure that diminishes suggestiveness and increases reliability.

Keep an eye out for future articles in this series.

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The Problem and the Solution

Ryan — August 25, 2010 @ 9:00 AM — Comments (0)

Flickr user Sean Munson.

While the Innocence Project of Florida was celebrating the first step toward an exoneration for Derrick Williams, many Americans – and people all over the world – were reading the Economist‘s most recent cover story, Rough Justice in America. The multi-part series details the endemic problems in America’s justice system, the gruesome statistics of which will be old news to many of us in the criminal justice community. (One in 100 Americans behind bars; imprisoning several times more people than Germany or Britain by population; increasingly harsh sentencing laws for nonviolent crimes; etc.) But the article was peppered with anecdotes that, as always, help to put a human face on the problem.

A 65-year-old man who imported orchids for a living, indicted for smuggling because his suppliers kept sloppy paperwork, and prosecuted as the “kingpin” of a smuggling ring. He was thrown in prison with an alleged murderer and two alleged drug dealers.

A depressed drug addict, busted in a dawn raid and sentenced to 7 years in prison. (The drug laws in Massachusetts are harsher on drug dealers than they are on armed rapists, the article notes.)

A three strikes offender in Alabama who eventually received a life sentence when the straw that broke the camel’s back was theft of a bicycle. And on, and on.

The Economist says most problems with the justice system can be traced to three systemic flaws: “First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.”

The human face of the problem, well illustrated by the cover story, is horrifying and frustrating. But America, not for the first time, has also been made into an international curiosity by being featured on the cover of the reputable British magazine. It is imperative that we as a country start searching for solutions, and what the Economist‘s article lacks is a mention of the progress is being made.

Flickr user sylvar.

Enter S.714, the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2010, introduced by Jim Webb (D-VA), which would establish “a National Criminal Justice Commission to undertake a comprehensive review of all areas of the criminal justice system.” The first charge of such a commission would be to make “recommendations for changes in oversight, policies, practices, and laws designed to prevent, deter, and reduce crime and violence, improve cost-effectiveness, and ensure the interests of justice.”

The bill has been heralded as promising from criminal justice advocates, and enjoys the support of the LAPD, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), Human Rights Watch, and other organizations, both in law enforcement and in criminal defense. The remarkable agreement between parties on this bill speaks to the true size and scope of the problem it is designed to address.

An analogous bill was introduced into the House of Representatives by William Delahunt (D-MA), and was passed by the House on July 27th. The bill has been placed on the calendar in the Senate, and awaits further action there. We can hope that it finds similar support in the Senate as it did in the House. If so, it would await signature by President Obama, and would represent a ray of light in the struggle for criminal justice. The bill is the most promising measure in recent memory, and it seems that reasonable people are finally coming together to declare that “Enough is enough,” and it is time to fix our broken justice system.

Ryan Jenkins is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a guest contributor to Plain Error. Photos by Flickr users Sean Munson and sylvar.

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Florida’s Innocence Commission in Pursuit of a Just Cause

Tabby — July 08, 2010 @ 10:58 PM — Comments (1)

In our blog entry from July 1, 2010 (“Innocence Commission to Begin; Prosecutors Grumble”), the points raised by the naysayers of Florida’s newly founded Innocence Commission are addressed, namely the point suggesting the diversion of the public’s dollars from the establishment of the Innocence Commission to the strengthening of the DNA labs administered by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.  To further highlight the irrationality of that suggestion, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan points out that the matter is not so much an inadequacy of our nation’s DNA labs; it is, in fact, a lack of their sufficient use.

Madigan details this point in The Huffington Post, using Illinois as a case study:

Lavinia Masters was 13 when a rapist broke into her bedroom in the dark of night, put a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her if she reported the crime.

Hours later, undeterred by the threats, Lavinia underwent the painstaking process for collecting DNA evidence, determined to help police find and prosecute her attacker.

That was 1985.

Almost 20 years passed. The evidence sat untested, and the case remained unsolved, with her attacker still potentially at large.

But around 2006, the local police department began to sift through its backlog of untested DNA kits, when it was discovered that a man already in prison for committing other sexual assaults was linked to Lavinia’s case.

I had the chance to learn about Lavinia’s disturbing story recently, while doing an interview with CNN. Shockingly, her case isn’t unusual. It’s part of a national problem.

Thousands, and by some estimates hundreds of thousands, of rape kits are sitting untested, collecting dust in police departments’ evidence lockers around the country. Meanwhile, victims’ attackers remain free to roam the streets and assault other innocent children and women.

In Illinois alone, there remain at least 4,000 untested kits stored away in police departments throughout the state, according to Human Rights Watch.

Ask anyone to name the most serious crimes – rape and murder always top the list. I cannot imagine our criminal justice system ignoring important evidence in a murder case. How then can we stand by as vital evidence in tens of thousands of rape cases sits on shelves ignored?

What message does this send to the children and women who are the primary victims of sexual assault when law enforcement doesn’t take their cases seriously?

When a rape victim undergoes the long, invasive process of collecting evidence from her body, she puts faith in our justice system to find her attacker and prosecute him. When those evidence kits wind up ignored and attackers remain free, other victims of sexual assault are discouraged from coming forward. They don’t believe justice will be pursued.

So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that in Illinois, as few as 30 percent of rapes are reported to police, according to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault. We can’t tolerate a justice system that requires a victim to endure a such a painstaking process only to dismiss her in the long run.

Hence, sharpening a tool does no good if there is no effort being made to use it.  What is the point of pouring more money into DNA labs that are not being adequately used for the purpose that they are meant to fulfill?  THAT is one of the many reasons why we need the Innocence Commission:  to ensure we are doing everything we can to hammer our criminal justice system into a system that is truly just.

And, for the record, Illinois is, indeed, taking measures to address this issue.  Madigan takes care to detail the state’s efforts:

An initiative by my office signed into law July 6 will help assure the system no longer fails these victims. We convened a working group last fall to develop an effective statewide policy for gathering and analyzing evidence in sexual assault cases. As a result, at the beginning of this year’s legislative session, we introduced a bill that would make Illinois the first state in the nation to mandate the testing of evidence collected in cases of sexual assault. This measure gained unanimous support in the General Assembly.

Under this new law, investigating law enforcement agencies are required to submit all evidence of sexual assault to the crime lab within 10 days of receiving it from a hospital. It also requires law enforcement agencies to provide the Illinois State Police an inventory of all untested kits in their possession to establish a timeline to complete their analyses.

Likewise, in examining Florida’s wrongful convictions, the Innocence Commission aims to pull any such thorns out of the heel of justice to ensure Florida isn’t left behind in pursuit of this just cause.  Let’s support this advent of greater justice!

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NY Times Article on Dog-scent Lineups

Scott — November 04, 2009 @ 6:11 PM — Comments (0)

Yesterday the New York Times ran a good article on dog-scent lineups looking particularly at cases in Texas involving that state’s version of discredited dog handler John Preston (see previous coverage of Preston here, here, here, and here.

According to the Times, Deputy Keith A. Pikett of the Fort Bend County, Tex., Sheriff’s Department, serves as a consultant to law enforcement agencies around Texas using his home-trained bloodhounds (named Columbo, Quincy and Clue) and has performed thousands of scent lineups since the 1990s.

The controversy surrounding him and the cases on which he has worked is essentially a mirror of what’s gone on in this state with John Preston. Makes you wonder how widespread the use of dog-scent lineups is in other states around the country, and more importantly, how many innocent individuals are wrongfully incarcerated as a result

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The FBI’s new scent technology

Lenore — September 29, 2009 @ 10:59 AM — Comments (1)

According to an Indianapolis news station, the FBI has developed a new scent preservation technology that can “literally bottle up a person’s distinct odor.”

The STU 100 Portable Vacuum Collection Unit absorbs the scent into a sterile pad, which makes it possible for the scent to be accessed later when needed. Ideally, the uncontaminated scent pads will be taken to K-9 units for tracking.

It seems a rather inconvenient time for the FBI to put this technology to use with all the current uproar about the unreliability of scent dogs, especially with the growing number of exonerations due to dogs’ mistakes. Since our last mention of Keith Pikett, the Texas Deputy responsible for the bloodhounds that put innocents like Calvin Lee Miller and Michael Buchanek behind bars, there has been at least one more innocent person (Curvis Bickham) released from prison who was put there partly due to Pikett’s dogs. And of course, there were many more innocent people convicted because of John Preston’s dogs. Perhaps we should come to terms with the fact that scent is another junk science and we should put it aside.

If you’d like to learn more about the unreliability of scent dogs, here is an interesting report from the Innocence Project of Texas entitled “Dog Scent Lineups: A Junk Science Injustice,” released last Monday.

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