Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Willie Manning: Radley Balko dissects Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Michael Randolph's "remarkably political dissent." (Must Read. HL)


POST: "Mississippi Supreme Court Justice writes a remarkably political 'dissent' to Willie Manning's stay of execution," by Radley Balko, published by  the Agitator, on May 8, 2013;

GIST: "If you've followed the case, you know that the state is attempting to execute Manning without testing available crime scene DNA. The state's main argument is that even if the DNA tests come back as a match to someone other than Manning, it doesn't necessarily mean that person committed the murders, and that the other evidence pointing to Manning overwhelmingly points to his guilt. Part of that other evidence, however, is testimony from an eyewitness and testimony from a jailhouse snitch, which have both since unraveled. Another portion of the remaining evidence is testimony from an FBI hair fiber analyst who claimed it was statistically likely that hair fiber found at the crime scene came from a black person. That's hardly damning, even if the testimony was accurate. The problem there is that on May 3, the Justice Department sent letters to Manning's lawyers stating that the testimony from its own FBI agent "exceeded the limits of science and was, therefore, invalid." DOJ then sent another letter declaring that the testimony of its own ballistics expert at Manning's trial was also invalid. This is all part of a broader scandal in which federal expert witnesses were found to have overstated the significance of forensic evidence in thousands of cases -- and to have trained who knows how many crime lab technicians at the state level in the same flawed methods of analysis. This isn't some last-minute scheme cooked up by Manning's lawyers and liberal Obama DOJ appointees to fend off executions. In fact, Attorney General Holder's DOJ had to be publicly shamed into finally admitting the breadth and scope of the scandal, and into making an effort to bother to notify the people who were convicted based on the flawed testimony. But that isn't how Justice Randolph sees it."

The entire post can be found at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/the-remarkably-poltical-d_n_3238729.html

Dear reader: Keep your eye on "The Charles Smith Blog" for future posts. We are following  the Willie Manning case.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE:

I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located  near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site. 

The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html

Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.  


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