"The delusional and unjust behavior of these prosecutors is the best argument against the death penalty and for the long-term preservation of DNA evidence that I have ever seen. These prosecutors have decided what they believe (for self-serving reasons, one way or another), and aren't about to let evidence or fairness stand in their way."
LETTER; NEW YORK TIMES;
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http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/dna-evidence-lake-county.html PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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:LETTER; NEW YORK TIMES;
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In Lake County, Ill., new DNA evidence doesn’t necessarily set men free; it just changes the theory of how they committed the crime.
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
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
The prosecutors’ career is enhanced by being known as a "Winner" which acts as a magnet for more high profile cases which includes a professional landscape of increased compensation and status. "Winner" prosecutors are promoted and rewarded by the governor and are appointed as judges. Any efforts to expose prosecutorial misconduct are often met with increased and intensified misconduct and a much longer sentence for the defendant. A government job for life, which pays the mortgage, your new car, good wages, overtime, security, and holidays. The main job of the managers is to ensure that next year’s revenue exceeds this year’s revenue. Prosecutors don’t even look at the evidence but rather negotiate the plea deal based on the accusation charge sheet: number of years the defendant is facing. This brews an environment of guilty by accusation. Rather than honestly accept that their case is weak or nonexistent, they instead choose to run with it, ignoring and excluding (with the help of the trial judge) evidence that would point to innocence, and rallying behind extremely weak evidence. Arrests are made on little or no evidence. Judges are not fair and impartial because most of them were former prosecutors and favor the prosecution. Prosecutors have withheld and destroy exculpatory evidence. The government can trick a jury into returning a tainted verdict based on false evidence. Detectives have lied, used trickery, and engaged in witness tampering and hardly investigate.
Many witnesses and defendants have said they were pressured into making false confessions and false statements. Some were threatened with life imprisonment and have pled guilty to lesser charges. Some said they were told that if they confessed they wouldn’t go to jail. Many were told they would never see their children again unless they signed a confession. Those questioned also said they were told that their children wouldn’t be placed in foster care or put up for adoption if they signed confessions. Defendants have been told that there were witnesses and that others had already confessed; when this was not true. Some defendants’ have been beaten and have had bones broken in order to obtain false confessions. Lies, brainwashing, suggestibility, manipulations, coaching, rehearsed memories, and leading questions serve as the collective truth of the State. Prosecutors and police will never talk about the tampering with witnesses mentioned above in jury trials.
Mirroring the prosecution are inexperienced, lazy, incompetent, court-appointed public defenders, tend to be overworked and underfunded and hence are more likely to cut corners. Little work is done by the defense: few motions filed, few witnesses called, little or no investigative work prior to trial, little cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, absence of expert witnesses to counter experts called by the prosecution. Many private attorneys charge as much money as they can, with no results. Sometimes the lawyer's biggest error is a naive belief that a jury will not convict because the evidence is so weak. In fact, many jurors expect defendants to prove they are innocent, not just poke holes in the prosecution's case. Plenty of jurors assume that defendants wouldn't be on trial if they hadn't done something bad.
However, this egregious misconduct (which is so much broader than the article even addresses - for example, the fact that prosecutors regularly extort guilty pleas by threatening absurd amounts of jail time) occurs because we the people enable it. We elect these prosecutors. We elect legislators that routinely criminalize trivial conduct so that prosecutors and police can go after people for pretty much any reason at any time. We support sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences that stamp out judicial discretion and continue this unwarranted transfer of power to the executive arm of the state.
The criminal justice system in this country is fundamentally broken, and it will loom as one of the largest crimes against humanity in the history of the United States, second only to slavery. WE allowed this to happen.
What this means is: the more people they put away, deservedly or not, the farther they advance in their career, the more money they make, the better things are for them.
It's an outrageously biased system: poor defendants with overworked underpaid Public Defenders vs. the money and might of the government.
This is why prosecutors pull endless additional charges against defendants out of their rectum. They convince defendants who are poor and must use overworked and underpaid Public Defenders that if they don't plead guilty to the major charge, additional charges will be piled on until a shoplifting charge becomes armed robbery because the perpetrator was carrying a 2 inch folding knife in their pocket. I have seen this particular scenario happen to someone I know.
People with money who can afford a proper defense don't have this problem. The conviction rate of those using private attorneys who have the time and resources to make prosecutors actually prove their case, have a MUCH lower conviction rate than the poor. When an attorney has the time and resources to stand up to the DA, conviction rates fall through the floor.
The prosecution's ability to suddenly change the theory of the crime because evidence shows their original theory to be invalid needs to be severely modified by law to keep these cowboys, who apparently answer to no one, from simply riding roughshod over the justice system in an effort to keep their numbers up, and ultimately, to keep their job.
What this means is: the more people they put away, deservedly or not, the farther they advance in their career, the more money they make, the better things are for them.
It's an outrageously biased system: poor defendants with overworked underpaid Public Defenders vs. the money and might of the government.
This is why prosecutors file endless additional charges against defendants. They convince defendants who are poor and must use overworked and underpaid Public Defenders that if they don't plead guilty to the major charge, additional charges will be piled on until a shoplifting charge becomes armed robbery because the perpetrator was carrying a 2 inch folding knife in their pocket. I have seen this particular scenario happen to someone I know.
People with money who can afford a proper defense don't have this problem. The conviction rate of those using private attorneys who have the time and resources to make prosecutors actually prove their case, have a MUCH lower conviction rate than the poor. When an attorney has the time and resources to stand up to the DA, conviction rates fall through the floor.
The prosecution's ability to suddenly change the theory of the crime because evidence shows their original theory to be invalid needs to be severely modified by law to keep these cowboys, who apparently answer to no one, from simply riding roughshod over the justice system in an effort to keep their numbers up, and ultimately, to keep their job.
America is obsessed with the idea of women as victims and men as perps, but the reality is not quite so simple. DSK who may or may not have done anything bad in 9 minutes risks decades of prison. A woman apparently responsible for the death of her own child goes free.
One might ask, "How can a country run by men discriminate against men?" and to see the answer look at the behavior of males in countless species. Males attack males of their own species, far often than they attack females. In America the males attacking other males use the law. They put other males in prison or send them out to Vietnam to fight pointless wars. But it is the same pattern.
Justice demands that both genders have to be treated as fairness. But we are blind, wilfully blind, to the fact that when we use the term sexism we ONLY mean sexism which affects women unfavorably. When 58,000 men die in Vietnam, we do not use the word sexism even though it belongs there far more appropriately than it does to a woman lawyer whose salary is less than that of her male partners.
The article brings to light a major flaw in the *justice* system, that anyone that has been grabbed by the justice systems talons knows quite well. And that is, that the justice system has very little (if anything at all) to do with seeking justice… and has everything to do with seeking convictions and/or acquittals… no matter the relative guilt or innocence of the accused.
We expect more from the system, but our expectations, though righteous, are unrealistic. People comprise the cogs of the machinery of the system, and people are fallible, biased, subjective, prejudicial, and probably most importantly, have their own self-interests at the core of their motivation(s).
Or in other words, they’re at least somewhat corrupt, all the way up to being overtly corrupt. Prosecutors are the worst… and they wield the most clout, having the police and often the judges necessarily in their corners.
The FBI has been pinched at least a few times in the past years for manipulating evidence in their crime labs, for the purpose of assisting prosecutors garner convictions. If they’re out to get you, you don’t stand a chance… unless you’re extremely wealthy and/or have powerful string-pulling connections.
Which excludes most of the population of the US.
How can we tell kids science is important when in the face of indisputable evidence Rivera is not guilty the games are played with Tessman, who likely could not even ID what DNA stands for? The important crime here is Mermel walks. This is known as finding the salient fact.
A friend of mine once said that we'll see wholesale changes in the justice system as soon as we find a case in which another person is murdered while the wrong person is sitting behind bars. But now we've seen several instances of wrongful convictions being overturned with the real perpetrator having gone on to murder others while the wrong person was in prison, and everybody just shrugs their shoulders and keeps voting in the same people who couldn't get it right the first time.
Clearly, the American public just wants convictions, they don't really care if the person convicted actually did the crime. And if a three year-old girl (like Caitlin Baker in Texas) has to grow up without a mother because prosecutors couldn't be bothered to follow up on evidence (or turn it over to the defense) in a previous case (the Christine Morton murder), then that's just her tough luck.
How can a person honestly believe that these women and girls who were raped and killed, had consensual sex with someone else moments before they were murdered? Or that pubic hairs were left by a moving man's naked crotch coming into contact with a mattress and he wouldn't be the prime suspect?
This is only possible if you believe that the girls and women were of loose moral character and must have brought the crime on themselves. In other words, blame the victim, ignore the evidence, rely on coerced confessions, convict an easy target, never admit you might have made a mistake and run for office touting how hard on crime you are.
No wonder people don't have faith in the "justice" system.
And how many 11-year-olds do you know who make fun of 6' 3" man because they "can't get it up?" Not even the most promiscuous 11-year-old talks like that. That sounds more like how a street smart 19-year-old guy claims an 11-year-old talks when he doesn't properly think through how implausible such a statement would be coming from a child.
Unfortunately, it must be something in the water table in Illinois since Holly's own twin sister doesn't see any problems. Apparently she never watched any one of dozens of shows on TruTV and similar networks on false confessions and how they're not only more prevalent than previously thought, but fairly easy to induce with things like, you know, little things like sleep deprivation, repetitive questions on the same topic until the person finally relents in the hope of going home or giving the cops what they want to here (so they can go home), etc.. Virtually any prosecutor in the country worth their salt who reads this case is rolling his or her eyes and embarrassed to be seen in public. Well, hopefully 80% at least.
What's also frightening is that 20% of the prosecutors in the U.S. will read this article and not see anything wrong whatsoever with Mermel's arguments.
In America, government-appointed lawyers are the means by which hundreds of thousands of poor people are railroaded into prison. It is the job of the victim's lawyer to "sell the deal" that the judge has decided will happen. This is Star Chamber justice.
A 1996 San Diego Superior Court corruption case in which three judges and a lawyer were convicted of taking bribes or influence peddling. Since neither county nor state would prosecute, federal prosecutors had to do the job under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) statute. Former San Diego Judge Michael Greer admitted taking $75,000 in bribes in exchange for having given a lawyer preferential treatment. Greer was placed on suspension after pleading guilty. Judges G. Dennis Adams, James A. Malkus and attorney Patrick R. Frega were convicted under the RICO statute. But in June of this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned racketeering charges against Adams and Malkus, claiming the jury had been given inaccurate instructions. All of these men have remained free since 1996 as they appeal their cases. Please write about Dr. Leslie Sachs /He stands for truth and justice / http://www.dr-les-sachs.be/
As for the dirt bag prosecutor, he should be made to read the court's decision in US v. Berger, which reminds and admonishes US prosecutors that the first goal of any criminal proceeding is that justice be sought, and justice be done.
Reminded me of the prosecutor Nifong.
As a rape and murder victim I would not like to be described as having been sexually active with "innocent co-ejaculators" just before the real crime.
The letters can be found at: