COMMENTARY: "Old Convictions, New Science," by Maurice Chammah, published by the Marshall Project on May 28, 2015.
SUB-HEADING: "Texas tackles debunked forensics."
GIST: "In the spring of 2013, the Texas Legislature passed a
law
that was hailed as the first of its kind in the country. The law
expressly allows the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals to grant a new
trial in cases where the underlying forensic science is flawed.
Throughout the U.S., scandals at
crime labs and the discrediting of forensic methods from
arson to
hair matching to
dog-scents
have led to legal battles over whether the defendants in such cases
could have their convictions overturned. With the 2013 law, Texas
lawmakers said they could. Lawyers dubbed an appeal of this sort a “Junk
Science Writ.” “In the other 49 states without a Junk Science Writ,
freeing an innocent person wrongfully convicted by faulty forensics
remains an obstacle,” Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence
Project,
wrote at the time. This past January, a
similar law took effect in California. But now the Texas law has hit an impediment, one
that illustrates a dynamic likely to reach other states as they address
wrongful convictions brought about by discredited forensic science: What
if a field of forensic science has not been discredited, but an
individual scientist makes a mistake? What if he or she recants expert
testimony years after the conviction? On June 3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals —
the highest court for criminal cases in the state — will examine this
question through the case of Neal Robbins. Since 1999, Robbins has been
serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend’s 17-month-old
daughter, Tristen Skye Rivet. Robbins had been left alone to take care
of the toddler and when her mother returned home, she was unconscious. At Robbins’ trial, Houston medical examiner
Patricia Moore concluded that the child’s death was a homicide, brought
about by asphyxiation, while Robbins and his lawyers said the girl was
found unconscious and that the bruising on her body was simply evidence
of efforts to resuscitate her — not signs of an attack. The jury
believed the medical examiner and convicted Robbins. Eight years later, in 2007, a friend of Robbins
asked the medical examiner’s office to review the autopsy, and another
medical examiner
found
that none of the toddler’s injuries would definitely point to homicide
as the cause of death. Moore recanted, writing in a letter to
prosecutors that she should have ruled the cause of death
“undetermined.” A district judge
called
Moore’s original testimony “expert fiction calculated to attain a
criminal conviction" and described Moore — who has not spoken publicly
on the matter — as overworked, inexperienced, and biased towards the
prosecution. This past December, the nine judges of the Court
of Criminal Appeals, based on the 2013 law, voted 5-4 to grant Robbins a
new trial. But three members of the majority have since retired, and as
a result, the court will revisit the case with oral arguments on June
3.