Bulletin: Wrongful convictions and defective cars: Bloomberg Business explains why old convictions raise new questions as car flaws raise doubts. (Must Read. HL);

Countdown to Wrongful Conviction Day:  Friday, October 2,  2105; 29 days. For information: http://www.aidwyc.org/wcd-2015/

"Lakisha Ward-Green spent three months in jail after she lost control of her Chevrolet Cobalt, killing her teenage passenger. Last week, a Pennsylvania judge, citing “newly discovered evidence” erased her guilty plea. The new evidence: the February 2014 recall by General Motors Co. of 2.6 million cars for defective ignition switches. Ward-Green, now 25, is part of a small but growing group of people caught in a Kafkaesque legal web stemming from the safety scandals that have rocked GM and other automakers. Often blamed for unexplained accidents and sometimes charged with serious crimes, they can wait years before learning the role played by undisclosed defects. With a record 64 million vehicles recalled in the U.S. last year, many of them after being on the road for a decade or more, experts expect an increasing number of proceedings over wrongful convictions to emerge. An examination of court filings has identified at least four such challenges in the case of GM’s recall and one in the case of Toyota. “When defendants claimed their cars shut off or sped up all by themselves, the claims seemed too far out to create a doubt that was reasonable. Now we know better,” said University of Michigan law professor Erik Gordon. In the case of GM’s defective ignition switch, the company knew of the problem for about a decade before it issued a public notice. “Just about everyone who is in jail in a case where there wasn’t clear evidence of driving under the influence or another wrongful act will try to get out using the ‘ignition switch made me do it’ defense,” Gordon said in an e-mail.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/old-convictions-new-questions-as-car-flaws-raise-doubts "Lakisha Ward-Green spent three months in jail after she lost control of her Chevrolet Cobalt, killing her teenage passenger. Last week, a Pennsylvania judge, citing “newly discovered evidence” erased her guilty plea. The new evidence: the February 2014 recall by General Motors Co. of 2.6 million cars for defective ignition switches. Ward-Green, now 25, is part of a small but growing group of people caught in a Kafkaesque legal web stemming from the safety scandals that have rocked GM and other automakers. Often blamed for unexplained accidents and sometimes charged with serious crimes, they can wait years before learning the role played by undisclosed defects. With a record 64 million vehicles recalled in the U.S. last year, many of them after being on the road for a decade or more, experts expect an increasing number of proceedings over wrongful convictions to emerge. An examination of court filings has identified at least four such challenges in the case of GM’s recall and one in the case of Toyota. “When defendants claimed their cars shut off or sped up all by themselves, the claims seemed too far out to create a doubt that was reasonable. Now we know better,” said University of Michigan law professor Erik Gordon. In the case of GM’s defective ignition switch, the company knew of the problem for about a decade before it issued a public notice. “Just about everyone who is in jail in a case where there wasn’t clear evidence of driving under the influence or another wrongful act will try to get out using the ‘ignition switch made me do it’ defense,” Gordon said in an e-mail.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/old-convictions-new-questions-as-car-flaws-raise-doubt