COMMENTARY: "Crime lab analysts fail, innocents go to prison, public officials shrug." by Radley Balko, published by the Washington Post on November 3, 2105. (Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.")
GIST: "In Oklahoma, two men who were convicted due in part to testimony from the same crime lab analyst have now been exonerated. Yet state officials continue to defend the analyst, and they’re refusing to go back and review her work. "Last week, the city of Tulsa agreed to pay Sedrick Courtney $8 million for a wrongful conviction that led to him spending 16 years in prison. He was convicted in 1996 in the 1995 robbery of a woman in her Tulsa apartment and was paroled in 2011. He later was exonerated. Emma Freudenberger of the New York law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin said Tulsa police crime lab analyst Carol Cox testified at Courtney’s trial that a bleached red hair was found on a mask recovered at the crime scene and on Courtney. Defense attorneys say the hair from Courtney was neither red nor bleached and that it should have been obvious that it didn’t belong to him. “It’s not that the testimony was made up or misleading. What she did was more devious than that,” Freudenberger said. “We’re not talking about evolving standards in science. We’re talking about a very basic standard: Don’t lie. She lied about finding the red hair on Sedrick’s head. The prosecutor said in closing it was key evidence.” . . . Freudenberger said Cox also provided similar testimony in the conviction of Timothy Durham Jr. He was convicted in 1993 of the rape of an 11-year-old two years before, despite having several alibi witnesses who placed him in Texas at the time of the crime.
Victim
identification played a key role in his conviction and led to a prison
sentence of 3,220 years. DNA testing exonerated him in 1996 after the
Innocence Project intervened. Oklahoma law
enforcement officials are standing by Cox. Here’s Gerry Bender, manager
of the Litigation Division for the city of Tulsa. “She
testified straight-forward. She testified to the truth, and she
testified to the evidence within the scientific standards of the day,”
Bender said. “What these attorneys from New York do is take the
standards of 1995 in hair analysis and look at it in the microscope of
2015. That is totally unfair to all the individuals involved.” There
are a lot of things wrong with that statement. First, the “these
attorneys from New York” line is almost a parody of something a corrupt
local local law enforcement official might have said in the 1960s.
Bender might as well have said, “We’re tired of these outsiders coming
around, stirring up trouble with their new ideas.” Second, Cox
wasn’t testifying “within the scientific standards of the day,” because
at the time, there were no scientific standards for hair fiber analysis.
There were guidelines adopted by various law enforcement agencies,
forensics groups and crime labs. But until only recently, there hasn’t
been any scientific research to develop standards for hair fiber
analysis. That’s the problem. And the research that has been done recently has shown that the testimony these analysts have given for decades has been flawed in nearly every single case — for decades. Third, even if Cox had
been testifying “within the scientific standards of the day,” if those
standards have now changed, and we know that the old standards caused
innocent people to be convicted, whether or not Cox intended to deceive
on the witness stand is completely irrelevant to the question
of whether there ought to be a thorough review of her old cases. She may
have been doing her absolute best, and with every intention giving the
most accurate testimony she could, but if she was relying on a method of
analysis that we now know to be scientifically unfounded, a review of
all of her cases is imperative. You don’t let potentially innocent
people rot in prison because you don’t want to besmirch the reputation
of a loyal public servant. Fourth, Bender notes that Courtney was
also identified by an eyewitness. This, he claims, shows that Cox’s
testimony isn’t the reason Courtney was wrongly convicted, and therefore
she shouldn’t be subject to all of this criticism. Actually, it calls
for precisely the opposite. We now know that Courtney was innocent. How
is it that Cox’s analysis was able to implicate an innocent man? Was
she told ahead of time about the eyewitness identification? Could that
have introduced some bias to her analysis? Or did Cox do the analysis
first, after which police or prosecutors then guided the witness
into making a mistaken identification? Under either scenario, the fact
that both a crime lab analyst and an eyewitness separately implicated an
innocent man suggests that there are some serious problems with how
Tulsa police and prosecutors handle and analyze evidence. If it happened
in these two cases, it almost certainly happened in others. Instead of
rushing to Cox’s defense, perhaps Bender and other public officials in
Tulsa ought to be looking into that.........Back
in the Oklahoma story, Bender lamented that those defense attorneys
from New York were implicating not just Cox, but also hard-working cops
and prosecutors — that they were “trying to trash the names and careers
of professionals who have given to our community for years.” But really.
What sort of public servant sees no ethical obligation to even notify potentially
innocent people that the conviction that sent them to prison and ruined
their lives was won with falsified evidence, and that they could now
try to clear their names? Scratch that. I guess we know what sort of
public official — a prosecutor. But even if there is no professional obligation, there’s certainly a moral one."
The entire commentary can be found at:
