STORY: "Meet Jay Via: One bad cop, in one county, who did a whole lot of damage," by Radley Balko, published by the Washington Post on December 11, 2015. (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: "At the center of all of this was a police investigator named Jay Via. It was Via and another investigator who got Beach to confess. His confession was the only solid piece of evidence against him. Beach quickly recanted and said the confession had been coerced with a brutal interrogation and threats of execution. Via denied all this. The interrogation was supposed to have been recorded. That recording would have revealed whether Beach was telling the truth about being coerced. At trial, Racicot claimed that in his confession, Beach revealed details that only the killer could have known. An audio recording would have revealed whether that was true, or whether police had provided those details to Beach themselves (a phenomenon that occurs even among well-intentioned and conscientious investigators). But the audio recording never turned up. Conveniently, Via would later say that he had accidentally recorded over the interrogation. All the other physical evidence that the authorities claimed linked Beach to Nees’s murder has since been lost or destroyed by law enforcement.........I noticed Via’s name in Beach’s case because back in 2008, I also investigated and wrote a story about a case in which he was involved. In 1998, Jimmie Duncan was convicted for the 1993 murder of 2-year-old Haley Oliveaux. The case against Duncan was largely built on testimony from the controversial Mississippi-based medical examiner Steven Hayne, and from bite mark evidence procured by the now-discredited dentist Michael West. In a video obtained by Duncan’s defense team years after his conviction, West can be seen repeatedly jamming a mold of Duncan’s teeth into the skin of the girl’s lifeless body, a practice multiple forensic specialists have said is malpractice at minimum, and may amount to felony evidence tampering. But Duncan was also convicted due to testimony from a jailhouse informant. Michael Cruse testified that Duncan confessed to him while the two shared a cell for a single day in December 1993. Years after his conviction, Duncan’s attorneys were able to track down a third man in the cell who signed an affidavit stating that not only did Duncan never confess, he insisted on his innocence, despite Cruse’s repeated efforts to get him to incriminate himself. Duncan’s attorneys later obtained signed affidavits from two other inmates who were in the Ouachita Parish jail at the same time as Duncan. Both say a law enforcement official promised them leniency if they’d lie and testify that Duncan had confessed. The investigator who was working with both Cruse and the two who claim they were asked to lie? Jay Via.........When I first wrote about Duncan’s case, I thought Steven Hayne and Michael West were the most disturbing aspects of his conviction. And to be sure, between them the two have tainted thousands of cases and sent who knows how many innocent people to prison. But you could say the same thing about Jay Via. Duncan’s case is merely where the two intersect. Racicot committed clear misconduct, was never disciplined for it, and went on to have a successful career in politics, thanks largely to his start as a prosecutor. The prosecutor in Duncan’s case was never disciplined for failing to turn over the exculpatory evidence in that case, either. Then there’s that hair fiber analyst in Beach’s case who sent other innocent people to prison. There are the thousands of other cases in which similar forensic evidence was misused or overstated. There are the judges who let all of this happen, and the county officials who refused to fire Via. To my knowledge, there has been no official effort to review all the other cases that may have been tainted by Via. In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood is not only refusing to conduct a thorough review of cases involving Steven Hayne and Michael West, he has tried to block others’ efforts to do so. So many implications — and that’s just from these two murder cases, 15 years apart, in just one state. I’ve found that if you pick at the threads of a wrongful conviction, you’ll find that this is often the case — that the problems that caused are not only not isolated to that case; they’re also pervasive, systematic and entrenched. Extrapolate these problems across 50 states and the federal courts, and you start to get a sense of just how expansive and overwhelming the problems in the criminal justice system really are. Never mind fixing the criminal justice system. We still haven’t even stopped the bleeding."
The entire post can be found at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/12/11/meet-jay-via-one-bad-cop-in-one-county-who-did-a-whole-lot-of-damage/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
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/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com; Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
