POST: " A trio of junk forensic science cases," by Radley Balko, published by the Washington Post on March 17, 2016. (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: "As we continue to plod, slowly, toward some sort of reform of how forensic science is used in the courtroom, the wrongful convictions roll on. First up, an arson conviction in Pennsylvania: Han Tak Lee, 81, spends much of his time alone in a small room in Queens. It is a ground-floor studio apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom, right beside train tracks used by the Long Island Rail Road. Commuter trains roar by every so often, though the double-glazing of his windows reduces the noise to a gentle whoosh.His cramped living situation invites a comparison to the way he spent most of the past quarter-century. From 1990 to 2014, Mr. Lee was locked away in a series of prisons in Pennsylvania, serving a life sentence for murdering his daughter in a fire. Two years ago, however, a judge exonerated him and ordered him freed after determining that his conviction was based on theories about arson that had later been discredited. An appellate court upheld the ruling in August.Because Pennsylvania has no law to compensate the wrongly convicted, Lee has relied upon the support and kindness of others to help him get by. He has grown bitter and angry. As he has every right to be.........It’s just astounding that some states still don’t compensate exonerees — that a guy like Lee, in his 80s, should have to wait out a lawsuit before he sees a dime from the state that wrongly imprisoned him. Moving on, here a hair fiber case from North Carolina: Mecklenburg County District Attorney Andrew Murray filed legal papers on February 16th dismissing the indictments against Timothy Bridges, who wrongly served over 25 years for a rape and burglary, based in large part on the erroneous testimony of an FBI-trained state hair analyst who claimed that Bridges’s hair linked him to two hairs found at the scene. Bridges was released on October 1, 2015, after prosecutors consented to vacating Bridges’s 1991 convictions. Bridges’s legal team, which included lawyers from the Innocence Project and North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, also uncovered evidence that police failed to turn over to the district attorney’s office before trial. Post-conviction discovery materials showed that police paid informants and made other threats or promises to the informants, which was contrary to their testimony at trial. Subsequent DNA testing on crime scene evidence also excluded Bridges . . . Bridges’s case “is one of the first cases to be litigated involving erroneous microscopic hair testimony proffered by an FBI-trained state examiner,” said Chris Fabricant, Director of Strategic Litigation for the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law..........The cases tainted by wrong or exaggerated hair fiber testimony number well into the thousands. This is only the first to be litigated. Finally — my favorite — there’s a bite mark exoneration pending in Virginia: Recent DNA testing proves that a former sailor, convicted primarily on questionable bite mark evidence, is innocent of the savage 1982 rape of a Newport News woman and the murder of her husband, the man’s lawyers say. Keith Allen Harward, 59, who could have been sentenced to death, now has served 33 years of a life sentence for the murder of Jesse Perron, a shipyard welder who was bludgeoned to death with a crowbar and whose wife was subjected to an hours-long sexual assault as their three children slept in a nearby room. Lawyers with the Washington firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, along with the New York-based Innocence Project, filed a petition for a writ of actual innocence on March 4, citing testing performed by the Virginia Department of Forensic Science that failed to find Harward’s DNA on sperm left by the perpetrator . . . Two forensic odontologists testified his teeth matched those of the bites on the rape victim. One expert testified, “with reasonable scientific certainty,” that Harward’s teeth caused the bite marks, while the other testified it was not possible that someone other than Harward could have bitten the woman. The evidence apparently was persuasive. In dismissing Harward’s appeal in 1988, the Virginia Court of Appeals noted: “both forensic dentists testified that all gross characteristics of spacing, width, and alignment of Harward’s teeth ‘fit on the money’ the photographs of bite marks.” “If believed, that evidence proves that Harward murdered Jesse Perron. There exists no evidence in the record tending to prove that someone other than Harward murdered Jesse Perron. Finding the circumstantial evidence sufficient, we affirm the conviction,” the appeals court ruled. The problem, as regular readers of The Watch know, is that there’s simply no scientific research to support the contention that human skin can reliably record bite mark in a usable way, or that human dentition is individually unique, much less that a bite mark in human skin can be matched to one person to the exclusion of all others."
The entire post can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader.
Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
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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:
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/
