"Jeff Rosenzweig and John Wesley Hall are working to persuade the
Arkansas Supreme Court to grant their clients legal avenues to return to
trial court in the wake of Department of Justice and FBI concessions
that expert testimony used against two Arkansas inmates was unsupported
by science. The problem, as state attorneys have pointed out in legal arguments,
is the inmates -- Eugene Pitts and Lonnie Strawhacker -- have exhausted
their appeals, and there is no mechanism for sending a case back to
trial because evidence was discovered to be faulty. Rosenzweig, who represents Strawhacker, said there ought to be. "In both cases, there was crucial evidence that was an important part
of their trial, and it has been explicitly repudiated by the FBI,"
Rosenzweig said. "The question is, does our system have a mechanism to
deal with that? The [attorney general] takes the position that we don't
and we shouldn't. Ours is, we do, and if we don't, then we need to
expand the writ [of error coram nobis] so that we do.".........Rosenzweig and Hall are asking for the Arkansas Supreme Court to hear
oral arguments for both appeals in the same court session. Even though
the inmates were convicted of different crimes, the barrier for going
back to court for some sort of relief is the same. Pitts, 68, has been in prison since 1979 after he was convicted of
kidnapping and killing a North Little Rock veterinarian who was married
to a former romantic interest of Pitts. Strawhacker, 61, was sentenced to life in prison for attacking a
woman in 1989, beating her face until it was so swollen that she
couldn't see, then sexually assaulting her. Prosecutors in both cases relied on voice identification from
victims, as well as testimony from Michael Malone -- a microscopic hair
analyst from the FBI -- that linked the suspects to hairs found at the
crime scenes. Under pressure from advocates, the FBI and the Department of Justice
began reviewing any cases involving such testimony and in April 2015
announced that 26 of their 28 experts, including Malone, offered
"erroneous" testimony. The Department of Justice, working with the Innocence Project, has
identified hundreds of cases similar to those of Pitts and Strawhacker,
where convictions were secured on the basis of what Hall has called
"junk science." The FBI still uses that forensic analysis, but as a complement to more scientific forensic testing, such as DNA analysis..........Although the Department of Justice announced that it would not fight
any procedural barriers in federal court on cases affected by faulty
testimony, the state attorney general's office is fighting to affirm the
state inmates' convictions. State attorneys argued that the discredited testimony was limited and
that both cases had compelling evidence, other than the FBI testimony,
that would have led to convictions. In a brief filed in Strawhacker's case, Assistant Attorney General
Brad Newman argued that the inmates did not have a right to return to
trial because there was no evidence withheld from the accused. "The prosecutor at the time could not have known that, over 20 years
later, the DOJ would assert that its examiner had testified outside the
bounds of his discipline," Newman wrote. "[Strawhacker] would require
the prosecutor to be omniscient, knowing all things that will ever
become known to any police agency, even long after the prosecution of a
case has concluded." State attorneys also argue that if the court were to expand certain
legal thresholds and allow the inmates a chance to return to trial, it
would open the floodgates to "an endless stream of re-litigation,"
Newman wrote. Hall said it's incumbent on the court to find a way to fulfill his
client's right to due process and not worry about what could come down
the road. "There are already tons of meritless appeals filed, and the judges
already screen them out," Hall said. "Who cares whether the floodgates
are open so long as it's fair and doing what's right? If people are in
Arkansas prisons and don't belong there, [the courts] should be doing
what's fair."
Monday, April 4, 2016
Bulletin: Eugene Pitts; Lonnie Strawhacker; Arkansas; Two Little Rock defense attorneys are combining efforts to get their clients -- who received life sentences in part based on now-discredited FBI forensic testimony -- back to a courtroom........." Prosecutors in both cases relied on voice identification from victims, as well as testimony from Michael Malone -- a microscopic hair analyst from the FBI -- that linked the suspects to hairs found at the crime scenes. Under pressure from advocates, the FBI and the Department of Justice began reviewing any cases involving such testimony and in April 2015 announced that 26 of their 28 experts, including Malone, offered "erroneous" testimony. The Department of Justice, working with the Innocence Project, has identified hundreds of cases similar to those of Pitts and Strawhacker, where convictions were secured on the basis of what Hall has called "junk science."......... "The problem, as state attorneys have pointed out in legal arguments, is the inmates -- Eugene Pitts and Lonnie Strawhacker -- have exhausted their appeals, and there is no mechanism for sending a case back to trial because evidence was discovered to be faulty. Rosenzweig, who represents Strawhacker, said there ought to be. "In both cases, there was crucial evidence that was an important part of their trial, and it has been explicitly repudiated by the FBI," Rosenzweig said. "The question is, does our system have a mechanism to deal with that? The [attorney general] takes the position that we don't and we shouldn't. Ours is, we do, and if we don't, then we need to expand the writ [of error coram nobis] so that we do."
