PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Of all the fields that could benefit from admitting its mistakes, law enforcement seems to be the most resistant to doing so. Why is this? People in law enforcement are no different than the rest of us. My hunch is that it is a byproduct of our adversarial justice system, that emphasizes winning rather than unbiased inquiry. For whatever reason, a consequence is that while medical care continually improves its safety record, there is no evidence of any improvement in the rate of false convictions in our legal system. In fact, a recent study of exonerations in one of the world's leading science journals estimated that about 1 in 25 death sentences imposed in the United States is a false conviction. We wouldn't accept this sort of error rate in our mail delivery system but apparently we do in judging our most serious crimes. A little error reduction might be in order. One particularly egregious example of a refusal to admit error is the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for two murders in Birmingham, Alabama that he didn't commit. He was exonerated and released from prison nearly 30 years later on Good Friday 2015, having become one of the longest-serving, falsely imprisoned individuals in American history. The case against him was flimsy from the beginning."
COMMENTARY: "Learning from mistakes in law enforcement," by reporter Steven Austad, published by AL.Com on January 7, 2018. (Steven Austad is Chair of the Biology Department at UAB. Before becoming a research scientist, he had various lives as an English major, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a Hollywood wild animal trainer. Living now in Birmingham with his veterinarian wife, 6 dogs, 2 parrots, and a cat, he enjoys nothing more than communicating how science works to the general public.)
GIST: "Just before Christmas 1994 Betsy Lehman, a 39 year-old prize-winning health reporter for the Boston Globe suddenly and unexpectedly died as she was about to be discharged from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she was being treated for breast cancer. More than 2 months later, during a routine record check, it came to light that she had died from an accidental overdose of the chemotherapy drug she had been receiving. This was particularly shocking as the Dana-Farber is widely regarded one of the world's premier cancer research institutions. Roughly 25 medical staff involved in Ms. Lehman's care could have caught the error, but didn't. Medicine is practiced by humans and humans make errors. What matters in medicine as in life is how we respond to our errors once they are discovered.vThe Dana-Farber responded by publically admitted its mistake, launching a massive investigation of what caused it, and ultimately installing a host of new, more rigorous patient safety procedures. Those procedures have become a model for maximizing patient safety at numerous other hospitals across the country. As I've noted before, admitting mistakes is not something we are wired to do easily. If possible we nearly always prefer to cover up an error or shift the blame. Yet progress and improvement depends upon learning from our mistakes and to do that you have to admit them. That's how we get better at anything not just hospital care. Of all the fields that could benefit from admitting its mistakes, law enforcement seems to be the most resistant to doing so. Why is this? People in law enforcement are no different than the rest of us. My hunch is that it is a byproduct of our adversarial justice system, that emphasizes winning rather than unbiased inquiry. For whatever reason, a consequence is that while medical care continually improves its safety record, there is no evidence of any improvement in the rate of false convictions in our legal system. In fact, a recent study of exonerations in one of the world's leading science journals estimated that about 1 in 25 death sentences imposed in the United States is a false conviction. We wouldn't accept this sort of error rate in our mail delivery system but apparently we do in judging our most serious crimes. A little error reduction might be in order. One particularly egregious example of a refusal to admit error is the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for two murders in Birmingham, Alabama that he didn't commit. He was exonerated and released from prison nearly 30 years later on Good Friday 2015, having become one of the longest-serving, falsely imprisoned individuals in American history. The case against him was flimsy from the beginning. He had no history of violent crime. There were no witnesses to either murder. No evidence of any kind linking him to the killings was found at either crime scene or in his car or at his home. However, investigators did find a gun, belonging to his mother with whom he shared a house, which was the same caliber as that used in the murders. The entire case depended on a forensic match between bullets fired from that gun and those recovered at the crime scene. The state's ballistic examiners indeed declared a match and this was enough to convict Hinton and get him sentenced to death. Hinton never wavered in proclaiming his innocence. In 2002, his new legal team from the Equal Justice Initiative, engaged three of the nation's top firearms examiners, including the former Chief of the FBI's firearms and tool mark unit, to re-examine the ballistics evidence. All three agreed that none of the six bullets were marked with sufficient clarity to match them to the gun in question or with one another for that matter. When asked to explain to these examiners how he had determined the original match to the weapon, the State's expert refused to cooperate. This could have been the end of the story. The prosecution could have decided to re-examine the evidence themselves or even have dropped all charges because the best experts in the country could not validate their only evidence linking Mr. Hinton to the crimes. But they chose not to. In fact, they fought re-opening the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted unanimously that Mr. Hinton was due a new trial. At that point prosecutors gave up, decided not to re-try him, and he was released. Let's consider the damage that could have been avoided here. There was the damage to Mr. Hinton, who served 13 more years in hell than he needed to. And there was the lost opportunity to begin an investigation and re-evaluation of the training, competence, and procedures at the state forensic laboratories to help prevent future miscarriages of justice. Tellingly, another Alabamian exonerated in the same year as Mr. Hinton, Beniah Alton Dandridge, had been also been falsely convicted due to flawed forensic analysis, in this case a mistaken fingerprint identification by the Alabama state forensic lab. Mr. Dandridge had been imprisoned 20 years by then. Learning how to reduce future errors is one large benefit of admitting one's mistakes. Another benefit is that it allows us to at least partially right-the-wrong by compensating people who are damaged by our mistakes. This is basic fairness, something I think we all agree on. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reached what the Boston Globe reported to be a multimillion dollar settlement with the family of Betsy Lehman. But as law enforcement hates to admit error, they also hate to see compensation paid for false convictions, because it is unavoidably a public admission that they had made a mistake. As the trickle of criminal exonerations in the 1990's turned into a stream in the early 2000's and a flood more recently, 32 states including Alabama passed laws defining the monetary amount due those who were wrongly incarcerated. In Alabama the minimum amount for each year of incarceration was set at $50,000. For Anthony Ray Hinton, that means he is owed a minimum of about $1.5 million. Of course, it is not that simple. The state Committee on Compensation for Wrongful Incarceration and the State Division of Risk Management must both agree that such compensation is really warranted and the State legislature must then appropriate the funds. In Mr. Hinton's case, both of the appropriate entities have approved payment and State Senator, Paul Bussman (R, Cullman) sponsored a bill in the last legislative session to appropriate the funds. That bill never made it out of committee, however. Unsurprisingly, state prosecutors, whose approval is thankfully not required, have resisted. Assistant Attorney General James Houts has been vehemently opposed to any compensation for Mr. Hinton, saying that a lack of the ability to match the bullets to the gun "is not evidence of innocence," the presumption of innocence, a core value of our justice system, apparently having slipped his mind. The legislature is about to reconvene. Senator Bussman, reiterating his view that "if they still think he is guilty, they should re-try him; if not, they need to compensate him," has assured me that reintroducing his compensation appropriation bill will be one of the first things on his agenda for the new session. At a time when Alabama is trying to shed its reputation for racial injustice, after Mr. Hinton has been exonerated for nearly three years, isn't it time for our legislature to do the right thing?"
The entire commentary can be found at:
Read the National Registry of Exonerations entry by Maurice Possley at the link below: "On February 23, 1985, 49-year-old John Davidson, the assistant manager of Mrs. Winner’s fried chicken restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, was fatally shot in an after-hours robbery. About $2,100 was missing from the safe. Davidson was still alive when an exterminator came to the restaurant and found him in the restaurant cooler with two gun shot wounds in the head. Davidson died on February 25 following surgery. The two bullets were removed and turned over to police. On July 2, 1985, 39-year-old Thomas Wayne Vason, the night manager at Captain D’s restaurant in Bessemer, Alabama, was found dead in the restaurant’s cooler. He had been shot twice in the head and $650 was missing from the safe. Two bullets were removed from Vason’s body. Police investigators said that based on their examination, the bullets in both crimes were fired from the same gun. There were no fingerprints or other items of physical evidence. Police believed that both men were confronted in the parking lots of the restaurants after closing up for the night and that both were ordered back inside and forced to open the safes. Because both men were found shot in the restaurant coolers, the media branded the perpetrator the “Cooler Killer.” On July 25, 1985, 55-year-old Sidney Smotherman, the night manager of Quincy’s Family Steak House in Bessemer, closed the restaurant and on his way home stopped at a grocery store shortly after midnight. Another restaurant employee, who coincidentally stopped at the same store, later said that a black man appeared to be watching Smotherman while shielding his face. Smotherman left the store after making a purchase and while driving home, his car was bumped from behind by another car. When he got out, the driver of the other car emerged with a gun. The gunman forced Smotherman to drive the gunman’s car to Quincy’s and go inside and empty the safe. The gunman ordered him to go to the restaurant’s freezer. Smotherman, who was aware of news accounts of the two other restaurant robbery/murders, said he told the gunman he wanted to be in the cooler because it was not as cold. Smotherman knew that he could lock the cooler from the inside. The gunman agreed and when Smotherman walked into the cooler and turned to pull the door shut, the gunman fired two shots. One struck Smotherman in the head, but did not pierce his skull. Instead, the bullet traveled under his skin and exited down his neck and wound up in his shirt pocket. The other bullet took off the end of a finger of his hand that he had raised to try to protect himself and ricocheted into the cooler. As he fell down, Smotherman kicked the door shut and it locked automatically. Smotherman waited about 10 minutes and then emerged and called police. Police compared the two bullets from this shooting and said their examination showed that all six bullets in the three crimes were fired by the same gun. An artist for the Bessemer newspaper worked with police and Smotherman to create a composite sketch. Reginald White, an employee of Quincy’s, told police he recognized the sketch as 29-year-old Anthony Hinton, a man he knew from a second job he had in nearby Hoover, Alabama. White said that about two weeks prior, Hinton approached him and asked him if he was still working at Quincy’s. When he said he was, Hinton asked if “Mr. Don” was the manager. White said that he told Hinton that there was a new manager who had just bought a new Fiero automobile. White said Hinton also asked what time the restaurant closed. The police prepared a photographic lineup for Smotherman, who selected Hinton as the man who robbed and shot him. On July 31, 1985, police went to Hinton’s home where he lived with his mother. They found an old, very-worn .38-caliber revolver under his mother’s mattress, but failed to find any evidence linking him to the crimes. He was arrested that day and charged with the robbery of Smotherman. The gun was turned over to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences. Examiners test-fired the gun and said that all six bullets from the three crimes were fired by the gun. The police then charged Hinton with capital murder in the deaths of Davison and Vason. Hinton went to trial in Jefferson County Circuit Court in September 1986 on the capital murder charges. He never went to trial on the robbery and shooting of Smotherman. Smotherman identified Hinton as the gunman who robbed and shot him. Smotherman’s co-worker identified Hinton as the man he saw following Smotherman in the grocery store. White testified about his conversation with Hinton prior to the robbery and shooting of Smotherman. The state firearms experts testified that the bullets from all three crimes had been fired from the gun found under Hinton’s mother’s mattress. The trial court authorized Hinton’s attorney to spend $1,000 to retain a ballistics expert. The attorney could not get a qualified expert for only $1,000, so instead of requesting more money, the lawyer hired a retired civil engineer whose experience was confined to working with heavy artillery in World War II. The expert had no training or experience in firearms identification, he did not know how to use a microscope to examine bullets, he did not test-fire the gun and he admitted during cross-examination that he was visually impaired—he only had one eye. He testified that the results of his examination were inconclusive. Hinton testified in his own defense and said he was working at a warehouse where employees were locked inside from midnight until 6 a.m. on the night of the robbery and shooting of Smotherman at Quincy’s. He denied involvement in all three crimes. He said he was driving a small red Nissan at the time of the Quincy’s robbery and owned a small yellow Volkswagen—neither of which fit the description of the larger automobile that Smotherman said his attacker was driving. On September 17, 1986, the jury deliberated for an hour before convicting Hinton of both murders. In December 1986, the jury voted 10-2 to sentence Hinton to death. Hinton had taken a polygraph examination and although the examiner said Hinton showed no deception when he denied involvement in the crimes, the trial judge declined to allow the jury to hear the polygraph results. His convictions and death sentence were upheld on appeal to the Alabama Court of Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court. In 1998, Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization in Alabama that provides legal assistance to indigent defendants and prisoners, began representing Hinton. In 2002, EJI commissioned a re-examination of the bullets and gun by three different experts. One was a forensic consultant named John Dillon, who had worked on ballistics identification at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s forensics laboratory and, from 1988 until he retired in 1994, had been a chief in the identification unit at FBI headquarters in Quantico. The other two experts had worked for many years as firearms examiners at the Dallas County Crime Laboratory and had each testified as experts in several hundred cases. All three experts examined the physical evidence and testified that they could not conclude that any of the six bullets had been fired from the revolver. The prosecution’s response was to ignore the findings and argue that the EJI experts essentially said the same thing that Hinton’s ballistic examiner said at trial—that the results were inconclusive. In February 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Hinton’s conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial. The Court ruled that Hinton’s trial lawyer had provided a constitutionally inadequate legal defense by failing to seek more money to obtain a qualified ballistics expert. The Court also held that the trial judge had been mistaken when he said the defense was entitled to only $1,000 for an expert. The statute relating to such expenses, which at one time had a $1,000 cap, had been amended prior to Hinton’s trial to allow for “any expenses reasonably incurred” as long as the expenses were approved in advance by the trial judge. Subsequently, in preparation for a retrial, the prosecution had new experts re-examine the bullets and gun. The prosecution experts also concluded that they could not link the bullets from the victims to the gun found in Hinton’s home. On April 2, 2015, a judge granted the motion by the Jefferson County District Attorney to dismiss the charges and Hinton was released. Efforts to pass legislation in 2017 approving compensation for Hinton failed."
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=4669
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/c
