PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The authors highlight this year’s review by Baroness Casey which detailed the ‘dire state’ of police property storage including ‘freezers crammed full of evidence samples, which were overflowing, frosted over and taped shut’.‘… the unit’s freezers, which held and preserved evidence obtained from victims and survivors of sexual violence including swabs, blood, urine and underwear, would be so full it would take three officers to close them: one person to push the door closed, one person to hold it shut, and one to secure the lock. All the fridges used for rape kits were in bad shape, packed and ruining evidence. In the heatwave in 2022, ‘G’ said that one freezer broke down and all of the evidence had to be destroyed because it could no longer be used. ‘G’ said a general email had been sent round to this effect and that it meant that all those cases of alleged rape would be dropped. ‘G’ also said she had ‘lost count’ of the number of times she had asked a colleague where the necessary evidence was before being told that it had been lost.’: Casey review, 2023: "
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POST: "More than 20,000 trials collapsed as a result of evidence going missing in less than three years," reported by The Justice Gap (Editor Jon Robins) on October 12, 2023.
GIST: More than 20,000 trials collapsed as a result of evidence going missing in less than three years including more than 40 murder cases, according to data contained in a new study. In a new article for the International Journal of Police Science & Management, Dr Carole McCartney, an academic at Leicester University and a member of the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science, and investigative journalist Louise Shorter argue that losing investigative material is a hidden problem in the justice system and that its safe retention is ‘critical’ both to the system of criminal appeals and the re-investigation of ‘cold cases’.
The new article features data from the Crown Prosecution Service on the impact of lost materials on prosecutions. It reports that between October 2018 and August 2021, some 20,838 cases collapsed pre-trial due to missing and lost evidence, including 42 homicides and 364 sex offences.
The research follows an exchange with the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2019 when the authors were challenged by the miscarriage of justice watchdog ‘to prove there is a problem’. ‘The CCRC do not (publicly) acknowledge that loss of materials is impacting their work, and the courts do not view the loss of materials as sufficient reason for a trial to be discontinued or an appeal to be heard,’ McCartney and Shorter argue.
They call for proper resourcing for police storage facilities as well as adequate training for staff. ‘Forensic regulation could not be said to have any (effective) oversight of this area, the College of Policing has no apparent interest and the National Police Chiefs Council and Forensics Capability Network may have written guidelines, but take a little role in overseeing the implementation.’
The authors highlight this year’s review by Baroness Casey which detailed the ‘dire state’ of police property storage including ‘freezers crammed full of evidence samples, which were overflowing, frosted over and taped shut’.
‘… the unit’s freezers, which held and preserved evidence obtained from victims and survivors of sexual violence including swabs, blood, urine and underwear, would be so full it would take three officers to close them: one person to push the door closed, one person to hold it shut, and one to secure the lock. All the fridges used for rape kits were in bad shape, packed and ruining evidence. In the heatwave in 2022, ‘G’ said that one freezer broke down and all of the evidence had to be destroyed because it could no longer be used. ‘G’ said a general email had been sent round to this effect and that it meant that all those cases of alleged rape would be dropped. ‘G’ also said she had ‘lost count’ of the number of times she had asked a colleague where the necessary evidence was before being told that it had been lost.’
Casey review, 2023: 179
McCartney and Shorter also highlight the ‘worrying inconsistency’ and ‘confusion’ between police forces in their approach to retention of investigative material. They also argue that minimum retention periods – 30 years for serious crime – need to be longer. It is ‘near impossible for prisoners who have been wrongly convicted to appeal quickly and it can take decades to re-investigate a case, particularly if the CCRC are involved, and this may take place after release,’ they say."
The entire story can be read at:
more-than-20000-trials-collapsed-in-less-than-three-years-as-a-result-of-missing-evidence
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Read the Abstract for the study at the link below:
A TASTE: "Problems with evidence retention can also be witnessed in at least the United States and Canada, where multiple reports into specific criminal cases have featured lost evidence, resulting in either a wrongful conviction or an inability to re-consider a questioned conviction. Data from the Innocence Project found that of the cases closed between 2004 and 2010, a quarter were closed because evidence could not be found or was confirmed destroyed, albeit they recorded: ‘at least twenty-eight DNA exonerations which were nearly closed for this reason, but persistence and luck eventually uncovered the evidence in the cases’ (West and Meterko, 2016: 723). Again, there is limited (academic) research on the issues surrounding evidence retention,10 and apparently little concern shown by authorities.11 Indeed, the prevailing anxiety is the retention of evidence (particularly sexual assault examination kits) that go un-tested and create ‘backlogs’, which the United States have been attempting to address for many years. In both the United States and Canada, there are huge variations in the existence of, and content of retention policies (Campbell, 2018; Roach, 2023). A 2021 document collating US state biological and evidence laws focuses upon DNA samples and sexual assault examination kits, and occasionally property seized or abandoned that the police acquire. There are no legal provisions detailed that govern what we would consider ‘investigative materials’.12
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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