BACKGROUND; From link below: "13 wrongful convictions all tied to one forensic analyst. The analyst – Mary Jane Burton – was hailed as a hero for saving the DNA evidence that led to the exonerations. But when reporter Tessa Kramer starts investigating, she meets a former lab trainee with a very different – and much darker – story to tell. Over the course of 12 episodes, Kramer unravels this mystery, searching for proof of explosive allegations against Burton and a possible cover-up at one of the nation’s leading crime labs An original podcast from VPM and Story Mechanics, future seasons of Admissible will investigate the role of evidence in our legal system."
ACCESS PODCAST AT:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/admissible-shreds-of-evidence/id1668887025
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The committee also heard from Robert Scanlon, a DFS forensic scientist who said he worked alongside Burton as a serologist. Scanlon stressed that when he arrived at the lab in 1982, there was no procedure manual. Lab notes were often skimpy and incomplete by today’s standards. Scanlon said some of Burton’s practices, like taping evidence to lab paperwork, were known to be problematic, even then. “It's difficult to look back at some of these case files, and … you just kind of hit your head, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this would never fly today,’” Scanlon said. “But at that time, you know, there was a lot of evolution to occur in forensic biology labs.”
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The podcast, which was produced by VPM and Story Mechanics, follows the career of Mary Jane Burton.
She was a serologist — a blood analysis expert — who worked at the lab several decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing.
Burton kept clippings of evidence from crimes in her case files.
In the 2000s, state officials used those clippings for DNA testing, leading to the exoneration of 13 people who’d been wrongfully imprisoned.
Burton, who died in 1999, was hailed as a hero.
But “Admissible” reporters, including host Tessa Kramer, uncovered evidence suggesting Burton tampered with test results and ignored scientific protocol.
The misconduct was carefully documented by Gina Demas, Burton’s former trainee, who attempted to get the lab’s leadership to address the problems as they occurred.
One former lab director, Peter Marone, acknowledged in the podcast that the lab’s senior team knew it couldn’t be nationally accredited while Burton was still on staff.
Burton ultimately left the lab in 1988 under unclear circumstances.
In July, after the series’ release, VPM provided the department with some of the documentation Demas kept that buttressed her allegations.
On Tuesday, members of the Forensic Science Board’s Scientific Advisory Committee — an oversight board consisting of outside experts — heard a rundown of the podcast from DFS staff.
The committee and the FSB itself were set up in 2005, in the wake of a national audit that found flaws in the lab’s post-conviction work in the case of Earl Washington Jr.
He was granted a pardon in 2000, by former Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore, and later won a $2 million civil suit that, among other charges, accused another lab serologist of altering results to help implicate Washington.
Linda Jackson, DFS’ current director, said she’s still going through the information provided by VPM.
Jackson didn’t commit to auditing the thousands of cases Burton worked on, but said she’s taking the podcast’s findings seriously.
“The reason we're all here is because we would like to think … it needs to be reviewed and then go from there,” Jackson said.
The committee will consider further action when it meets again on Jan. 9."
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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