"PUBLISHER'S NOTE: WORDS TO HEED: FROM OUR POST ON KEVIN COOPER'S APPLICATION FOR POST-CONVICTION DNA TESTING; CALIFORNIA: (Applicable wherever a state resists DNA testing): "Blogger/extraordinaire Jeff Gamso's blunt, unequivocal, unforgettable message to the powers that be in California: "JUST TEST THE FUCKING DNA." (Oh yes, Gamso raises, as he does in many of his posts, an important philosophical question: This post is headed: "What is truth, said jesting Pilate."...Says Gamso: "So what's the harm? What, exactly, are they scared of? Don't we want the truth?")
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SUB-HEADING: "Hail Mary bid seeks police reports, DNA testing."
GIST: "Lawyers for a small legal-defense team that has launched a Hail Mary bid to uncover new evidence in the gruesome case of notorious double murderer Scott Peterson — whose wife Laci and unborn child were found dead on the shores of San Francisco Bay — are seeking materials from police investigations they say were improperly withheld during Peterson’s trial.
“Mr. Peterson’s been waiting for 20 years for police reports and audio recordings and video recordings that should have been provided,” Paula Mitchell, lawyer and executive director for the Los Angeles Innocence Project, said at a court hearing in Redwood City on Tuesday. “We are eager to get our investigation underway.”
Peterson, wearing a blue work shirt and with his dark hair pulled back into a short ponytail, appeared on a courtroom screen via a video link from a room at Mule Creek State Prison east of Sacramento. After a glitch saw him muted so he could be seen speaking but could not be heard, Peterson, now 51, answered briefly and politely when occasionally questioned by Judge Elizabeth Hill. Asked by the judge if he consented to appearing via Zoom, Peterson responded, “Absolutely. Thank you, your honor.”
Peterson was originally handed a death sentence over the Christmas Eve 2002 killings of his 27-year-old wife and the son she had carried for nearly eight months and planned to name Conner. The case, involving a handsome defendant, his dimpled substitute-teacher wife, and a mistress who started taping Peterson’s phone calls and talking to police after she found out Laci was missing, attracted worldwide attention.
Nearly two dozen journalists attended Tuesday’s hearing in San Mateo County Superior Court, where a thicket of TV cameras was set up outside the courtroom.
Mitchell’s group last month filed motions seeking the purported missing evidence, and asking for a court order for DNA testing on items they claim are related to the case. The Los Angeles Innocence Project, a nonprofit whose most recent charity filing with the IRS in 2022 showed a $350,000 annual budget and six employees, has said it is investigating Peterson’s “claim of actual innocence.”
Mitchell declined to speak to news media before or after the half-hour hearing. “We’ll let our case play out in court,” she said when asked why her group took Peterson’s case.
In 2020, the California Supreme Court overturned Peterson’s death sentence, and two years later Peterson was finally moved from San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco to Mule Creek State Prison. His life sentence carries no possibility of parole.
Soon after he was transferred to Mule Creek, Peterson lost a years-long quest for a new trial, after unsuccessfully arguing that a juror’s experience of domestic violence had biased her against him.
No forensic evidence tied Peterson to the murders of Laci and the child. On Dec. 24, 2002, Peterson had reported his wife missing from Modesto where the couple lived.
In mid-April 2003, the bodies of Laci and her son washed up separately along the edge of the Bay, within a mile of where Peterson told police he motored from the Berkeley Marina to go fishing on Christmas Eve day.
Prosecutors argued that Peterson was having an affair with a Fresno massage therapist when he killed Laci, took her body out in his newly bought fishing boat and dumped her in the bay, weighted with cement.
Peterson’s lawyers had argued that strangers abducted Laci Peterson while she walked the couple’s dog.
Peterson’s appearance Tuesday in a case-status conference arose from the group’s court filings seeking information about the investigation, and DNA testing of potential evidence, Reuters reported last month.
The group’s lawyers are looking into a burglary at a house across the street, around the time of Laci’s disappearance, and suggest in court filings that she may have witnessed the crime and been taken by the burglars, according to Reuters. The L.A. Innocence Project is asking the court to order DNA testing on materials connected to the burglary, and on tarps and a large plastic bag found on the shore near the bodies of Laci and her son, Reuters reported.
The national Innocence Project has distanced itself from the Los Angeles group, saying in a press release issued after the court filings that the Southern California nonprofit was “wholly independent of the Innocence Project.”
Hill set three separate hearings on the case in San Mateo County Superior Court, with Peterson saying he would attend each by Zoom. Mitchell asked that the hearing on her team’s request for DNA testing be held before the hearing on investigative materials, “so if there is going to be testing ordered we can get that started.”
That DNA hearing was set for May 29. A hearing for the request from Mitchell’s team to seal court records was scheduled for April 16, with the group’s request for investigative materials was set to be heard July 15."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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/
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/
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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-12348801
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MORE VALUABLE WORDS: "As a former public defender, Texas' refusal to delay Ivan Cantu's execution to evaluate new evidence is deeply worrying for the state of our legal system. There should be no room for doubt in a death penalty case. The facts surrounding Cantu's execution should haunt all of us."
