Monday, June 25, 2018

Brendan Dassey: Wisconsin: False confession case: His co-counsel, Jerome Buting, has just had published a book called "Illusion of Justice: Inside Making A Murderer And America's Broken System" - to the background of bad news: The U.S. Supreme Court has just rejected Dassey's application for leave to appeal.)

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  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing  number of exonerations in the USA, Canad...

Brendan Dassey: (Up-dated): Wisconsin: (False confession case): Washington Post alerts (Reporter Robert Barnes)... "Supreme Court won’t hear the case of Brendan Dassey, a teen sentenced to life and featured in 'Making a Murderer';

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing  number of exonerations in the USA, Canada an...
Sunday, June 24, 2018

Technology: Artificial intelligence, justice and fairness - and one of the scariest proposed algorithms that I have yet heard of (undoubtedly more to come) - an algorithm which can help flag parents who could pose risk of abuse to children. We have already entered a world in which 'bias detectives' strive to make algorithms fair, writes Rachel Courtland, in nature.com. HL...."Vaithianathan, a health economist who co-directs the Centre for Social Data Analytics at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, told the crowd how the algorithm might work. For example, a tool trained on reams of data — including family backgrounds and criminal records — could generate risk scores when calls come in. That could help call screeners to flag which families to investigate."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Each day, the area’s hotline receives dozens of calls from people who suspect that a child is in danger; some o...
Saturday, June 23, 2018

Leaky evidence rooms: (Massachusetts): Bill introduced by state legislator Mark Cusack aims at cleaning up Massachusett's "scandal-plagued evidence rooms."..."The measure before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary was filed by state Rep. Mark J. Cusack of Braintree, where in 2016 investigators discovered $400,000 missing from the police department’s evidence lock-up as well as drugs and some 60 firearms. The scandal put hundreds of criminal cases at risk, and the veteran officer responsible for the room took her own life."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Evidence room scandals erupted in multiple departments in recent years. In Framingham, a hidden key gave some co...
Friday, June 22, 2018

Gerald Manning: Louisiana: False confession case: Yet another abomination from Louisiana's criminal justice system: Even the victim's family stood by him all these 40 years... "We stood by him and we don’t even know him," said Rhondalyn Harris, who is the youngest daughter of Vonda Harris, the murder and rape victim. "We prayed, we cried, because who wants someone to be locked up for your parent’s murder who didn’t do it?" Rhondalyn Harris said she and her sister — who were both younger than 6 years old when their mother was killed — are frustrated how Manning eventually got his freedom because he was not fully exonerated, as they believe he should have been."...". "Nearly six months after Ms. Harris’ death, Gerald Manning, an intellectually impaired high school student, just three months past his eighteenth birthday, was brought into the Monroe police station on an unrelated matter," Wenstrom wrote in Manning's application for post-conviction relief. There, Manning was interrogated for more than 28 hours and eventually gave "numerous, varied, and conflicting confessions to the murder." Wenstrom said that while looking into the case decades later, she found a box stored by the clerk of court containing clothing stripped from Vonda Harris's body and a weapon used to kill her, and that evidence was tested for DNA. "The results confirm what Ms. Harris’ entire family has always believed — that Gerald Manning was not involved in her murder," Wenstrom wrote in the application."

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and...

Radley Balko: (Washington Post); He posts about two FBI officials who say the state of forensics is fine - and then shows with ample evidence (point by point) that they are wrong. (Another remarkable analysis of the intersections of forensic science, politics and ideology published by The Washington Post, in Balko's column 'The Watch.' HL. (Note the references to Pamela Colloff's on going Pro-Publica/New York Times series on the unreliability of blood-splatter analysis as illustrated by her investigation of the Joe Bryan (Texas) case.)

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Last August, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced a new forensics review and monitoring process...
Thursday, June 21, 2018

Brendan Dassey: Wisconsin. False confession case. 'Law and Crime' (a Dan Abrams production) provides an excellent backgrounder for today's application by Dassey for leave to appeal to America's highest court..."Dassey’s appellate team has sought to increase Dassey’s chances of success by highlighting the larger policy issues which resulted in his conviction. Specifically, Dassey’s team has argued that it has been decades since the Supreme Court has examined the issue of juvenile confessions and that the gap between the last relevant decision and the present day has resulted in incongruent and incorrect rulings throughout the lower courts. Typically, the results of a conference on a case are released the following Monday at 9:30 a.m. We should know Monday, June 25th, whether the Court is accepting or rejecting Dassey’s petition."

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and...