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Post by happyhaddock on Jul 24, 2007 12:31:42 GMT -5
A Good Conviction (Paperback)by Lewis M. Weinstein (Author) Editorial Reviews
Book DescriptionImagine yourself if Sing Sing prison, convicted of a murder you did not commit. How do you survive? How do you keep hope alive that your life will ever again be anything but terror and pain? Then it gets worse -- you begin to suspect that the Manhattan prosecutor who tried your case knew you were actually innocent. From the PublisherMost Americans are comfortable in the belief that if they don't commit a crime, they have no risk of going to jail. Unfortunately, that's not always the way things are. In addition to writing a compelling novel, Mr. Weinstein has put forth a wakeup call about a problem which plagues the American criminal justice system. While most prosecutors are honest and try to afford all defendants the fair trial to which they are entitled, far too many prosecutors fail to uphold this sacred obligation. Most often, those prosecutors who cheat to get a conviction do so by suppressing evidence that goes against their case, evidence that would produce `reasonable doubt' in a juror's mind. Sometimes, they even conspire to make up evidence which alleges guilt, for instance by planting a "stoolie" who will then testify about admissions by the defendant which never happened. Don't believe it? Think it can't happen in America, the land of justice for all? Consider these damning reports by very credible organizations ... - The Chicago Tribune reported that 381 murder convictions were reversed because of police or prosecutorial misconduct.
- Columbia Law School documented "chronic prosecutorial suppression of evidence of innocence."
- Barry Scheck et al (in Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right ) report numerous cases of prosecutorial misconduct, usually by suppression of evidence that would have proven innocence.
- The book In Spite Of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases , published by Northeastern University Press, cites 400 wrongful convictions.
- The heart-wrenching play The Exonerated presents the true stories, in their own words, of seven persons who were wrongfully convicted
How likely is it there are many more such cases that have never come to significant public attention? Is it possible that what we do know is but the tip of the iceberg? When you have read A Good Conviction, you will know that wrongful prosecution could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. Mr. Weinstein would like to hear your views, about his book and about the important issues it portrays. Please consider posting a Customer Review for A Good Conviction and a comment on his "So You'd Like to ... Stay Out of Jail" Discussion Guide which is found near the bottom of the amazon page for A Good Conviction.
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Post by happyhaddock on Jun 29, 2007 17:56:33 GMT -5
A small extract from the Lamer Report on wrongful convictions in Canada: The conviction of innocent people has been established with increasing frequency in Canada in recent years. The Supreme Court of Canada recently referred to ''a disturbing Canadian series of wrongful convictions" commencing with Donald Marshall Jr. in 1971 and including David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, Thomas Sophonow and Gregory Parsons: The United States v. Burns [2001] 1 S.C.R. 283 at paras 97 et seq., commonly referred to as the Burns and Rafay case. In each of these wrongful convictions, a Royal Commission, such as this one, was established to determine what "went wrong" in order to determine how such gross miscarriages of justice can be avoided in future. The most recent reports in the Morin and Sophonow inquiries have built upon the Marshall Inquiry Report. The Milgaard Commission has not yet reported. I, and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, are fortunate to have the findings of these earlier reports to draw upon. The Morin Commission was conducted by my good friend and a former colleague on the Quebec Court of Appeal, the Honourable Fred Kaufman. The Sophonow Commission was conducted by another good friend and a former colleague on the Supreme Court of Canada, the Honourable Peter Cory. I have made liberal reference to their reports in order to avoid attempting to "re-invent" the wheel. These reports and other literature identity a number of recurring features in wrongful conviction cases. These include: - A crime which is horrible and alarming, giving it a high profile in the community and creating public pressure to find and convict the perpetrator immediately;
- An absence of direct evidence, leading to reliance upon "circumstances" which are subjectively interpreted to draw inferences of guilt; (frequently such inferences are logically weak and are, occasionally, "far-fetched");
- Reliance upon highly questionable evidence such as "jailhouse informants";
- The "demonizing" of a suspect, who may be a "loner", "outsider" or member of a minority group;
- Exaggeration of adversarial roles on the part of the police and prosecutors, leading to "noble cause corruption". This involves the justification of improper professional practices in order to achieve the perceived "correct" result.
All of these features may contribute to the malaise of "tunnel vision" which, in turn, may reinforce them, creating a vicious circle. Tunnel vision is rarely the result of malice on the part of individuals. Rather it is generated by a police and prosecutorial culture that allows the subconscious mind to rationalize a biased approach to the evidence. Moreover, it is mutually reinforcing amongst police officers, amongst prosecutors and in the interaction between these groups of professionals. It may even affect judges. Commissioner Kaufman described tunnel vision as:Commissioner Cory elaborated: Once "locked in" to the theory of their case, it is not difficult to understand how some police officers, with "noble" motivation, may move from mere interpretation of the evidence to more malignant practices. These could include "assisting" witnesses in their recollection, ignoring relevant evidence that does not support their mission and using coercion to attempt to obtain admissions from the single suspect, whose guilt is assumed. Many of these consequences became visible in the case of Gregory Parsons. It is important to emphasize that these were not the result of personal malice. This "disease" is transmitted through individuals but it does not mean those who carry it are evil. There is no question that the conduct of the professionals "infected by this virus" has inflicted profound pain and suffering on the victims...the accused, family and friends. However, in the case of Gregory Parsons, I perceive that it has also caused genuine anguish to those professionals who were misguided by tunnel vision, for the pain and suffering it has caused.
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Post by happyhaddock on May 27, 2007 15:06:24 GMT -5
FORENSIC FRAUDThis is an archive of 50+ cases involving alleged, admitted, and/ or demonstrable forensic fraud. That is, it is an archive of cases where forensic and police experts have provided sworn expert testimony, documents, or reports to the court that contain deceptive or misleading information, findings, opinions, or conclusions, deliberately offered in order to secure an unfair or unlawful gain as determined by their employers, the courts, and/ or in many cases their own admission. Subsequently, no opinions have been added to the referenced sources of information. We currently have a back-log of about 50 or more cases to add to this archive. This will be done as time permits. This is not an archive of mere forensic mistakes, mishaps, or misidentification. It is maintained solely for educational and informational purposes.<MORE> . . . .
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Post by happyhaddock on May 20, 2007 21:27:40 GMT -5
Dateline NBC
Tue, May 22, 8:00 PM | Run Time: 60 min.
Author John Grisham discusses the murder case that resulted in the wrongful conviction of two Oklahoma men.
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Post by happyhaddock on Apr 30, 2007 12:14:57 GMT -5
www.justiceontrial.org/Some very interesting articles on how badly the courts are serving the public and why so many people are convicted despite the evidence.
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Post by happyhaddock on Apr 18, 2007 0:47:32 GMT -5
The Wrong Man in the Right PlaceTuesday, April 17, 2007 Vancouver homicide cops confront wrongful convictionby Julian Sher vancouver — He’s not the kind of person you’d think the police would want to spend time with, much less invite to a private get-together. After all, Thomas Sophonow is one of the disturbing number of wrongly convicted people in Canada — a victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct. In 1982, Winnipeg police arrested Sophonow, then twenty-nine, for strangling a sixteen-year-old doughnut-shop waitress named Barbara Stoppel. In the course of their investigation, they used dubious eyewitnesses and even more dubious jailhouse informants, ignoring other leads in a classic case of tunnel vision. Sophonow was tried three times, resulting in one hung jury and two convictions that were overturned on appeal. He was incarcerated during this time, emerging after his second appeal, an outright acquittal in 1985, a broken man, shunned by many as a murderer who got off on a technicality. For years, Sophonow vainly proclaimed his innocence, but it was only in 2000 — fifteen years later — that police finally cleared him and announced that they had a new suspect. With that kind of history, it was surprising to see Sophonow listed as a speaker at the Vancouver Police Homicide Investigators Conference last fall, alongside people such as the lead investigator on the Laci Peterson murder case and the officer who’d tracked Washington’s infamous Beltway snipers. But to their credit, police are starting to concede that although, as the old Mountie slogan put it, they always get their man, their man is sometimes the wrong one. Detective Rob Faoro, an eight-year veteran of the Vancouver Police Department’s homicide squad and one of the conference organizers, said they wanted Sophonow to shake up the crowd. “He’s real. He’s not somebody I read about in the paper,” Faoro said. “If we can see the guy in person, if we can live it and feel it, maybe we can think twice the next time.” And there will be a next time, because good police officers know that even with recent advances in dna technology, mistakes get made. There are no hard numbers of the wrongly convicted, but a handful of famous cases — Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, and Steven Truscott among them — have led to various inquiries and reviews, which have recommended measures such as taping interviews of suspects and banning the use of jailhouse informants. Implementation has been spotty at best. Outside the conference room in Vancouver, a fidgety Sophonow was rethinking his decision to appear. He doesn’t particularly like police officers, much less 250 of them. “I’d blow up in fits of rage,” he said of the aftermath of his arrest and trials. “Over nothing. I’d feel it coming on. Up my back and up the back of my hair — and I’d just blow up. It would last for a few seconds and then I’d be normal again.” Once inside, Sophonow spoke faintly and haltingly to the assembled homicide hunters. “You ever get that really nauseous feeling in the pit of your stomach?” he asked them. He told them he’d felt that way once when looking at a poster of a smiling police officer holding the hand of an adoring little girl. “I made a promise to myself that my kids would never believe the propaganda that was put out.” This was not going to be a “let bygones be bygones” speech. The officers and prosecutors squirmed as Sophonow recounted how few of his co-workers would talk to him at the machine shop where he laboured for fourteen years. On one occasion, someone literally pinned the label “murderer” on his work overalls. “I would stand by the machine 100 times a day and curse the cops who did this to me,” he said. “May each and every one of them burn in hell for all eternity.” In the depths of his despair, he told the crowd, he’d plotted to blow up a police station, though he never followed through. Sophonow described how his own house in New Westminster was firebombed in 1995; no one was ever arrested or charged. He held back sobs, breathed heavily, and brought a finger nervously to his mouth. “Dead silence, right?” he observed wryly. “After years of therapy, I can sleep now,” he concluded. After the speech, Sophonow hovered in a corner, alone. Finally, a young woman approached and asked to shake his hand. “I think you’re very brave and very strong,” she said, adding that she was a crown prosecutor. Sean Trowski, a detective for five years and one of the conference organizers, felt that Sophonow’s unsettling message had gotten through: “I think it’s a very important lesson for every single guy in this room to think about.” Sophonow said he is thinking of becoming a regular on the police lecture circuit. He spoke to a convention of crown prosecutors in Whistler last summer and also addressed an rcmp training session in Chilliwack. “I hope they take to heart what I have to say and remember what happens to real people because of tunnel vision,” he said. In 2001, Sophonow was awarded $2.6 million in compensation from the city of Winnipeg and the provincial and federal governments. He used the money to buy a 9,000-square-foot heritage home in New Westminster, which he is restoring brick by brick. “I’m still on the basement in rebuilding my life,” he said. “I tried to let it go, but you really can’t. You really can’t. The anger is still there. I’m not over it.” - Published February 2006Sher's book on Canada's longest-standing case of wrongful conviction, Until You are Dead: Steven Truscott's Long Ride Into History (Vintage 2002), is being made into a TV movie.
© 2007 The Walrus Magazine
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Post by happyhaddock on Jun 30, 2007 12:32:22 GMT -5
I saw it when it was shown on PBS, but I am also wishing to share this movie with a friend in Australia. I appreciate the suggestions and will start my search there since it is not scheduled to be aired again anytime soon. FWIW, most VCRs in Australia can play US VHS tapes fine. The reverse is not true, BTW.
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Post by happyhaddock on Jun 24, 2007 13:03:19 GMT -5
www.filmakers.com/indivs/RaceExecution.htmThe above link shows this film can be purchased for $195.00. Does anyone know if there is an affordable alternative? (Besides the also high cost of video rental also shown on that page) Try libraries - maybe even college libraries? Maybe a college with a law school will show it?
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Post by happyhaddock on Apr 2, 2007 1:32:19 GMT -5
RACE TO EXECUTIONRace discrimination infects America’s capital punishment system. According to a landmark study regarding race and the death penalty, a black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim. RACE TO EXECUTION, a film by Rachel Lyon, traces the fates of two death row inmates, Robert Tarver in Russell County, Alabama and Madison Hobley in Chicago, Illinois. Their compelling personal stories are enlarged and enriched by attorneys who fought for these men’s lives, and by prosecutors, criminal justice scholars and experts in the fields of law and the media. <MORE> . . .
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Post by happyhaddock on Apr 6, 2007 13:48:22 GMT -5
I find your argument(s) very hard to follow. Perhaps English is not your native language?
In the US it is true that many people are sentenced to death or to prison despite the evidence, which in many cases is slight or may even all go to innocence. Often, other matters are allowed into the court despite the fact that they are not evidence at all but are mere prejudice.
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Post by happyhaddock on Mar 5, 2007 12:54:56 GMT -5
Congregation of the Condemned: Voices Against the Death Penalty by Shirley Dicks (Editor) Editorial Reviews From Publishers WeeklyThis is gripping reading. The words of death-row inmates on the subject of capital punishment jump off the page. Fear, hope, bitterness, regrets, love and the anguish of their last minutes are all here. The book is compiled by the mother of Tennessee death-row inmate Jeff Dicks. He's here too. So are other relatives of inmates and victims. Doctors, activists, lawyers, Edward Kennedy, Coretta Scott King, Mario Cuomo and Camille Gabriel, mother of a murder victim, also contribute essays. Among their persuasive conclusions: it is the poor who are executed, and some of them are innocent. "What good is the law if it can't protect the innocent from false imprisonment?" asks one inmate. This book makes one wonder. Midwest Book ReviewOver forty essays call for an end to the death penalty, gathered by Shirley Dicks, whose son is on death row for his role in a robbery which resulted in a storekeeper's death. Dicks maintains that those sentenced to death are the poor; while wealthy criminals with similar crimes are allowed lighter penalties. The collection makes a point.
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Post by happyhaddock on Mar 1, 2007 23:38:59 GMT -5
Michigan and the Death Penalty—A Brief and Horrible Experience... In Michigan's early days, the death sentence was virtually unknown. One early experience near the territory involved a Detroiter named Patrick Fitzpatrick. In 1828, he was living in an inn on the south side of the Detroit River, in a town then known as Sandwich, now called Windsor, Ontario. When the innkeeper's daughter was found raped and murdered, Fitzpatrick was convicted and hanged for the crime. .... And then, five years after Simmons was put to death for an offense that--terrible though it was--did not warrant the death penalty, the old case of Patrick Fitzpatrick, the man that had been hanged just south of the river in 1828, was back in the news. Because another man confessed on his deathbed to raping and killing the innkeeper's daughter. Patrick Fitzpatrick was innocent. .... To this day, the ghosts of Stephen Simmons and Patrick Fitzpatrick still haunt the state, and there is never any serious talk about bringing the death penalty to Michigan. Read the whole story: <MORE> . . .
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Post by happyhaddock on Feb 28, 2007 21:37:27 GMT -5
Straying into the Realm of Opinion... Don’t email me telling me that I’m wildly off track. It’s my opinion, I’m entitled to it. And you won’t convince me to change my mind that a lot of criminal defense attorneys are bad, bad lawyers. ...
... But even if you set aside the issue of the quality of the representation and the low standards for court-appointed lawyers, there’s the juries to consider. A few years ago, many states started moving away from selecting potential jurors based on voter registrations and instead moved to a system of selection based on driver’s licenses. And what a difference that made to the quality of the jury pool. Needless to say, there’s a tremendous difference in the education and intelligence of the average driver’s license holder vs. the average registered voter. Felons who can’t register to vote can now appear on juries. People who aren’t informed enough to have enough of an opinion to cast a ballot now appear on juries. Ask lawyers who’ve been in practice long enough to witness the change and they’ll tell you that the quality of the average jury plummeted. ...
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Post by happyhaddock on Feb 21, 2007 14:02:42 GMT -5
A STATE OF DENIAL: TEXAS JUSTICE AND THE DEATH PENALTY Executive Summary The nation is embroiled in a debate over the death penalty. Each day brings fresh accounts of racial bias, incompetent counsel, and misconduct committed by police officers or prosecutors in capital cases. The public increasingly questions whether the ultimate penalty can be administered fairly - free from the taint of racism; free from the disgrace of counsel sleeping through a client's trial; free from the risk of executing an innocent person. Support for the death penalty is falling, and across the country, momentum gathers for a moratorium. Even death penalty supporters - such as Illinois Governor George Ryan - have acknowledged the need for fundamental reform. In Texas, the call for reform has been deflected by state officials' aggressive defense of the Texas system. Repeatedly, Governor Bush and others have defended the administration of the death penalty. Texas Attorney General John Cornyn has gone so far as to describe the death penalty in Texas as "a model for the nation." This report challenges that confident assessment. To show why Texas justice is not a model for anyone, we have undertaken a preliminary examination of the Texas death penalty system. We have conducted original research into the discriminatory charging practices of Texas prosecutors. We studied hundreds of cases, including every published decision (and many unpublished decisions) of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in capital cases in the modern death penalty era. We examined over half of the capital post-conviction appeals filed in Texas since 1995 - a stage of the appeals that has never before been systematically scrutinized - and we evaluated treatment given to those appeals by the state courts. In this Report, we explain and lay bare many disturbing features of a thoroughly flawed system. <MORE> . . . Download the full report
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Post by happyhaddock on Feb 20, 2007 1:19:55 GMT -5
THE INTRACTABLE PROBLEM OF RACE
Not all areas of serious concern are related to the appalling lack of resources. Another serious problem unrelated to finances is one that plagues the application of the death penalty in far too many places: the destructive influence of race.
Many point to the record of Judge Sabo--the same judge who refused to allow a psychologist to examine black defendant Anthony Reid--as an example of that influence. Sitting as a homicide judge since 1974, he has sentenced more people to death than any judge in the state: 26 death sentences, accounting for 40 percent of all those sentenced to death from Philadelphia and more than 20 percent of all condemned prisoners in the Pennsylvania. A whopping 24 out of the 26--more than 92 percent--are black men. (See Fig. 2.)
A more recent example of blatant racism came to light in July, 1991, during a congressional hearing concerning the federal crime bill then being debated in the Congress.
In 1986, the Supreme Court held that systematic exclusion of blacks from juries violates the Constitution. [11] However, the Court refused to apply the principle retroactively. An amendment to the crime bill under consideration at the hearing, the Berman Amendment, would have rectified this by permitting pre-1986 prisoners one year in which to raise claims that blacks had been unconstitutionally excluded from their juries.
The Philadelphia DA's office dispatched Assistant district attorneys, Gaele Barthold and Elizabeth Chambers, to testify against the amendment. Committee Chairman Don Edwards asked, "Do you believe there is racism in the criminal justice system, especially in capital cases?" Assistant DA Barthold replied, "I don't believe that this is something we see in Pennsylvania." [12]
What both DAs had seen in Pennsylvania, however, was just such an unconstitutional, systematic exclusion of blacks by the head of the Philadelphia homicide unit, Assistant DA Barbara Christie. [13] Indeed, Elizabeth Chambers, sitting next to Ms. Barthold at the hearing, had recently--and unsuccessfully--defended the practice before a federal magistrate.
Described by a defense attorney as "a vicious guided missile" whose prosecution tactics have been characterized by one homicide judge as "outlandish" and "out of control," Ms. Christie had three-times prosecuted accused murderer Charles Diggs. [14] Three times she used her discretionary peremptory challenges systematically to exclude black jurors. In the second and third trials, she succeeded in seating all-white juries.
In March, 1991, Federal Magistrate Richard Powers, III, recommended to the U.S. District Court that it grant habeas corpus relief in the case because prosecutor Christie used all 15 of her discretionary strikes to seat an all-white jury, a practice prohibited by the Constitution.
"Given the inescapable fact that members of the black race accounted for approximately one-third of Philadelphia's total population at the time of petitioner's trial, it is incredible that the assistant DA could not find one satisfactory black juror capable of fairly sitting in judgment of the petitioner," the Magistrate wrote.
"Assistant DA (Christie)... kept a running tabulation of the number of blacks left on the jury after each challenge was exercised... a telling indication of (her) predisposed prejudice toward blacks on the jury... particularly when no white jurors were challenged for any reasons whatsoever... The Assistant District Attorney testified that she never used race as a factor to exclude a black from a jury... I find that... unworthy of belief."[15]
On March 27, 1991, the U.S. District Court Chief Judge, John P. Fullam, accepted the recommendation of his magistrate, and granted the writ for habeas corpus.
CONCLUSION
When former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan said of the death penalty, "It smacks of little more than a lottery system," he might well have had Philadelphia in mind. There, the poverty of individual defendants is matched by the poverty of the city. This dual impoverishment starves the system of justice itself.
When you are poor in Philadelphia, and charged with a capital crime, two rolls of the dice go a long way in determining your fate. The first determines the lawyer who will represent you. The second determines the judge who will preside.
As unfair as this initial crap shoot may be, any pretense to equal justice of law is fatally undermined by the lack of available resources and their uneven distribution. When justice is defined differently for the poor than for the rest of society, justice ceases to be a vaunted principle and becomes instead an empty slogan. In the realm of the death penalty, such inequality of application is intolerable to a just society. Like a house divided, justice divided cannot stand.
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