Wisconsin Innocence Project wins release of wrongfully convicted man

Robert Lee Stinson, who has served nearly 29 years in jail on a murder conviction, had his conviction vacated by a judge today in Milwaukee County, thanks in part to the work of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

Park of the state's case against Stinson was that he had bit the victim, but

[f]our forensic odontologists who evaluated the dental evidence for the [Wisconsin] innocence project found that the bite marks were not Stinson's, the project said. The innocence project also said DNA found on the victim's sweater did not match Stinson's DNA.

The state will have until a September hearing to decide whether they can go forward without the bite mark evidence, though, with the DNA exclusion coming to light, it seems difficult for the state to establish Stinson's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

We congratulate the Wisconsin Innocence Project for this momentous achievement.

A call for sentencing rationality in Florida

Sentencing Law and Policy has a snippet of a compelling Florida Bar Journal article this morning.

Here's what they cite:

Americans love to be number one. Unfortunately, we are now tops in two negative areas: debt and prisons....

[O]ur nation imprisons more people per capita than any other nation. Florida is leading this trend with the fastest growth of any state. A recent Pew Report noted that Florida “will run out of prison capacity by early 2009 and will need to add another 16,500 beds to keep pace.” With $65,000 per bed “as the best approximation for a typical medium security facility” and $19,308 per year for each Florida inmate, Florida must raise taxes, cut programs, or finance this $1.1 billion in initial capital costs plus an additional $314 million in annual recurring costs....

Our current approach to criminal justice sentencing is not only fiscally irresponsible — it is morally questionable. This approach will result in a continuing, chronic economic crisis.

It's a good point that I've mentioned before: if the obvious moral failings of the corrections system aren't enough to motivate serious reforms, then perhaps the deepening economic crisis in America will have legislators looking for human solutions to the problem. It's embarrassing that SentLaw called out Florida in particular, and the statistic that we lead the nation in prison population growth is a sin and a shame.

Those cleared by DNA tests struggle to be free

Media coverage of exonerations is usually pretty good. There are newspaper articles, television clips, interviews and most often an editorial or two about the horrors of wrongful incarceration. But what happens after the cameras stop rolling and the reporters move on to new stories?

As the following USA TODAY story by Kevin Johnson points out, for many exonerees, the nightmare of their wrongful incarceration doesn't end when they walk out of prison.

ST. LOUIS — Johnny Briscoe thought his nightmare was over in the summer of 2006 when, after 23 years of proclaiming his innocence, he finally walked out of a Missouri prison.

DNA evidence lifted from a cigarette butt should have stripped away any doubt that another man — not Briscoe — had raped and robbed a woman in her suburban St. Louis apartment on Oct. 21, 1982. Yet Briscoe's exoneration, featured by national news organizations, did not fully free him from the persistent doubts of acquaintances and family members about his innocence, or from the emotional scars seared by more than two decades in prison.

That's one of the problems. There will always be people who wonder, or worse who insist, despite DNA evidence to the contrary, that the exonerated person was guilty. Thankfully, these misguided individuals are few, but their affect on an innocent person who has spent decades in prison can be devastating.

Nearly 90% of the 227 people cleared by DNA evidence since 1989 were convicted of some of the most heinous sex crimes, according to the Innocence Project, which helps inmates prove their innocence through DNA testing. DNA — present in blood, semen and body cells — can be particularly useful in solving sex crimes and often is the most definitive way of determining innocence.

Yet not even DNA washes away the lasting stigma that shadows once-convicted sex offenders who are cleared by genetic testing, and the criminal justice system that wrongly jailed them offers little help. Briscoe's plight is part of a silent struggle for a rising number of exonerees. After high-profile releases from prison, they often fend for themselves.

Add to the stigma a financial wall that most exonerees encounter as soon as they are released.

Most states did not account for the exonerated when officials started re-entry programs for the hundreds of thousands of offenders released in the U.S. each year. Most are ineligible for basic benefits, such as counseling and job training, that states give guilty offenders when they re-enter society.

So exonerees have no money (almost all are indigent by the time they’re released) and no job. They have no place to live, no driver’s license, and sadly, by the time they get out, some have no family or friends. From an exoneree's talk in 2003:

Financially I was broke. No family. Occupationally I was 44 years old. Nobody was going to hire me. Nothing was available when I walked out of prison. Absolutely nothing.

The transition is never easy. And for those without an intact supportive family, it can be lonely as well as stressful.

At least in Florida we are fortunate to have a full-time social worker on staff to help our exonerees with their transition. (The paperwork alone can be daunting.) Our social worker coordinates an array of transitional services to meet their immediate and long-term needs including medical, psychological, and social support; occupational training and assistance; housing assistance; family support; and education.

And although we do have a compensation law on the books in Florida, it can still take one to two years to receive payment, if the individual even qualifies. (Florida's law prohibits compensation for any exoneree who has a previous felony conviction, or a conviction incurred while wrongfully incarcerated.) Most of Florida's exonerees would not be eligible under the bill as it now stands. Their only recourse has been, and continues to be, seeking compensation through a personal claims bill, a long and arduous process whose outcome is entirely dependent on the whim (and political makeup) of that particular legislative session.

So, in 2007 we established the Exoneree Emergency Fund to provide financial assistance for basic necessities during their transition. The fund, which is entirely dependent on contributions from the public, helps our clients buy groceries and gas, pay bills, purchase clothes for work, and secure job training. Each individual's needs vary, as does the length of time they require assistance, but we are thankful that, so far, we've received enough contributions to enable the Fund to continue.

Read the complete article.

Visit IPF's Website here; sign up to volunteer here; contribute to our work here. (If you want your donation to go directly to the Exoneree Emergency Fund, please include a note with that request.)

Scientific American on false confessions

Here's a podcast from Scientific American's series called "60-second Psych" on false confessions. They relate a study published in the journal of Psychological Science.

According to the Innocence Project, false confessions contributed to 25% of wrongful convictions in the U.S. in 2008...

Despite the presumption in law that different types of evidence are to be considered independent, this research shows just how tough it is to keep human nature from seeping in and tainting hard logic.

More information can be found on false confessions here.

Visit IPF's Website here; sign up to volunteer here; contribute to our work here.

Van de Kamp decision undercuts accountability

A few days ago, the Supreme Court rendered an opinion in the case of Van de Kamp v. Goldstein. The case revolved around the sharing of information between prosecutors and public defenders, and whether a prosecutor who failed to share potentially exculpatory evidence with a public defender is vulnerable to damage liability.

The SCOUTUSwiki has the background and a good analysis of the opinion written by Lyle Denniston. In part:

The case of Van de Kamp v. Goldstein (07-854) involved a plea to the Court by a former chief prosecutor in Los Angeles, John Van de Kamp, and his chief deputy, Curt Livesay. They were seeking to head off a civil rights damages lawsuit by a man who had been prosecuted and convicted of murder in 1980. That conviction had been based in part upon the testimony of a jailhouse informant about a confession to the murder by Thomas Lee Goldstein.

After Goldstein served 24 years in prison, he was released based upon a court finding that the jailhouse informant had been given favorable treatment for his information, but that fact was never shared — as it should have been — with Goldstein’s defense lawyer. Goldstein then brought his civil rights lawsuit, claiming that some prosecutors knew about the informant’s favorable treatment, but the word did not get passed to defense counsel, mainly because the leaders of the office failed to train line prosecutors to share such information, failed to supervise the line attorneys, and failed to create a system for retaining and sharing information about informants. (emphasis added)

And to answer the "So what?" question, "The Court’s ruling continued a process that began in 1976, in Imbler v. Pachtman. In that decision, the Court said that, just as judges, jurors and legislators need absolute immunity to damage liability in order to perform their duties without facing harassing litigation against them, so do prosecutors."

Without disagreeing with too much precedent, I feel there are very good arguments to be made on the other side of this issue. For example, if the goal is to protect all of those parties from harassing litigation, why not make an effort to distinguish when litigation is frivolous and harassing (and when it is appropriate), rather than toss out the litigating baby with the bathwater?

It can't be the case that prosecutors enjoy total immunity, and it's not. (The Court makes a distinction between administrative and court-related activities, the former alone enjoying immunity.) But, in this case, the Court seems to have faulted, and here is why I think that's so: The negligence – or purposeful obfuscation, take your pick – of the prosecutor Van de Kamp in this case was found to be enough to overturn a man's conviction and release him from his sentence after he had served 24 years. That evidences to me that, even if this were a careless slip-up, it was one that was consequential enough that it would have changed the course of trial if it were known back then.

Second, Goldstein had been wrongfully incarcerated for 24 years before he was released. Most people would agree he is entitled to compensation. Goldstein has already tried to sue for damages the most appropriate target. What recourse has he left?

Jailhouse snitches are a notoriously unreliable source of information. See our page here on other ways to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place.

Visit IPF's Website here; sign up to volunteer here; contribute to our work here.

Interview with LBN Studios on Jimmy Ates

Have a look at this video posted on YouTube, it contains an interview with IPF's Executive Director Seth Miller about the release of Jimmy Ates.

Convicting the Innocent

From the Death Penalty Information Center,

A new law review, “Convicting the Innocent,” by Samuel Gross, explores the rate of false convictions among death sentences and demographical and procedural predictors of such errors. Gross’ research shows the exoneration rate is 2.3% for “inmates who had been on death row at least 15 years as of 2004 and for those who had been on death row for at least 20 years.” Gross continues, “This figure – 2.3% - is the actual proportion of exonerations for death sentences imposed in the United States between 1973 and 1979.” He concludes, “The proportion of capital exonerations is almost certainly an underestimate of the true rate of false capital convictions.”

The obvious question, then, which Gross hints at, is how many innocent people have been executed without being exonerated. The United States has executed 1,138 people with another 3,308 waiting on death row. At 2.3%, that would mean over 100 people have been falsely convicted and sentenced to death.