NEWSDNA TESTING

Yesterday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued an unlimited stay in the execution of Hank Skinner.

Skinner was set to be executed tomorrow evening for the murders of his girlfriend and her two adult sons on New Years Eve of 1993 in Pampa, TX. Since the beginning, Skinner has maintained his innocence in the crime and there are numerous factors that make a strong case for DNA testing.

But the fight for testing crime scene evidence for DNA is just beginning. Earlier this year, Rick Perry signed into a law SB 122, a bill that amended Texas' post-conviction DNA evidence testing law. Now, the court must decide if that law applies to Skinner's appeals. According to the Texas Tribune, the post conviction law has been changed three times since its adoption in 2001, each time with the purpose of removing restriction on access to testing. In Texas, 45 innocent men have been exonerated using DNA testing. In October, 57 year-old Michael Morton was freed after serving 25 years in Texas jail for killing his wife. Morton was able to walk out of prison as a free man after DNA testing proved his innocence and linked another man to the murder.

Last week, officials in North Carolina announced a crime lab analyst near the center of recent controversy was fired. Some began questioning just how meaningful the termination was and what other steps were being taken towards reform. But as soon as questions formed on their lips, Attorney General Roy Cooper held a press conference extolling the reported strides the state is making.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) Crime Labs has been in the local spotlight for over six months now after a scathing audit of the DNA unit brought numerous problems into the spotlight. After national media attention and overturned convictions, people have been pushing Cooper to make significant changes, though they've seemed to be very slow in coming.

Following the February 2010 exoneration of Greg Taylor, wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered an audit of the state’s DNA crime lab. Taylor’s case indicated a culture of bad science at the lab, a place where it seemed commonplace for analysts to withhold blood evidence that could exonerate defendants. The audit would uncover more than 200 cases where the SBI withheld or distorted such evidence, 80 of which involved people still serving time for convictions that may have otherwise been avoided.

National headlines were made this past spring when it was uncovered that Debbie Madden, a now former San Francisco drug lab worker, was pocketing cocaine from the lab in which she worked to supply a personal habit. But while the nation was paying attention to the drug lab, which handles thousands upon thousands of cases every year, a quieter scandal was building within the city’s smaller but even more crucial DNA crime lab.

Evidence concealment, DNA switching and lax security are just a few of the issues uncovered in a remarkable report from SF Weekly released earlier this week. But with the San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris in the midst of the scandal and rising to her newly elected position as state Attorney General this coming year, one has to wonder where the complaints should go and what can be done.

In the wake of the Madden shakeup in the drug lab, eventually leading to the lab closing its doors, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massulo found that Harris’ office had failed to live up to the requirement that prosecutor’s offices disclose potentially beneficial evidence to criminal defendants. She stated this constitutional obligation, as set forth in Brady v. Maryland, should be fulfilled with the prosecutor actively seeking such exculpatory information from the police rather than waiting for the police to disclose it. According to the SF Weekly report, this has not happened and the DA’s office, in fact, may have been purposefully hiding such evidence in an effort to cover their tracks.

New DNA test results from the scene of a 1989 Texas murder have proven that Claude Jones was executed based on faulty evidence, darkening the shadow of doubt looming over the state's death machine.

Jones, pictured left during a death row visit with his mother, always maintained his innocence, and sought DNA testing on a critical hair from the crime scene before his execution. George W. Bush was the governor at the time, awaiting a decision from the Florida Supreme Court on whether a presidential recount in the 2000 election could go forward. Bush's senior counsel sent him a memo on Jones' case and somehow neglected to mention the potential for DNA testing to reveal his innocence. Bush allowed the execution to go forward.

The DNA tests were obtained as a result of a lawsuit filed by a group of legal and media organizations that believe the public has a right to know if an innocent man was executed. Jones' case now joins countless other examples of grave injustice in the Texas court system. Gov. Rick Perry, who allowed the notorious execution of Cameron Todd Willingham to go forward, recently said the exoneration of Anthony Graves after years on death row for a crime he didn't commit shows that the system is "working." What do these results show, governor?

Two men who spent a combined total of nearly 35 years on death row for crimes they didn't commit are now campaigning to help others who may be facing similar fates.

Working directly with Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CADP), Derrick Jamison and Shabaka WaQlimi said in an interview interviewed this week with David Sirota on Colorado’s Progressive Radio AM 760 that they are hoping to raise awareness about wrongful convictions and the likelihood that states across the country may be preparing to execute innocent people. The exonerees are staunch critics of the death penalty in general -- with good reason -- are currently on a nationwide tour to draw attention to their cases.

Derrick Jamison spent 20 years on death row in the state of Ohio before being cleared of all original charges in 2005. His case in 1985 had all the features of a typical wrongful conviction: unreliable eyewitness testimony, withheld evidence and a codefendant who testified against Jamison in exchange for a sweet plea deal. In initial photo lineups, one witness to the robbery and murder that Jamison was ultimately convicted of didn’t choose Jamison out of a photo lineup. Instead, he chose two other men.

Shabaka WaQlimi, formerly known as Joseph Green Brown, came within 14 hours of being executed before a stay was issued. He had spent 13 years on death row in Florida, the state currently leading the nation in wrongful convictions. What he believed to be his final three weeks were spent just 30 feet from the execution chamber in what’s known as the “death watch cell." He had been measured for the suit he would be buried in, though he refused to order the “final meal."

You can't put a price on losing your freedom for decades after being convicted of a crime you didn't commit. But some states take that a bit too literally, barring people wrongly sentenced to years behind bars from receiving any compensation at all, while the ones that do reimburse those whose lives have been ruined by the criminal justice system often cap compensation at a relative pittance.

Paul House spent 22 years in prison after being convicted and sentenced to death on charges of rape and murder. In 2008, he was released from Tennessee state prison at 48 years of age and in poor health after DNA tests showed he wasn't the perpetrator, one of 138 death row inmates to be exonerated in the U.S. since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (pdf). Prosecutors officially cleared him of wrongdoing a year later.

"I'd be happy with a million, but it's not even close to what they should pay me," House recently told the Associated Press. He'll be lucky if he gets that.

Under Tennessee law, House is entitled to a maximum of $1 million for his wrongful conviction, or roughly $40,00 for each year he was incarcerated -- equivalent to the average per capita income in 2009, meaning it would essentially compensate House for lost wages, but hardly enough to begin to reimburse him for his lost freedom. And he's entitled to that money only if outgoing Gov. Phil Bredesen declares him formally exonerated. While his lawyer is confident that will happen, telling the AP the state parole board is likely to recommend just that, it's far from a sure thing.

The phrase "forensic science" may have a bland, neutral sound to it. But in recent years, some labs have started skewing test results and manipulating the processes behind it.

That's why the National Academy of Sciences is calling for the creation of an independent agency to monitor and set standards for forensic science used in our courts.

If you needed a reminder of how badly we need this reform, look no further than this excellent four-part series in the Raleigh News & Observer, which paints an ugly picture of how forensic analysts and officials have falsified results and tested selective evidence — all to get evidence that supports state prosecutors' theory of a crime. Thanks to the paper's work, officials across the state are calling for a shakeup of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

And it's not just North Carolina. Similar controveries and lab closings have swept through countless state and city labs in recent years — from Houston to Boston to San Francisco.

And those are just the problems with forensic science that actually make the headlines. In reality, there are plenty of other issues simmering beneath the surface. 

For Jerry Hobbs, the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' didn't exactly apply.

The Illinois man spent five long years in an Illinois jail awaiting trial for allegedly killing his daughter and another young girl. Earlier this week, DNA testing proved his innocence, but prosecutors didn't apologize as they opened the jail doors to free him.

All they said was that the state didn't have the evidence to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. So he was kept incarcerated — for five years — as law enforcement tried in vain to build a case against him, all while ignoring clues that pointed in other directions.

How did an innocent man get stuck in jail for five years? The saga began when Hobbs was arrested for the double murder after he apparently signed a confession following long interrogations over a 24-hour period. He quickly recanted, and a year after his arrest, DNA tests on semen from one victim's body pointed to another unknown man.

Yet despite this evidence, prosecutors kept Hobbs in jail, claiming they would try him eventually. In fact, his case never made it to trial — instead he spent five years waiting for the news he received this week to arrive. It wasn't until the DNA was found to match another man in June that momentum finally built to secure Hobbs' release.

The case is a textbook example of an overzealous prosecutor who was unwilling to admit a mistake. We write frequently here on Change.org about wrongful convictions overturned through DNA tests after decades. Hobbs is a testimonial to the fact that wrongful arrests — even those caught before conviction — can likewise cause unimaginable disruption and harm for years.

When the Los Angeles 'Grim Sleeper' murderer was caught earlier last month, I was skeptical about the way law enforcement had nabbed the killer. After all, to catch the man, police turned to a controversial new DNA testing technique — one that's a gross violation of DNA privacy.

The state started by running DNA from a crime scene through a database. No hits — the accused killer wasn't on file. So the state tried again — this time by searching for 'near matches.' They located the killer's son, and that near match allowed the police to investigate the son's male blood relatives, and eventually arrest his father.

At the time of his arrest, many claimed that the case was proof positive that near-match DNA testing was an irreplaceable investigative tool — privacy implications be damned. ("We have been waiting for a case like this to hit a home run," said a Harvard geneticist.)

All that triumphalism didn't sit right with me. It turns out that the killer was actually a repeat offender with a penchant for carrying guns and stealing cars. In other words, he should have been a prime suspect all along — DNA or no DNA evidence. As I wrote then, “It's enough to make the cynical among us wonder whether the case would have been solved much sooner if the victims weren't living in East Los Angeles.”

Now, some great reporting from the LA Times gives further weight to that hypothesis. This week, they published a chilling story which reveals that from 1984 to 1993, when the 'Grim Sleeper' was operating, over 100 women — almost all of them African American — were killed in south L.A. and nearby neighborhoods. The media paid them scarcely any attention.