Friday Roundup: Fighting for Freedom

It's a sad fact, but you don't have to look far in this country to find a case in which a prisoner, with a credible claim of innocence, has been fighting for years to get a day in court. Here are few making news this week:

The appeals of the West Memphis 3, one of the most notorious wrongful convictions in American history, are still going, Damien Echols is still on death row, and he filed (again) for a new trial this week. More news on the WM3 is here.

Another of our country's best-known ongoing claims of innocence is the "yogurt shop murders" case in Austin. A judge this week scheduled a two-day hearing for May to consider new DNA evidence that could exonerate the two defendants still behind bars.

In a lesser-known case, Temujin Kensu is trying to overturn a murder conviction in Detroit for a crime he says he didn't commit.

And faulty forensic evidence is one of the leading causes of wrongful conviction. Radley Balko continues his ongoing investigation in this month's Reason Magazine into a case in which evidence may have been fabricated to send Jimmie Duncan to Mississippi's death row.

Firedoglake checked out the documentary "The Body Farm," about the Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility, where bodies are buried and exposed to various elements to study decomposition for forensic use.

There may be thousands or tens of thousands of wrongfully convicted people in our prisons, but there are hundreds of thousands serving excessive sentences for non-violent drug crimes. I reported on the Rockefeller Laws progress in New York earlier today. Here's more good news: a group of seasoned Supreme Court lawyers is calling on the justices to hear a case that could give broad authority to judges to resentence people convicted under mandatory minimums.

On CNN's website, Harvard economics prof Jeffrey Miron made an impassioned plea to legalize and regulate all drugs in order to stop drug violence. "Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground," he writes. "This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead."

And twitter law continues to evolve at the pace of the tubes. Courtney Love got sued for her trash-talking tweets. A Florida judge banned courtroom tweeting.