NEWSWRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

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.

Below is a letter from Kimberly Davis, the sister of Troy Davis who is set to be executed on September 21, 2011. Last week, Kimberly started a petition at Change.org and more than 200,000 of you signed it to help convince the Georgia Board of Parons & Parole to grant clemency to Troy. Now, she's asking just once more for your help in preventing the execution of her brother.

Dear fellow Change.org members,

Thanks in part to your amazing mobilization and effort, 650,000 signatures were delivered to the Georgia Board of Pardons & Parole, asking them to grant clemency for my brother, Troy Davis, who is slated to be executed by the state of Georgia this Wednesday despite evidence of innocence.

Despite recanted and conflicting witness testimony, the state of Georgia Department of Corrections plans to executeTroy Davis at 7:00 PM on September 21, 2011.

Kim Davis, Troy's sister, came to Change.org and started a petition asking the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to save her brother's life at a clemency hearing set for September 19 - two days before his scheduled execution. In just a few days, more than 200,000 people joined the campaign, voicing their support for Kim and Troy.

At a press conference taking place tomorrow morning, Amnesty International and the NAACP, two organizations that have been working hard to stop Troy Davis' execution for years, will be adding the signatures collected by Kim's Change.org petition to their own successful petitions and presenting them to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

If you’re one of the three people (other than my parents) who’ve read my change.org bio, you’ll already know that before I started campaigning for the repeal of California’s death penalty and sentencing reform in LA County, I spent a few years living in Atlanta, Georgia – home to Coca Cola, Cartoon Network, and a criminal justice system intent on executing a man who may well be innocent.

I’ve never met him, but Troy Anthony Davis, on Georgia’s death row since 1991 despite grave doubts concerning his guilt, is the reason I left the work I was pursuing in graduate school and devoted myself to working against the death penalty.

I remember the exact moment. In September 2008, I got a call from a classmate who knew I had been involved in human rights activism in the past. He asked if I’d ever heard of Troy Davis, and I confessed that I hadn’t. He told me he was scheduled to be executed in a few days and asked me to research the case and let him know if I wanted to get involved. When I got home, I Googled the name. I invite you to do the same.

There was no physical evidence linking Courtney Bisbee to a crime, just the incomplete and inconsistent testimony of child witnesses who claimed they saw her engage in inappropriate touching with a 13 year old boy. And it was based on that testimony alone that she was convicted in 2006 of child molestation and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Bisbee, a 35-year-old mother and former school nurse, was prosecuted by the office of disgraced District Attorney Andrew Thomas, the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation who has been accused by the Arizona State Bar of having engaged in at least 33 ethical violations while in office, from abuse of power to prosecutorial misconduct. Thomas is also perhaps best known for prosecuting a 16-year-old boy as a child sex offender for allegedly showing a Playboy to two of his friends.

In January 2007, the case against Bisbee – already thin – began to unravel, as journalist Stephen Lemons reported in a comprehensive piece for The Phoenix New Times. Indeed, one of the prosecution's “star” witnesses, Nik Valles, signed an affidavit stating that he was forced to lie on the stand – forced to say his brother, Jon, was groped by Bisbee at a friend's house – by his mother, who he says put him up to it in order to cash-in from a lawsuit against the school where Bisbee worked.

In 1997, Patricia Wright was sentenced to life without parole for a crime she didn’t commit. Now, she’s facing another sentence, one no judge or jury can overturn: Patricia has stage IV breast cancer, and all she wants is to spend the remainder of her days at home, with her family by her side.

Patricia was convicted of her former husband’s murder 16 years after his partially-decomposed body was found in his motor home. Willie Jerome Scott had been stabbed numerous times; there was a knife sticking out of his chest and a plastic bag covering his head. Patricia complied fully with the original investigation of the crime, and wasn’t a suspect because none of the blood or fingerprints found at the crime scene matched hers. The case was eventually abandoned.

But in 1995, the LAPD established a “cold case” task force, and after lying dormant for 14 years, Jerome’s murder became a priority case.

Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in federal prison on Friday, nearly two decades after he was fired from the department for his role in torturing more than a hundred suspects, almost all of them black and many of them completely innocent.

Burge’s four-year sentence drew understandable anger from many, especially among those directly affected by his actions, who are tired of seeing racial injustice punished with a slap on the wrist. Although I can never know what it felt like to fall victim to Burge’s torture, and although I’m a white boy from the suburbs who has no idea what living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s felt like, I want to make a challenge those angry with Burge’s sentence.

First, four years is not a slap on the wrist. It’s not an acquittal, and it’s twice as long as sentencing guidelines recommended. Too often, serious misconduct like Burge’s doesn’t even draw an investigation, let along charges and convictions. This measure of justice took too long to come, but it should mean something that it came at all.

When it was revealed that fly-by-night British drugmaker Dream Pharma was selling lethal injection drugs to states like Arizona desperate to put prisoners to death, owner Matt Alavi claimed he didn't know the corrections departments he sold it to would use it to kill.

As far as excuses go, Alavi's was never very persuasive. And as e-mails obtained by human rights group Reprieve confirm, it was a lie. When told his drugs would be used to carry out state-sanctioned killings, Alavi's response? “I am more than happy to assist.”

The email was released as the result of litigation in Georgia on the behalf of Emanuel Hammond, a man who many believe was wrongly convicted of murder – first by the media, then by a court. Thanks to Alavi's greed – he marked up his drugs at 1,000 times their market price, knowing full well that the only U.S. supplier of lethal injections had stopped selling them – Hammond could be executed as soon as Tuesday at 7 pm.

Hammond, an African American, was convicted amid a media circus of the 1988 rape and murder of 27-year-old, white preschool teacher Julie Love.

On Monday, Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson denied a request from Hammond's lawyers to delay his execution, claiming there was not sufficient evidence to prove the state's lethal injection drugs from Dream Pharma – which is located in the back of a driving school in England – were counterfeit or impure, never mind the fact that they have not been approved or inspected by the FDA.

No matter what a federal prosecutor does during a trial – from withholding evidence that could set an innocent person free to flat out lying to the jury – they enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability, meaning the worst that can generally happen is they'll receive a sternly worded letter from their superiors imploring them to do better (i.e. not get caught) the next time.

Last year, USA Today – best known for those fancy graphics depicting Americans' soft drink preferences and other important polling information – published a truly impressive series identifying more than 200 cases where Justice Department lawyers, the cream of the government legal crop, engaged in flagrant prosecutorial misconduct “that put innocent people in jail and set guilty people free” with little in the way of repercussions. In response, more than 470 Change.org members petitioned the Justice Department to step up its efforts to punish prosecutorial misconduct.

In response to USA Today's series – not that the Justice Department would admit that – Attorney General Eric Holder this week announced the creation of a Prosecutioral Misconduct Review Unit that he cast as way to streamline the department's disciplining of its lawyers for gross ethical violations.