17 ms·

Man Convicted Based on Erroneous Evidence Exonerated After 25 Years

144 points by salmonet 11y ago

bonniemuffin 11y ago
"[Out] of 268 cases where agents used microscopic hair analysis to link a defendant to a crime, the agents’ testimony was scientifically invalid in 257 or 96% of the cases." That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.
- Eric_WVGG 11y ago
  if you think that’s bad, don’t go reading about states and prosecutors that oppose wrongful conviction payments, you’ll be seeing red one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent. Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. At the moment I have no reason to suspect either if it was de rigour of the times.
    - koenigdavidmj 11y ago
      We have prosecutors actively saying on record that we should not retry obviously innocent men because of the pain this would cause the families. There's your mens rea.
      - superuser2 11y ago
        Source? People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
        finance-geek 11y ago
        >> People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
        the_ancient 11y ago
        Any conviction in which microscopic hair analysis was presented to the jury should be automatically tossed and a retrial conducted... Period, end of discussion That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
        superuser2 11y ago
        > and a retrial conducted So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree. >I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice. That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
        the_ancient 11y ago
        One is assumed to be innocent, thus if the trail they were convicted under it tainted, then until such time they are retried and found guilty using untainted testimony or actual science then yes these people are in fact "obviously innocent" I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment. If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      There is a whole body of fraudulent pseudoscience that kept this practice looking all sciency. Once you show they knew it was bogus, that's not just being wrong, that's a criminal conspiracy. I'm surprised nobody has called out the fake science behind "polygraph," too.
      - throwaway2048 11y ago
        polygraphs are not legally admissable
        Zigurd 11y ago
        Polygraph is, however, fraudulent pseudoscience. There are journals and conferences. The Homeland Security Administration funds universities to train people in this fraudulent practice. These people need to be called out as frauds, and it is an outrage to be openly training frauds in accredited universities.
      - mdpopescu 11y ago
        Anything called "science" is automatically granted a huge amount of respect from the masses. Science is the most successful religion we know.
    - HarryHirsch 11y ago
      There is a lot to be said against the idea of mens rea and for strict liability. It's an impossibility to accurately gauge someone's intent, on the contrary it's easy to evaluate someone's actions and see if they amount to criminal conduct. Just tick boxes in the criminal code. No thought-reading required. The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious? Same with banksters.
      - throwaway2048 11y ago
        The problem with strict liability is the same problem with thing like mandatory minimum sentences. It ties judges hands to address the actual circumstances of an event, and without exception forces at least equal penalties on people who frankly, don't deserve it. There is no balancing point in this equation either. politicians always wanna be "tough on crime", and the latest case where some horrible monster gets a lighter penalty for nuanced reasons the public isn't interested in understanding is sure to result in a push for mandatory minimums and strict liability. Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time. A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form. The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance. The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        Strict liability has its place, but so does mens rea. I once bought a motorbike. The man sold it to me from his front porch for going market price. He gave me the keys, he signed over the authentic title. I took it to the DMV to register. The desk worker called the police and had it confiscated; it was stolen property. Under strict liability, I would be a felon. The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing) I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. "Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.
- cm2187 11y ago
  What I would be curious to know is how many of these 268 samples do not have a matching DNA. "Scientifically invalid" is a bit vague. Does that mean that the samples were not a match or does that mean that the method used didn't provide a sufficient degree of confidence of a match?
  - walid 11y ago
    It doesn't matter if "scientifically invalid" is a vague because when the jury decides based on invalid hair sample analysis then justice is not served. Also some evidence collection might not yield DNA in the first place.
  - Someone 11y ago
    This isn't about DNA analysis, it is about staring through a microscope, comparing hairs. Quote: "At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
    - cm2187 11y ago
      I know the analysis isn't about DNA, but DNA gives us a way to validate the analysis. When a defense lawyer uses words like scientifically invalid, it is designed to make it look like the analysis is just bullocks, but most likely it is something much more subtile, like a different confidence interval, or something like that.
- pmarreck 11y ago
  Dude that's nothing in the legal system I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i... Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin' As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.
badsock 11y ago
This is one of the big reasons why there shouldn't be a death penalty.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06... ...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d... Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is. (My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)
  - weaksauce 11y ago
    I think the real reason that the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent is that the people that murder in general don't think things through. Very reactionary. Obviously there are plenty of cold blooded killers out there too but I doubt penalties have a ton of bearing on things. Most people just don't murder other people. I could be completely off base though and would love to see some evidence either way.
atemerev 11y ago
Can he sue for compensation? Or, better yet, for putting prosecutors into jail for that?
- tzs 11y ago
  Probably yes on the first. No on the second, for good reason. There wasn't anything in the article that indicated that the prosecutors did anything wrong. They took the evidence they were given by the police, by informants, and by the crime lab employee and presented it at trial. That the police did not give the prosecutors all the evidence the police had, and that a forensic technique that was widely accepted at the time by the FBI and the state turned out to not be accurate is beyond the scope of the prosecutor's role.
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    I don't know about this case, but about a month ago I heard another wrongfully-convicted person discussing his case, including the fact that in the agreement that freed him, he waived the option to sue. His stated reason was that his alternative was to stay in jail for the process to work its way through, and in jail, 'accidental' death was just too easy. Paranoid? Given his circumstances, l don't think so.
    - onion2k 11y ago
      If a prosecutor knows someone is innocent and doesnt let them out immediately they should be disbarred.
      - nommm-nommm 11y ago
        I am pretty sure prosecutors don't have the power to let people out of jail.
  - blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    The prosecutor's job is not to robotically, bureaucratically follow a fixed process. They have a lot of latitude and can choose to pursue a defendant for maximum prison time, minimum prison time, something in between, persuade them to take a plea, or drop the charges completely. Many options, really. For this prosecutor's office to have put this fellow away for so many years on not even circumstantial evidence but merely the good faith acceptance of three unreliable sources with criminal records, and the hair which turned out to be erroneously identified, despite the bloody handprint that was not a match, and despite the victim's failure to identify the defendant, is almost obscene. Sadly, however, it's not unheard of at all; our criminal justice system is far from perfect, though it probably still ranks near the top in a world where justice is difficult to obtain in most countries outside of western Europe and North America.
rayiner 11y ago
The state of forensic "science" today is similar to the state of medicine in the 18th century. Bloodletting wasn't an effective treatment, and but it's not like doctors--much less ordinary people--of the time knew any better. Obviously those participating in hiding evidence should be prosecuted, but it's hard to blame everyone else who is going along with what forensic "scientists" tell them. The legitimate scientific establishment has done little to nothing to expose this field as the domain of charlatans. How are lay people supposed to understand the difference?
- the_ancient 11y ago
  >How are lay people supposed to understand the difference? Well first off lay people not to stop placing government agents on a God like pedestal where by everything a "forensic scientist" from the state utters in court is assumed to be truthful and beyond questioning. This is how we get terrible science and convictions, the public watches a episode of CSI or NCIS where you have infinite zoom and enhance, where you can do facial recognition on a person in a ATM video from 25 miles away, where 2 people can hack all encryption by typing on the same keyboard really fast.... They see this shit, so then when a person from the FBI gets on the stands, says a bunch of big words, and points to the scary man or women at the table saying they did it... the case is over....
  - nroets 11y ago
    I mostly agree with you. It is however a serious flaw of the jury system. Forensic science is NOT in the terrible state that the OP makes it out to be.
    - the_ancient 11y ago
      I think the OP is being kind.... I question even the validity of fingerprint matching one of the oldest "Forensic science" fields. Almost nothing in "Forensic science" follows the actual scientific method. There is far far far far far too many assumptions, "intuitive leaps", and formation of a preconceived narrative round "science" They make the evidence fit their story, vs allowing the evidence to tell a story.
ps4fanboy 11y ago
Listen and believe
vijayr 11y ago
The very fact that something like innocence project needs to exist is depressing :(
nicolas_t 11y ago
And this goes to show that if you want a fair trial in any country (even relatively evolved western countries), you need to be rich enough to have a decent legal team. When you read some of the cases from the innocence project, the incompetence is mind boggling. And don't get me started on countries like Japan with 99.7% conviction rate and antiquated laws regarding police arrest. I think that until you have a significant sum of money that can be used to pay for a legal defense team, you are at risk of prison even if you're innocent (of course in most cases the risk is negligible but if you're part of a minority it might not be)...
- the_ancient 11y ago
  The cases from the innocence project are bad, but they only see the cases in which the person pleaded innocent and was convicted by a jury... Most cases end in a Plea, which innocent people with out proper legal representation, and many with proper legal representation take for a whole host of reason.
reddytowns 11y ago
Another reason why it's best just to close the blinds, turn on the computer, and lay low for the rest of your life, using video games and pornography to entertain and escape. You'll be more likely to duck things like this if no one knows your name.
flippyhead 11y ago
One of the best, most eye-opening books on this subject I've read is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.
SeanDav 11y ago
One gets the ridiculous situation where an innocent person in prison, keeps on maintaining that they are innocent and end up serving far longer sentences than guilty people, convicted of very similar crimes, that don't deny their guilt. I am not sure if this applied in this case, but it may well have done.

144 points by salmonet 11y ago

"[Out] of 268 cases where agents used microscopic hair analysis to link a defendant to a crime, the agents’ testimony was scientifically invalid in 257 or 96% of the cases." That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.

Eric_WVGG 11y ago
if you think that’s bad, don’t go reading about states and prosecutors that oppose wrongful conviction payments, you’ll be seeing red one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262
enraged_camel 11y ago
>>impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent. Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. At the moment I have no reason to suspect either if it was de rigour of the times.
  - koenigdavidmj 11y ago
    We have prosecutors actively saying on record that we should not retry obviously innocent men because of the pain this would cause the families. There's your mens rea.
    - superuser2 11y ago
      Source? People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
      - finance-geek 11y ago
        >> People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
      - the_ancient 11y ago
        Any conviction in which microscopic hair analysis was presented to the jury should be automatically tossed and a retrial conducted... Period, end of discussion That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
        superuser2 11y ago
        > and a retrial conducted So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree. >I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice. That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
        the_ancient 11y ago
        One is assumed to be innocent, thus if the trail they were convicted under it tainted, then until such time they are retried and found guilty using untainted testimony or actual science then yes these people are in fact "obviously innocent" I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment. If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    There is a whole body of fraudulent pseudoscience that kept this practice looking all sciency. Once you show they knew it was bogus, that's not just being wrong, that's a criminal conspiracy. I'm surprised nobody has called out the fake science behind "polygraph," too.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      polygraphs are not legally admissable
      - Zigurd 11y ago
        Polygraph is, however, fraudulent pseudoscience. There are journals and conferences. The Homeland Security Administration funds universities to train people in this fraudulent practice. These people need to be called out as frauds, and it is an outrage to be openly training frauds in accredited universities.
    - mdpopescu 11y ago
      Anything called "science" is automatically granted a huge amount of respect from the masses. Science is the most successful religion we know.
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    There is a lot to be said against the idea of mens rea and for strict liability. It's an impossibility to accurately gauge someone's intent, on the contrary it's easy to evaluate someone's actions and see if they amount to criminal conduct. Just tick boxes in the criminal code. No thought-reading required. The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious? Same with banksters.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      The problem with strict liability is the same problem with thing like mandatory minimum sentences. It ties judges hands to address the actual circumstances of an event, and without exception forces at least equal penalties on people who frankly, don't deserve it. There is no balancing point in this equation either. politicians always wanna be "tough on crime", and the latest case where some horrible monster gets a lighter penalty for nuanced reasons the public isn't interested in understanding is sure to result in a push for mandatory minimums and strict liability. Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time. A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form. The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance. The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      Strict liability has its place, but so does mens rea. I once bought a motorbike. The man sold it to me from his front porch for going market price. He gave me the keys, he signed over the authentic title. I took it to the DMV to register. The desk worker called the police and had it confiscated; it was stolen property. Under strict liability, I would be a felon. The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing) I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. "Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.
cm2187 11y ago
What I would be curious to know is how many of these 268 samples do not have a matching DNA. "Scientifically invalid" is a bit vague. Does that mean that the samples were not a match or does that mean that the method used didn't provide a sufficient degree of confidence of a match?
- walid 11y ago
  It doesn't matter if "scientifically invalid" is a vague because when the jury decides based on invalid hair sample analysis then justice is not served. Also some evidence collection might not yield DNA in the first place.
- Someone 11y ago
  This isn't about DNA analysis, it is about staring through a microscope, comparing hairs. Quote: "At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
  - cm2187 11y ago
    I know the analysis isn't about DNA, but DNA gives us a way to validate the analysis. When a defense lawyer uses words like scientifically invalid, it is designed to make it look like the analysis is just bullocks, but most likely it is something much more subtile, like a different confidence interval, or something like that.
pmarreck 11y ago
Dude that's nothing in the legal system I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i... Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin' As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.

badsock 11y ago

This is one of the big reasons why there shouldn't be a death penalty.

_yosefk 11y ago
I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06... ...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d... Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is. (My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)
- weaksauce 11y ago
  I think the real reason that the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent is that the people that murder in general don't think things through. Very reactionary. Obviously there are plenty of cold blooded killers out there too but I doubt penalties have a ton of bearing on things. Most people just don't murder other people. I could be completely off base though and would love to see some evidence either way.

atemerev 11y ago

Can he sue for compensation? Or, better yet, for putting prosecutors into jail for that?

tzs 11y ago
Probably yes on the first. No on the second, for good reason. There wasn't anything in the article that indicated that the prosecutors did anything wrong. They took the evidence they were given by the police, by informants, and by the crime lab employee and presented it at trial. That the police did not give the prosecutors all the evidence the police had, and that a forensic technique that was widely accepted at the time by the FBI and the state turned out to not be accurate is beyond the scope of the prosecutor's role.
- mannykannot 11y ago
  I don't know about this case, but about a month ago I heard another wrongfully-convicted person discussing his case, including the fact that in the agreement that freed him, he waived the option to sue. His stated reason was that his alternative was to stay in jail for the process to work its way through, and in jail, 'accidental' death was just too easy. Paranoid? Given his circumstances, l don't think so.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    If a prosecutor knows someone is innocent and doesnt let them out immediately they should be disbarred.
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      I am pretty sure prosecutors don't have the power to let people out of jail.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  The prosecutor's job is not to robotically, bureaucratically follow a fixed process. They have a lot of latitude and can choose to pursue a defendant for maximum prison time, minimum prison time, something in between, persuade them to take a plea, or drop the charges completely. Many options, really. For this prosecutor's office to have put this fellow away for so many years on not even circumstantial evidence but merely the good faith acceptance of three unreliable sources with criminal records, and the hair which turned out to be erroneously identified, despite the bloody handprint that was not a match, and despite the victim's failure to identify the defendant, is almost obscene. Sadly, however, it's not unheard of at all; our criminal justice system is far from perfect, though it probably still ranks near the top in a world where justice is difficult to obtain in most countries outside of western Europe and North America.

rayiner 11y ago

The state of forensic "science" today is similar to the state of medicine in the 18th century. Bloodletting wasn't an effective treatment, and but it's not like doctors--much less ordinary people--of the time knew any better. Obviously those participating in hiding evidence should be prosecuted, but it's hard to blame everyone else who is going along with what forensic "scientists" tell them. The legitimate scientific establishment has done little to nothing to expose this field as the domain of charlatans. How are lay people supposed to understand the difference?

the_ancient 11y ago
>How are lay people supposed to understand the difference? Well first off lay people not to stop placing government agents on a God like pedestal where by everything a "forensic scientist" from the state utters in court is assumed to be truthful and beyond questioning. This is how we get terrible science and convictions, the public watches a episode of CSI or NCIS where you have infinite zoom and enhance, where you can do facial recognition on a person in a ATM video from 25 miles away, where 2 people can hack all encryption by typing on the same keyboard really fast.... They see this shit, so then when a person from the FBI gets on the stands, says a bunch of big words, and points to the scary man or women at the table saying they did it... the case is over....
- nroets 11y ago
  I mostly agree with you. It is however a serious flaw of the jury system. Forensic science is NOT in the terrible state that the OP makes it out to be.
  - the_ancient 11y ago
    I think the OP is being kind.... I question even the validity of fingerprint matching one of the oldest "Forensic science" fields. Almost nothing in "Forensic science" follows the actual scientific method. There is far far far far far too many assumptions, "intuitive leaps", and formation of a preconceived narrative round "science" They make the evidence fit their story, vs allowing the evidence to tell a story.

ps4fanboy 11y ago

Listen and believe

vijayr 11y ago

The very fact that something like innocence project needs to exist is depressing :(

nicolas_t 11y ago

And this goes to show that if you want a fair trial in any country (even relatively evolved western countries), you need to be rich enough to have a decent legal team. When you read some of the cases from the innocence project, the incompetence is mind boggling. And don't get me started on countries like Japan with 99.7% conviction rate and antiquated laws regarding police arrest. I think that until you have a significant sum of money that can be used to pay for a legal defense team, you are at risk of prison even if you're innocent (of course in most cases the risk is negligible but if you're part of a minority it might not be)...

the_ancient 11y ago
The cases from the innocence project are bad, but they only see the cases in which the person pleaded innocent and was convicted by a jury... Most cases end in a Plea, which innocent people with out proper legal representation, and many with proper legal representation take for a whole host of reason.

reddytowns 11y ago

Another reason why it's best just to close the blinds, turn on the computer, and lay low for the rest of your life, using video games and pornography to entertain and escape. You'll be more likely to duck things like this if no one knows your name.

flippyhead 11y ago

One of the best, most eye-opening books on this subject I've read is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

SeanDav 11y ago

One gets the ridiculous situation where an innocent person in prison, keeps on maintaining that they are innocent and end up serving far longer sentences than guilty people, convicted of very similar crimes, that don't deny their guilt. I am not sure if this applied in this case, but it may well have done.