14 ms·

Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

165 points by MilnerRoute 5y ago

briefcomment 5y ago
How do you execute someone without at least testing DNA on the weapon?
- mk89 5y ago
  Like it was always done before DNA testing, I guess...
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Not having evidence and not caring about available evidence are very different things.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  In this case, the rationale was that there is no DNA evidence that would outweigh the eye witness testimony.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Heh, I love how courts still accept eye witness testimony as reliable in the first place.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Every court system in the world accepts eye witnesses testimony. Reliability is evaluated on a case by case basis.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Its reliability is consistently over-estimated versus what studies tell us about its utility.
  - gbrown 5y ago
    Which is an absurd statement on its face
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Which part do you think is absurd? That eye witness data can be considered or that the DNA evidence is irrelevant? I don't support the death penalty but I see the judge's point. Most DNA evidence isn't very useful and rarely as damning or exculpatory as people think.
      - hedora 5y ago
        You asked for absurd, so: Eye witness testimony is only slightly more reliable as waving purple LEDs around while chanting long words and rambling off conspiracy theories. (Which is apparently now an acceptable form of criminal investigation in the US).
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Is this in reference to something? I did not ask for absurd. I asked what they thought was absurd.
        gbrown 5y ago
        You got your answer: seriously, just do a cursory search about the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
      - gbrown 5y ago
        The idea that eyewitness testimony obviates the need to examine hard evidence is absurd, given how poor people are at providing accurate eyewitness testimony. It’s not that DNA evidence is perfect, it’s that eyewitness testimony is hot garbage.
- analog31 5y ago
  Ruth Bader Ginsberg was apparently quoted as saying: "No well defended person receives the death penalty." One of the issues with death penalty cases is that they require special hand-selected judges and juries who favor the death penalty, and they have a very hard time finding competent defense lawyers. In fact, an extension is "no well defended person gets convicted," which isn't quite as ironclad, but still works pretty well in practice. This is actually a good thing. Our system was intended to make it hard to convict people.
endymi0n 5y ago
> In an effort to prevent his execution, Lee's attorney sought in the post-conviction appeals process to finally have the DNA evidence in the case tested for the first time. [...] Their request was denied. "The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said. Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution? Then again, if execution itself is still legal, I can answer part of that question myself, even if I don't like the answer.
- gbrown 5y ago
  Especially when the current result is based on eyewitness testimony, which is known to be crap.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    Well that kind of depends on the actual testimony, doesn't it? Here, the defendant was neighbors with the victim, and the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.
    - mikeryan 5y ago
      the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least. Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.
      - beerandt 5y ago
        The neighbor witness followed the suspect to a place where he was known/recognized.
        5y ago
cyberlurker 5y ago
Would it be possible to pass a law where judges and prosecutors are punished if someone is executed and it’s later found they were not guilty? Would it be a good or bad idea?
- Semaphor 5y ago
  I mean, that would essentially be a law that makes executions illegal. Which is a law that most civilized countries have.
  - gbrown 5y ago
    It would still allow them to go after notorious people caught in the act where there really is no risk of confusion. I mean, better to just ban it entirely, but I’d take culpability as a half measure.
  - fossislife 5y ago
    It's a law that all civilized countries have. Allowing executions while dismissing evidence makes you uncivilized.
- foepys 5y ago
  It's easier to just get rid of the death sentence all together.
- momothereal 5y ago
  If the country in question has a good track record of punishing judges, prosecutors, and LEA, then it would be abolishing the death penalty _de facto_, as no-one would take that sort of risk over just imprisoning the person for life. If the country does not have a good track record, it doesn't really change anything.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    There are sometimes sitautions where someone's guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt; I don't imagine prosecutors would be particularly afraid to pursue the death penalty for someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik (who got 21 years in jail for the murder of 77 people).
LocalH 5y ago
The death penalty should be abolished, end of discussion. If even a single innocent person is murdered, then an obscene and heinous crime has been committed by the state.
- ta988 5y ago
  I wonder how this argument would be applied to police murders of innocents. How do we deal with that?
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    Train police to de-escalate and avoid police violence at all costs instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect...
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect... Realistically though, for that to work the US needs a sweeping reform of drug and gun laws. Right now, if I'm a drug mule with a ton of meth in my trunk and get stopped on some lonely road, I have the choice between shooting the cop and maybe get away or getting a life in jail for the drugs. Here in Germany, you usually get out after 5, 6 years as a simple mule, and our cops (unless you're on an international route where cops can claim Schengen border duty rights) can't simply demand to open your trunk unless they have reasonable suspicion - and it's really hard to get your hand on a gun. As a result, our cops don't have to be afraid for their life at a random traffic stop. There's a reason why cops are so trigger happy in the US, and it goes way beyond shoddy training.
    - ta988 5y ago
      I've seen part of police training in a big city and was impressed. They have a good portion of their training already on all the different methods of deescalation. With simulators (I tried them it is pretty impressive and immersive), role-play and so on. My guess is that the problem is after training.
AcerbicZero 5y ago
How does the state justify this behavior in 2017? We execute so few people and it’s already so excessively expensive what’s the logic for refusing to test and retest everything? 20+ years in jail waiting to be executed seems pretty cruel, if not all that unusual IMO. Tangential but I also strongly oppose lethal injection as a method of execution - if the state lacks the will to line up a proper firing squad, it has no business executing citizens in the first place.
- chmod600 5y ago
  In some states, a firing squad is an option: https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/south-carolina-becomes-fourth-state-to-approve-firing-squads/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/south-carolina-becomes-fourth-...
- beerandt 5y ago
  If your complaint is that it's too expensive and takes too long, then allowing additional appeals (once the conviction is final) isn't the answer.
tyingq 5y ago
>The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said. Not mentioned is that he was her neighbor. So, yeah, people saw him in the neighborhood, often.
scrps 5y ago
Death is an immutable punishment, that really should be all the logic needed to dissuade people from supporting the death penalty. Locking an innocent person up for n number of years is a massive injustice but at least the person can be freed and compensated.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >at least the person can be freed and compensated. I don't think most innocent people who are freed get any compensation in the U.S.
  - scrps 5y ago
    Do all states have compensation statutes? The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 36 states have compensation statutes of some form. The following 14 states do not: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. https://innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convicted/ https://innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convicted/
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      Anyone want to summarize the argument of these 14 states that isn't "Yes, we as a society locked up an innocent for 30 years, but now that they're free we don't owe them anything"..?
      - GavinMcG 5y ago
        Why would they need an argument? Politics isn't about who has the better argument. It's just that no one in those states has (so far) had the skill, energy, and resources to organize political change on the issue.
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        the legal argument in the U.S for not giving compensation (as I recall) tends to be you should only be compensated if there was legal irregularities (cough, cough) that resulted in your incarceration - for example falsification of evidence, withholding evidence by the police, forced confessions etc. So if things were fair and followed correctly and you were by mistake locked up that's too bad, regrettable but not the state's fault and as such the state does not need to compensate you.
sscarduzio 5y ago
To the pro death penalty puritans: I guess this is what happens when you play god.
aqsalose 5y ago
Concerning DNA testing in general. Recently there was a case where the Finnish police arrested a person as a suspect for a robbery of a convenience store on basis of DNA evidence: the robber had dropped a plastic glove, presumably to hide fingerprints, on the floor of the store. Officers isolated DNA from the glove, searched archives, found a match with a person who had had some minor offense years prior, and brought him in for a questioning. It turned out the DNA-matched first suspect was innocent when the police found a second suspect, who confessed to the crime and whose clothes fitted security camera footage of the robbery better. So how the first suspect's DNA arrived on the gloves at the crime scene? The investigators noticed he told he had visited the same mall where the second suspect (according to his testimony) had obtained the gloves prior to the robbery. Based on the security camera footage from the mall, the investigators concluded that the likeliest way the DNA of the first suspect ended up on the gloves the robber because they rode the same escalator. Like this: https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1200,h_1200,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:eco/13-3-11824031.gif https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1200,h_1200,f_auto... The lesson is, humans shed lot of skin cells around. The DNA from incriminating bodily fluids or similar is much better evidence than random DNA. Source https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 and Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  Or this woman: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
- barbazoo 5y ago
  That's an adorably bad animation but it explains it perfectly
- rhino369 5y ago
  You need to apply Bayes Theorem to DNA evidence, but courts typically don't.
  - 5y ago
themgt 5y ago
This case has been so poorly reported by the mainstream media. Just going to quote a couple other sources about the case and Ledell Lee. AK Supreme Court[1]: At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived. Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair. Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder. Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police. --- AK Supreme Court in Lee's previous rape case[2]: Evidence -- evidence of rape overwhelming -- trial court did not err in denying motion for directed verdict. -- There was overwhelming evidence of the rape and kidnapping from the testimony of the victim and the emergency-room physician; moreover, the evidence linking appellant to the assault was substantial and included fingerprints taken from the place of attack that matched appellant's and semen in the vaginal swabs taken from the victim and appellant's blood that matched, with the chance of an identical match being one in eighty-three million; the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's conviction for the crimes charged; the trial court did not err in denying his motion for directed verdict. Lee was convicted of the kidnapping and rape of a seventeen- year-old girl in Jacksonville, Arkansas. The victim was abducted from her sister's home on the night of November 27, 1990, and was raped in a wooded area behind the house. The victim described her attacker as a tall, black male, but was unable to identify him because he prevented her from seeing his face during the attack. Evidence from a rape-kit examination performed on the victim was submitted to the state crime laboratory for analysis. Hair combings from the victim's clothing contained two Negroid hairs, and semen was identified in vaginal swabs taken from the rape examination. After the analysis, the rape-kit evidence was stored by the state crime lab in a secure freezer in May, 1991. Also, two days after the rape, Jacksonville police officers processed the victim's home for evidence and took latent fingerprints from inside and outside the residence. The case remained in an inactive status until Lee became a suspect in February, 1993. Hand prints and fingerprints, hair samples, and a blood sample were taken from Lee in February, 1993. Lee's palm print matched a palm print found on a bedroom window at the victim's home. Lee's blood was tested along with the victim's blood and the vaginal swabs from the rape kit. The FBI agent who performed the DNA analysis concluded that the probability of the assailant being someone other than Lee was one in eighty-three million from the black population. The palm print and the DNA profile evidence essentially comprised the state's case against Lee. --- The irony here is what actually happened was eye witnesses and direct evidence of the $100 bill connected Lee to Reese's murder ... after that arrest his blood/DNA was sampled and that connected him to additional unsolved cases of raping two women and raping and murdering another woman. He was convicted of both counts of rape, and the murder charge only dropped after a hung jury since he had already been sentenced to death for Resse's murder. The DNA evidence examined by ACLU/Innocence project absolutely doesn't demonstrate he was unjustly convicted in this case, and if you examine the totality of the evidence I don't think it even raises a reasonable doubt. They even found moderate support for his DNA on the murder weapon and the victim's blood on his shoe. Finding someone else's DNA is being dramatically overstated in importance. [1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html [2] https://law.justia.com/cases/arkansas/supreme-court/1996/cr96-466.html https://law.justia.com/cases/arkansas/supreme-court/1996/cr9...
hmart 5y ago
Before I opened the link I was 99% that the article was about an Afro American and ... Bingo!. Sad.
adolph 5y ago
The Innocence Project and ACLU said five of the six hairs tested for mitochondrial DNA excluded Lee as the source. Lee could not be "excluded as a potential source" in one of the hairs. https://www.thv11.com/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-dna-testing-results-debra-reese/91-781451b1-4820-47c5-86a9-52099d7ed00f https://www.thv11.com/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-dna-test... Lee's counsel had argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee
kome 5y ago
Death penalty is barbarism.
qalmakka 5y ago
The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration. The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for centuries (at least since the 1700s) as being completely ineffective as a deterrent, and it has been shunned by most of the western world, the USA remaining the last holdout of such a barbaric practice. Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  "strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment." Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person should _die_, as _punishment_, and that would be fair and just. You are operating from the premise that justice is only about re-education. There are plenty of people who reject this view and say that justice is about both re-education and punishment for the crime. And that yes, justice involves punishment, not re-education. "Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not." What planet are you living on? There are lots of countries far less powerful than the US who execute far more prisoners than the US. The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019.
  - f38zf5vdt 5y ago
    The problem of lifetime state issued punishments that are designed to make people feel really bad is their economic insanity. Applying the death penalty in the US involves spending millions in legal and incarceration fees. It also seems to have no deterrence effect on mass murderers, which the US has a high concentration of. The cost of lifetime imprisonment or execution is outright massive, in the millions over the lifetime of imprisonment. When you look at it in terms of economic output, these sentences are a calamity. For $2m USD spent on achieving a death penalty outcome, you could buy over 600k healthy school lunches for $3 each or pay the salary for one extra school teacher per year over a lifetime.
seer 5y ago
I’ve recently had the privilege of watching “12 angry men” for the first time. It’s a masterpiece in showing how a legal “sure thing” can be so wrong. Legal cases are often constructed with testimony, unreliable evidence, and chance. Its an effort to increase likelihood of certainty using very unreliable data. And human intuition really sucks when it comes to probability calculations. I think that film as no other really captures how wrong we can be, even if we “feel” certain about it. It might sound like a tangent but I think it narrates how errors like this are possible more eloquently than I would ever be able to do on my own.
- beerandt 5y ago
  I recently watched the films "Hannibal," and "Silence of the Lambs," which convinced me that killers who aren't executed will continue to orchestrate murders from inside prison by psychologically manipulating people. I think those films really capture what happens when we only imprison killers, even if we feel certain that there would be no public harm from handing down a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
  - swiley 5y ago
    Sure but lets not add the state to the list of things that can end people's lives.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  I think every country has baffling and shocking miscarriages of justice were someone was thrown in jail for something they didn't do. But you can release someone, even after 20 years. "Oops it wasn't you who raped and strangled that child sorry". The death penalty is final however.
GhostVII 5y ago
Wasn't Lee reported as asking around the neighborhood for tools immediately before the person was murdered? Someone else's DNA being on the murder weapon isn't particularly surprising if that weapon wasn't owned by Lee.
chmod600 5y ago
I skeptical of news stories that ask the readers to play juror based on a reporter's one-sided take, often a lazy one designed for clicks. Sometimes it's necessary, but most of the time it's just generating a lot of low-information outrage. (This is apart from the larger question of whether we should abolish the death penalty. But that's not really news.)
- beerandt 5y ago
  The Louisiana non-unanimous jury verdict saga just got similar, scary, one-sided newspaper treatment. Not necessary because it should or shouldn't have been changed, but because the obvious propaganda was so damn effective. And it wasn't blanket coverage by every local news outlet, but constant, serialized coverage from one, arguably dying, newspaper. Reminds you of just how powerful even a single media outlet can be when it wants to. Also, that any future that newspapers might have will require selling influence, instead of advertising and subscriptions.
beerandt 5y ago
For those concerned with the eye witness testimony: In this case, the neighbor saw the suspect go into the victim's house and then leave, and followed him. At the suspects next stop there was a women who knew him. This is the woman who later ID'd him. This isn't a case of a botched police lineup, or a stranger relying on memory.
hedora 5y ago
Prosecutors are typically promoted based on conviction rates. Each false conviction, plea bargain or guilty plea should count as -20 convictions. It all comes down to incentives. Murdering this man was probably great for all of the involved people’s careers (and I’d be surprised if he is their only victim). If it was a potential career-ender, they’d find some other way to game the system, or others would be promoted instead of them. The same story plays out millions of times a year in the US (though usually with lesser crimes); it’s clearly a systemic issue.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Can we equally punish defenders who get criminals released, who shouldn't be? -20 legal points for each aquitted defendant that goes on to actually be a repeat criminal.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  If what you say is true: that prosecures or promoted based on conviction rates, false convictions should count as -100 convictions- perhaps even more.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
This is why the corporate punishment zealots should be kept in check by sane laws. Giving the state the power to execute people can, did and will go wrong and is too abusable. For example, soon after the Iranian government was overthrown by the UK puppet "shah", within a year butchers who were regarded as brutes suddenly have been delegated to positions of executioners, killing previous government officials. Death is irreversible and what would be the correct punishment for the judge or prosecutor here? If you ever think judges, state attorney's and prosecutors are humans of elevated morals, then I know where you can buy bridges for a good price. To use the state apparatus when sending someone to death row after interpreting "beyond reasonable suspicion" in such a liberal, reckless way is pretty much first degree murder. Monetary fine will not reanimate the dead and is footed by taxpayer money. The death penalty is a ridiculous and archaic concept, it is no better than blood feuds between families or gangs, just applied by the state instead. It should have no place in a civil legal system. Someone said Stalin and Hitler barely avoided execution. Sure thing, they were some monsters, but who elevated them to power? People with the same mentality who welcome the death penalty. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have ever happened if they did not have wide support from coward and dumb citizens along with whatever financed them. Stupidity and cowardice are not fixed via death penalty.
ffggvv 5y ago
you can be guilty and someone else’s dna can be found on the murder weapon. both can be true. it actually seems pretty easy to not get your own dna on it
raincom 5y ago
Legalese: "Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later." This is how the justice system hides behind its sins: Judges/Officials/Prosecutors say "there is no blood on my hands", Lee was "lawfully executed". Sidestepping the question.
heldrida 5y ago
I don't even need to click, to know that the man has a certain dark skin colour...

165 points by MilnerRoute 5y ago

briefcomment 5y ago

How do you execute someone without at least testing DNA on the weapon?

mk89 5y ago
Like it was always done before DNA testing, I guess...
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Not having evidence and not caring about available evidence are very different things.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
In this case, the rationale was that there is no DNA evidence that would outweigh the eye witness testimony.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Heh, I love how courts still accept eye witness testimony as reliable in the first place.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Every court system in the world accepts eye witnesses testimony. Reliability is evaluated on a case by case basis.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Its reliability is consistently over-estimated versus what studies tell us about its utility.
- gbrown 5y ago
  Which is an absurd statement on its face
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Which part do you think is absurd? That eye witness data can be considered or that the DNA evidence is irrelevant? I don't support the death penalty but I see the judge's point. Most DNA evidence isn't very useful and rarely as damning or exculpatory as people think.
    - hedora 5y ago
      You asked for absurd, so: Eye witness testimony is only slightly more reliable as waving purple LEDs around while chanting long words and rambling off conspiracy theories. (Which is apparently now an acceptable form of criminal investigation in the US).
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Is this in reference to something? I did not ask for absurd. I asked what they thought was absurd.
        gbrown 5y ago
        You got your answer: seriously, just do a cursory search about the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
    - gbrown 5y ago
      The idea that eyewitness testimony obviates the need to examine hard evidence is absurd, given how poor people are at providing accurate eyewitness testimony. It’s not that DNA evidence is perfect, it’s that eyewitness testimony is hot garbage.
analog31 5y ago
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was apparently quoted as saying: "No well defended person receives the death penalty." One of the issues with death penalty cases is that they require special hand-selected judges and juries who favor the death penalty, and they have a very hard time finding competent defense lawyers. In fact, an extension is "no well defended person gets convicted," which isn't quite as ironclad, but still works pretty well in practice. This is actually a good thing. Our system was intended to make it hard to convict people.

endymi0n 5y ago

> In an effort to prevent his execution, Lee's attorney sought in the post-conviction appeals process to finally have the DNA evidence in the case tested for the first time. [...] Their request was denied. "The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said. Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution? Then again, if execution itself is still legal, I can answer part of that question myself, even if I don't like the answer.

gbrown 5y ago
Especially when the current result is based on eyewitness testimony, which is known to be crap.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Well that kind of depends on the actual testimony, doesn't it? Here, the defendant was neighbors with the victim, and the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.
  - mikeryan 5y ago
    the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least. Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      The neighbor witness followed the suspect to a place where he was known/recognized.
      - 5y ago

cyberlurker 5y ago

Would it be possible to pass a law where judges and prosecutors are punished if someone is executed and it’s later found they were not guilty? Would it be a good or bad idea?

Semaphor 5y ago
I mean, that would essentially be a law that makes executions illegal. Which is a law that most civilized countries have.
- gbrown 5y ago
  It would still allow them to go after notorious people caught in the act where there really is no risk of confusion. I mean, better to just ban it entirely, but I’d take culpability as a half measure.
- fossislife 5y ago
  It's a law that all civilized countries have. Allowing executions while dismissing evidence makes you uncivilized.
foepys 5y ago
It's easier to just get rid of the death sentence all together.
momothereal 5y ago
If the country in question has a good track record of punishing judges, prosecutors, and LEA, then it would be abolishing the death penalty _de facto_, as no-one would take that sort of risk over just imprisoning the person for life. If the country does not have a good track record, it doesn't really change anything.
- logicchains 5y ago
  There are sometimes sitautions where someone's guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt; I don't imagine prosecutors would be particularly afraid to pursue the death penalty for someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik (who got 21 years in jail for the murder of 77 people).

LocalH 5y ago

The death penalty should be abolished, end of discussion. If even a single innocent person is murdered, then an obscene and heinous crime has been committed by the state.

ta988 5y ago
I wonder how this argument would be applied to police murders of innocents. How do we deal with that?
- t0mas88 5y ago
  Train police to de-escalate and avoid police violence at all costs instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect...
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect... Realistically though, for that to work the US needs a sweeping reform of drug and gun laws. Right now, if I'm a drug mule with a ton of meth in my trunk and get stopped on some lonely road, I have the choice between shooting the cop and maybe get away or getting a life in jail for the drugs. Here in Germany, you usually get out after 5, 6 years as a simple mule, and our cops (unless you're on an international route where cops can claim Schengen border duty rights) can't simply demand to open your trunk unless they have reasonable suspicion - and it's really hard to get your hand on a gun. As a result, our cops don't have to be afraid for their life at a random traffic stop. There's a reason why cops are so trigger happy in the US, and it goes way beyond shoddy training.
  - ta988 5y ago
    I've seen part of police training in a big city and was impressed. They have a good portion of their training already on all the different methods of deescalation. With simulators (I tried them it is pretty impressive and immersive), role-play and so on. My guess is that the problem is after training.

AcerbicZero 5y ago

How does the state justify this behavior in 2017? We execute so few people and it’s already so excessively expensive what’s the logic for refusing to test and retest everything? 20+ years in jail waiting to be executed seems pretty cruel, if not all that unusual IMO. Tangential but I also strongly oppose lethal injection as a method of execution - if the state lacks the will to line up a proper firing squad, it has no business executing citizens in the first place.

chmod600 5y ago
In some states, a firing squad is an option: https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/south-carolina-becomes-fourth-state-to-approve-firing-squads/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/south-carolina-becomes-fourth-...
beerandt 5y ago
If your complaint is that it's too expensive and takes too long, then allowing additional appeals (once the conviction is final) isn't the answer.

tyingq 5y ago

>The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said. Not mentioned is that he was her neighbor. So, yeah, people saw him in the neighborhood, often.

scrps 5y ago

Death is an immutable punishment, that really should be all the logic needed to dissuade people from supporting the death penalty. Locking an innocent person up for n number of years is a massive injustice but at least the person can be freed and compensated.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>at least the person can be freed and compensated. I don't think most innocent people who are freed get any compensation in the U.S.
- scrps 5y ago
  Do all states have compensation statutes? The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 36 states have compensation statutes of some form. The following 14 states do not: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. https://innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convicted/ https://innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convicted/
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    Anyone want to summarize the argument of these 14 states that isn't "Yes, we as a society locked up an innocent for 30 years, but now that they're free we don't owe them anything"..?
    - GavinMcG 5y ago
      Why would they need an argument? Politics isn't about who has the better argument. It's just that no one in those states has (so far) had the skill, energy, and resources to organize political change on the issue.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        the legal argument in the U.S for not giving compensation (as I recall) tends to be you should only be compensated if there was legal irregularities (cough, cough) that resulted in your incarceration - for example falsification of evidence, withholding evidence by the police, forced confessions etc. So if things were fair and followed correctly and you were by mistake locked up that's too bad, regrettable but not the state's fault and as such the state does not need to compensate you.

sscarduzio 5y ago

To the pro death penalty puritans: I guess this is what happens when you play god.

aqsalose 5y ago

Concerning DNA testing in general. Recently there was a case where the Finnish police arrested a person as a suspect for a robbery of a convenience store on basis of DNA evidence: the robber had dropped a plastic glove, presumably to hide fingerprints, on the floor of the store. Officers isolated DNA from the glove, searched archives, found a match with a person who had had some minor offense years prior, and brought him in for a questioning. It turned out the DNA-matched first suspect was innocent when the police found a second suspect, who confessed to the crime and whose clothes fitted security camera footage of the robbery better. So how the first suspect's DNA arrived on the gloves at the crime scene? The investigators noticed he told he had visited the same mall where the second suspect (according to his testimony) had obtained the gloves prior to the robbery. Based on the security camera footage from the mall, the investigators concluded that the likeliest way the DNA of the first suspect ended up on the gloves the robber because they rode the same escalator. Like this: https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1200,h_1200,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:eco/13-3-11824031.gif https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1200,h_1200,f_auto... The lesson is, humans shed lot of skin cells around. The DNA from incriminating bodily fluids or similar is much better evidence than random DNA. Source https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 and Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

gherkinnn 5y ago
Or this woman: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
barbazoo 5y ago
That's an adorably bad animation but it explains it perfectly
rhino369 5y ago
You need to apply Bayes Theorem to DNA evidence, but courts typically don't.
- 5y ago

themgt 5y ago

This case has been so poorly reported by the mainstream media. Just going to quote a couple other sources about the case and Ledell Lee. AK Supreme Court[1]: At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived. Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair. Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder. Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police. --- AK Supreme Court in Lee's previous rape case[2]: Evidence -- evidence of rape overwhelming -- trial court did not err in denying motion for directed verdict. -- There was overwhelming evidence of the rape and kidnapping from the testimony of the victim and the emergency-room physician; moreover, the evidence linking appellant to the assault was substantial and included fingerprints taken from the place of attack that matched appellant's and semen in the vaginal swabs taken from the victim and appellant's blood that matched, with the chance of an identical match being one in eighty-three million; the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's conviction for the crimes charged; the trial court did not err in denying his motion for directed verdict. Lee was convicted of the kidnapping and rape of a seventeen- year-old girl in Jacksonville, Arkansas. The victim was abducted from her sister's home on the night of November 27, 1990, and was raped in a wooded area behind the house. The victim described her attacker as a tall, black male, but was unable to identify him because he prevented her from seeing his face during the attack. Evidence from a rape-kit examination performed on the victim was submitted to the state crime laboratory for analysis. Hair combings from the victim's clothing contained two Negroid hairs, and semen was identified in vaginal swabs taken from the rape examination. After the analysis, the rape-kit evidence was stored by the state crime lab in a secure freezer in May, 1991. Also, two days after the rape, Jacksonville police officers processed the victim's home for evidence and took latent fingerprints from inside and outside the residence. The case remained in an inactive status until Lee became a suspect in February, 1993. Hand prints and fingerprints, hair samples, and a blood sample were taken from Lee in February, 1993. Lee's palm print matched a palm print found on a bedroom window at the victim's home. Lee's blood was tested along with the victim's blood and the vaginal swabs from the rape kit. The FBI agent who performed the DNA analysis concluded that the probability of the assailant being someone other than Lee was one in eighty-three million from the black population. The palm print and the DNA profile evidence essentially comprised the state's case against Lee. --- The irony here is what actually happened was eye witnesses and direct evidence of the $100 bill connected Lee to Reese's murder ... after that arrest his blood/DNA was sampled and that connected him to additional unsolved cases of raping two women and raping and murdering another woman. He was convicted of both counts of rape, and the murder charge only dropped after a hung jury since he had already been sentenced to death for Resse's murder. The DNA evidence examined by ACLU/Innocence project absolutely doesn't demonstrate he was unjustly convicted in this case, and if you examine the totality of the evidence I don't think it even raises a reasonable doubt. They even found moderate support for his DNA on the murder weapon and the victim's blood on his shoe. Finding someone else's DNA is being dramatically overstated in importance. [1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html [2] https://law.justia.com/cases/arkansas/supreme-court/1996/cr96-466.html https://law.justia.com/cases/arkansas/supreme-court/1996/cr9...

hmart 5y ago

Before I opened the link I was 99% that the article was about an Afro American and ... Bingo!. Sad.

adolph 5y ago

The Innocence Project and ACLU said five of the six hairs tested for mitochondrial DNA excluded Lee as the source. Lee could not be "excluded as a potential source" in one of the hairs. https://www.thv11.com/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-dna-testing-results-debra-reese/91-781451b1-4820-47c5-86a9-52099d7ed00f https://www.thv11.com/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-dna-test... Lee's counsel had argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee

kome 5y ago

Death penalty is barbarism.

qalmakka 5y ago

The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration. The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for centuries (at least since the 1700s) as being completely ineffective as a deterrent, and it has been shunned by most of the western world, the USA remaining the last holdout of such a barbaric practice. Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
"strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment." Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person should _die_, as _punishment_, and that would be fair and just. You are operating from the premise that justice is only about re-education. There are plenty of people who reject this view and say that justice is about both re-education and punishment for the crime. And that yes, justice involves punishment, not re-education. "Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not." What planet are you living on? There are lots of countries far less powerful than the US who execute far more prisoners than the US. The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019.
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  The problem of lifetime state issued punishments that are designed to make people feel really bad is their economic insanity. Applying the death penalty in the US involves spending millions in legal and incarceration fees. It also seems to have no deterrence effect on mass murderers, which the US has a high concentration of. The cost of lifetime imprisonment or execution is outright massive, in the millions over the lifetime of imprisonment. When you look at it in terms of economic output, these sentences are a calamity. For $2m USD spent on achieving a death penalty outcome, you could buy over 600k healthy school lunches for $3 each or pay the salary for one extra school teacher per year over a lifetime.

seer 5y ago

I’ve recently had the privilege of watching “12 angry men” for the first time. It’s a masterpiece in showing how a legal “sure thing” can be so wrong. Legal cases are often constructed with testimony, unreliable evidence, and chance. Its an effort to increase likelihood of certainty using very unreliable data. And human intuition really sucks when it comes to probability calculations. I think that film as no other really captures how wrong we can be, even if we “feel” certain about it. It might sound like a tangent but I think it narrates how errors like this are possible more eloquently than I would ever be able to do on my own.

beerandt 5y ago
I recently watched the films "Hannibal," and "Silence of the Lambs," which convinced me that killers who aren't executed will continue to orchestrate murders from inside prison by psychologically manipulating people. I think those films really capture what happens when we only imprison killers, even if we feel certain that there would be no public harm from handing down a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
- swiley 5y ago
  Sure but lets not add the state to the list of things that can end people's lives.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
I think every country has baffling and shocking miscarriages of justice were someone was thrown in jail for something they didn't do. But you can release someone, even after 20 years. "Oops it wasn't you who raped and strangled that child sorry". The death penalty is final however.

GhostVII 5y ago

Wasn't Lee reported as asking around the neighborhood for tools immediately before the person was murdered? Someone else's DNA being on the murder weapon isn't particularly surprising if that weapon wasn't owned by Lee.

chmod600 5y ago

I skeptical of news stories that ask the readers to play juror based on a reporter's one-sided take, often a lazy one designed for clicks. Sometimes it's necessary, but most of the time it's just generating a lot of low-information outrage. (This is apart from the larger question of whether we should abolish the death penalty. But that's not really news.)

beerandt 5y ago
The Louisiana non-unanimous jury verdict saga just got similar, scary, one-sided newspaper treatment. Not necessary because it should or shouldn't have been changed, but because the obvious propaganda was so damn effective. And it wasn't blanket coverage by every local news outlet, but constant, serialized coverage from one, arguably dying, newspaper. Reminds you of just how powerful even a single media outlet can be when it wants to. Also, that any future that newspapers might have will require selling influence, instead of advertising and subscriptions.

beerandt 5y ago

For those concerned with the eye witness testimony: In this case, the neighbor saw the suspect go into the victim's house and then leave, and followed him. At the suspects next stop there was a women who knew him. This is the woman who later ID'd him. This isn't a case of a botched police lineup, or a stranger relying on memory.

hedora 5y ago

Prosecutors are typically promoted based on conviction rates. Each false conviction, plea bargain or guilty plea should count as -20 convictions. It all comes down to incentives. Murdering this man was probably great for all of the involved people’s careers (and I’d be surprised if he is their only victim). If it was a potential career-ender, they’d find some other way to game the system, or others would be promoted instead of them. The same story plays out millions of times a year in the US (though usually with lesser crimes); it’s clearly a systemic issue.

beerandt 5y ago
Can we equally punish defenders who get criminals released, who shouldn't be? -20 legal points for each aquitted defendant that goes on to actually be a repeat criminal.
jmercouris 5y ago
If what you say is true: that prosecures or promoted based on conviction rates, false convictions should count as -100 convictions- perhaps even more.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

This is why the corporate punishment zealots should be kept in check by sane laws. Giving the state the power to execute people can, did and will go wrong and is too abusable. For example, soon after the Iranian government was overthrown by the UK puppet "shah", within a year butchers who were regarded as brutes suddenly have been delegated to positions of executioners, killing previous government officials. Death is irreversible and what would be the correct punishment for the judge or prosecutor here? If you ever think judges, state attorney's and prosecutors are humans of elevated morals, then I know where you can buy bridges for a good price. To use the state apparatus when sending someone to death row after interpreting "beyond reasonable suspicion" in such a liberal, reckless way is pretty much first degree murder. Monetary fine will not reanimate the dead and is footed by taxpayer money. The death penalty is a ridiculous and archaic concept, it is no better than blood feuds between families or gangs, just applied by the state instead. It should have no place in a civil legal system. Someone said Stalin and Hitler barely avoided execution. Sure thing, they were some monsters, but who elevated them to power? People with the same mentality who welcome the death penalty. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have ever happened if they did not have wide support from coward and dumb citizens along with whatever financed them. Stupidity and cowardice are not fixed via death penalty.

ffggvv 5y ago

you can be guilty and someone else’s dna can be found on the murder weapon. both can be true. it actually seems pretty easy to not get your own dna on it

raincom 5y ago

Legalese: "Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later." This is how the justice system hides behind its sins: Judges/Officials/Prosecutors say "there is no blood on my hands", Lee was "lawfully executed". Sidestepping the question.

heldrida 5y ago

I don't even need to click, to know that the man has a certain dark skin colour...