Repercussions

This will not come as a surprise to most of you, but the Houston Chronicle seems flabbergasted that prosecutors are rarely held accountable for convicting the innocent; they are quick to point out that Ken Anderson received a whopping 10 day sentence for his role in sending Michael Morton to prison for over 20 years, and that Charles Sebesta was disbarred for his actions that resulted in Anthony Graves’ 18 years of wrongful incarceration.

            In fact, hardly any time at all is spent on the report, or the many, many overturned cases here in Texas that have not resulted in any repercussions for prosecutors. Mo mention of medical ‘experts’ who have used faulty evidence to convict and yet continue their careers as witnesses but still, it’s a good thing to see a study like this getting attention from a major newspaper.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/Prosecutors-rarely-disciplined-for-misconduct-7215179.php

Wharton County

Hmmm…

“In a hearing earlier this month, Assistant District Attorney Nathan Wood told a judge that his boss, District Attorney Ross Kurtz, told him to keep black residents off  juries in criminal trials in order to improve the prosecution's chances of winning the case.

"I was not 'instructed' to strike black jurors so much as I was advised or encouraged to do so as a matter of trial strategy," Wood recently told a judge. "Whatever the true intentions behind the statements made in our office, they made me feel uncomfortable."”

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Wharton-County-prosecutor-says-he-was-told-to-6949222.php?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Parallels

I’ve been reading a lot of studies on the suggestibility and memories of children this week; probably because of the San Antonio 4 case. I see so many parelells between the cases; the age of the supposed victims, the possibility of vindictive lovers, the media frenzy surrounding the cases…It’s crazy how much they have in common.

Anyway, I found an interesting piece that gathers several studies together and examines what we knew and what we didn’t know about children’s testimony around that time period. Suggestibility, interview methods, and their effects on memory are all addressed; it's long, but very interesting.

   http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1240&context=lcp

Guiltocent

Harris County is currently wrestling with the issue of whether ‘not guilty’ actually means ‘innocent’. Alfred Dewayne Brown recently applied for compensation for the 12 years he spent in TDJ. Although I believe the ultimate decision rests with the state comptroller, Houston’s police union continues to insist that he is guilty and therefore ineligible.

This article by the Houston Chronicle presents part of the story; that phone records which could have been helpful to Brown’s defense were never presented to the defense, and were in fact hidden away in a detective’s garage. What it does not mention, however, was how Brown’s girlfriend and alibi at the time was bullied andthreatened by members of a grand jury into reversing her testimony; she flipped from saying that Brown had spoken to her by phone from their apartment at the time of the murders, to claiming that he had admitted to her that he was guilty.

            Devon Anderson decided that there was no longer enough evidence to try him and dismissed the charges. You would think that an overturned conviction and dismissal would be enough to return him to his previous legal status; innocent until proven guilty. But because no official has declared him ‘actually innocent’, he may be told to piss off without a penny for the 12 years gone.

            The horror presented in these articles is that of a guilty man getting one over onthe system; that Brown may be guilty and therefore does not deserve to be paid for his time. However, the most basic premise of our justice system is Blackstone’s formulation, that “the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer”. When we abandon that principle, when we relax the standard of proof as happened in Carlos Coy’s case, we end up at a point where anyone who comes before the court is more likely to suffer than not.

Even More on San Antonio's 4

     Bexar County judge Pat Priest has finally ruled on the case of the San Antonio 4; while not declaring them ‘actually innocent’, which would allow them to receive compensation for wrongful imprisonment, he did recommend a new trial. DA Nico LaHood has said it’s unlikely that his office will pursue the cases.

     This is great news for these four women and their families; I wish it were more well known that Nancy Kellog, the expert who provided the now discredited science that lead to their convictions, was still working on cases for the District Attorney’s office.

     Despite offering suspect testimony in at least one other case mentioned in this article, Kellog has provided evidence for the prosecution in possibly hundreds of cases. We’ve talked before about the weight of testimony, and how juries often give more weight to the testimony of individuals presented as experts; Coy’s trial was packed full of these ‘experts’, from Susan Szczygielski the therapist to Heidi Ruiz, the ‘relentless tigress’ who doesn’t take no for an answer.