The StandDown Texas Project

National Registry of Exonerations News & Twitter Q&A;

The National Registry of Exonerations hosts a Twitter Q&A today at 1:00 pm (EDT), 12:00 noon (CDT).

At 1:00 p.m. Eastern today, Professor Gross and Maurice Possley, the Registry’s lead writer/investigator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will host a Twitter Q & A on their findings. The media and the public are invited to participate by following #NRE12 or #innocence or @exonerationlist.

The organization has also issued a news release, "Prosecutors and Police are Assisting with Exonerations at Record High Levels, New Data Shows," available in Adobe .pdf format.  Here's the beginning:

In 2012, the number of cases in which prosecutors or police helped exonerate innocent defendants increased dramatically, according to a new report released today by the National Registry of Exonerations. Of 63 known exonerations in 2012, law enforcement initiated or cooperated in 34 or more than half (54 %).

Since 1989, prosecutors and police cooperated in 30 percent of the exonerations that the Registry has been able to identify (317 of 1050 exonerations in the national database at the end of last year). In 2012, for the first time, law enforcement cooperated in the majority of known exonerations. The previous high was 2008 when prosecutors or police assisted in 22 of 57 known exonerations (39 percent). In general, official cooperation is least likely among exonerations in capital murder and mass child sex abuse cases, and most likely in robbery and drug crime exonerations.

“We see a clear trend. Prosecutors and police are more open to re-investigating cases and clearing the names of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted,” said Michigan Law professor Samuel Gross, editor of the Registry and author of the “2012 Update” released today. “This is as it should be. The purpose of law enforcement is to seek truth and pursue justice. I’m glad to see they are now doing so more often after conviction, to help correct some of the terrible mistakes we sometimes make.”

Earlier coverage of the National Registry of Exonerations begins at the link. 

McCleskey v. Kemp: 25 Years Later

A consortium of organizations has created the website, McCleskey v. Kemp: 25 Years Later.

Twenty-five years ago this April 22, the Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp allowed our criminal justice system to relegate Blacks and Latinos to second-class citizen status simply because of their race or ethnicity.

In McCleskey, a majority of the court ruled that it was "inevitable" that Blacks would be treated worse by the criminal justice system and that the Constitution is only violated where it is proven that a specific person in a specific case intentionally discriminates against the defendant because of his or her race.

There exists today significant racial disparities at many critical stages of the criminal justice, resulting in Blacks and Latinos being treated differently than whites in comparable circumstances.

EJS has joined together with the following organizations to raise awareness this week of the April 22 anniversary of McCleskey:

NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
ACLU Capital Punishment Project
Capital Litigation Communications Project
Center for Death Penalty Litigation Inc.
Death Penalty Information Center
Equal Justice USA
Innocence Project
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
Proteus Fund

You can join our efforts to awaken America from what Cornel West calls the "long slumber of indifference":

•  Visit our website;
• Spread the word about the McCleskey decision's 25th anniversary and get involved; and,
• Connect with our partner organizations and lend your support.

Listen to the oral argument and read the decision (via LDF, which argued the case before the Supreme Court.)

Join the #McCleskey conversation on Twitter (kicked off by the ACLU Capital Punishment Project)

Hear Michelle Alexander describing the "new Jim Crow"

Watch Bryan Stevenson share some hard truths about America's justice system

The Supreme Court has never reconsidered McCleskey despite the fact that this decision has yielded enormous negative consequences that extend far beyond the confines of courthouses and jail cells. By sanctioning racial disproportionality in the administration of criminal justice, McCleskey has caused significant racial disparities in access to meaningful employment, to public housing, to higher education, and to voting.

Justice Lewis Powell, the author of McCleskey, later admitted to a biographer that he was wrong in that decision and that he belatedly found capital punishment to be unworkable.

By condoning criminal justice laws and policies which disproportionately impact communities of color, the Supreme Court has endorsed a system of justice that fosters racism by ignoring it.

There will be more on McCleskey, I'm certain, in the upcoming Race and the Death Penalty symposium at the University at Albany symposium, marking the contribution of David Baldus' papers to the University's National Death Penalty Archive.  Last year's Baldus Academic Conference & Tribute at the University of Iowa College of Law also offered significant discussion of McCleskey.

Baldus was co-author of the chapter on McCleskey v. Kemp for Capital Punishment Stories, and was a participant in 2007 symposium at UT Law which featured contributors to the book.

Related posts are in the race index.  Oyez also provides more on  McCleskey v. Kemp.

Bryan Stevenson at TED

Bryan Stevenson, leader of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, has a TED Talk, "We need to talk about an injustice."  It's a much-watch.

In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system

One takeaway:

"We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.”

He will be the keynote speaker at a UT Law symposium later this month in Austin, Lynching and the Death Penalty, noted at the link.

Getting It Right

That's the title of a new widget from the Innocence Project and University of Virginia Law prof Brandon Garrett, author of the recently published, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong.

Here's what the IP has to say in announcing the widget:

The Innocence Project today launched a new multimedia resource on the central causes of wrongful convictions and proven reforms to prevent injustice. The new interactive widget, “Getting it Right,” is embeddable on any website and features videos, case studies and in-depth research on forensics, false confessions, eyewitness identification, informant testimony, defense representation and conduct by police and prosecutors.

The widget was produced in partnership with University of Virginia Law School Professor Brandon Garrett, whose 2011 book, “Convicting the Innocent,” has earned rave reviews and provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the causes of wrongful convictions later overturned through DNA testing.

I'll add a link to the site in the left-column webroll, "Innocence Projects & Resources."

Earlier coverage of Brandon Garrett and his book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, begins at this link.

Novel Tweeting

Simon Owens posts, "The Live-Tweeting of a Murderer's Execution," at The Next Web.

Ben Tribbett was not a witness to Teresa Lewis’s execution last Thursday, but this did not stop him from tweeting a minute-by-minute narrative of the event as it took place. The execution — which occurred in Virginia’s death chamber — reached its end a few minutes after 9 p.m., with the first news outlet confirming her death around 9:15. But Tribbett, a Virginia-based political blogger, began his live updates as Lewis was walked into the death chamber.

“Virginia Execution Protocol: 8:50: The condemned inmate is led in restraints to the execution chamber where she is seated on the execution gurney, then placed on her back,” he tweeted. “Guards then strap the inmate down at various points.”

The first three words of that initial tweet shed light into how Tribbett knew the play-by-play of the night despite not being present. The blogger told me via phone that he had come across an execution protocol published on the website of a northern Virginia daily newspaper. It had been posted a few years ago because of a highly-publicized execution of a prisoner who had once lived in the county where the newspaper is based. Because executions carried out by the government are a closely-watched, delicate affair, they are carried out in a carefully-timed, rehearsed way. The prison guards often run through a mock execution beforehand and they leave little room for error. This is why Tribbett is fairly certain that the protocol from an execution that took place years before matched the Thursday execution exactly.

I asked Tribbett why he was so interested in this execution.

“It was a big case to begin with,” he replied. “She was a female. She was not the trigger man in the crime. It got national attention for that. The actual killers got life in prison rather than the death penalty. She was mentally retarded, but one point above where the Supreme Court cuts off execution for the mentally retarded.”

And:

Over the course of the night, Tribbett said, his tweets were retweeted more than 1,000 times and he received over 100 new followers. “A lot of the retweets came from Virginia [Twitter users] and from people following this who were outraged by the case. A bunch of my followers online were shocked. I got a lot of @ replies saying, ‘are you really live tweeting the execution?’”

“Virginia Execution Protocol Approx. 9:11,” Tribbett’s last live-tweet reads. “The curtain is closed again and a physician examines the body and pronounces death.” During this examination, the physician was likely unaware that thousands of Twitter users were peering over his shoulder, contemplating what it means to condemn another human being to die.

More on the execution, here.  Since we're on this topic and California's recently enacted lethal injection protocol has been in the news, you can view them in Adobe .pdf format.

Texas Forensic Science Commission to Meet Friday

The FSC meeting will convene at 9:30 am tomorrow morning in the Omni Madalay Hotel in Las Colinas, near downtown Dallas.  The topic of arson investigations is on the Commission's agenda.

As it did in January, the Innocence Project will webcast the meeting.  It will be available at this LINK.  In announcing the webcast, the Innocence Project said:

The Willingham case was not discussed when the commission met in January, but it is on the agenda for Friday’s meeting.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission was created by the Texas Legislature in 2005 for the purpose of investigating all allegations of negligence or misconduct that would significantly affect the results of forensic analysis.  

The Innocence Project formally asked the commission to investigate the Willingham and Willis cases in 2006. That request specifically asked the commission to determine whether there was negligence or misconduct in the forensic analysis that initially deemed the fire arson and – importantly – to determine whether other arson convictions in Texas may have been based on the same kind of unreliable forensic analysis.

The January meeting in McAllen produced fireworks when Chairman John Bradley violated the Texas Open Meetings Act by closing the meeting to one camera crew, noted here.

Earlier coverage of the Commission begins with this post.

Earlier coverage of the Todd Willingham case begins with this post.  All coverage is available through the Todd Willingham category index.

The Beyler report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission is here in Adobe .pdf format.

David Grann's September 2009 New Yorker article is noted here.    Steve Mills and Maurice Possley first reported on the case in a 2004 Chicago Tribune series on junk science.  The December 9, 2004 report was titled,"Man executed on disproved forensics."

The Innocence Project, which webcast Friday's FSC meeting, has a Todd Willingham resource page which provides a concise overview of the Willingham case with links to all relevant documents.

Case Law Now on Google Scholar

Thanks to TechnoLawyer's Blawgworld, I've read Dan Friedlander's Law On My Phone post, "Google Enters Into The Realm Of Legal Research And Adds Legal Opinions To Google Scholar."  Here's a snippet from the beginning:

Is this the beginning of the end for Westlaw and Lexis? Today, Google added the ability to search legal opinions through Google Scholar. As a litigator, I rely quite heavily on Westlaw to conduct online legal research and have become quite proficient at creating searches that will quickly and efficiently get me good results. (I have used Lexis as well, and don't intend to debate the differences between the two services.) But, as good as Westlaw's database is, their searches are slow and their web interface is cluttered.

I was wondering when Google was going to enter the legal research field and was excited to hear that the day has finally come. Considering that Westlaw and Lexis have had a monopoly over online legal research for the last 20 years, I was curious to see Google's take on legal research. After all, who knows search better than Google?

After playing with Google Scholar for a couple of hours, I am very impressed with the service. It is nothing short of amazing and will create some serious competition for Westlaw and Lexis. It is important to note that, as of today, only legal opinions and journals are available through Google's database. In that sense, and until statues and regulations and included, it is not yet a comprehensive research tool for attorneys. I wouldn't think this would be very difficult for Google to add and, as is evident from the way Google treats case citations and references related cases (see below), statutory annotations and links to citing cases should follow.

In order to get the full benefit of Google Scholar's legal search capabilities, searches should be conducted through the Advanced Search page. Scroll to the bottom of the page to select your jurisdiction. You may also want to increase the number of returned search results to 50 or 100 in the upper right hand corner of the page or in your search preferences. Once your jurisdictions are selected, the various search fields at the top of the page provide a lot of flexibility in specifying search parameters.

The Google Blog has more:

As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that's a problem: Laws that you don't know about, you can't follow — or make effective arguments to change.

Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).