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Tag: wrongful conviction
Houston Police End Use Of Drug Tests That Helped Produce Wrongful Convictions

Houston Police End Use Of Drug Tests That Helped Produce Wrongful Convictions

Reprinted with permission fromProPublica.

The Houston Police Department has ended its longstanding practice of using $2 chemical kits to make drugs arrests, a policy that had contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions in recent years.

In announcing the change, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department was abandoning the use of the kits, known formally as chemical field tests, because conducting the tests in the field had exposed officers to the dangers posed by potentially lethal drugs such as fentanyl. He did not address the recent scandal that had shown the unreliable tests to have often been the only evidence used to gain guilty pleas from innocent defendants.

The hundreds of wrongful convictions, reported on by ProPublica and the New York Times last July, had moved then-Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson to require that any positive field test be confirmed in the crime lab before a guilty plea could be won. ProPublica, in a subsequent article on the field tests used to identify fentanyl, had highlighted the threat to police officers.

The Drug Enforcement Administration last year warned local police that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid sold on the street, is toxic in tiny doses when breathed in or exposed to skin. In May, a police officer in Ohio collapsed and was hospitalized after merely brushing the drug off his uniform with his bare hand. Acevedo said Houston police recently recovered three kilos of fentanyl.

“That’s quite a few doses, lethal doses, of this pretty bad substance,” Acevedo said. The Houston Forensic Science Center also identified another potent synthetic opioid, carfentanil, in a drug evidence sample earlier this year.

The field tests have been used by police departments across the country for decades. Officers simply drop a suspicious substance into a pouch of chemicals and use supposedly telltale changes in color to make arrests for cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and other illegal drugs. But virtually everyone in the criminal justice system – prosecutor, judges, lab scientists, defense lawyers – has had plenty of reason to know the tests are faulty. Courts in most states, in fact, bar the tests from being used in evidence in a criminal trial, saying the tests do not constitute forensic science.

But as increasing numbers of criminal drug cases are resolved through plea bargains, the tests have become enormously consequential. District attorneys in many jurisdictions allowed prosecutors to use the tests to gain guilty pleas even without confirmation by a lab.

ProPublica’s reporting on the long and troubled use of the tests prompted the district attorney’s office in Portland, Oregon, to alter its practice and require lab confirmation before guilty pleas were entered. A modest review of recent cases in Portland done by the prosecutor’s office resulted in the vacating of five criminal convictions.

In 2016, a panel created by lawmakers in Texas formally termed the field tests too unreliable to trust in criminal cases, and called on crime laboratories across the state to confirm drug evidence in every prosecution.

Without field tests, Acevedo said officers in Houston and across Harris County will instead use their own “expertise” in deciding when to make drug arrests. Officers have “a wealth of training and experience into what narcotics look like, what they feel like in terms of the packaging, the color, the appearance,” he said.

Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, said that dropping field tests makes officers’ jobs both safer and easier. Gamaldi acknowledged that making arrests based only on officers’ beliefs about whether substances are illegal drugs does create a risk of wrongful arrests. “There is certainly that fear,” he said.

Former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland had told ProPublica last year that he thought the field tests should be abandoned, saying officers were not chemists and shouldn’t be conducting experiments on the hoods of their patrol cars.

On Friday, McClelland told the Houston Chronicle that the policy change was “a very positive step for the criminal justice process.”

“I don’t think any law enforcement agency in America should be doing this anymore,” he told the Chronicle.

Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, said he had no love for the field tests, calling them erratic and unreliable. But leaving decisions about arrests to an officer’s mere observations, he said, could wind up producing wrongful convictions too, maybe even greater numbers.

Ryan Gabrielson is a reporter for ProPublica covering the U.S. justice system.

More Than 4 Percent Of Death Row Inmates Wrongly Convicted, Study Says

More Than 4 Percent Of Death Row Inmates Wrongly Convicted, Study Says

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — A new study argues that more than 4 percent of all defendants who have been sentenced to death — and who remain under threat of execution — are probably innocent.

In a paper published this week in the journal PNAS, a team of researchers statistically examined the cases of 7,482 death row convictions from 1973 to 2004.

Using a so-called survival analysis mathematical model, study authors estimated that if all death-sentence defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated.

By the same token, authors concluded that although the number of innocent people who have been executed was “comparatively low,” the percentage of innocent people who have had their death sentences commuted to life is even greater.

“The great majority of innocent defendants who are convicted of capital murder in the United States are neither executed nor exonerated,” Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, wrote with his colleagues Monday. “They are sentenced, or resentenced to prison for life, and then forgotten.”

Gross, whose colleagues included biostatisticians from the American College of Radiology and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, said the differing rates had to do with the unique workings of the U.S. justice system.

Specifically, the cases of defendants actively awaiting execution on death row receive the most intense scrutiny of all criminal convictions. Prisoners who have had their sentences reduced to life in prison receive much less scrutiny, authors argued.

“The threat of execution is the engine that drives the process of exonerating innocent death row prisoners, and it is likely that this process becomes more painstaking as inmates approach their execution dates,” authors wrote.

“Courts and executive officials explicitly recognize that it is appropriate to take the possibility of innocence into account in deciding whether to reverse a conviction for procedural error or commute a death sentence to life imprisonment. … As a result, those who are resentenced to punishments less than death are more likely to be innocent than those who remain on death row.”

In the time period examined, authors wrote that 943 people had been executed, or roughly 13 percent of the 7,482 death sentences imposed.

By contrast, 117, or roughly 2 percent, were exonerated. An additional 2,675, or roughly 36 percent of the total, had their sentences commuted. (The number of people who died on death row but who were not executed was 298, or 4 percent.)

Study authors wrote that the most charged question regarding capital punishment was how many innocent defendants have been executed.

“We cannot estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively low,” authors wrote. “If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States in the past 35 years would be more than 50. We do not believe this has happened.

“Our data and the experience of practitioners in the field both indicate that the criminal justice system goes to far greater lengths to avoid executing innocent defendants than to prevent them from remaining in prison indefinitely.”

Casey Konstantín via Flickr.com

Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter Dies; Boxer Was Wrongfully Imprisoned For Murder

Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter Dies; Boxer Was Wrongfully Imprisoned For Murder

By Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the middleweight boxer whose wrongful triple-murder conviction inspired a film starring Denzel Washington and a song by Bob Dylan, died in Toronto on Sunday. He was 76.

Carter, who died of complications from prostate cancer, had a difficult upbringing in New Jersey and had stints in prison for assault and robbery before channeling himself into boxing. In 1963, Ring magazine listed him as one of its top 10 middleweight contenders of the year.

Three years later, his fortunes changed drastically after he and his friend John Artis were pulled over by police looking for the perpetrators of a triple homicide at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, N.J. The victims were white; witnesses said they saw two black men flee the scene in a white car with out-of-state license plates.

Carter was convicted twice (in 1967 and 1976) by all-white juries. He spent 19 years in prison and became a cause celebre for legal injustice and racial inequality. The profile of his plight skyrocketed in 1975 with the release of Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane.”

Here comes the story of the Hurricane

The man the authorities came to blame

For something that he never done

Put him in a prison cell but one time he could-a been

The champion of the world.

Dylan played the powerful tune — what many consider to be his last great protest song — during nearly every concert of that year’s sold-out Rolling Thunder tour, but Carter was still convicted again the following year.

Carter’s conviction was set aside in November 1985, when he was 48, by a federal judge, who ruled that Carter and Artis did not receive fair trials and released them.

He went on to become the first executive director of the Association for the Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.

Carter’s story got new life in 1999 with the release of the Norman Jewison film “Hurricane,” for which actor Denzel Washington received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Carter.

The film was highly controversial, with detractors saying that it took major liberties with the truth. The film glossed over some of the more unpleasant aspects of Carter’s life, they said, and created a cliched parable of racism based on the actions of one cop rather than focusing on the more difficult subject of racism endemic in the justice system.

The fact that the critically acclaimed film landed only one Oscar nomination fueled the controversy. Supporters of the film said the unnecessary protests hindered the movie’s shot at more nominations.

Nonetheless, Carter was thrilled by the film and Washington’s portrayal of him.

“God bless Rubin Carter and his tireless fight to ensure justice for all,” Washington said in a statement to CNN on Sunday.

4WardEver Campaign UK via Flickr