Jurors want CSI-quality forensic evidence Prosecutors forced to explain lack of DNA, fingerprints

SFGate ^ | 5/29/05 | Jamie Stockwell, Washington Post

[KneelBeforeZod]

juries are too insulated from what goes on in the court room. I think they should be allowed to hear what the def/pros argue about being put into evidence, and why it was not allowed/was allowed

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

"Why then did you plead guilty if you weren't in fact guilty?"

I never said I wasn't guilty. I deserved what I got hence my plea. However the obvious to me, the only non LEO witness, hedging of facts in their report and actions the night of the arrest changed my outlook forever.No longer do I defacto believe the officers. I'm not saying I won't believe them either, just not automaticaly.

[Ramonan]

GOT THAT RIGHT!

[B4Ranch]

I made a common mistake that I am prone to do. I assumed that you knew more about the subject than you actually do.

"The FBI made widespread changes in the mid-1990s after its lab was rocked by a whistleblower's allegations and an investigation that found shoddy science by several lab examiners. AP reported last month that Justice officials have identified about 3,000 cases that might have been affected by those earlier problems and have let prosecutors decide whether to notify convicted defendants.

What I am saying is that I remember the time when if you wanted a 100% top score analysis done, it went to the Bureaus D.C. Labs. When the doubts started appearing I refused to follow along. The Bureaus Lab was still the best in my mind. It took the full investigation for me to understand that my level of standards no longer had a high point attached to the Bureau. I had seen SACs and the AICs fowl up tremendously, but the Lab was the last place I expected to witness just and verifiable criticisms of. Now, I question everything and everybody which is probably the way it should have been all along.

[zip]

ping

[chaosagent]

"Having been the foreman on two juries where it quickly became evident the the police were either lying about what they saw the defendant do, or completely incompetent, I'm afraid I would need a little additional proof."

"If that's your standard -- no one would ever get convicted. Because the forensic "expert" (an employee of the police department) testifying as to if the fingerprints match or not could also be lying or completely incompetent. At some point you have to take the tin-foil hat off."

Hah!

In one case here in Houston, two white cops arrested a black guy for possession of crack cocaine outside a known crackhouse. The guy had been in jail for almost ten months because he was unable to make the $100,000 bail.

The two officers said that they had been driving by the house a little after 10pm and said that when the defendant saw them, he threw something underneath the house. (This was what is known as a "rowhouse" which is built 18" to 24" off the ground on concrete blocks.

They said the defendant was about 25' away and they were able to see this by the street light in front of the house. They also said that some other people were sitting on the front porch and on the front steps that led straight up into the house.

When they stopped and approached the house, everyone ran away except the defendant. They did not try to chase any one. After looking under the house, they said they found a ziplock baggie with about 30 rocks of crack cocaine and a small .25 caliber automatic.

This was the prosecution's case.

The defense's case put a little different light on things.

From photos of the scene, the defense showed that the defendant would have had to standing almost 75' from the street to throw the crack and the gun where the cops said they found them. The defense also showed from pictures and light company records that there was no streetlamp at that location and never had been.

There was also no light on the front of the house. The only light would have been coming thru the open front door.

The defense also showed that there never was a front porch on the house. There were overgrown rose bushes where the porch would have been. In addition, the steps did not go straight up into the house, but came up from the side and you took a left turn into the house. Due to other plants and a small trellis, it was obvious that this was also nothing new.

The house was also not a "known" crackhouse. According to police records there had been no drug arrests on the entire block for at least the last 10 years.

There were no fingerprints on the gun. They apparently never checked the bullets or the baggie.

In short, nothing to actually connect the defendant to the items.

The defendant had no record of any kind. He held a good job as a warehouse supervisor for a company in a Houston suburb. He was almost finished with his Associates degree in Business at a local community college. He was married with one child, with one on the way. (who was born while he was in jail.)

While he was in jail, he lost his job and his house. His wife had to move in with her mother and go on welfare.

The only reason he was where he was arrested was that a co-worker had ask him to take the dockworker downtown to the city jail to pick up his brother who was bailing out on a DUI. The co-worker had ask him to stop at this address first so he could see a friend. The defendant did not know anyone at the scene.

This is the case we got as the jury. Our first vote was 11-1 to acquit. After 2 days we were a hung jury with the same vote. The lone holdout was a Baptist preacher whose teenage daughter had gotten involved with drugs. He told the jury during deliberations that if the police arrested you, you were probably guilty.

After the trial was over, I saw the prosecutor yelling at the two cops in a side hallway.

So put your tinfoil hat on and tell me how you would have voted in this case.

BTW my late father retired as a Captain after 23 years on a large city police department and my best friend is a retired cop.

[Hank Rearden]

After the trial was over, I saw the prosecutor yelling at the two cops in a side hallway.

So, did you bring the preacher idiot around, or did the judge kick it for a retrial?

[chaosagent]

We ended up as a hung jury.

From what I was able to find out later, the prosecutor declined to retry the case.

[FreedomCalls]

Now, I question everything and everybody which is probably the way it should have been all along.

Absolutely. I learned a long time ago that people I thought knew their stuff were often clueless. "Trust but verify!"

[FreedomCalls]

That's quite a different story than the one in the news article -- where the lack of fingerprints was the only thing saving him. I go by history a lot. A known gang-banger covered in gang-tattoos with a 20-page rap sheet is not going to get the benefit of the doubt as opposed to someone with a long-standing job who has never before been arrested. Going by your facts, I would have acquited him as well. But that would have had zero to do with the lack of fingerprints on the evidence.

[ASOC]

That's interesting, I was recently selected for a capital case jury *because* I had watched "Cold Case Files" and other fact based forensic TV shows (vs the cr@p seen on all the 'csi' like shows) as well as reading novels of like type.

BTW, pretty gruesome case.

[flashbunny]

The cable series "the new detectives" is a good show for those interested in forensics. I think jerry bruckheimer must have seen it and thought it would be a good series to copy and make a bad cop show out of it.

CSI is just awful, though. Bad science, bad acting, bad writing = hit show for CBS.

[ASOC]

yup - never could see why folks watch 'em - but then there are a lot of shows you think would be gone after the secong episode...and they are still around years later.

Guess if the ads work, the shows stay on.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Sounds like a case of BWB (Bystanding While Black.)

[TKDietz]

"Which is how most citizens feel, up until they become a victim of crime. Then the "rose-colored glasses" come off, and the attitude does a 180."

Then it does another 180 when you or someone you care about is wrongfully accused of a crime. The notion that it is better that several guilty people go free rather than one innocent person be wrongfully punished is an old principle of justice that has been around a lot longer than this country. It is a principle that was on the minds of the people when this country was founded and when the protections were built in the Constitution to protect the rights of the accused.

It's a tough principle to swallow when we are talking about people like murderers and child molesters, but we have to do it. And there are benefits that come from this besides protecting the innocent from being wrongfully convicted. Think about it, with modern forensic science there have been numerous people found to be innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing and in fact convicted who had sat in prison for many years, sometimes decades, some on death row, for heinous crimes they did not commit. What were the people who really committed the crimes doing while others were in prison paying for their heinous acts? They were probably out there committing more serious crimes. We don't want to convict the wrong people, not just because it is terribly unfair to them and the people they care about but also because when we get the wrong people that means the real criminals are still out there being a threat to you and me.

I'm a criminal defense attorney and I've got a different take on this. Television and other media hurt people wrongfully accused of crimes too. If you think these lawyer/cop shows are reality, you would think we lawyers are only working one case at a time, when in fact a public defender like me might be working hundreds. From watching the news and reading the paper it would be easy to get the false notion in your head that criminals are getting off left and right on technicalities, when in fact that almost never happens. Every time some guy gets off because of some bad search or coerced confession or something conducted by law enforcement, it gets blasted all over the news. What you don't see is that there might have been a hundred motions to suppress evidence filed on other cases before the judge finally granted that one. People could also easily be mislead into thinking that people are being acquitted by juries all the time. Again, this is something that rarely happens. Most of the time juries convict and the story ends up being a few lines in the middle of a newspaper. The big news is when a jury acquits. Then even if it wasn't a high profile case to start with it's liable to make the front page of the paper and even make it on TV.

Do you know what percentage of felony cases actually make it to jury trial? The national average always hovers around 2.5%. Almost all of the rest of them are handled by plea agreement. Nationally, about 95% of all people charged with felonies end up with a conviction for something by the time their case is over. I don't know off the top of my head what the the national average conviction rate for felony jury trials is but I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% to 90%.

Is everyone who is convicted guilty of what they are accused of doing? Heck no. Look at the results from things like Barry Scheck's Innocence Project. Numerous people convicted of heinous crimes have been exonerated, and they've only looked at the most serious cases so they have probably only touched the tip of the iceberg. Bad eyewitness identification (common), coerced confessions, lying informants trying to get out of trouble, unscrupulous police officers and prosecutors, lynch mob media, and so on have all contributed to this problem.

But also, contrary to what you might think the deck is not stacked in favor of people accused of committing crimes, in reality the opposite is true. They're going against the full force of the government, with its seemingly unlimited war chest, its teams of investigators and trained witnesses who pride themselves in getting convictions in almost every case. Unlike civil trials, we can't send them interrogatories to answer or depose their witnesses so that we can get an idea about what they'll say at trial and guard against them changing their stories. They have databases at their fingertips to instantly pull up information to discredit your witnesses. They have snitches everywhere willing to say whatever is asked of them either for money or to avoid prison on their own charges. They can threaten witnesses with jail who try to come out and say that what the police officer wrote in his report is not what they told him. And where are all these liberal judges who want to let all the criminals off? I've never run across any. Even the card carrying Democrat judges for the most part are prosecutors in black robes who think everyone is guilty and who whenever they can get away with it will bend over backwards to help prosecutors get a conviction.

Innocent or not, most people are terrified of going to trial because they don't think the process is going to be fair. They know most everyone is convicted. They know they'll be going up against people with badges and the built in credibility in the eyes of jurors that comes with the badge. They know that even though there is supposedly a presumption of innocence in our system that most of the jurors who show up for voir dire are going to think they probably did whatever they were accused of doing or they wouldn't be charged. They know it's going to be a roll of the dice and most of them don't want to do it.

There is no doubt in my mind that sometimes people plead guilty to things they didn't do rather than go to trial. A fine and a suspended sentence or even a short stint behind bars is better than the years or even decades they could potentially get if things don't go right at trial. I do pleas for probably dozens of people every year who tell me they are innocent but don't want to go to trial. Most of them are liars who would rather be able to claim they were screwed by the system rather than accept responsibility for their actions, but not all of them. And the truth is, even though we defense attorneys will talk tough and say we aren't afraid of going to trial, we don't want our clients we think might very well be innocent to get hammered by a jury and we are cognizant of the fact that no matter how good of a job we do that could happen even if our clients are innocent. If a client I think is innocent tells me he'll take a plea I might advise against it but I'm not going to try to push him to go to trial unless I'm almost certain we can get an acquittal, and even then I'm not going to push too hard because 1) I might be wrong and he might be guilty, and 2) innocent people sometimes get convicted and if convicted at trial my client will almost certainly get hammered a lot harder than if he took a plea.

[been_lurking]

I'm a criminal defense attorney....

Interesting title. You defend "criminals"? What exactly is the definition of "criminal"? I used to think a criminal was and individual who broke the law. By simple logic, therefore, you defend people who broke the law.

Maybe you should call yourself a "wrongly accused" defense attorney.

[TKDietz]

Actually that would be less accurate. Most of the people I represent are guilty of at least part of what they were charged with. Some are entirely wrongfully accused, but those are in the minority. I suppose I could say I'm an attorney for people accused of committing crimes who in some cases are wrongfully accused but that's a mouthful. Or maybe I could call myself an attorney for persons presumed innocent? I don't know. I didn't make up the "criminal defense attorney" moniker.