Is the Lake Co., Ill. Prosecutor’s Office Turning the Page on Resistance to Science?

Michael Mermel, formerly a lawyer in the State’s Attorney’s office in Lake County, Illinois, became famous as a the prototypical prosecutor resisting science — even DNA.  Readers will remember Mr. Mermel from my post “Resistance, Thy Name is Mermel” back in June of 2012.  When DNA results in four of the office’s cases did not support the guilty verdicts, Mermel made clear that the DNA results meant nothing to him.  Mermel eventually resigned from the office  after telling The Chicago Tribune: “The taxpayers don’t pay us for intellectual curiosity. They pay us to get convictions.”  Mermel’s boss,  State’s Attorney Michael Waller, was replaced after the last election by Mike Nerheim, who made restoring the damaged integrity of the office one of his top priorities.

Now Nerheim has acted.  He has appointed a special “case review board” to examine possible cases of wrongful convictions.   In a video clip posted on YouTube, Nerheim explained that since “Lake County, Illinois, unfortunately,  has been identified as having an issue  with wrongful convictions,” he had appointed a panel of ”independent” lawyers  All of the six appointees “have no ties to these cases or to the office.”   According to Nerheim, an independent “fresh set of eyes” was critical in order to  “restore the public’s trust and confidence in the State’s Attorney’s Office.”

For making integrity of convictions a high priority for his office, Mr. Nerheim deserves credit and applause.  The only thing that seems off is the make up of the case review board.  According to The Chicago Tribune, four of the six members are former prosecutors; one of these four was a prosecutor in the Lake County office.  Without in any way impugning the integrity of the board members, their backgrounds may cause members of the community to perceive the board as less than fair — that the deck is stacked deck in favor of the prosecution.  I take no position on whether this is true or not; the concern is that if the function of this  very worthy panel is to restore trust and integrity, some citizens of Lake County may be less than fully impressed with the independence of the group.  One possible remedy would be to do what DA Craig Watkins has done with his Conviction Integrity Unit in Dallas: he has made the Texas Innocence Project an integral part of the Unit’s work.

Still, it’s important to congratulate Mr. Nerheim and everyone he serves in Lake County, Illinois.  Now things can start to get better, even if they aren’t perfect.

DNA Testing and Privacy: the Maryland v. King Argument in the Supreme Court

In yesterday’s post, I discussed Maryland v. King.  Those arguments,  heard at the Court on February 26, considered whether a state should be permitted to take a DNA sample from every person arrested (not convicted — arrested) for a felony.  I asked in my post that we put questions of  individual privacy aside, and instead ask whether such wide sampling would be a good idea from a crime-solving point of view.  (Some experts do not think so, as discussed in the post.)

Today, let’s put the question of privacy back into the equation, because that appears to be what the Justices will do.

In his recap of the Feb. 26 argument, Scotusblog’s Lyle Denniston tells us that the key points were posed by two of the Court’s conservative justices.  According to Denniston, Justice Samuel Alito clearly favored the idea that law enforcement should be able to take these samples.  DNA sampling “is the 21st century fingerprint” Alito said at least twice.  According to his way of thinking, there is no constitutional difference (in terms of the degree of intrusion on individual privacy) between taking a fingerprint and taking a DNA sample.

The other pole of the argument was taken up by conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia.  When the lawyer for the state of Maryland used a long list of cases solved through DNA testing to support her argument in support of the law, Justice Scalia reacted forcefully.  According to the National Law Journal:  “Well, that’s really good!” Scalia exploded. “I’ll bet if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you’d get more convictions, too. That proves absolutely nothing.”  In other words, the question isn’t whether the state’s action solves cases; some methods of solving cases are simply not allowed under the Constitution, even if they could be proven to work better than others.  The question is whether the Constitution — in this case, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches — allows the state to do what it wants to do.

During Tuesday’s argument, Justice Alito commented that King could be “the most important criminal procedure case this Court has had in decades.”  That will depend on how the Court decides the case, which it will do sometime before the end of June.  But one thing we do know:  the debate between law enforcement’s desire to use all the tools it can to fight crime and the Constitution’s protections of the individual against state intrusion will go on.

Put Privacy Aside: Is Collecting DNA From Every Arrested Person a Good Idea?

Today the U.S.  Supreme Court hears arguments in Maryland v. King, the Court’s latest foray into  DNA testing.  Most reports have focused on the clash between law enforcement’s desire to test every arrested person in order to try to solve old cases, and those who advocate for a strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy.  For example, a report by the excellent Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio discussed the positions of police, who believe taking a sample from every person arrested is a minimal intrusion that can have a big payoff, and the arguments of defense attorneys and civil libertarians, who feel that allowing testing of all arrestees would surrender the basic principles of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful searches and seizures.

But there’s a question that may be far more important: from a crime fighting point of view,   is it a good idea for police to take and process a DNA sample for everyone who gets arrested?   Of course there will be some cases — such as the King case itself — in which the time-of-arrest sample leads to an arrest for a different, serious crime.  But taking samples from every arrestee may actually hurt our efforts to use DNA most effectively to make ourselves safe.  According to an article in Slate by Brandon Garrett and Erin Murphy, real public safety gains from DNA lie not with taking samples from every jaywalker and burglar and hoping for a hit in a cold case, but instead in taking many more samples from crime scenes.  In other words, we get more hits when we process samples from active crime scenes and match them against our already-large DNA database, instead of fishing for leads among the whole population of more than 12 million people arrested every year.  And all of those additional samples from arrestees crowd out and slow down the processing of samples from real crime scenes and victims, creating backlogs.  In other words, bigger DNA databases is not the answer to crime.

[B]igger is only better if DNA databases grow in the right way: by entering more samples from crime scenes, not samples from arrestees. DNA databases already include 10 million-plus known offender profiles. But a database with every offender in the nation cannot solve a crime if no physical evidence was collected or tested.  And police collect far too few such samples….The police solve more crimes not by taking DNA from suspects who have never been convicted, but by collecting more evidence at crime scenes.  Even worse, taking DNA from a lot of arrestees slows the testing in active criminal investigations….Backlogs created by arrestee DNA sampling means that rape kits and samples from convicted offenders sit in storage or go untested.

The bottom line: even if the Supreme Court says we can take a sample from every person arrested, doesn’t mean we should.

 

“Failed Evidence” Selected By delanceyplace.com, the Non-fiction Book Source

Good news: Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science is the Feb. 4 selection by delanceyplace.com, a service that highlights and quotes new works for a large community of readers.  Delancyplace.com provides daily subscribers with “an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, primarily historical in focus, and will occasionally be controversial. Finally, we hope that the selections will resonate beyond the subject of the book from which they were excerpted.”  Other recent selections have included Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815; and Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.

 

With 300-plus Cases of DNA Exoneration, In How Many Is the Defendant Actually Innocent?

My  presentation Failed Evidence on January 31 at the University of Toledo College of Law — lively, well attended, and intense — featured a great question that I want to put to everyone.

One person in attendance was a man who is a police chief in Ohio.  He’s had a long and distinguished career; I had the great privilege of working with him some years ago, when I was a member of the University of Toledo faculty.    In one part of my presentation on Failed Evidence, I discussed the more than 300 cases since 1989 in which DNA identification has resulted in an exoneration.   In the Q & A after the talk, the chief asked a question about the 300-plus cases.  I’ll paraphrase: among those cases, he said, there would be some in which the DNA results disproved the conviction, but did not necessarily prove the defendant was not guilty.  This is because, he said, the absence of the defendant’s DNA may not support guilt, but it also does not necessarily prove innocence either.  (I’m hoping I understood his comment/question correctly and am conveying it clearly.) Was I prepared to admit that in at least some of the 300 cases, the defendants might indeed be guilty, even if the DNA had resulted in the defendant’s release and the dropping of charges?

I have had this question asked of me before, and heard it posed to others.  I gave my answer, but I would like very much to hear yours.  What do you think? Is the question correct, or is it based on certain assumptions that may not hold?  What would your answer to the question be?

Why Does Law Enforcement Have the Power to Control DNA Databases and Exclude Defense Testing?

An article titled “Lawyers, Saying DNA Cleared Inmate, Pursue Access to Data” tells the story of the case of Joseph Buffey, a man imprisoned in West Virginia for 70 years for rape.  And Buffey’s story tells us something disturbing: control of DNA evidence in most states is in the hands of law enforcement.  Unfortunately, this can block defense efforts to get at the truth.

Buffey’s case features something common to more than a quarter of DNA exonerations: he confessed, and later entered a guilty plea and apologized, at the urging of his lawyer.    But Buffey then recanted his confession and maintained his innocence.  Years later, defense lawyers got the physical evidence tested, and the DNA did not belong to Mr. Buffey.

Defense lawyers then asked the state to run the sample against the state’s DNA database (known as CODIS, which stands for Combined DNA Index System).  The idea, of course, was that the DNA might have come from a person whose DNA was already in the database.

The state of West Virginia’s reaction: no thanks.  According to the article, the authorities in West Virginia said that “the state does not believe such testing will or can prove the defendant’s innocence after his guilty plea.”  West Virginia is one of the other thirty-one that do not give a defendant the right to have the sample run through the DNA database.

After 18 months of legal wrangling, West Virginia agreed to the test.  The result: the DNA belongs to a man incarcerated in another state prison with a history of assaulting women.

Naturally, Buffey’s lawyers are now working to get him out of prison.  But the more important thing to notice is that in West Virginia, as in most other states, DNA databases, constructed at great public expense, remain in control of one party to criminal cases: the prosecution.  They, and they alone, decide whether testing will be done, and under what circumstances.  And while we can certainly hope that requests to run DNA through the database will be granted, it can also be withheld when the state simply decides that this is not in its interest.

But the article contains something I had not seen before.  Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association is quoted as saying that he sees the failure to run DNA samples through CODIS as a problem that must be solved.

We, as law enforcement and prosecutors, are obligated to seek the truth and follow the evidence, and DNA should be entered into Codis,” said Burns.  “It seems like there should be laws for it, and I agree that the defense should be given the information.

Hats off to Mr. Burns and the NDAA if this is their official position.  (I say “if” because they have not always been open to such changes.)  In the next few days, I will attempt to confirm that the impression given by the story — that the organization would join in an effort to assure that DNA in a case like Buffey’s should be run — is correct.

Why Every Prosecutor’s Office Needs a Conviction Integrity Unit, Part 3: The Place of CIUs in Criminal Justice Reform

When I explain conviction integrity units (CIUs) — units lawyers in a prosecutor’s office whose job is to examine past convictions when real claims of actual innocence surface — most people understand that CIUs make sense.  They create an institutional process to investigate and resolve questions about past cases in which the system may have convicted the wrong person.  That in itself is a good thing.

In Failed Evidence, I make a further argument: CIUs are a necessary ingredient if we are to change law enforcement practices to reflect the best science we have.  Here’s why.

For more than two decades, the starting point of reform in the criminal justice system has been the wrongful convictions uncovered through DNA testing.  These cases, which now number three hundred, exposed many of the weaknesses in our traditional police practices.  Finding and righting these miscarriages of justice has been one of the major issues for  criminal justice reformers.  And rightly so: a justice system that tolerates these kinds of catastrophic mistakes lacks integrity and will eventually lose public confidence.

These efforts must, of course, continue.  But we also need to energize efforts to change the practices that lead to these mistakes.  To make those changes happen, we need the involvement not just of advocates for the wrongfully convicted, but also of police and prosecutors themselves.  Sometimes, those folks are reluctant to become involved if they think reform efforts will be about blaming them and pointing out their mistakes.  Thus one of the keys to success is to focus the effort on reforms going forward — how do we prevent mistakes in the future? — while at the same time, creating a regular way for the mistakes of the past to be confronted and corrected.

That last part, of course, is where CIUs come in.  If every prosecutor’s office had a CIU, cases of possible wrongful convictions would be referred to that unit in the regular course of business.  It would become part of the institutional infrastructure — one of many standard operating procedures.  Citizens would have confidence that these kinds of injustices would be dealt with.  And that would, I hope, free up our criminal justice leaders to pursue the question of how we do better as we go forward.

This isn’t a perfect solution, and in an upcoming post I’ll address a couple of very perceptive comments I’ve already received criticizing this approach.  But I do think it would be a substantial advance over what we have now.

Why Every Prosecutor’s Office Needs a Conviction Integrity Unit, Part 2: Some Recent History

This week, prompted by an article in the  New York Times on October 27, I’m writing about Conviction Integrity Units (CIUs).  These are small groups of lawyers inside a prosecutor’s office — just like a homicide unit or a narcotics unit — who have the job of investigating bona fide claims of actual innocence in prior convictions originating in the same office.

CIUs are a relatively recent phenomenon.  The first well-known CIU was established in Dallas in 2006.  In that year, voters elected Craig Watkins DA of Dallas County, Texas.  Watkins was the first African American ever elected to the office of DA anywhere in the history of Texas. At that time,  Dallas  County by itself had had more cases of wrongful convictions,  discovered through DNA testing, than all but a handful of states.  Watkins was elected on a promise to clean up the mess, and one of the first things he did was establish the CIU in his office.  He soon began to have the CIU work in partnership with Texas Innocence Project.  The Innocence Project served as the investigating and screening system for claims of actual innocence, which it then brought to the attention of the CIU.

In the almost six years of its work, the Dallas DA’s CIU has uncovered and righted some grave miscarriages of justice: DNA testing revealed that those convicted had not committed the crimes.  In some number of these cases, the CIU investigation and DNA testing has also managed to find the real perpetrators by comparing crime-scene DNA with DNA samples in existing databases.   In others, the CIU’s work has confirmed the guilt of the convicted.

Watkins’ CIU proved to be an example for a few other DAs.  The first was Pat Lykos, elected DA in Houston in 2008.  (Lykos lost her bid for re-election earlier this year, for reasons having nothing to do with her CIU.)  This year, the DA in Manhattan announced that his office will create a CIU, and the Times article tells us that the Brooklyn DA has established one already.

Readers: Do you know of a DA’s office with a CIU?  Tell us where and how long it has been around.

“Forensics on Trial” on PBS Gets It Mostly Right

Last night, PBS broadcast “Forensics on Trial” on Nova, the network’s terrific science show.  My take: the show got most of the issues regarding forensic science right, but not all.  And I think it might leave a misleading impression on some viewers.

Here’s a quick list of some of the things the program got right:

* The Brandon Mayfield fingerprint fiasco set in motion deep scrutiny of forensic science, culminating in the National Academy of Science 2009 report, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States.”

* According to that report, aside from DNA, most forensic science isn’t science at all but a craft based on human interpretation, subject to all of the cognitive flaws one would expect.

* Most of forensic science operates without standards, accountability, or basic certification.

But I had some reservations:

* The show conveyed a sense that the lack of scientific rigor in forensic methods would be solved by shiny new high-tech gadgetry.  Too little attention was paid to the ways we should address more basic flaws: the lack of real data on which to base our judgments about the sources of the evidence we find; the absence of standard laboratory practices, such as blind testing,  to protect against cognitive biases and flaws.

* The show failed to probe into the weaknesses of some of the lamest forensic disciplines, such as tire and shoe prints, hair and fiber matching, and the like.  Some of this was mentioned, but only in passing.

* The segment on bite mark identification was particularly striking.  It did a good job of exposing how this “discipline” put an innocent man in jail for fifteen years.  But it made it seem as if the problem was shoddy use of a legitimate method, when the issue is more fundamental: bite marks on skin are not consistent, and they change as the body tissue changes, moves, etc.

* I recall nothing about fraudulent forensics — so-called “dry labbing” that is now rocking the Jamaica Plain lab in Massachusetts, and that has shown up again and again in other places.  (Paging Fred Zain…paging Joyce Gilchrist…)

A worthy effort?  Yes, no question.  But I was hoping for better.

Reaction, readers?

Failed Evidence on WYPR Public Radio’s “Midday” Program

I was a guest on WYPR Public Radio’s “Midday” program today, discussing Failed Evidence.  Today was the monthly “Midday on Science” show, and host Dan Rodicks and regular science contributor John Monahan asked great questions on everything from DNA to more traditional forensic sciences to eyewitness identification and false confessions.  Listeners asked terrific questions too.

You can hear the whole show by clicking here and clicking on the audio button.