Staff Articles

Shaken Baby Case Update

April 9, 2012
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The Supreme Court’s first ruling of this Term — a controversial decision in which a majority simply ran out of patience with a lower court – had threatened to send a grandmother back to prison in a highly contested “shaken baby’ case.  Now, the woman will remain free.  On Friday, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted the sentence of Shirley Ree Smith to the time she had already served behind bars — almost ten years, according to her lawyers, who now will try to get the conviction overturned. Read more here.

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Did Police Force False Confession from 12 Year Old for Murder?

January 15, 2012
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File this under completely F’d up!!!! Excuse my french, my friends know I only use it when I am truly passionate about something – hope I don’t let it slip in court one day.  So I have to admit I read the dailymail as my gossip, shut my brain off, candy but the article I found on it tonight was anything but light and airy. Another huge issue in wrongful convictions is false confessions dragged out by cops who should be fired and then in my humble opinion prosecuted. The case of Thomas Cogdell as reported by the dailymail would seem too fantastical to be true if I didn’t already know a few things about wrongful conviction and false confessions. Basically this 12 year boy has spent the last two years in prison for the murder of his sister who was suffocated. Police interrogated him ,likely alone, for many...

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Death Row Inmate Likely To Be Freed After 20 Years

January 15, 2012
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Jermaine Wright served 20 years on Delaware's death row and will likely be set free shortly.

Reading this article about Delaware death row inmate Jermaine Wright frustrates me. There are so many things wrong with his case and some of them echo Ben Spencer’s Texas case although there are many points of distinction as well. There is a jailhouse snitch who has since recanted his testimony that Wright allegedly confessed to him- Spencer has one of those in his case. There is no physical evidence in the case – much like in the Ben Spencer case- no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. In Wright’s case the victim did have a bullet wound which caused his death so at least the court could correctly say a gun was involved whereas in the Ben Spencer case the victim died from blunt force trauma to the head and the prosecutors literally made up out of thin air that a gun was was used to beat the victim. I am...

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Posts from this point back were published in the original DCDB Blog

November 14, 2011
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Beginning at the End

November 14, 2011
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Kristina Hahsler, the founder of Dallas Can Do Better (DCDB), set up this organization because she has strong feelings about the injustice of wrongful convictions and because she’s seen how little society does for exonerees who have given a good part of their lives for someone else’s egregious mistakes.  Mistakes of faulty eyewitness identifications, mistakes of police and prosecutors, mistakes of juries, and mistakes of government officials – especially in Texas – that politicize “law and order” and often use the machinery within their power to push for convictions because it wins elections.  Since that beginning, DCDB has become an advocacy group not just for the wrongfully convicted but for social justice issues of all stripes.  During the past week we’ve seen evidence that persistent grass-roots advocacy can be a powerful tool to effect change.  When Hank Skinner received a stay of execution from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) last week it was due in no small part to...

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RIP Mark Stroman, Along With a Piece of Our Humanity

July 20, 2011
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Mark Stroman was murdered by the state of Texas today despite the pleas of one of his victims to spare his life. Rais did all he could to stop the execution and is heart broken that Mark’s life was taken tonight. My 7 year said the sweetest prayer before bed that Stroman’s life would be spared and that the laws would be changed. I wish I had a recording. Now I have to tell him in the morning that life doesn’t always work out the way it should and people make very bad decisions and  . . .

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Rais Bhuiyan – Campaigning for his Attempted Murderer

July 12, 2011
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Life works in funny ways – one such moving example that gives a misanthrope like me a flicker of hope that humanity is worth saving comes in the form of Rais campaigning to save the life of the man who tried to take his. No matter what religion you subscribe to if that is not God’s grace in action I do not know what is. Check out a recent article (there have been a zillion lately) on what Rais is doing and join the World Without Hate group on facebook.

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Lots of News

July 12, 2011
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Lots has been going on lately social justice related and I was on vacation! Please forgive the late updates and if you have been in a vacuum like me lately then get caught up by checking out these stories . . . Weighing the Death Penalty Versus Life Without Parole Black Economic Gains Wiped Out in the Downturn Despite Obama bid Mexican Executed for Texas Teen’s slaying

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Shaken Baby Syndrome- Junk Science?

June 29, 2011
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I was listening to this on NPR on the way home from work yesterday. Very interesting investigative journalism that seems almost extinct these days. Hearing about any shaken baby case I immediately think about Audrey Edmonds who was wrongfully convicted in Wisconsin and has since been exonerated. I first saw her three years ago at a conference on innocence work being held in Houston and drum roll . . .  here is where my total prejudice and ignorance kick in. I was graciously invited by an exoneree to an exoneree only session and each was standing up to tell their name and how long they were wrongfully incarcerated for and there was this pretty lady with long blond hair, nicely dressed, if your from Dallas she looked like she was from the Park Cities and in my mind I thought “oh she is a guest like I am” and...

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Mark Stroman Execution Alert from Amnesty

June 29, 2011
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Mark Stroman is due to be executed in Texas on 20 July. He was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of an Indian immigrant following the 9/11 attacks in the USA. A Bangladeshi man he also shot during a series of post-9/11 crimes is calling for clemency. On 4 October 2001, Vasudev Patel, a native of India who had lived near Dallas, Texas, for 10 years, was shot and killed in the petrol station he and his wife operated there. The shooting was captured on surveillance camera, and the following day Mark Anthony Stroman was arrested at his home. The murder was part of a series of violent crimes in the area following 11 September 2001 for which Mark Stroman claimed responsibility. He said he committed them in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, against people he considered of Middle Eastern descent. At his trial for the murder...

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