Dallas Can Do Better Blog

Shaken Baby Case Update

Kristina Hahsler — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 02:09:13 +0000

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.

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

Kristina Hahsler — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:37:09 +0000

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 hours, without food, and lied to him to coerce a confession. Part of his interrogation is on tape but its often telling what the police leave out and when they feel the need to turn the tape recorder off and how the course of things seem to change once they turn it back on again. In this case though if the reporting is true it sounds like the police left just enough on the tape to prove their tactics were unsavory. I don’t even understand how this could happen – why there is not a social worker or someone there looking out for this child while this is going on. The mother is apparently bi-polar and sometimes doesn’t feel like taking her meds- no idea about the father- no child should be forced to make decisions about Miranda rights and waiving them on their own which is apparently one of the points of error being addressed. This case highlights further the need for full video tapes of police interrogation- no turning it off while police operate in the shadow of truth. It’s crazy but I have to tell my kids that not all people are good and that included law enforcement – its hard to know who to trust. Check out the full article here at the dailymail. Here is another article on the same case.

Death Row Inmate Likely To Be Freed After 20 Years

Kristina Hahsler — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:44:04 +0000

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 still trying to figure that one out – why if one had a gun would one rather than shoot beat someone with it. Another similarity is the use of reward money to perhaps coax a neighbor to point the finger somewhere even if its not true. You can check out the article here. In short there the justice system is broken – believe me when I say this is true of both the civil side as well as the criminal but when life truly hangs in the balance we cannot afford to get it wrong.

Prosecutorial Misconduct Inquiry Requested by Exoneree Michael Morton

Philip Stonecipher — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:22:18 +0000

On November 18th we posted a story about the wrongfully convicted Michael Morton receiving an apology from the prosecutor who convinced a jury to sentence him to prison for life. Morton languished in jail for 25 years for the 1986 fatal beating of his wife before he was finally freed after DNA testing cleared him completely. Now lawyers for the former Austin grocery store manager who had no prior criminal record before his arrest will request that prosecutor Ken Anderson be investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.

A Dec. 19 story in the The New York Times, co-authored by the Times’ John Schwarz and Brandi Grissom of the Texas Tribune, was so intriguing to me that I could find no way to properly summarize it without leaving out critical information. Rather than posting the lengthy article in its entirety here, we offer the opening paragraphs verbatim and encourage you to read the entire story via this link.

Exonerated of Murder, Texan Seeks Inquiry on Prosecutor

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BRANDI GRISSOM

AUSTIN, Tex. — A Texas man wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife is scheduled to be officially exonerated on Monday.

That is no longer so unusual in Texas, where 45 inmates have been exonerated in the last decade based on DNA evidence. What is unprecedented is the move planned by lawyers for the man, Michael Morton: they are expected to file a request for a special hearing to determine whether the prosecutor broke state laws or ethics rules by withholding evidence that could have led to Mr. Morton’s acquittal 25 years ago. “I haven’t seen anything like this, ever,” said Bennet L. Gershman, an expert on prosecutorial misconduct at Pace University in New York. “It’s an extraordinary legal event.”

A Travesty of Justice Squared

Philip Stonecipher — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:34:37 +0000

Steven Phillips, Innocent

We shouldn’t be surprised if Steven Phillips is ready to just throw in the towel.

It’s awful enough that the man was registered as a sex offender and spent 25 years of a life sentence in a Texas prison for a crime that DNA proved with certainty he didn’t commit. But after being awarded $4.1 million by the state for involuntarily donating half of his life to the penal system, his ex-wife is now seeking to make history by being the first ex-spouse to claim she’s entitled to a share of his compensation for wrongful conviction.

And according to the 51-year-old Phillips, ex-wife Traci Tucker rarely visited him in prison and stopped coming altogether just three years into his life sentence. He said she has been with another man during the 20 years since their 1991 divorce, and Phillips has had nothing to do with her following their break-up.

The audacity of her action renders the term “golddigger” an extreme understatement.

Phillips was a roofer who was arrested in 1982 for a two-day crime spree of sexual assaults. He was freed in Dallas County in 2008 after DNA tests proved his innocence. To further compound the tragedy of the Phillips case, investigators later found that the DNA obtained from crime scenes matched that of Sydney Alvin Goodyear, who went on to commit additional sex crimes while police and prosecutors concentrated on putting the innocent Phillips away. Goodyear later died in prison.

For more on this story, see this 2008 blog post as well as the principal source for our report, the UK’s Daily Mail Online.

Sidney Alvin Goodyear, believed by police to be responsible for the crimes wrongfully charged to Steven Phillips

Jim Crow, Jr. — Like Father, Like Son

Philip Stonecipher — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:19:08 +0000

We buried Jim Crow several years ago after gradually beating him into submission over half a century, but he apparently had a son we didn’t know about.

Lyndon Johnson did a hell of a lot of arm-twisting in his signature style to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed despite the vociferous objections of Southern segregationists then serving in Congress. That act enabled the Justice Department to go to court to block states from passing discriminatory election laws designed to keep minority voters — primarily black voters — in a permanent minority. The attempts to codify discrimination via poll taxes and onerous voter registration requirements – Jim Crow laws – were a favorite tactic of primarily Southern states from Reconstruction in 1877 until 1965. They were designed to circumvent the result of the Civil War and keep the South’s racial caste system in place, only without overt slavery. The Voting Rights Act did wonders for minority electoral representation in the last half-century, but in recent times a similar movement to restrict voting power has arisen as a highly partisan power-grabbing strategy used primarily by the Republican Party to establish a political caste system with the GOP at the apex. It seems to me that a good moniker for this nefarious effort might be Jim Crow, Jr.

In a major policy speech given by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at UT-Austin last week, Holder quoted Georgia’s Rep. John Lewis — a notable leader in the civil rights movement at the time the Voting Rights Act was passed – as saying recently that voting rights are under attack again by “a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, and minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process”. Evidence of this “systematic attempt” are new laws passed at the instigation of Republican Party legislators that require photo IDs at the polls, limit early voting, and restrict periods for registration, among other things.

Holder said the Justice Department is now reviewing some of those new laws. “We will examine the facts, and we will apply the law. If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and approve the change. And where a state can’t meet this burden, we will object as part of our obligation” under the Voting Rights Act, he added.

That Act is currently being challenged in several lawsuits. To make matters more disturbing, the U.S. Supreme Court “recently expressed the view that the time may be ending when close review by the Justice Department is required for changes in voting procedures in states with a history of racial discriminating at the polls. Perhaps, some members of the court said, that requirement of the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary”, per an MSNBC story reporting Holder’s speech.

The MSNBC story also said that Holder “called the recent effort at congressional and legislative redistricting in Texas ‘precisely the kind of discrimination’ that the Voting Rights Act was intended to block.”

The Supreme Court has agreed to review Texas’ Republican majority-drawn partisan districts as well as a lower federal court’s substitution of a different plan. The issue in question arises from the 2010 census data, which showed that Texas added more than four million new residents in the last decade, most of them Hispanic, giving the state four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Holder noted that despite the heavy influx of Latinos — who historically tend to vote more often for Democratic Party candidates than for Republicans — the new districts drawn by the heavily Republican Texas Legislature added “zero additional seats in which Hispanics would have the electoral opportunity envisioned by the Voting Rights Act”.

Holder added: “As concerns about the protection of this right and the integrity of our election systems become an increasingly prominent part of our national dialogue, we must consider some important questions. It is time to ask: What kind of nation and what kind of people do we want to be? Are we willing to allow this era, our era, to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended? Are we willing to allow this time, our time, to be recorded in history as the age when the long-held belief that, in this country, every citizen has the chance and the right to help shape their government, became a relic of our past, instead of a guidepost for our future?”

For more information on Holder’s speech and the attempts to water down the protections of the Voting Rights Act, see this New York Times story.

Recent Social Justice Posts from the ACLU’s Blog of Rights

Philip Stonecipher — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:52:56 +0000

This morning I found three excellent ACLU posts that might be of interest to Canadoons:

The Truth About the Racial Justice Act;

Help Us Stop Congress From Passing Indefinite Detention Bill!;

The Proof is in the Practice: FBI Documents Show Misuse of Community Outreach for Intelligence Gathering and Privacy Act Violations.

These are definitely discussion-worthy. I invite all to read these and come back to The DCDBlog and post your comments.

SCOTUS to Review Nation’s Immigration Laws

Philip Stonecipher — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:16:27 +0000

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed this morning to review Arizona’s law targeting illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has been fighting the actions of several states that have passed, or are considering passing, their own get-tough immigration laws, arguing that immigration is solely in the federal government’s domain. The administration is trying to discourage a patchwork of state laws that could interfere with national immigration legislation, but a few states have decided that the feds aren’t doing enough to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and have thus taken matters into their own hands.

The Supremes agreed to review a federal appeals court ruling that blocked several provisions in Arizona’s immigration statute. One of those provisions “requires that police, while enforcing other laws, question a person’s immigration status if officers suspect he is in the country illegally”, per an Associated Press story posted on Yahoo’s news website. In April, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal judge’s ruling halting enforcement of other controversial provisions of Arizona’s recently passed law – one requiring that all immigrants obtain or carry immigration registration papers, another making it a criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job, and a third allowing police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant.

The Obama administration is fighting similar laws passed in Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah.

It seems to me that any law that requires that police question a person’s immigration status ”if officers suspect” that (s)he is in the country illegally is way beyond the pale. While it might look less odious on paper to say that the police can do so only “while enforcing other laws” and only “if they suspect”, it’s easy to imagine that in practice anyone looking Hispanic has a fair chance of being asked about their status, even during something as common as a traffic violation. And woe be unto them if they left their papers on the kitchen counter at home. Aside from the fact that this practically codifies racial profiling by Arizona law enforcement, it also resembles something far more sinister: the ubiquitous demand of “das Papieren, bitte” in Germany during the 1930s-40s.

Washington Post Editorial: “Righting a Wrongful Conviction in Virginia”

Philip Stonecipher — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:08:28 +0000

Occasionally we come across an editorial or op-ed piece in one of the national media that we think will be of interest to our readers, and since it is entirely an expression of opinion we prefer to print it in full rather than paraphrase it and perhaps lose context. The Washington Post published the following editorial on December 5th, and it’s about a non-capital case in Virginia of justice gone awry yet again.

Four years ago, 15-year-old Edgar Coker Jr. pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit after his lawyer warned that he could be prosecuted as an adult and subjected to a lengthy prison term if he fought the charges.

Two months later, after Edgar had been sent to a juvenile facility, the 14-year-old girl who accused him of raping her recanted and said she made up the story after her mother walked in on the young couple. The girl’s mother has acknowledged the lie and is now advocating on his behalf.

But as The Post’s Chris L. Jenkins reported, this horrible episode continues to haunt Edgar Coker and has forced him to live with the vilification that comes with being falsely branded a rapist.

Rectifying this injustice should be swift and unconditional, but Virginia’s laws make that virtually impossible. Mr. Coker’s name still appears on the state’s sex-offender registry. Because of that, he was arrested for attending a high school function, and he and his family have been subjected to threats from neighbors who learned of his presence on the list. Prosecutors say they can do nothing to help the young man, who spent 17 months locked up, because they lost jurisdiction once he was released from state custody. Mr. Coker’s new lawyers hope that Virginia’s Supreme Court will give them a chance to challenge the conviction in a trial court, but it is a long shot. His only plausible argument at this stage involves a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel — an argument that Virginia courts are often reluctant to embrace.

A state law allows convicts to go back into court to make a claim of “actual innocence,” but this second chance is not available in the vast majority of instances to those who pleaded guilty. It is not clear because of wording issues whether those adjudicated as juveniles may avail themselves of this law.

Mr. Coker’s case is scheduled to be heard by the state’s high court in January. His lawyers should seek a full pardon from Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), although executive clemency is typically not considered until all court action has been exhausted. The best chance for speedy redress may lie with Virginia’s General Assembly, which reconvenes next month for its annual legislative session. Del. Gregory D. Habeeb, a Roanoke-area Republican, plans to introduce legislation to allow juveniles — even those who entered guilty pleas — to make a claim of actual innocence.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is not a race issue. This is a justice issue,” he says. This change would not guarantee a clean record, but it would rightly give those caught in a paralyzing legal vise a chance to clear their names.

CNN Interviews the Documentary Filmmakers of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”

Philip Stonecipher — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:45:58 +0000

Documentary Filmmakers Joe Bailey Jr., left, and Steve Mims (photo by Chris Bailey Photography, found on CNN's website)

In perhaps the most notorious of the many executions of Rick Perry’s gubernatorial term, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 for the murder of his three children in a house fire. As Joe Bailey, Jr., and Steve Mims, the directors of the documentary “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” told CNN in an interview this week, Willingham was executed even though the evidence cast serious doubt that a crime ever occurred.

“In most of these stories, you have a crime and maybe they found the wrong guy. In this case, there isn’t any evidence of a crime in the first place. That’s kind of a unique thing and an interesting thing to dissect, even before you get into everything that happened after the conviction,” Bailey said in the interview.

The documentary was first shown to the public in March during Austin’s annual South by Southwest music and film festival, where it played to packed theaters and won the 2011 festival’s Louis Black Lone Star Award. It opened in theaters nationally on October 7.

CNN asked the directors how the documentary fit into the “media mosaic” of the 2012 presidential election, and Bailey had this to say about the aversion to science expressed by many in the Republican Party (in the Willingham case, the science in question relates to arson investigations) and about Rick Perry’s role in the case:

I think that early on there was a lot of discussion in the early primary about science and the role of science. [Republican presidential candidate] Jon Huntsman talked a lot about how denying climate change isn’t a modern view that a presidential candidate should hold.

I think this story is definitely consistent with a difficulty we have in American society with science. Our relationship with science is complex, and this story is a lot about that.

There’s a little bit about what you might call the executive model of governance, the assumption that everything in the process has taken care of itself, or not necessarily taken care of itself, but that people have dealt with something before it reaches the president — for instance — or the governor.

I think that’s something that this film brings out and reveals, and it’s kind of troubling that executives make assumptions about death penalty cases … I think there’s a lack of curiosity at work. Not just one person, but a systemic lack of curiosity in certain functions of our courts and our government, just to sort of make assumptions about the depth at which something has been considered before and not to re-examine something independently.

The funny thing about Gov. Perry is we don’t know how closely he scrutinized the Willingham case because those documents have not been released publicly. The Houston Chronicle has filed suit for the governor to disclose the legal memos and documents related to the Willingham case, and they’ve refused to do that.

The entire CNN interview with the directors can be found here.