Thanks to Instapundit for alerting me to this section of Bush's State of the Union Address

In America we must make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit -- so we are dramatically expanding the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful conviction. (Applause.) Soon I will send to Congress a proposal to fund special training for defense counsel in capital cases, because people on trial for their lives must have competent lawyers by their side. (Applause.)

As to DNA testing for the innocent, the final bill that passed Congress is the Justice for All Act, and it is primarily a crime victim's bill, not an Innocence bill. Here is how the money is apportioned (scroll down to portion with subtitle, DNA Testing (Title II, III, IV)):

Update: Kinky Friedman will announce his candidacy for Governor of Texas tomorrow on MSNBC's 'Imus Show', from 7 to 8 am CST.

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Highly recommended: Kinky Friedman's article about Max Soffar locked up in Texas for 23 years, and granted a new trial last year. It was written a year ago for Texas Monthly, but is available free at the link above (as well as on Kinky's website.) It begins like a Friedman novel, but this is no fictional story.

I've seen Cool Hand Luke and The Green Mile, but I'm not a prison reform activist. I'd never interviewed anyone on death row until the middle of January, when I picked up a telephone and looked through the clear plastic divider at the haunting reflection of my own humanity in the eyes of Max Soffar.

Max doesn't have a lot of time and neither do I, so I'll try to keep it brief and to the point.

Among the brief points:

The Independent has an interview with exonerated death row inmate and Scottish citizen Ken Richey.

A Briton who faced the death sentence for 18 years in an American jail has spoken for the first time of his harrowing ordeal, saying he was "treated like an animal" for a crime he did not commit.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent on Sunday, Kenneth Richey, whose sentence was finally quashed last week after a campaign backed by the Pope, Hollywood stars and Tony Blair, revealed he had been shackled and handcuffed for 23 hours a day as he faced death by lethal injection.

Richey is 40 years old and was imprisoned since he was 22. Not only did he not commit the crime, it is likely there was no crime, and that the fire he was accused of setting was accidentally started. When he is released, he plans to return to the Scottish Highlands.

by TChris

Judge Don Harding in Franklin County, Idaho, will soon decide whether Bart Pitcher should remain in prison. Pitcher's release seems like a no-brainer.

Harding heard arguments from Pitcher's attorneys and from a special prosecutor representing the state of Idaho who all agreed Pitcher was convicted on trumped-up evidence collected in an illegal search.

The special prosecutor acknowledged that the case against Pitcher was based on "lies, half-truths, illegal searches, manufactured facts and probable manufactured evidence." Pitcher has been in prison since 2003, serving a minimum sentence of 10 years.

Pitcher’s attorneys say that former Police Chief Scott Shaw coerced Pitcher into pleading guilty to charges of manufacturing methamphetamine by threatening to pursue charges against Pitcher’s ex-wife and daughter if Pitcher didn’t take the rap. Shaw has since been charged with seven felony counts, “including falsifying police reports, perjury and misappropriation of public funds.”

A new report on wrongful convictions prepared by prosecutors and police in Canada has been released.

"Various commissions and studies in Canada and around the world have provided valuable insight into the systemic causes of wrongful convictions and into what has gone wrong in individual cases," the report says...."What is startling, however, is that some problems, themes and mistakes arise time and time again, regardless of where the miscarriage of justice took place."

Fault lies with the conduct of police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges and forensic scientists, and they are not confined to proceedings in the courtroom, says the report.

The report compares wrongful convictions to natural disasters, and says they are rarely the result of just one thing going wrong.

"Police officers, Crown counsel, forensic scientists, judges and defence counsel all have a role to play in ensuring that innocent people are not convicted of crimes they didn't commit," says the report. "As useful as commissions of inquiry may be, they usually come many years after the fact. The goal of all justice system participants must be to prevent wrongful convictions from occurring in the first place."

The report identifies the leading causes:

With the release of the Oscar nominations today, we thought we'd mention a few lesser publicized films:

"After Innocence" was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend. The New York Times today discusses the film, noting:

...viewers leaped to their feet, many in tears, at the end of the first screening on Saturday.

Thursday night, Court TV will air the film version of the critically aclaimed play, The Exonerated, starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Aiden Quinn and more. It is directed by Bob Balaban, who also directed the play. The movie tells the story of six exonerated inmates.

Former Chicago police officer Steve Manning was framed by two FBI agents and ended up on death row. A jury has now awarded him $6 million in damages.

The jury also held that one of the FBI agents also framed Manning in a Missouri kidnapping case. Manning spent 14 years in prison before both convictions were overturned and the prosecutions were dropped. The damages could go even higher. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly, who presided over the six-week trial, is yet to rule on whether the United States shares responsibility with the two agents for malicious prosecutions.

"It's a long, long way from Death Row to complete vindication,'' Manning said after the verdict.

Jeffrey Toobin, writing for the January 17, 2005 New Yorker, has a long article on Arizona death row inmate Martin Soto-Fong, and asks whether former prosecutor Kenneth Peasly put the wrong man on death row (pdf)? Soto-Fong was 17 at the time of the crime. The article is not available at the New Yorker site, but the Federal Defender's office in Arizona has put up a copy.

Last year, Peasley acquired another distinction: he was isbarred for intentionally presenting false evidence in death-penalty cases—something that had never before happened to an American prosecutor. In a 1992 triple-murder case, Peasley introduced testimony that he knew to be false; three men were convicted and sentenced to die. Peasley was convinced that the three were guilty, but he also believed that the evidence needed a push.

...According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the mid-nineteen-seventies a hundred and seventeen death-row inmates have been released. Defense lawyers, often relying on DNA testing, have shown repeatedly how shoddy crime-lab work, lying informants, and mistaken eyewitness identifications, among other factors, led to unjust convictions.But DNA tests don’t reveal how innocent people come to be prosecuted in the first place. The career of Kenneth Peasley does.

Read the whole thing, it's fascinating and Toobin doesa great job telling the story. Peasly, now disbarred, is working as a paralegal. He can apply to get his license back in four years. Soto-Fong remains on death row.

The Chicago City Council has approved a $2 million settlement for a youth wrongfully accused of murdering 11 year old Ryan Harris. A second youth's case remains pending.

"It's probably one of the most shameful episodes in our city's history," Alderman Joe Moore said Monday. "We're getting off pretty easy."

Another Alderman thought the settlement should be $10 million. If the city had gone to trial and lost, the verdict might have been $30 to 50 million.

Here's some details of the case--and the inexcusable police conduct. Here's some background on Floyd Durr, whose DNA did match semen in Ryan's underwear and who is awaiting trial for her murder.

Bump and Update:

by TChris

Sixteen years into a 75 year sentence, Brandon Lee regained his freedom. DNA tests persuaded El Paso County District Attorney Jaime Esparza to join the Innocence Project in a request to vacate Lee's sentence.

In 1988, Moon was convicted of the aggravated sexual assault of an El Paso women. Both she and another sexual assault victim identified Moon as their attacker during the trial. However, recent DNA tests performed on semen evidence found at the scene cleared Moon of the crime. The tests also show that the real rapist was never apprehended.

Moon's lawyers blame the Texas Department of Public Safety's poor blood analysis for Moon's ordeal.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has decided to back the formation of Innocence clinics.

After years of criticism for favoring prosecutors, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is supporting a proposal for a project to investigate prisoners' claims that they were wrongfully convicted. The project could involve a network of clinics, like those at the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin, that investigate inmate claims.

The appeals court will ask lawmakers to increase its 20 (M) million-dollar fund to teach defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges about handling innocence claims, according to Judge Barbara Hervey.

One Innocence Clinic would not be enough. In a state like Texas with its huge number of death sentences and reversals, a network is definitely needed.

Since the Center for Actual Innocence opened at the University of Texas Law School in 2003, about 10 students have screened more than 1 thousand claims of innocence from inmates. About a dozen cases selected are in the early stages of investigation.

by TChris

Life has not been good for Kevin Baruxes.

Baruxes was three weeks past his 18th birthday when he was arrested. Now he's 26 and he's got two scars from a prison knife attack that almost killed him and a seven-year gap in his life story that's impossible to replace and almost as hard to explain.

Baruxes was charged with sexually assaulting Cortni Mahaffy, and because a hate crime enhancer was added, the jury was allowed to hear about Baruxes' obnoxiously racist opinions. The jury didn't believe Baruxes' mother, who testified that he was at home when the attack allegedly occurred.

Now, it seems, the attack never happened. The first of a two-part story reporting Baruxes' exoneration appears today. It's a story that has become common.

Wrongful convictions in America's courts are no longer surprising. Rarely a month goes by without one surfacing; in California alone, there have been at least 200 in the last 15 years, according to a recent San Francisco magazine report.