A few days before Christmas, Miguel Roman received the best present imaginable: freedom from unjust imprisonment.

Superior Court Judge David P. Gold ... ordered a new trial and set aside the guilty verdict and 60-year prison sentence that had confined Roman to prison for a murder it now appears he did not commit. Loud applause followed the judge's order.

Prosecutors agree that DNA analysis (unavailable at the time of Roman's 1990 trial) points to another man as the likely murderer. Connecticut will certainly dismiss the charges against Roman, given that the other man has now been charged with the murder.

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Recent wrongful conviction items of interest:

• An interview with Steven Barnes, who served almost 20 years for crimes he didn't commit.

"The investigation only focused on me. That's not right. You should investigate everything," Barnes said. "If they had DNA (testing) back in '85, I would have never been arrested."

• Craig Watkins has been named the 2008 Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year.

Speaking of police crime labs that produce unreliable results, the Innocence Project recently asked the Maryland state police to investigate the Baltimore police crime lab.

The Innocence Project, a national group of lawyers who try to exonerate convicts based largely on new DNA evidence, wrote in the complaint that "serious negligence or misconduct substantially affecting the integrity of forensic results has occurred at the Baltimore Police Department Crime Laboratory... Recently, the BPD-CL revealed that a lab employee working in the DNA lab contaminated evidence in approximately 12 open cases."

Lab staff didn't wear gloves when handling evidence, and the lab failed to enter the DNA profiles of its staff members into its database, causing staff contaminations to appear as "unknowns." These were among the failures of management that caused the crime lab's director to be canned in August. [more...]

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt insists his department bears no responsibility for Ricardo Rachell's wrongful arrest, conviction, and incarceration. When the police arrested Rachell for sexually assaulting a minor, they recovered physical evidence that could have been tested for DNA. The department's notoriously unreliable crime lab had been closed, so the evidence wasn't tested. Prosecutors didn't order DNA testing and nobody told the defense that the evidence existed.

While Rachell was in jail, the officers involved in his arrest investigated a string of similar assaults in their district. If that fact caused them any concern for Rachell's innocence, they did nothing about it.

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• Des Moines businesswoman Phyllis Davis died in the cross-fire of a gang-related shootout between the occupants of two vehicles in 1996. One of the vehicles matched a distinctive SUV that David Flores owned. Via the Des Moines Register, Flores makes a strong argument that he was wrongly convicted of killing Davis.

[N]o murder weapon, no fingerprints and no eyewitnesses ever placed him at the scene. During Flores' controversial trial, four witnesses - including three for the prosecution - testified that a black man, not a light-skinned Hispanic like Flores, was in the SUV from which prosecutors believed the fatal bullet was fired.

This year, the judge in Flores' post-conviction case learned a newly discovered FBI report from 1996 shows another man, Rafael Robinson, might have been involved in Davis' death. At least two people also agreed to testify in sworn depositions that Robinson, a gang member who was also fatally shot in 1996, was the man witnesses saw in the SUV that day.

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The evidence against Joshua Kezer was weak. No physical evidence connected him to the murder of Angela Lawless.

Key prosecution evidence included the trial testimony of Mark Abbott, who claimed he saw Kezer near the Interstate 55 off-ramp where Lawless' body was found. However, in an interview with Scott City police 10 days after Lawless' death, Abbott had identified a different man as being near the crime scene.

Kezer's defense lawyer wasn't told about Abbott's change of story. The other witnesses against Kezer had everything to gain by implicating him.
Update: Be sure to read Jeralyn's comment. [more ...]

It was a happy Thanksgiving for Steven Barnes -- the first he's had since some time before 1989, when he went to prison for a rape and murder he didn't commit.

The 42-year-old man walked out of state prison Tuesday after spending nearly half his life behind bars for a crime he did not commit. An Oneida County Court judge set Mr. Barnes free after DNA testing exonerated him of the murder and rape of a 16-year-old girl.

To his credit, the district attorney didn't stand in the way of Barnes' freedom.

The district attorney conceded that Mr. Barnes "would never have been arrested" if today's DNA technology had existed in 1985. The search for the real killer has been renewed.

Happy Thanksgiving, Steven Barnes.

The New York Times today joined TalkLeft and a host of others in asking Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia to pardon the Norfolk Four.

An accurate and pointed observation by Scott Horton:

What makes a bad prosecutor? It’s simple: Does the prosecutor’s longing for the public limelight, his aspirations for public office, come to overwhelm his dedication to justice, to simply doing the right thing? It’s said that a famous chief prosecutor from Dallas, Henry Wade, summed up the thinking that goes into a really bad prosecutor like this: “any prosecutor could convict a guilty man, but ... it takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.”

Good prosecutors go about their jobs by blending duty, respect for the law and ethics with compassion and understanding. Average prosecutors just try to muddle through the day without upsetting the boss or a judge. There are many more good and average prosecutors than there are bad ones (although the bad ones are far from a tiny minority).

A few prosecutors stand out in their dedication to justice. Horton and the Wall Street Journal both call attention to a district attorney who has been repeatedly praised at TalkLeft: Craig Watkins in Dallas. [more ...]

Six people convicted in 1985 of a Nebraska murder have been exonerated by DNA testing that implicates the man police originally viewed as a suspect. The day after the murder, Bruce Smith had scratches on his face. A blood test by the Oklahoma City crime lab seemed to rule out Smith as a suspect. The lab made a mistake. Recent DNA testing places Smith at the scene of the crime and rules out the six wrongly convicted defendants.

The Nebraska Attorney General doesn't want to accuse the police investigators of malice, but they clearly worked to shape the evidence to match their theory of the crime.

[S]ome "unorthodox" interrogation and prosecution interview tactics used on the six have since been discredited, such as helping witnesses construct testimony by showing them tapes of the crime scene, or interrupting videotaped interviews to help refresh a witness's memory.

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This 2006 post asked Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine to pardon the Norfolk Four. Four sailors confessed to raping and murdering Michelle Moore-Bosko in Norfolk after they were threatened with the death penalty if they maintained their innocence. The evidence is strong that a different man is telling the truth when he says that he committed the crime alone.

Perhaps Gov. Kaine will do the right thing this year, now that 30 retired FBI agents who reviewed the case have concluded that the servicemen are innocent.

The former agents join a long list of unusual supporters, including four former Virginia attorneys general; 12 former state and federal judges and prosecutors; and a past president of the Virginia Bar Association, who have called for the men to be pardoned.

One sailor has been released from prison but three others are serving life sentences. What are you waiting for, Gov. Kaine? Give them an early Christmas present. Send them home to their families where they belong.

New York City has agreed to pay $3.5 million to Shih-Wei Su. That will make his life better, but it won't give him back 12 years of lost freedom.

Shih-Wei Su, was convicted by a jury in 1992 after Queens prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from the star witness, according to a ruling in 2003 by the United States Court of Appeals, which overturned Mr. Su’s conviction and condemned the Queens district attorney’s office. ...

“The settlement doesn’t buy back the time I lost and doesn’t do real justice, but the amount shows the public something is very wrong here,” said Mr. Su, now 35 and a financial consultant in Manhattan. “I did 12 years on a wrongful conviction, and no one was punished for it.”

Misconduct by police and prosecutors that leads to wrongful convictions is rarely punished. [more ...]