Tag: DNA testing
Posted on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 11:36:10 AM EST
Tags: DNA testing, wrongful convictions (all tags)
Two men in Mississippi, wrongfully convicted of murdering a child, have been released from prison after a decade, thanks to the work of the Innocence Project and local lawyers.
The cause of these wrongful convictions: fraudulent evidence. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project says:
"You have a local forensic dentist who fabricated evidence in both these cases to get two innocent men convicted."
Here's more from the Innocence Project on the clearing and release of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks.
In both cases, the real perpetrator has now been apprehended.Update: Radley Balko at Reason has an update on Mississippi's woeful forensics system.
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Posted on Mon Apr 23, 2007 at 04:46:21 PM EST
Tags: DNA testing (all tags)
Image from the Innocent Project.
Jerry Miller has been ordered released from jail after serving 25 years for a rape DNA has shown he didn't commit.
Miller is the 200th person shown by DNA evidence to have been wrongfully convicted.
The Innocence Project says,
The 100th exoneration occurred in January 2002, 13 years after the first exoneration. It took just more than five years for the number to double.
"Five years ago, people said that the number (of exonerations) was going to dry up because there just weren't many wrongful convictions," said lawyer Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project in 1992 to help prisoners prove their innocence through DNA evidence. "But clearly, there are plenty of innocent persons still in prison. There's no way you can look at this data without believing that."
David Lazer, a Harvard University public policy professor who specializes in DNA issues, says improved testing technology and an increase in the number of lawyers who are taking on DNA cases should result in a continued increase in the number of wrongful convictions that are set aside.
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Posted on Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 01:15:00 AM EST
Tags: DNA testing (all tags)
The Bush Administration knows no bounds when it comes to violating our civil liberties. Here's the latest:
The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.
The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by federal authorities, and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.
Arrestees who have not been convicted of a crime should not be required to have their DNA sampled and collected. It's just the latest step down the slippery slope of over-intrusion into our privacy without just cause.
As Innocence Project co-director Peter Neufeld points out:
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