| Innocent until prove guilty; Investigative Journalists — or Stenographic Enablers? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 3 2010, 10:25 AM (292 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Mar 3 2010, 10:25 AM Post #1 |
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http://truthinjustice.org/weinberg-report.htm Innocent Until Reported Guilty The simple prescription for reducing wrongful convictions: better journalism about crime and punishment. By: Steve Weinberg | September 23, 2008 (snip) In each of those cases, the justice system failed. But so did journalism. The Last of the Sacred Cows The typical situation within newsrooms today looks like this: Coverage of criminal cases is spotty and often superficial when it occurs. Elected prosecutors tend to be treated as the last of the sacred cows, the white hats who keep the streets safe for law-abiding citizens. The lawyers hired by the elected prosecutor are rarely mentioned in print and even more rarely subjected to meaningful scrutiny, despite their considerable power. The police in general are not treated so sacredly by journalists. That said, almost all individual police officers operate anonymously as far as most journalists are concerned, allowing rogues to make questionable arrests with relative impunity. (snip) Investigative Journalists — or Stenographic Enablers? (snip) All this progress aside, “enabler” might serve as the best word to describe many journalists assigned to cover the justice system. They should all know the warning signs of wrongful prosecution by now, yet their coverage (and absence of coverage) suggests little learning from experience. In the November/December 2007 issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a change-oriented media watchdog group, Jon Whiten examined the coverage by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times of a May 24, 2002, rape at the city’s Daley Center. Police arrested Carl Chatman, a homeless veteran, the day the rape occurred. The victim identified him in a lineup. A day later he allegedly confessed, and 20 months later a trial led to a conviction. Chatman received a 30-year prison sentence. Chatman might be the rapist. But many signs point to a potential wrongful conviction. Among other things, Chatman is mentally retarded. Yet both newspapers, despite exemplary investigations of wrongful convictions in other cases, Whiten wrote, “favored the prosecution’s framing of events and did not raise appropriate questions — or even quote the defense raising such questions — about eyewitness … misidentification, false and coerced confessions and a lack of solid scientific evidence.” Chatman’s IQ measured 68, considered evidence of mental retardation. The assistant state’s attorney wrote the defendant’s confession, conveniently did not tape any of his three conversations with Chatman and produced handwritten notes from only one of those interviews. Many journalists who cover the “cops and courts” beat and its unwavering defenders of the criminal justice system will react to this article by saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” They will contend that if it were easy to spot wrongful prosecutions, they would never happen. But I like to think that after police arrested Ellen Reasonover for murder in St. Louis County, an intelligent, persistent journalist looking at the evidence before trial would have published an article showing that the state’s case was built on nothing more than the questionable testimony of two jailhouse snitches and that the snitch testimony contravened common sense. That story might not have halted an injustice. Then again, maybe it would have. Reporting for Justice Newsroom managers can revamp their criminal justice coverage to spot potential wrongful convictions early. The revamping would require a collaboration of the police reporter, the reporter who covers the criminal courts and a reporter who specializes in building in-house databases that could track every felony arrest on a spreadsheet. If cataloging every felony arrest is impractical given newsroom resources, the tracking could be limited to crimes against persons (murders, rapes, nonsexual assaults), with crimes against property omitted. The spreadsheet would contain categories that direct the appropriate reporter to complete certain tasks at the appropriate time. Those tasks would include: • Studying the police report of the arrest • Talking to the suspect, the victim, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer as soon as practical • Indicating on the spreadsheet when the prosecutor files a felony charge, drops the charge to a misdemeanor or dismisses the case • Covering the preliminary hearing and other pretrial proceedings if the prosecutor moves the case forward as a felony • Checking periodically to find out if the defendant has decided to plead guilty and, if so, the conditions accompanying the plea • Preparing to cover the trial if the case goes that far • Tracking any appeals if the trial results in a conviction At each step, the appropriate reporter could write a story for publication if anything seems to have gone awry in the prosecution. And there’s a side benefit of the tracking system: Many cases that are not examples of wrongful conviction would yield important and interesting stories. To supplement the case-tracking system, reporters would need to leave the newsroom frequently to build long-term relationships with not only the district attorney but also the nearly anonymous assistant district attorneys who negotiate most plea bargains and try most cases. Reporters would operate similarly with public defenders, private-practice defense lawyers, judges, court administrators, bailiffs, police detectives, police crime laboratory personnel, law professors who are experts on criminal procedure and staff from the Innocence Project covering the state, among others. This relationship building can be accomplished in the ways good reporters have always cultivated sources: by chatting over lunch or coffee, with the reporter initiating the invitation and picking up the tab; by attending the same continuing education seminars as prosecutors do, mingling during meals and breaks; and by generally treating each potential source like a human being, especially when no deadline looms and no request for sensitive information is pending. Some of those efforts would lead to feature stories that entertain and educate news consumers about important, interesting people within the criminal justice system. While preparing those stories, though, the reporters could also be looking for the police crime laboratory technician distrusted by defense lawyers because of an obvious prosecution bias; the sex crimes detective who’s racist; the defense lawyer who misses appellate deadlines, closing legal doors for possibly innocent defendants; and the prosecutor who refuses to institute an open-files policy for defense lawyers, leaving decisions about evidence that might point to innocence entirely in the state’s hands. Crime reporters from the enlightened newsroom would also, of course, continue to write the process stories often seen as the meat and potatoes of the cops and courts beats — but they would make sure that at least some of the stories involved the possibility of wrongful prosecution. For example, these reporters would obtain police and prosecutor training manuals to evaluate the procedures police and prosecutors use for ensuring accurate eyewitness identification, the uncontaminated collection of evidence and proper protocols to guard against false confessions. The reporters would regularly review the accreditation reports for police crime laboratories, noting shortcomings in equipment and training. They would study appellate court opinions in every felony criminal case, looking for references to wayward individuals and procedures leading to inequities. They would, in short, do their jobs thoroughly and well, knowing that innocent people were depending on them, every step of the way. [And if the press in Durham had done this, the lax case would never have happened, the reporters would have earned Pulitzers, and they would all sleep better at night knowing that they had done some good in the world (even if they finally get laid off--unlikely, though, since their papers would prosper because of their rich and trustworthy, reliable content).] |
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| Quasimodo | Mar 3 2010, 10:27 AM Post #2 |
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More cases and articles on wrongful convictions, the law, and journalism : http://www.truthinjustice.org/systemworks.htm |
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| Bill Anderson | Mar 3 2010, 10:30 AM Post #3 |
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This is really good. I'm going to incorporate this material into my book review of Alex S. Jones' "Losing the News," which I am writing for Regulation Magazine. One of the concerns I raised about journalism in my doctoral dissertation was the fact that so many "sources" are government employees. The "watchdog" becomes a lapdog.
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| Quasimodo | Mar 3 2010, 10:33 AM Post #4 |
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Never let DNA stand in the way of a good conviction... By Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune reporter December 15, 2008 Monday DNA evidence has been widely embraced over the last two decades as a powerful forensic tool to prove a defendant's guilt or innocence. But in Lake County, authorities have sometimes pressed for convictions even when the DNA doesn't match a suspect. Consider three active cases overseen by Michael Mermel, chief of the criminal division for the Lake County state's attorney's office: When DNA evidence excluded a man convicted in the rape and battery of a 68-year-old woman, Mermel suggested the victim had consensual sex with someone else. When DNA evidence excluded a man in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, Mermel and another prosecutor suggested that the girl may have been sexually active. The DNA, he said, was a "red herring." And, just recently, when lawyers for the man charged in the killing of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend said in court that DNA evidence from semen excluded him as the perpetrator, the Lake prosecutor had another explanation. Mermel said DNA may have gotten inside the 8-year-old's body as she played in the woods at what became the crime scene -- a place where Mermel said some couples go to have sex. The girl was found fully clothed. In each of the cases, all likely to go to trial in the new year, Mermel argues that other evidence, mainly confessions and witness identification, carry greater sway than the genetic material. That attitude startles some DNA experts and others in the criminal justice system. "The vast majority of prosecutors in the United States generally are willing to walk away from a case where DNA excludes a suspect," said Joshua Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor and member of the board of directors of the National District Attorneys Association. 'Forensically significant' In these Lake County cases, several DNA scientists and others say the prosecutor's explanations are difficult to imagine. "It's just amazing how convincing DNA can be if it supports your case and how unconvincing it is when it doesn't support your case," said William Thompson, a lawyer and DNA expert at the University of California at Irvine. (snip) 'DNA ought to humble us' (snip) But eyewitness identification, while still widely used, has been proven fallible by DNA. In three-quarters of the more than 200 DNA exonerations nationwide, eyewitness identifications were central to the state's case, according to the Innocence Project, which represents inmates seeking to prove their innocence with DNA. (snip) "The DNA ought to humble us," said Starks' lawyer, Jed Stone. "But it doesn't humble some people." |
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