Robin Lovitt, pictured above, would have been the nation’s 1000th execution since the death penalty was re-introduced into the US in 1976. But with only 24 hours to spare before his November 30th execution, Lovitt was spared that distinction with a last-minute commutation of his sentence by Virginia’s Governor Mark Warner.
The reason? Call it the […]
It’s truly scary how many ugly stories of sloppy forensics are emerging under the white hot light of real, peer-based scientific scrutiny. A lot of the credit for the movement toward hyper-scrutiny has to go to Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project (as of this writing, they are up to 163 exonerations), whose group is probably single-handedly […]
It’s called Identity Theft, and it has no trouble establishing an identity of its own; in fact, it’s the hottest new crime in town. Here in Washington state, Attorney General Rob McKenna has allocated unprecedented resources and new attorney positions to fight this fastest-growing form of theft. His site reports here on the problem and […]
I just got an unbelievable email. It was an urgent request from the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to join a letter writing campaign to the Washington State Bar Association urging the Board of Governors to file an amicus brief in a case currently before the State Supreme Court. If you can believe this, […]
As I reported here regarding a recent Florida case, the quest to obtain the software code behind the curtain of most breath test machines has started to pick up steam. In the Florida case, the deadline for turning over the code passed yesterday, and no code materialized. Accordingly, the defense is moving for sanctions today, […]
It was an exciting night, and even though this has nothing to do with Criminal Defense and only tangentially touches on technology, I had to hurry home and write about it. My son and I went out tonight to see Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, world-renowned physicist, and hugely popular lecturer. […]
Nationally recognized DUI guru Lawrence Taylor has one of the best blogs on the net focused on DUIs. I make The DUI Blog a standard stop on my daily tour through the blogosphere. One of the recurring themes you’ll find there is the inherent unreliability of the Breathalyzer machine regularly used by police to “confirm” […]
I’ve been meaning to get a tablet PC for some time, but my need is very specific: I want the lightest possible device that will really feel like a paper notepad when I’m in court. The convertible tablet PC’s I’ve seen haven’t excited me, mostly because they wind up having to pack so much into […]
The kind of science that’s erroneously convicting innocent people for things like drunk driving and sexual assault knows no limits, and has now infected arson investigators too. In one of the most chilling stories I’ve read lately, Texas has executed a man who went to his lethal injection deathbed swearing his innocence of the death […]
If you think fingerprints are an infallible source of unique identification, you should read this. It’s just one of many recent stories raising serious questions about a technology so established in this country, no one’s ever bothered to actually scientifically validate it. Although serious questions are surfacing about the reliability of this technology, a more […]