Imagine Being Locked Up in Prison because of Bad Forensics
How many more innocent Americans must be imprisoned before we get junk science out of the courtroom?
by Regan Hines
In 1978, a cab driver was robbed and killed in front of his home. Police recovered a stocking mask near the scene of the crime and an FBI analyst testified that hairs found on the mask matched the hair of seventeen-year-old suspect Santae Tribble. He had half a dozen alibi witnesses, but the strength of this testimony and the prosecutor exaggerating that there was perhaps “one chance in ten million” that the hair could have belonged to anyone other than Tribble was enough for the jury to convict him of murder.
In 2012,
DNA testing proved none of the hairs were Tribble’s, and one of the 13 hairs wasn’t even human but came from a dog. Sandra K. Levick, Tribble’s lawyer wrote,
“Such is the true state of hair microscopy, two FBI-trained analysts could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.”
Oh for Heaven's sake. Is this just another anecdotal tragedy of injustice to prejudice further the court of public opinion in the US v. Donald J. Trump, et. al. case?
A tiny sliver of the justice system in this country, and far greater a percentage elsewhere, get it wrong, and innocent people are wrongly convicted for a variety of tragically connected series of errors by investigators, witness memories, forensic evidence, law enforcement errors and/or bias, known and unknown in the course of their collaborative effort to seek justice.
Thankfully there is at least a recognition of the problem and organizations under supported to attempt to address them.
If he was convicted of murder, no "Innocents Project" would take on that mountain of forensically undisputed evidence pointing to him and him alone. Civil Rights groups going after Fuhrman? Oh yeah.
Trump is the ancillary target of a Russian collision and conspiracy investigation initiated by and controlled by his own party. Money laundering, emoluments, obstruction of justice, perjury all are on the big white board in Mueller's conference room. Several high level four star general "volunteer" "baristas" have confessed, and given up extraordinary inside information to get time served sentencing deals.
Your equating the OJ Dream Team tactics with Trump's NY mob lawyers' tactics only serves to reinforce the perception of Trump's culpability in at least one of the many high crimes and misdemeanors being investigated by lifetime Republican career prosecutors and investigators.
The most memorably historic aspect of this constitutional drama will be the Supreme Court. In 1974? it ruled 8-0 ordering the Nixon tapes be produced. Well more than half those justices were deeply conservative, and/or appointed by Nixon. I think at that point William Douglas and Thurgood Marshall were the only liberal lions. But then the only litmus test was outstanding credentials as a lower court justice.
