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A reporter looks at day-to-day practices in American courtrooms, and finds them wanting.
Last year in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., two juvenile judges were indicted on charges of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for sending children to a private prison. But this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had studied the daily procedures in their courtrooms.
An Omaha case in which a down-on-his-luck attorney agreed to wear a wire for the U.S. attorney’s office to get incriminating statements during a jail meeting with a local inmate raises “one huge legal ethics question,” Ashby Jones writes in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog. Defense attorneys are moving to suppress evidence collected by the lawyer, Terry Haddock. The inmate, Shannon Williams, is the alleged ringleader of a big marijuana conspiracy. (more…)
Below are copies of three chapters on covering criminal justice, a special report by Criminal Justice Journalists and the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice:
Part One: Covering Prisons and Jails
Part Three: Covering Community Corrections, Probation and Beyond
As of July 1
Office Phone: (207) 780-4409
Professor Tuerkheimer focuses her scholarship on the intersection of criminal law and the lives of women and children. As an ADA, she prosecuted child abuse, sex crimes, and internet crimes and conducted trainings for prosecutors, law enforcement officers, medical personnel and child protective workers.
Mistaken diagnoses of Shaken Baby Syndrome may have sent thousands of innocent people to prison, according to a new study
Exclusive to The Crime Report
In October, 1995, when police charged Audrey Edmunds, a Waunakee, Wis. day care provider, with the murder of a seven-month-old girl who had been left in her care, prosecutors said she had shaken the baby to death.
A medical expert testified at trial that the child had suffered critical injuries that were the hallmarks of Shaken Baby Syndrome. A jury convicted Edmunds and she was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Across Georgia, poor people accused of crimes are being abandoned by their lawyers because there is no money to pay their legal fees, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There are 10 death-penalty cases proceeding to trial with $1.1 million in expected billings. But there is no money to pay for those cases, either. (more…)
Houston’s most recent inmate exonerated by DNA evidence may have spent an extra year in prison because of his attorney’s slow work, says the Houston Chronicle. Judges hope to eliminate such scenarios through a plan to restrict appointments to cases involving post-conviction DNA testing to a small pool of experienced lawyers. A 2001 law allowing convicts to request DNA tests has been the key to freedom for dozens in Texas, but judges and lawyers say such cases can suffer from a lack of attention and experience.
Judge Randy Roll considered a 28-year-old case against a defendant seeking DNA tests on evidence that was collected but never analyzed, evidence that police and county officials years ago reported had been lost or destroyed. New lawyers found what others could not: three hairs from the victim’s clothes that may resolve questions about Donald R. Burke’s 1981 rape conviction. The case prompted Roll to ask his fellow judges to change the system for appointing lawyers to defendants seeking post-conviction DNA testing to ensure that the cases go to people with knowledge of evidence storage and DNA. “It upset me that there could be a 30-year-old case out there with evidence that no one knew how to find,” said Roll, elected to his first term last November. “It became clear to me that we cannot just name lawyers to these cases ad hoc, but that we need experts doing this.” Harris County’s 22 criminal district judges have approved a plan to limit the lawyers assigned to cases in which defendants are seeking post-conviction DNA testing to a selected group with experience in the area.
