For more Shepard Fairey images, click here.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Fingerprint Bias Affects Reliability
Often times when a fingerprint examiner is examining whether there is a match in fingerprints, the examiner is aware that the fingerprint is of the "suspect" and is looking to confirm what is already believed by other law enforcement investigators. Cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror found that analysis of fingerprint data by human examiners can be ruined by unintentional bias. Dror put together a study to test whether a cognitive bias would affect the reliability of the fingerprint examiner's results:
The article describing the study and its aftermath, here, is worth a look if you have a fingerprint case where you are looking to challenge either the finding or the fingerprint's use in court.
And so, five international experts were put to the test covertly, re-examining matched prints from their own old cases while armed with different — and potentially biasing — "case information." They'd agreed to be tested, but they didn't know when — or even if — test prints would cross their desks.
That night in Brighton, the results were in. For Charlton, they were a jaw-dropper.
"Not only some, but most, of the fingerprint examiners changed their minds," said Dror, who was far less surprised by the flip-flopping. As an expert in human thought processes and the hidden power of cognitive bias — an array of distortions in the way humans perceive reality — he had a decided advantage.
Fingerprints have been accepted as unassailable evidence in courts for more than 100 years, but vaunted claims of their uniqueness and infallibility still lack scientific validation. By contrast, the existence of cognitive bias and the subjective nature of human judgment have been thoroughly established by hundreds of scientific studies going back decades.
Dror knew the ways in which unconscious bias could impact expert decision-making, yet allowances were rarely made for it in the work of fingerprint or other forensic examiners. Then, in February, a landmark National Academy of Sciences report on forensic science called for massive reform. The report, which cited Dror's studies, sent a strong message about the need for research into the effects of cognitive bias and finding ways to minimize it.
The article describing the study and its aftermath, here, is worth a look if you have a fingerprint case where you are looking to challenge either the finding or the fingerprint's use in court.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
EDD in Criminal Cases
From the Association of Litigation Support Professionals
We’re all aware of the enormous attention paid to e-discovery in civil cases, especially since the changes to the FRCP. But what about criminal cases? White collar criminal prosecutions have become more common in the post-Enron world as the Government has sharpened it’s focus on corporate crimes and focused on activities such as securities fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.
And prosecution of these cases can closely resemble the characteristics of a complex civil case. Discovery can include millions of pages of ESI from standard sources such as computers and PDA’s but may also involve hundreds of hours of wiretaps, body wires and surveillance videos. At the end of one such complex criminal case in which I was involved, the cost of transcribing recordings of wiretaps and body wires actually exceeded the fees for the appointed defense counsel!
But criminal cases do not have the constitutional right to discovery of evidence which mandate procedure in civil trials. The Brady rule (Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963),) requires that exculpatory evidence be provided to the defense and the Jencks Act requires production of verbatim transcripts and other notes or documents related to testimony by government agents, employees or witnesses. But the request for production must be made by the defendant and is required only AFTER the witnesses have testified and are not generally available in pre-trial hearings.
So what constitutes Brady material is often the source of prolonged pre-trial motion practice and although many federal administrative agencies have incorporated Jencks standards into their procedures, local rules in the various federal courts may vary as to the application of Jencks.
The result is that document exchange between the parties in criminal cases is not the result of the negotiation that exists in civil cases. No litigation hold letters, no meet and confer, no motions over delivery format. A warrant is served without notice, an agency seizes computers and when they are done processing the ESI the agency provides defense counsel a copy of what they seized in a fixed format, typically EnCase or FTK.
So what does this mean for the defense attorneys in these cases? To get some real world perspective I called Russ Aoki, a Seattle attorney specializing in white collar criminal cases who is often appointed liaison counsel for appointed defense teams in complex criminal cases. I have worked for Russ on several such cases, including the government prosecutions of both the Banditos and Hells Angels motorcycle clubs, and knew he would have a good perspective on this issue.
Russ told me he was introduced to complex criminal cases in 2003 when he was appointed counsel for Kevin Lawrence, the CEO of health care company Znetix, who had been indicted on a $92 million securities fraud claim and was indigent following a series of civil cases and asset forfeitures.
More on the Znetix case in a minute, but first I asked Russ what differences he sees between civil and criminal cases when it comes to e-Discovery. He agrees with my points about lack of negotiation and fixed formats and added a few more of his own:
Criminal cases are “on the clock”, with issues of speedy trial and defendants who are often in custody and want to get to trial as soon as possible
Attorneys are not always as tech savvy as their civil counterparts
Document review is difficult with in custody defendants who have restricted or no access to computers
Collaboration with co-counsel is difficult given a system that rewards defendants who cooperate with the government
Technology purchases are difficult because the judge must approve all expenditures (more than 80 percent of criminal defendants in Federal court appear with court appointed counsel because they are indigent)
Russ summed it up this way, “Unlike a complex civil case, criminal defense lawyers tend to be solo practitioners or from small law firms. The majority of criminal defense attorneys have few staff, if any and they must balance numerous cases that require far more frequent court appearances then in the civil justice system. To further increase the pressures on them, an immediate trial is mandated by the constitutional right to a speedy trial. A client who is unwilling to waive his right to a speedy trial requires the criminal defense attorney to use tools to review and organize discovery in a quick and effective manner.”
Those tools must, of necessity then, be technological. Going back to the Znetix case, Russ recalled that “Within a few days we learned that there were 1.5 to 2 million pages of potentially relevant documents spread out in several cities along the west coast. The documents were mostly business records, some of which pertained to the issuance of securities that were the basis of the prosecution”.
He went on to say, “There was no doubt we needed to database the discovery. We calculated that the average document in this case was likely to be 3.5 pages in length. A person could read 10 documents an hour, including writing down a few notes. Even assuming a person could work at that pace for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take that one person 14.7 years to read 1.5 million pages of documents. With a team of two lawyers and a paralegal, we could easily trim that time down to…oh, let’s see…just under 5 years.” The solution was technology but being court-appointed meant he needed court approval. Luckily the judge, the Honorable Marsha J. Pechman of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, was interested in technology and after a demonstration of the CaseShare database Russ wanted to use, approved its use.
Russ noted that “The use of a Web-based document repository was a critical tool that allowed a defense team of only three to rapidly digest 1.5 million pages of documents. Without it, we would have been lost.”
Where is all this headed in the future? Well in my opinion towards more incorporation of the FRCP provisions regarding e-Discovery by criminal case judges. At least one judge has done so already, as Judge Fasciola applied these civil rules to a federal criminal case in United States v. O’Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14, (D.D.C. 2008).
And one state court system has ruled that the fixed format delivery system by prosecutors violates the States obligation to provide the defense “meaningful access” to copies of a hard drive. In State v Dingman, No. 34719-9-II consolidated with No. 35949-9-II, 2009 Wash. App. LEXIS 550 (Wash. App. Mar. 10, 2009), an appeals court in Washington counseled “against unduly restricting access to electronic evidence in criminal matters” and issued an order to “strike down the trial court's order requiring the defense to access the mirror image drives ‘only through the State's operating system and software.’”
The court reversed and remanded for a new trial, concluding that the trial court erred by requiring that the State provide only an EnCase mirror image of defendant’s hard drives to the defense because “the State must meet its burden of showing a need for appropriate restrictions before the trial court [could] limit a computer forensics expert's analysis of a defendant's hard drive to only the State's chosen software format.”
The key is, I believe, to be well versed in the FRCP provisions regarding e-Discovery and make strategic decisions on how to apply that knowledge to the specifics of your criminal case. Your needs will be much more limited than in a civil matter and may revolve around only one or two specific items within the EDRM workflow. The key is knowing what you want to do with technology to handle those specifics.
With that in mind, Russ suggested one other tip for handling a criminal defense matter: “When I am appointed by the Court to be the Coordinating Attorney on complex racketeering and fraud cases, my role is to coordinate the use of technology to support the defense teams and look for cost sharing opportunities. I start each case by asking: “What do you want to do with the technology?”
That simple premise has served us well in many cases.
We’re all aware of the enormous attention paid to e-discovery in civil cases, especially since the changes to the FRCP. But what about criminal cases? White collar criminal prosecutions have become more common in the post-Enron world as the Government has sharpened it’s focus on corporate crimes and focused on activities such as securities fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.
And prosecution of these cases can closely resemble the characteristics of a complex civil case. Discovery can include millions of pages of ESI from standard sources such as computers and PDA’s but may also involve hundreds of hours of wiretaps, body wires and surveillance videos. At the end of one such complex criminal case in which I was involved, the cost of transcribing recordings of wiretaps and body wires actually exceeded the fees for the appointed defense counsel!
But criminal cases do not have the constitutional right to discovery of evidence which mandate procedure in civil trials. The Brady rule (Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963),) requires that exculpatory evidence be provided to the defense and the Jencks Act requires production of verbatim transcripts and other notes or documents related to testimony by government agents, employees or witnesses. But the request for production must be made by the defendant and is required only AFTER the witnesses have testified and are not generally available in pre-trial hearings.
So what constitutes Brady material is often the source of prolonged pre-trial motion practice and although many federal administrative agencies have incorporated Jencks standards into their procedures, local rules in the various federal courts may vary as to the application of Jencks.
The result is that document exchange between the parties in criminal cases is not the result of the negotiation that exists in civil cases. No litigation hold letters, no meet and confer, no motions over delivery format. A warrant is served without notice, an agency seizes computers and when they are done processing the ESI the agency provides defense counsel a copy of what they seized in a fixed format, typically EnCase or FTK.
So what does this mean for the defense attorneys in these cases? To get some real world perspective I called Russ Aoki, a Seattle attorney specializing in white collar criminal cases who is often appointed liaison counsel for appointed defense teams in complex criminal cases. I have worked for Russ on several such cases, including the government prosecutions of both the Banditos and Hells Angels motorcycle clubs, and knew he would have a good perspective on this issue.
Russ told me he was introduced to complex criminal cases in 2003 when he was appointed counsel for Kevin Lawrence, the CEO of health care company Znetix, who had been indicted on a $92 million securities fraud claim and was indigent following a series of civil cases and asset forfeitures.
More on the Znetix case in a minute, but first I asked Russ what differences he sees between civil and criminal cases when it comes to e-Discovery. He agrees with my points about lack of negotiation and fixed formats and added a few more of his own:
Criminal cases are “on the clock”, with issues of speedy trial and defendants who are often in custody and want to get to trial as soon as possible
Attorneys are not always as tech savvy as their civil counterparts
Document review is difficult with in custody defendants who have restricted or no access to computers
Collaboration with co-counsel is difficult given a system that rewards defendants who cooperate with the government
Technology purchases are difficult because the judge must approve all expenditures (more than 80 percent of criminal defendants in Federal court appear with court appointed counsel because they are indigent)
Russ summed it up this way, “Unlike a complex civil case, criminal defense lawyers tend to be solo practitioners or from small law firms. The majority of criminal defense attorneys have few staff, if any and they must balance numerous cases that require far more frequent court appearances then in the civil justice system. To further increase the pressures on them, an immediate trial is mandated by the constitutional right to a speedy trial. A client who is unwilling to waive his right to a speedy trial requires the criminal defense attorney to use tools to review and organize discovery in a quick and effective manner.”
Those tools must, of necessity then, be technological. Going back to the Znetix case, Russ recalled that “Within a few days we learned that there were 1.5 to 2 million pages of potentially relevant documents spread out in several cities along the west coast. The documents were mostly business records, some of which pertained to the issuance of securities that were the basis of the prosecution”.
He went on to say, “There was no doubt we needed to database the discovery. We calculated that the average document in this case was likely to be 3.5 pages in length. A person could read 10 documents an hour, including writing down a few notes. Even assuming a person could work at that pace for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take that one person 14.7 years to read 1.5 million pages of documents. With a team of two lawyers and a paralegal, we could easily trim that time down to…oh, let’s see…just under 5 years.” The solution was technology but being court-appointed meant he needed court approval. Luckily the judge, the Honorable Marsha J. Pechman of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, was interested in technology and after a demonstration of the CaseShare database Russ wanted to use, approved its use.
Russ noted that “The use of a Web-based document repository was a critical tool that allowed a defense team of only three to rapidly digest 1.5 million pages of documents. Without it, we would have been lost.”
Where is all this headed in the future? Well in my opinion towards more incorporation of the FRCP provisions regarding e-Discovery by criminal case judges. At least one judge has done so already, as Judge Fasciola applied these civil rules to a federal criminal case in United States v. O’Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14, (D.D.C. 2008).
And one state court system has ruled that the fixed format delivery system by prosecutors violates the States obligation to provide the defense “meaningful access” to copies of a hard drive. In State v Dingman, No. 34719-9-II consolidated with No. 35949-9-II, 2009 Wash. App. LEXIS 550 (Wash. App. Mar. 10, 2009), an appeals court in Washington counseled “against unduly restricting access to electronic evidence in criminal matters” and issued an order to “strike down the trial court's order requiring the defense to access the mirror image drives ‘only through the State's operating system and software.’”
The court reversed and remanded for a new trial, concluding that the trial court erred by requiring that the State provide only an EnCase mirror image of defendant’s hard drives to the defense because “the State must meet its burden of showing a need for appropriate restrictions before the trial court [could] limit a computer forensics expert's analysis of a defendant's hard drive to only the State's chosen software format.”
The key is, I believe, to be well versed in the FRCP provisions regarding e-Discovery and make strategic decisions on how to apply that knowledge to the specifics of your criminal case. Your needs will be much more limited than in a civil matter and may revolve around only one or two specific items within the EDRM workflow. The key is knowing what you want to do with technology to handle those specifics.
With that in mind, Russ suggested one other tip for handling a criminal defense matter: “When I am appointed by the Court to be the Coordinating Attorney on complex racketeering and fraud cases, my role is to coordinate the use of technology to support the defense teams and look for cost sharing opportunities. I start each case by asking: “What do you want to do with the technology?”
That simple premise has served us well in many cases.
Full article here.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
While We're On the Topic of the Spokane Police
More Spokane police officers could face criminal charges over the city’s handling of the fatal confrontation with unarmed janitor Otto Zehm, with newly filed court documents indicating a federal probe is continuing into potential obstructions of justice.Full Story here.
The new documents filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Durkin contain new details about the confrontation that suggest police and city officials have misled the public and others about what happened the night of March 18, 2006, when Zehm was beaten with a police baton, shocked with a Taser, and hogtied by a half-dozen officers before lapsing into a coma and dying two days later.
The Center for Justice is representing Otto Zehm's mother and the estate of Otto Zehm in a civil trial and has full coverage on the new information released by United States Attorney's Office that suggests that city officials were involved behind the scenes to clear the Spokane police officers involved in the death of Otto Zehm three and a half years ago. Check out some other Center For Justice projects here including upcoming events like the Dirty Martinis for a Clean River Benefit.
Golden Goose Fund: Spokane Police Spent Millions Using Private Accounts
Spokane police bought $5.3 million in cars, travel, gasoline, weapons, training, clothing, electronics and office equipment over two decades, using a private account operated by the department’s Special Investigations Unit outside of public scrutiny and in violation of city and state laws. The Special Investigative Unit or SIU mainly funded these accounts from drug seizures. This information was revealed in accounting statements obtained by The Spokesman-Review through a public records request. Full Story here including documents, audio and interactive graphics. The State Auditor Report is available here.
‘Criminally Insane’ Killer Escapes
Breaking news A “criminally insane” killer committed to Eastern State Hospital is at large, having escaped from a field trip to the Spokane County Interstate Fair, officials said. Officers are combing the fairgrounds in search of Phillip Arnold Paul, 47, but it’s believed he already has fled the fairgrounds, said Sgt. Dave Reagan. Read more here.AP IMPACT: New Meth Formula Avoids Anti-Drug Laws
This is the new formula for methamphetamine: a two-liter soda bottle, a few handfuls of cold pills and some noxious chemicals. Shake the bottle and the volatile reaction produces one of the world's most addictive drugs.
Only a few years ago, making meth required an elaborate lab — with filthy containers simmering over open flames, cans of flammable liquids and hundreds of pills. The process gave off foul odors, sometimes sparked explosions and was so hard to conceal that dealers often "cooked" their drugs in rural areas.
But now drug users are making their own meth in small batches using a faster, cheaper and much simpler method with ingredients that can be carried in a knapsack and mixed on the run. The "shake-and-bake" approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.
"Somebody somewhere said 'Wait this requires a lot less pseudoephedrine, and I can fly under the radar,'" said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control.
An Associated Press review of lab seizures and interviews with state and federal law enforcement agents found that the new method is rapidly spreading across the nation's midsection and is contributing to a spike in the number of meth cases after years of declining arrests.
The new formula does away with the clutter of typical meth labs, and it can turn the back seat of a car or a bathroom stall into a makeshift drug factory. Some addicts have even made the drug while driving.
The pills are crushed, combined with some common household chemicals and then shaken in the soda bottle. No flame is required.
Using the new formula, batches of meth are much smaller but just as dangerous as the old system, which sometimes produces powerful explosions, touches off intense fires and releases drug ingredients that must be handled as toxic waste.
"If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball," said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol's Division of Drug and Crime Control. "You're not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway. If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction."
One little mistake, such as unscrewing the bottle cap too fast, can result in a huge blast, and police in Alabama, Oklahoma and other states have linked dozens of flash fires this year — some of them fatal — to meth manufacturing.
"Every meth recipe is dangerous, but in this one, if you don't shake it just right, you can build up too much pressure, and the container can pop," Woodward said. Full article can be found here.
Only a few years ago, making meth required an elaborate lab — with filthy containers simmering over open flames, cans of flammable liquids and hundreds of pills. The process gave off foul odors, sometimes sparked explosions and was so hard to conceal that dealers often "cooked" their drugs in rural areas.
But now drug users are making their own meth in small batches using a faster, cheaper and much simpler method with ingredients that can be carried in a knapsack and mixed on the run. The "shake-and-bake" approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.
"Somebody somewhere said 'Wait this requires a lot less pseudoephedrine, and I can fly under the radar,'" said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control.
An Associated Press review of lab seizures and interviews with state and federal law enforcement agents found that the new method is rapidly spreading across the nation's midsection and is contributing to a spike in the number of meth cases after years of declining arrests.
The new formula does away with the clutter of typical meth labs, and it can turn the back seat of a car or a bathroom stall into a makeshift drug factory. Some addicts have even made the drug while driving.
The pills are crushed, combined with some common household chemicals and then shaken in the soda bottle. No flame is required.
Using the new formula, batches of meth are much smaller but just as dangerous as the old system, which sometimes produces powerful explosions, touches off intense fires and releases drug ingredients that must be handled as toxic waste.
"If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball," said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol's Division of Drug and Crime Control. "You're not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway. If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction."
One little mistake, such as unscrewing the bottle cap too fast, can result in a huge blast, and police in Alabama, Oklahoma and other states have linked dozens of flash fires this year — some of them fatal — to meth manufacturing.
"Every meth recipe is dangerous, but in this one, if you don't shake it just right, you can build up too much pressure, and the container can pop," Woodward said. Full article can be found here.
CCleaner
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. Download CCleaner here.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
New FBI Report; Pot Bust Every 37 seconds in 2008
As reported on in more detail at Talk Left, the FBI today released its report (available here) on arrests for 2008.
Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has reviewed the report and writes:
Someone is arrested in the United States for a drug-law violation every 18 seconds, an FBI report released Monday shows. More than four-fifths of those arrests were for possession only and nearly half were for possession of marijuana. Of the 847,863 marijuana arrests -- one every 37 seconds -- 89 percent were for possession alone.
Ryan Grim is the author of "This is Your Country on Drugs".
Innocence Speaks
The Center for Wrongful Convictions has this interesting podcast on the story of innocence and a new book "True Stories of False Confessions". This episode of Innocence Speaks features a conversation with Rob Warden and Steve Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions discussing their new book. The book presents 39 stories of false confessions and this conversation touches on a few of the compelling stories. (direct mp-3 download here.)
Monday, September 14, 2009
Challenging Drug Testing: An Interesting Article
Ever find yourself dealing with the client who wants you to investigate a false positive drug test? Here is a link to an interesting article on false positives. The article linked deals with marijuana false positives, which, as it turns out, can be caused from hemp seed oils. When dealing with challenges to drug tests, it is also a good idea to contact a private lab. Sometimes a lab can be useful in interpreting test results.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project
Injustice Everywhere has an interesting project going: the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project. Here is the stated goal:
The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project utilizes news media reports of police misconduct to generate statistical information in an effort to approximate how prevalent police misconduct may be in the United States.
As part of this project, reported incidents of misconduct are aggregated into a news feed on Twitter and added into an off-line database where duplicate entries and updates are removed and remaining unique stories are categorized for statistical information in monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports here on this site.
A sampling of the statistics...
The following quarterly report for the second quarter of 2009 was generated from data gathered in April, May, and June of 2009.
1,313 Alleged incidents tracked in national news media.
14.4 Reported incidents tracked per day on average.
1,457 Law enforcement officers cited in reports.
122 Law enforcement leaders (police chiefs & sheriffs) cited.
1,390 Alleged victims specifically cited.
142 Fatalities reported in connection with alleged instances of misconduct or criminal activity.
$72,049,301 Reported costs in police misconduct related civil litigation.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
"a notorious example of oppressive injustice culminating in an outrageous adjudication."
This quote comes from the remarkable concurrence opinion from Judge Torruella of the First Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of US v. Cirilo-Munoz, No. 08-1830. This was a nice read today as I was pondering the injustice of a particular mandatory minimum case and the abuses that our clients often face at the arbitrary and capricious nature of "the system". The concurrence is worth a read. Here is an excerpt as quoted on from the Sentencing Law and Policy:
This case, and its outcome, is a notorious example of oppressive injustice culminating in an outrageous adjudication. It is a stain on the robes of American justice. Appellant Cirilo-Muñoz was convicted of aiding and abetting the murder of an on-duty police officer. He was convicted even though his co-defendant Lugo- Sánchez, the murderer himself, who initially tried to pin Cirilo-Muñoz for the murder and was the government's star witness, "testified unequivocally that Cirilo[-Muñoz] had no advance knowledge about his plan to murder . . . and did not assist him in committing the murder in any way." United States v. Mangual-Corchado, 139 F.3d 34, 50 (1st Cir. 1998) (McAuliffe, J., dissenting). We are now called upon to affirm the imposition of a harsh mandatory minimum sentence, which only compounds the injustice caused by Cirilo-Muñoz's conviction. Because I have taken an oath to uphold the law irrespective of my personal views, I am left without a principled choice in this appeal other than to concur, and, in the process, register my most vehement disagreement with the warped outcome of this case....
A series of coincidences have laid bare a system of law, which in Cirilo-Muñoz's particular circumstances has failed to protect him from the oppressive power of government and its bureaucracy. The result is that a seventeen-year-old adolescent has been condemned to spending his entire adult life incarcerated in a federal prison. To this wrongful outcome have contributed all three branches of government, with Congress making its contribution on this appeal through its draconian mandatory minimums.
Our prior decisions and the laws passed by Congress command this result, which I must obey. I write this opinion so that this injustice is not forgotten in our otherwise summary disposal of Cirilo-Muñoz's appeal. His case calls out for clemency and relief, and should serve to remind us both of the flaws in our system of adjudicating guilt and the dangers of mandatory minimums.
Center for Justice: We Need You More Than You Think
How you can help us build a new justice network.
There's a tantalizing piece of "good news, bad news" I have to share with you. This summer, as you know, we conducted a reader/member survey to find out how you want us to talk to you.
The good news is this: nearly all of the people who get this E-newsletter, Justice Calling , not only like it a lot but they like it beyond our wildest dreams. It's clearly the way in which most of you want to hear about the Center's work.
The fly in our delicious soup is this one--we're still reaching less than 400 people and that, to put it simply, is not nearly enough. As the Center tries to build and sustain its work following the worst economic recession in a generation, we need a larger number of people to know and care about what we do, and to become members and supporters.
There's a tantalizing piece of "good news, bad news" I have to share with you. This summer, as you know, we conducted a reader/member survey to find out how you want us to talk to you.
The good news is this: nearly all of the people who get this E-newsletter, Justice Calling , not only like it a lot but they like it beyond our wildest dreams. It's clearly the way in which most of you want to hear about the Center's work.
The fly in our delicious soup is this one--we're still reaching less than 400 people and that, to put it simply, is not nearly enough. As the Center tries to build and sustain its work following the worst economic recession in a generation, we need a larger number of people to know and care about what we do, and to become members and supporters.
Now here's another important fact: WE DON'T SPAM and we NEVER share our email list.
You get Justice Calling because you (or someone with whom you share your email address) went to cforjustice.org and enrolled. The main reason we don't spam is because we scrupulously obey anti-spamming laws passed to protect and respect people's privacy. To us, it's just part of being a good neighbor in the world of e-communications. And, yet, it also means that we need help in getting the word out, so to speak.
So, here's a modest request: while we'll always gladly accept donation checks, we can also really use a few hundred ambassadors who can help us build our readership for Justice Calling . All we ask is that you think of five or more people who live in your electronic address book, and who share your values and interests. Ask them to read and subscribe to Justice Calling with our monthly slate of in-depth articles about the Center's work on behalf of ordinary people and organizations trying to improve and protect their communities. In the process they'll also get to enjoy our national award-winning environmental writing and timely features about a host of other things that cross our paths.
You'll be doing both them and us a favor and, more importantly, contributing to the network the Center for Justice needs to remain a vital and viable force in your world.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Boxbreaker
Boxbreaker, Slang for a form used by the United States Post Office. Its called Request for Boxholder Information for Service of Legal Process. Take the form to the nearest Post Office to your targets last know address and the U.S Postmaster will provide you with a forwarding address. The forwarding address can also be obtained using a blank envelope and mailing a letter to the last know address with the following words capitalized AND underlined.
FORWARDING ADDRESS REQUESTED - DO NOT FORWARD
This usually comes back in a week and again almost always works so long as the forwarding address is on file with the USPS.
This usually comes back in a week and again almost always works so long as the forwarding address is on file with the USPS.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
In a ruling that avoids a criminal justice migraine for Spokane, the state Supreme Court Reverses Appeals Court on Judicial Jurisdiction Case.
In a 9-0 decision published this morning, the Washington Supreme Court has reversed a state court of appeals panel’s conclusion that a Spokane County district court judge had no right to decide local, municipal court cases. The complicated ruling reinstates the convictions of Lawrence Rothwell and Henry Smith who, with the Center’s assistance, had appealed their 2005 convictions in proceedings before Spokane District Court Judge Patti Walker.
The reach of today’s opinion goes well beyond the convictions of Rothwell and Smith. Had the Supreme Court upheld the appeals court ruling, it would have called into question virtually every conviction in Spokane County over a fourteen year period in which district court judges, like Walker, had ruled on prosecutions of Spokane municipal code violations. Thus, today’s ruling spared the city the ordeal of possibly retrying countless cases, at a cost that may have reached into the millions of dollars for city taxpayers.
“We are thrilled with the outcome in this case,” said Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, upon learning of the court’s unanimous decision. “This is a win for the City and its taxpayers.”
Still, the obvious silver-lining in the Rothwell/Smith litigation for both sides is Mayor Verner’s decision, in the wake of the court of appeals ruling, to forge ahead and create a separate Municipal Court for city cases as the law, currently, requires. The new municipal court opened for business in January of this year and, by all accounts, has proven a remarkable success with three new appointed judges. Candidates for the three positions will go to Spokane city voters in this fall’s election.
Full article here.
The reach of today’s opinion goes well beyond the convictions of Rothwell and Smith. Had the Supreme Court upheld the appeals court ruling, it would have called into question virtually every conviction in Spokane County over a fourteen year period in which district court judges, like Walker, had ruled on prosecutions of Spokane municipal code violations. Thus, today’s ruling spared the city the ordeal of possibly retrying countless cases, at a cost that may have reached into the millions of dollars for city taxpayers.
“We are thrilled with the outcome in this case,” said Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, upon learning of the court’s unanimous decision. “This is a win for the City and its taxpayers.”
Still, the obvious silver-lining in the Rothwell/Smith litigation for both sides is Mayor Verner’s decision, in the wake of the court of appeals ruling, to forge ahead and create a separate Municipal Court for city cases as the law, currently, requires. The new municipal court opened for business in January of this year and, by all accounts, has proven a remarkable success with three new appointed judges. Candidates for the three positions will go to Spokane city voters in this fall’s election.
Full article here.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Did Texas execute an innocent man?
From The New Yorker by David Grann:
The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.
Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.
Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”
Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”
...........................
Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”
“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”
While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.
.......................................
Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. (Willingham gave authorities permission to search the house: “I know we might not ever know all the answers, but I’d just like to know why my babies were taken from me.”) Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,” he told me.
He was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes-like aura of invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”
Vasquez and Fogg visited the Willinghams’ house four days after the blaze. Following protocol, they moved from the least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information. . . . I have not made any determination. I don’t have any preconceived idea.”
The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat damage—a sign that the fire had not originated there—and so they pushed deeper into the nine-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot building. A central corridor led past a utility room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room, on the left, and the children’s bedroom, on the right, ending at the front door, which opened onto the porch. Vasquez tried to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering one’s mother-in-law’s house for the first time: “I have the same curiosity.”
In the utility room, he noticed on the wall pictures of skulls and what he later described as an image of “the Grim Reaper.” Then he turned into the master bedroom, where Amber’s body had been found. Most of the damage there was also from smoke and heat, suggesting that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling.
As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles.
Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle configurations.”
The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”
Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken windows. It contained a spiderweb-like pattern—what fire investigators call “crazed glass.” Forensic textbooks had long described the effect as a key indicator that a fire had burned “fast and hot,” meaning that it had been fuelled by a liquid accelerant, causing the glass to fracture.
The men looked again at what appeared to be a distinct burn trailer through the house: it went from the children’s bedroom into the corridor, then turned sharply to the right and proceeded out the front door. To the investigators’ surprise, even the wood under the door’s aluminum threshold was charred. On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant.
The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled a “V.” When an object catches on fire, it creates such a pattern, as heat and smoke radiate outward; the bottom of the “V” can therefore point to where a fire began. In the Willingham house, there was a distinct “V” in the main corridor. Examining it and other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire had originated: in the hallway, in the children’s bedroom, and at the front door. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by human hands.”
By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.
The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.
The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.
...............
In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”
Full article here.
The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.
Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.
Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”
Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”
...........................
Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”
“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”
While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.
.......................................
Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. (Willingham gave authorities permission to search the house: “I know we might not ever know all the answers, but I’d just like to know why my babies were taken from me.”) Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,” he told me.
He was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes-like aura of invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”
Vasquez and Fogg visited the Willinghams’ house four days after the blaze. Following protocol, they moved from the least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information. . . . I have not made any determination. I don’t have any preconceived idea.”
The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat damage—a sign that the fire had not originated there—and so they pushed deeper into the nine-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot building. A central corridor led past a utility room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room, on the left, and the children’s bedroom, on the right, ending at the front door, which opened onto the porch. Vasquez tried to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering one’s mother-in-law’s house for the first time: “I have the same curiosity.”
In the utility room, he noticed on the wall pictures of skulls and what he later described as an image of “the Grim Reaper.” Then he turned into the master bedroom, where Amber’s body had been found. Most of the damage there was also from smoke and heat, suggesting that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling.
As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles.
Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle configurations.”
The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”
Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken windows. It contained a spiderweb-like pattern—what fire investigators call “crazed glass.” Forensic textbooks had long described the effect as a key indicator that a fire had burned “fast and hot,” meaning that it had been fuelled by a liquid accelerant, causing the glass to fracture.
The men looked again at what appeared to be a distinct burn trailer through the house: it went from the children’s bedroom into the corridor, then turned sharply to the right and proceeded out the front door. To the investigators’ surprise, even the wood under the door’s aluminum threshold was charred. On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant.
The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled a “V.” When an object catches on fire, it creates such a pattern, as heat and smoke radiate outward; the bottom of the “V” can therefore point to where a fire began. In the Willingham house, there was a distinct “V” in the main corridor. Examining it and other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire had originated: in the hallway, in the children’s bedroom, and at the front door. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by human hands.”
By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.
The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.
The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.
...............
In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”
Full article here.
Flash Cookies Are Tracking You
From PCMAG.com:
A paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley brings to light the problem of cookies in Adobe's Flash and their under-appreciated widespread use.
The problem begins with the fact that large numbers of users delete their browser HTTP cookies periodically, making it difficult for web sites, mainly commerce sites, to accurately track the number of unique visitors. Flash cookies have filled this data gap for many sites.
Flash cookies are similar to HTTP cookies in that they store data locally for a site for that user. This could be as simple as a unique ID to let the site track which user has connected. Flash cookies, also known as "local shared objects," have advantages over HTTP cookies: they can be much larger, they have no expiration date by default, and they are shared among different browsers in the system. Of course,
The concern, of course, is that Flash cookies can be used to track users in ways that aren't appreciated and that users won't know. In fact, some top 100 sites use the Flash cookies to repopulate HTTP cookies that the user deleted.
You can control cookies in Flash, both on a per-site basis and globally. For a site, right click on the flash object and select Settings and then the folder tab. Read the Flash Player help for more on this.
The Global Storage Settings panel can be accessed on its own help page. There you can tell Flash you don't want any sites to be able to store local content at all. You can also see which sites have cookies on you.
Full article here.
A paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley brings to light the problem of cookies in Adobe's Flash and their under-appreciated widespread use.
The problem begins with the fact that large numbers of users delete their browser HTTP cookies periodically, making it difficult for web sites, mainly commerce sites, to accurately track the number of unique visitors. Flash cookies have filled this data gap for many sites.
Flash cookies are similar to HTTP cookies in that they store data locally for a site for that user. This could be as simple as a unique ID to let the site track which user has connected. Flash cookies, also known as "local shared objects," have advantages over HTTP cookies: they can be much larger, they have no expiration date by default, and they are shared among different browsers in the system. Of course,
The concern, of course, is that Flash cookies can be used to track users in ways that aren't appreciated and that users won't know. In fact, some top 100 sites use the Flash cookies to repopulate HTTP cookies that the user deleted.
You can control cookies in Flash, both on a per-site basis and globally. For a site, right click on the flash object and select Settings and then the folder tab. Read the Flash Player help for more on this.
The Global Storage Settings panel can be accessed on its own help page. There you can tell Flash you don't want any sites to be able to store local content at all. You can also see which sites have cookies on you.
Full article here.
You may be surprised at how many sites use flash cookies for tracking you. You can manage them here.
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