Sleepless in Midland

Darkness at Noon -- Stalin's show trials similar to Schiff's impeachment thingee

I just finished reading the novel "Darkness At Noon" written by Arthur Koestler and published in 1941 (translated by Daphne Hardy). The period described in the novel, although not identified as such in the novel, was during Stalin's rule over Russia, and particularly the period of the purging of the old guard.

The main character, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had been a hero in the revolution and eventually became a party big wig. But the dictator, called "No. 1" in the novel, implemented the liquidation of all those old guys. And Rubashov ended up being charged with thought crimes, speech crimes, and conspiracy to assassinate No. 1.

After his arrest, he was subjected to "hearings" which were one-on-one examinations conducted by an aggressive and experienced interrogator. Although there was no physical torture, sleep deprivation was sufficient to ultimately get a signed confession -- Rubashov having resigned himself to the same fate as his old friends from the early days. We learn of the resulting trial through an ancillary character reading about it in the newspaper, and the actual trial had all the earmarks of a show trial in which the verdict had already been decided.

Fast forward to the present, and Donald Trump is on trial in a secret chamber which is off limits to the plebeians. Only the insiders know what is going on there. And presumably Trump is being accused of all sorts of things for which the evidence is very slim but with enough exaggeration and no rebuttal could be stretched into something serious. But the outcome has already been decided by the inquisitors. They will only need to move the goal posts just enough to fit the facts.

Most of us believe by now that the intent of the Trump inquiry really isn't to impeach the president but to increase the likelihood that he won't be reelected.

Nonetheless, the similarity between the Stalin show trials and the impeachment inquiry is striking.

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3:32 PM 10/19/2019

Trump gets high marks for originalist judge nominations

This blogger declared himself to be a one issue voter -- the U.S. Supreme Court -- prior to the November 2016 election. Trump came through with the Gorsuch nomination. Of course, that came after Mitch McConnell cleared the runway for his arrival.

But those of us who like originalist judges weren't satisfied. We want more! And Trump seems to be accommodating. A report about this appeared in a Bloomberg article which Hugh Hewitt referenced in his Saturday morning TV show. Written by Sahil Kapur and Laura Litvan, it's titled McConnell Cements a Legacy for Trump With Reshaped Courts. Excerpts:

The Republican-led Senate confirmed Trump’s 15th appeals court nominee this week — more than the last five presidents at this juncture — with eight of the new judges in their 40s, and seven in their 50s. McConnell set the stage Thursday to confirm six more, one day after a committee voted to cut debate time, which if approved would further speed things up.

The court realignment is the product of the Senate Republican leader playing a long game by holding up then-President Barack Obama’s court nominees and then closely collaborating with Trump’s White House Counsel Don McGahn. Both men have made it a priority to advance judges ensconced in originalist legal thinking favored by the Federalist Society, which distrusts New Deal-era jurisprudence and seeks to limit the federal government’s ability to assert powers that aren’t explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. ...

Trump’s record so far also includes 17 Trump-nominated judges on district courts, and conservative favorite Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court after McConnell made the extraordinary move of refusing to consider Obama nominee Merrick Garland in 2016.

Elections have consequences, as a famous man once said. And finally, an election may have had favorable consequences for those among us who favor originalist judges.

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2:18 PM 5/7/2018

California cop Glock accidental discharge -- Chavez v. Glock Inc

Yesterday we talked about how easily striker-fired pistols are to discharge if they have no manual safety. That was in relation to the Kate Steinle case in which the illegal alien shooter got off on all but the felon in possession of firearm charge.

It brought to mind the case of Chavez v. Glock Inc. I made a half axed effort to follow the case but dropped the ball until today.

You can read the facts of the case in the California Court of Appeals decision in cause number B230346 here. In summary, officer Enrique Chavez was driving a car with his infant son in the back seat. His loaded Glock 21 was back there, too. The kid found the gun and pulled the trigger. The bullet paralyzed officer Chavez from the waist down. He sued and lost at the trial level. However, the appellate court gave his case a second chance.

Last year the parties settled the case -- see Glock Settles Negligent Discharge Case With Paralyzed Ex-LAPD Cop. That's not surprising. Paul Barrett in his excellent book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun said that Glock Inc. fights tooth and nail against lawsuits unless they fear a loss, a negative precedent, or an embarrassment. Then they settle quietly.

(Click hyperlink to read an interview with Mr. Barrett.)

According to Mr. Barrett, Glocks came along around the time police departments were trying to transition away from revolvers. But the officers resisted because they couldn't get accustomed to manual safeties. So a Glock with no manual safety fit the bill perfectly. It wasn't long before they became popular with citizens.

But a pistol that's easily fired and has no manual safety will be involved in a lot of negligent discharges. Common sense should tell us that. Any dangerous activity that requires the user to be 100% perfect is an accident waiting to happen. That's why sky divers strap on back up parachutes.

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10:44 AM 12/2/2017

If the gun that shot Kate Steinle had a manual safety she might still be alive

The gun used to kill Kate Steinle was stolen from a Bureau of Land Management Ranger's car, according to news reports. The gun was apparently left loose in the vehicle, and that may have been a local law violation in itself. So errors started early in the Steinle case.

Thursday we heard that the jury in the murder case found the defendant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, not guilty of murder or manslaughter but guilty only of possessing a firearm by a felon. So he won't go free just yet.

Let's put aside the issue of sanctuary cities and the screw ups that preceded the killing and stipulate that the shooting was not intentional but a negligent discharge. News reporters are notoriously neglectful in identifying firearms they write about. But we did learn that the gun was a .40 caliber Sig Sauer. But so far I have not been able to find a report of the model number.

Old school Sigs were DA/SA with a visible hammer, a firm trigger pull and no manual trigger. It's possible to fire one negligently, but it's not as easy as with a striker-fire Glock. Glocks are very popular among handgun buyers, and it wasn't long before other manufacturers began making theirs with the striker-firing mechanism and no manual safety. Sure enough, Sig followed the pack and made one too.

So -- just speculating here -- the .40 caliber Sig involved in the shooting was the striker-fired version. Reports said the gun had a "hair trigger." A hair trigger on a striker-fired pistol is an accident waiting to happen, but more than likely, the trigger pull was standard, it was just easy to pull.

So going along with Mr. Zarate's version of the story, he finds the gun, picks it up, and BAM. Down goes an innocent bystander. It's entirely possible, and it is conceivable that that was enough to generate reasonable doubt among the jurors.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've preached about manual safeties on this blog. So maybe it's time to restart. If the gun that shot Kate Steinle had a manual safety she might still be alive, and it might have been a while longer before Mr. Zarate used it on someone.

Sources:
Kate Steinle Murder Trial: 'Freakish Ricochet' From 'Hair-Trigger' Gun Caused Accidental Death: Defense
Undocumented immigrant acquitted in Kate Steinle death
Court Filing IDs Fed Whose Stolen Gun Was Used in Kathryn Steinle Killing
Kate Steinle’s accused killer found not guilty of murder, to be deported
S.F. police didn’t investigate gun theft before pier killing.

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1:37 PM 12/1/2017

No tears for Slobodan Praljak who poisoned self in courtroom

The newsworthiness of the story is that he staged his suicide in the courtroom. (Dailymail.co.uk has a couple of articles about it: here and here.)

The tribunal is probably disappointing that he didn't serve his sentence -- opting for a self administered death penalty instead. But before getting upset about it, consider this. Maybe that should be an option in cases involving serious crimes.

When I was young we heard that Harakiri was a suicide ritual practiced among Japanese generals who were somehow disgraced. So maybe Praljak was guilty of cultural appropriation, too. In any event, perhaps we should welcome its comeback as a way to deal with really bad people.

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1:07 PM 11/30/2017

Hans A. von Spakovsky on the next Supreme Court nomination

Rumors abound. Chuck Grassley was the first that I heard talk about it in a news report. The rumor was that a Supreme Court justice will retire this summer. Ideally, that prospective retiree would be one of the justices who always side with the Democrat position. But if Grassley is in the loop on that then speculation that the prospective retiree is one of the conservative justices seems appropriate. That would be a wasted opportunity to get another originalist on the court.

Which of the justices will be the next to retire? Bloomberg says Kennedy.

Here's Hans A. von Spakovsky on that prospect. Trump's first 100 days: Our next Supreme Court pick will be the kicker:

But even if it is Justice Kennedy who resigns (and he is the justice the rumor mills are concentrating on), replacing a justice who is only a part-time conservative with a full-time conservative could make a significant and very crucial difference in the outcomes of the decisions that come before the Court.

Whoever the next departing justice is, President Trump must make sure the next Supreme Court justice is someone who believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights 100 percent of the time, not just when it is convenient to achieve the particular policy goal the justice wants.

And President Trump will need someone who doesn't care what the New York Times, MSNBC, or the Washington cocktail circuit says about him or her.

He needs a rock-solid, principled lawyer who understands that the U.S. Supreme Court is the last defense against an increasingly powerful, oversized, busybody government that seems to believe it has the right to dictate every aspect of our lives.

Would it be too crude to say, "drain the swamp?."

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1:52 PM 4/27/2017

Tea Party wins one against IRS

The Tea Party movement and various Tea Parties took it on the chin after the IRS and the Obama administration, including its agents among the main stream media, put a bulls eye on them.

So it's nice to see a win every once in a while. See this rather unsympathetic article: Court rebukes IRS for tea party targeting, orders release of secret list. Excerpt:

A federal appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the very tea party groups it targeted.

The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.

Thomas Lifson wonders is Lois Lerner might be losing some sleep over this in Appeals Court issues nightmare decision for Lois Lerner and the IRS. One can hope.

Ms. Lerner got a get-out-of-jail-free card from Eric Holder. But there's always the chance she'll have to face justice in civil court. Ordinarily a plaintiff can't sue a federal government employee for damages. But there's an exception if the employee abused his/her position. There's no predicting how a judge or jury would rule, but to this lay person it sure looked like abuse, especially since it affected the outcome of a presidential election.

Hmm, could it be possible O.J. Simpson really is guilty of killing Nicole and Ron?

If this is true, it sure does make the LAPD look bad. Of course, the O.J. dream team did a *pretty good job of making the LAPD look bad, at least to the jury.

Now there are reports that a folding Buck knife was found buried on Simpson's premises but kept from investigators by a cop who wanted it as a souvenir. See Buried Knife Found at O.J.'s Estate

We're told a construction worker found the knife years ago -- we have heard several different stories, ranging from "several years ago" to 1998, when the house was demolished.

The weapon is a folding buck knife.

Our law enforcement sources say the construction worker took the knife to the street, where he saw an LAPD cop. He told the officer where he found the knife and the cop took it. Turns out the cop -- who worked in the traffic division -- was off duty at the time, working security for a movie shoot at a house across the street on Rockingham. Our sources say the officer took the knife home and kept it ... kept it for years.

In late January of this year, after the cop retired from the LAPD, he contacted a friend who worked in LAPD's Robbery Homicide Division (RHD). The cop told the friend about the knife and said he was getting it framed to put on his wall. He wanted his friend to get the DR (Departmental Record) number for the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ronald Goldman murder case, which he planned on engraving in the frame.

We're told the friend was indignant, and told his superiors. The brass was outraged and demanded that the retired cop turn the knife over, which he did.

The knife is being analyzed for blood evidence, according to the story.

*The one thing they did prove was that a good narrative can beat hard evidence.

Maybe you can indict a ham sandwich but you can't always prosecute a ham sandwich -- Rick Perry charges tossed out by appeals court

Just like the charges brought by the politically charged Austin prosecutor's office against Tom Delay were tossed out on appeal, the more recent charges against Rick Perry were tossed out on appeal.

If history repeats, the msm will try to minimize the reporting of this aspect of the case.

Defending Bill Cosby

With public opinion piling on, Bill Cosby's attorneys and publicists have a big job. But it's not too hard to figure out a course of action.

At the time Cosby's transactions were alleged to occur women were thought to be a little bit smarter when it came to men than they are now. If a man asked a woman to take a bunch of pills and drink a bunch of wine, she was thought to be smart enough to figure out what he was up to. Not now, apparently. But the current standards are being applied.

Surely Cosby's reputation among single females must have been a clue to his alleged victims as to what he might do. No one knew, you say? Well, one of his alleged victims is fond of saying that no one believed her. So she had to have told someone. And while the recipients of this information may not have wanted to get on Cosby's bad side, surely they gossiped about it behind his back. It's hard to imagine that word didn't spread like wildfire.

There's another factor here. According to a damning editorial at WaPo, "Mr. Cosby’s own words in a deposition in a civil suit brought by Ms. Constand damn him; he acknowledged securing drugs with the aim of giving them to young women he wanted to have sex with." It isn't too far fetched to think that some women might consent to sex in exchange for drugs. Nor is it far fetched to think they may be faced later with either admitting that or saving face and claiming rape.

The upcoming trial(s) could be very revealing.

Finally, we saw how some black Americans cheered when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. More recently we watched as some black Americans made heroes/martyrs out of the likes of Michael Brown. Where are they now?

In any event, Cosby's attorneys and publicists are set to have a big payday. And the rest of us are set to watch a salacious show.

Joe Jamail -- It wasn't a bribe, it was grease

The morning paper told us that the legendary lawyer Joe Jamail died the other day. I lived in Houston during the time that he was making that legend, and everyone, I mean everyone, had a Joe Jamail story.

I attended a Christmas party where there were a bunch of people from the legal profession present and struck up a conversation with the husband of a lady who was a clerk in one of the civil courts. He told about how Jamail had a case in that court and requested a copy of a file from the clerk. She complied.

A few days later a case of scotch arrived at their house courtesy of Joe Jamail. Neither Jamail nor the clerk had done anything illegal. It wasn't a bribe. It was grease.

Here's another one. Jamail was suing the pants off someone, and the defense attorney was gamely trying to keep the jury award low. The defense attorney contended that the plaintiff was asking for more than they expected to receive, and he told a heartwarming story about how he worked for his father as a child. When it came time to be paid he asked to be paid for more work than he did knowing his dad wouldn't give him all the money he asked for.

So when it came time for Jamail's summation he said about the other attorney, "He told us right here that he lied to his own father!"

Maybe someone will compile all the Joe Jamail stories for an entertaining blog post.

Hillary gave us all a good lesson on how to act when you're in the hot seat

The appearance by Hillary Clinton before Trey Gowdy' committee shared some lessons she probably paid a lot of money to learn, and those lessons came free of charge to the rest of us. They could be useful for anyone who is ever a party to a criminal or civil trial.

The lesson was for the witness to stay calm, don't get angry, and most importantly, answer with confidence that what you are saying is the truth. Don't react to negative information, simply act as if that's what you expected. Anyone watching might be led to think everything you did was perfectly normal.

Listening to some of the talking heads after the hearing suggests that that's all that matters to the observers. The facts didn't matter so much. What scored the points were the witness' attitude, demeanor, appearance and body language.

Now the pundits are ready to usher Clinton into the white house.

Bob Owens weighs in on Glocks and safety, or lack thereof

Readers of this blog may recall the several articles I posted on these pages about Glock handguns and the frequency of their involvement in accidental/negligent discharges. They've got a light trigger pull, and there's no manual safety. And they are very easy to shoot.

I understand that newer ones have an indicator which tell the user whether there's a bullet in the chamber. But that's a relatively new feature, and besides, it only matters if the user actually looks at it.

Anyway, gun writer Bob Owens weighed in on the issue in Why the police shouldn't use Glocks, (Via Instapundit.) From Owens' article:

In terms of mechanical design, there are few flaws with Glock pistols. If a law enforcement officer, soldier or citizen does exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time with cyborg certainty, there will be no problems with the Glock or other popular pistols mimicking its basic design. Unfortunately, “RoboCop” is only a movie, and humans are liable to make similar mistakes over and over again.

The cyborg metaphor is a good one. It's always risky to engage in an activity that requires you to be right 100% of the time. That's why skydivers use back-up parachutes. More from Owens:

The underlying problem with these pistols is a short trigger pull and the lack of an external safety. In real-world encounters, a short trigger pull can be lethal, in part because a significant percentage of law enforcement officers — some experts say as high as 20% — put their finger on the trigger of their weapons when under stress. According to firearms trainers, most officers are completely unaware of their tendency to do this and have a hard time believing it, even when they're shown video evidence from training exercises.

In any event, there seem to have been an inordinate number of accidental/negligent discharges involving Glock handguns. From time to time a victim sues the company following an injury from an unintentional discharge. One such case that may still be pending is Chavez vs. Glock, Inc, et al. Enrique Herrera Chavez was a Los Angeles police officer who was hauling his small child in the back seat of his car when the child fiddled with Mr. Chavez's Glock model 21 which was also back there. The gun discharged and injured Mr. Chavez. Mr. Chavez sued Glock, Inc., as well as some tangentially involved parties. The trial judge threw the case out with a ruling in favor of a motion for summary judgment. The appellate court confirmed in part but allowed Mr. Chavez to continue his suit against Glock, Inc., on the theory that the gun could have had a design defect. The appellate case issued the ruling on July 24, 2012. And then the case disappeared off the face of the internet.

Paul Barrett wrote an excellent book titled "Glock: The Rise of America's Gun" which is well worth the time it takes to read. In it he says that Glock, Inc., tends to quietly settle the cases it thinks it could lose and fight those that it thinks it can win with an emphasis on just how careless a person has to be to fire off a round unintentionally. It would seem that the Chavez case could go either way in a California court. So maybe the case was quietly settled with a non-disclosure clause.

For more about Glocks at this blog click on the Guns tag. The post there aren't all about Glocks, but it shouldn't be hard to find them.

Jury nullification

I ran across this article today titled Good News: Jury Nullification is Interfering With Marijuana Convictions at a website named The Daily Sheeple. If that name deters you, try one at the Houston Chronicle.

Their focus was on marijuana cases, and with the current trend toward decriminalization of marijuana, jury nullification would seem to fit in nicely with a juror mindset that wants to correct perceived wrongs in a setting designed to correct wrongs.

The issue of jury nullification reminded me of my own call to jury duty a couple of months ago here in Midland, Texas. There were two cases on which I was on the panel - not the jury itself, just the jury panel. I got struck both times. One was a criminal trial in which the defendant was charged with "failure to appear," i.e., having an obligation to show up at a trial and skipping it. During the prosecutor's voir dire he asked whether everyone could have an open mind about the penalty of 2 to 10 years in the slammer. When asked if probation was a possibility, the prosecutor answered that it was not.

More than a few potential jurors said they would have a problem with that. The words "jury nullification" were never spoken, however the prospect of a mandatory jail sentence would surly have weighed on the minds of some of the jurors in the guilt/innocence phase. After all, why didn't they try him for the crime with which he was originally charged? Instead they picked what they thought was an easy one to prove.

A bunch of us on the panel probably got challenged for cause when the attorneys conferred with the judge, because when they called out the 12 jurors they got all the way to number 33 on the 36 member panel.

Anyway, jury nullification can apply to other than the marijuana cases, and in this case, the prosecutor was wise to weed out those who might be tempted to do it. It certainly helped the prosecution in this case as the jury sentenced the defendant to three years, one more than the minimum.

Editor's note:
If one believes the morning paper, jurors here are a step ahead. They're nullifying the whole process by failure to appear for jury duty. -- Robo-ed. | No sheeple here. -- Sleepless.

Top ten things Barack Obama and his enablers would have done if he had been president at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial

President Obama, his administration, and his media enablers worked very strategically at politicizing the George Zimmerman trial. And it paid off for them at the ballot box in November 2012. So what if Barack Obama had been president at the time of the O.J. Simpson murder trial?

Let's go back a few years and recall the O.J. Simpson murder trial in the mid 1990s. All the evidence pointed to his guilt, and most white people were stunned at the not-guilty verdict. They were even more stunned at the videos showing black students cheering wildly as the not-guilty verdict was announced.

But that was the trial of the previous century. Let's speculate on what would have happened had the racially divisive Barack Obama been president back then.

-Eric Holder would devote all the resources of the United States Department of Justice to help find the real killer.

-Barack Obama would praise the jury system for rendering the right verdict.

-NAACP would demand that the entire LAPD be fired.

-Piers Morgan would bemoan racist prosecutors and demand they be fired.

-National Organization for Women - "Nicole Brown Simpson was asking for it."

-David Simon would say the verdict "makes me proud to be an American."

-Mark Furhman would be jailed for hate speech.

-Eric Holder: "White people need to have an honest conversation about why they are all a bunch of racists."

-Nancy Grace: "This innocent man should never been brought to trial!"

-Barack Obama: "If I had a son he sure as hell wouldn't look like Ron Goldman."

But, this is mere speculation.

Good joke about a criminal trial

This has absolutely nothing to do with any high profile trial, but for some reason with all the trial news coverage lately, this joke sprang to mind. It was posted at Bits and Pieces last year. To wit:

A defendant was on trial for murder. There was strong evidence indicating guilt, but there was no corpse. In the defense’s closing statement, the lawyer, knowing that his client would probably be convicted, resorted to a trick.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have a surprise for you all,” the lawyer said as he looked at his watch.

“Within one minute, the person presumed dead in this case will walk into this courtroom.” He looked toward the courtroom door. The jurors, somewhat stunned, all looked on eagerly.

A minute passed. Nothing happened.

Finally the lawyer said, “Actually, I made up the previous statement. But you all looked on with anticipation. I, therefore, put it to you that you have a reasonable doubt in this case as to whether anyone was killed, and I insist that you return a verdict of not guilty.”

The jury retired to deliberate.

A few minutes later, the jury returned and pronounced a verdict of guilty.

“But how?” inquired the lawyer. “You must have had some doubt; I saw all of you stare at the door.”

The jury foreman replied: ”Yes, we did look, but your client didn’t.”

Bending the war on drugs to help its victims

Readers of this blog may remember the case reported on these pages in late 2010 about the pathetic coke junkie who got caught conducting a "pass off". A "pass off," he explained while on the stand in the punishment phase, was collecting the money and passing off the product to the ultimate consumer at the last stage of a drug transaction, apparently to finance his own drug habit. The late Judge Hyde sent him to the slammer for 15 years. Link.

The war on drugs has been an expensive failure. And if there were an easy solution it would have been discovered by now. Legalizing hard drugs is not a viable option due to the way those drugs replace a person's personality and ambition with a drive to get more of the drug. (Marijuana, though, might be a good candidate for legalization for reasons discussed before. Link.)

The problem that neither prohibition nor legalization will solve is getting drug users to quit. An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal noted the ineffectiveness of prohibition and told about some experiments in a few jurisdiction that have shown some success in getting people who have been caught to break the habit. See Rethinking the War on Drugs.

Probation has long been a very important tool of the criminal justice system. But there's a flaw in how it has been implemented. If a probationer violated the terms, there were only two alternatives, scold them and send them back on the street or send them to prison to serve out their terms. The probationers figrued out what they could get away with, and the tendency was not to send them back to already crowded prisons.

An alternative program has been put in place in a few jurisdictions for people on probation for drug crimes. In Tarrant County, Texas, it's called SWIFT, an acronym (almost) for "Supervision With Intensive enForcemenT."

The SWIFT program is fairly simple. Probationers must phone in each week day to find out whether they must take a drug test that day. If they fail to call, fail the test, or fail to take the test they go to jail for the next couple of days. The important aspect is that it's swift.

Detection and punishment must be swift and certain if it is going to serve as a deterrent. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Klassen told us that just last month.

The program in Tarrant County was patterned after a similar program started in 2004 in Hawaii called HOPE which an independent 2009 report PDF indicates showed a significant improvement over the old way.

Legalization isn't likely to happen in the near future, and the war on drugs isn't going away anytime soon. But programs like SWIFT and HOPE are ways to use the war on drugs in a positive way to actually improve someone's life. But it takes someone in authority to actually look at the studies and implement the program.

The late Judge Hyde's place on the bench is up for election.  If there's anyone reading this who wants to help voters in Midland, Texas, decide which of the four candidates should be elected District Judge, 238th Judicial District, ask Jeff Robnett, Mike Rittenberry, David W. Lindemood and Elizabeth Byer Leonard whether if elected they will take the initiative and establish a similar program locally. Judge Hyde would be proud of you.

Cold case got hot -- another suspect indicted in murder case in which Michael Morton was exonerated

Remember Michael Morton? He was the fellow who was released last year after serving 25 years for his wife's murder when DNA evidence was found to belong to someone else.

That DNA was found 100 yards from the crime scene on a bandana that also contained the victim's blood. A man named Mark Norwood is alleged to be the owner of said DNA.  And a Williamson County Grand Jury has indicted Mr. Norwood -- see TexasTribune.org. Mr. Norwood's attorney says he's innocent.

Here's where it gets really interesting. The M.O. in Mrs. Morton's murder was very similar to other murders in the area where Mr. Norwood lived. And last year someone else was convicted on circumstantial evidence for one of those murders. Could that have also been a wrongful conviction? The Travis County D.A. may be looking into that one.

Thank goodness those District Attorneys are entertaining the possibility that some of the people that get convicted might be innocent. Contrast that with controversy surrounding the Harris County District Attorney.

And if that's not enough, Prosecutorial Oversight issued a news release today saying that:

From 2004 to 2008, courts found that prosecutors committed error in 91 [Texas criminal] cases. Of these, the courts upheld the conviction in 72 of the cases, finding that the error was “harmless.” In 19 of the cases, the court ruled that the error was “harmful” and reversed the conviction. From 2004 until November 2011, only one prosecutor was publicly disciplined by the Texas Bar Association, and this was from a case that arose before 2004.

The Texas Bar Association might not be the best arbiter in cases involving prosecutorial misconduct, however.

As for Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in Michael Morton's case, he's headed for a court of inquiry scheduled for September 11 regarding accusations that he withheld evidence that a jury could have used to decide Mr. Morton was not guilty. Mr. Anderson, now a Williamson County state district judge, says he's innocent.

Two reasons why people hate jury duty

Reason number 1:

If the powers disagree with your verdict they'll try to shame you.

Reason number 2:

Judge is going to do what he wants anyway.

Garland Leon Martin

The other day the morning paper contained a short version of an article by AP writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins titled "New Science being used to fight arson conviction." It's not available at the MyWestTexas.com website, but the extended version is available at Guardian.co.uk.

The gist of it is that some arson convictions in the past were obtained with testimony of expert witnesses whose conclusions were based on theories have since been shown to be invalid. For example, a V shaped pattern on a burned wall was thought to be evidence of arson because it pinpointed the spot where the fire started. Newer theories suggest that the V might indeed point to the starting place, but they don't prove the fire was deliberately started. Additionally, the experts might have testified that certain patterns on the floor proved that an accelerant was used. Newer theories hold that such patterns can develop without the use of accelerants.

There's no reason why Mr. Welsh-Huggins should have mentioned any local cases, but there was such an arson/murder case in Midland, Texas, roughly 14 years ago involving a defendant named Garland Leon Martin.

According to a case summary at InnocenceProject.org, Mr. Martin was charged with murdering his common law wife Marcia Pool, her three year old son, and their 20 month old daughter who died in a fire in Midland County on 2/25/1998. At the trial, Fire Marshal Dale Little testified that he found a pattern on the floor which he said was evidence of the use of an accelerant. Samples were tested, and Armstrong Laboratories director John Corn testified that they tested positive for Norpar and deparaffinated kerosene. "Based on Armstrong’s results, Little testified that he believed the cause of the fire was arson and that the liquid poured in the house was lamp oil."

The defense countered that there were 268 patents for common household items containing Norpar other than lamp oil. Defense experts testified that Mr. Little was wrong about the pour patterns and the location of the starting point of the fire, and further, that Mr. Little neglected to investigate a possible accidental cause.

There was other circumstantial evidence, and the jury was ultimately convinced that Mr. Martin was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and he is currently serving a sentence of life times three.

Post script. Info about this case has been in my "pending" file for a few years. And one of the initial web searchs pulled up a page for Mr. Martin at Writeaprisoner.com where prison inmates advertise for pen pals. His listing is no longer there, but at the time it contained a photo of a rather handsome man. However, it was not a complete photo, someone had been cut out of it. Yet all we could see of that other person was part of an arm that appeared to belong to an adult female.  Draw your own conclusions.

Toyota settlement on sudden acceleration

The crash killed a California Highway Patrol officer named Mark Saylor -- listen to his last words on the 911 call here -- and it unleashed a firestorm of negative news reports about runaway Toyotas and resulted in countless recalls of Toyotas and Lexuses.

WSJ's Law Blog quotes an L.A. Times report that Toyota Motor Corp. settled with Mr. Saylor's family for $10 million last September, but the amount wasn't released until recently. Toyota wanted to keep the amount secret, but according to Toyota's news release:

Unfortunately, Bob Baker Lexus, along with the Orange County District Attorney and several news organizations, fought to make the amount of the settlement public, and the court agreed to do so.

Indeed, Bob Baker Lexus already knew the terms of the settlement. However, Mr. Baker now wants the amount publicized in an apparent effort to shift the focus away from his dealership as he continues to litigate this case with the families.

Mr. Baker and his dealership continue to ignore the December 2009 San Diego County Sheriff’s Department report on the Saylor accident, which determined that the cause was an incompatible all-weather floor mat from a Lexus SUV model that was installed incorrectly in the ES 350 sedan at the dealership then loaned to the Saylor family by Bob Baker Lexus.

The accident report makes for interesting reading, and it would be hard to disagree with its conclusion about the improperly installed floor mat.  The photo on the right captured from the said report shows the floor mat melted to the gas pedal.  [Wrong link, corrected.]

In the meantime, Toyota has spent a ton of money on installations of automatic accelerator shutoff mechanisms. Maybe those people who are suing Toyota for an alleged loss of their car's value because of this issue should take advantage of Toyota's recall efforts.

Joe Ervine sentenced

Late last Friday afternoon, 12/17/10, Judge Hyde bestowed the sentence on Joe Samuel Erving, Jr.  You will recall that Mr. Ervine was convicted in November of slinging crack in the Flats. Actually the formal charge was possession of a controlled substance with the intent to deliver. Click for trial summary.

The trial was heard by a jury which could have found him guilty of mere possession, but the testimony of a police officer convinced them that Mr. Ervine must have been holding the drugs because he intended to sell them. Mr. Ervine had elected before trial to have the penalty decided by the judge, and that happened Friday afternoon.

Judge Hyde listened to the prosecutor and the defense attorney give brief arguments for why Mr. Ervine should go to prison or be released on probation. Judge Hyde had ordered a sentencing report at the end of the trial, and at the hearing on Friday he announced that the report suggested that Mr. Ervine seemed unable to control his drug and alcohol use, and therefore he would not be a good candidate for probation. So the Judge sentenced him to 15 years in the slammer.

At the penalty phase of the trial Mr. Ervine confessed that at the time he was arrested he was conducting a "pass-off," a phrase that doesn't appear in the government's dictionary of drug terms, but which could reasonably be construed to mean that he was merely the person who did the dangerous work, i.e., passing off the drugs to the customer and taking the money -- the part of the trade with the highest risk of detection and arrest.

My expertise on the drug trade was formulated from watching The Wire on TV.  And there, if it can be believed, the street sales were conducted by adolescents who were expendable. One gets arrested, another one steps in his place. Here, if Mr. Ervine's case is typical, it looks like the kingpins might be using adults willing to do the pass-offs in order to feed their own drug habits. It's a ruthless business.

Most of the members of the jury pool told the lawyers in voir dire that they believed the most important thing about the criminal justice system should be punishment, not rehabilitation. And those people would probably be satisfied with the punishment meted out to Mr. Ervine.

Smarter people than me have wrestled with this, and the opinions all over the map. But this bystander has to question whether warehousing a junkie in the pen until he reaches retirement age is the best thing for society. I guess they have to do something with him. But the alternatives are limited to probation or prison. Too bad there's not some third alternative that wouldn't cost taxpayers as much as prison yet still keep tabs on the guy and just maybe give him a greater chance of breaking that ruinous habit than would sentencing him to stagnate in the penitentiary where any skills he learns will not be to make the world a better place.

There are no winners in the war on drugs.

Jury duty, the game

Eventually almost everyone whose name is on some government record gets a summons for jury duty. It's a forced interruption of our daily routine, and most people would like to get out of it.

There are some statutory exemptions that can keep a person from having to show up at all, and there are excuses the judge presiding over the jury pool might accept. But then once the prospective juror gets sent to a trial it's up to the lawyers to decide who gets to go home.

And wouldn't you know, someone has made an online game out of it. The Jury Game puts the player in the lawyer's shoes and lets him/her pick a jury. The player as lawyer chooses either a civil or criminal trial then chooses which side to represent. Then the game presents 30 potential jurors with short personal descriptions. The player decides with 12 to put on the jury then gets a score based on some general principles about how good those jurors would by for that side of the case.

It's mildly fun, but it helps a prospective juror figure out what the lawyers like and don't like. And once in the courtroom, the prospective juror needs to make sure the lawyers know all the traits that might earn the juror a rejection.

Then again, some people might want to be on a jury. In that case our prospective juror needs sit there silently, not volunteer any information, and try to look as persuadable as possible.

State of Texas vs Joe Samuel Ervine, Jr.

On Tuesday, 11/16/10, Mr. Ervine sat in Judge Hyde's 238th Judicial District Court facing the second degree felony charge of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver which had the potential to send him to the slammer for 2 to 20 years.

The prosecutors were Tim Flathers and Stacy Street, and Mr. Ervine's defense attorney was David Rogers. The voir dire process began as the lawyers for each side wheedled away at the 44 potential jurors to figure out to whom to apply their 10 peremptory challenges and who they could try to get the judge to strike for cause. They are looking for the people they think are most persuadable, and anyone who sits though the whole process without saying a word had the best chance of ending up on the jury, according to Mr. Rogers.

It was a revealing look at a random sampling of Midland citizenry. ( I was one of those 44, but not one of the 12.) We were asked if any of us or someone close to us had been charged with a crime, and many hands went up. Same thing when asked whether we worked with or were related to someone who works in law enforcement. Same thing when asked if we or someone close to us had ever had a problems with illegal drugs. So in this random sampling there were many people affected in some way by the war on drugs.

Then there was the multiple choice question from Mr. Flathers asking which of these two choices is the most important thing about criminal justice: punishment or rehabilitation. Most of the pool members picked punishment which probably pleased the prosecution to no end.

So 12 were selected, some men and some women. All white.

Slinging Crack in the Flats

Here's the way it went down. At around 7:00 pm on May 1, 2009, police patrol Officer Jesse Roblado was traveling in his police car North on Lamesa Rd., and he glanced to the right in the direction of Dorothy's Place which is a bar a block over on Lee Street. See map. He testified that he saw a black guy and a white woman with dirty blond hair, and they both reached into their pockets and exchanged something. Officer Roblado saw the woman get into the passenger side of a car after the exchange, and the car drove off. He followed the car for about five minutes before going back to Dorothy's Place where he spotted the black guy standing outside drinking a beer. He called for backup, Officer Bradley Alexander arrived, and they both searched Mr. Ervine. They patted the guy down and found a pill bottle containing some white rocks and five $20 bills. Only then did Officer Roblado turn on the video camera in his car.

They arrested Joe Erving for loitering and drinking alcohol in a public place. And the money, the pill bottle, and 20 white rocks were logged in as evidence at the police department property room.

Officer Roblado admitted on cross examination that the arrest for drinking and loitering wasn't valid. And at some point before the trial, probable cause for the search changed from a routine search for weapons accompanying an arrest to the officer acting on what he thought was a drug buy.

Mr. Roger's repeated objections that the search violated Mr. Ervine's 4th amendment rights were overruled. So one of the questions the jurors had to answer was whether the police had probably cause to search Mr. Ervine.

Weighing the drugs

The weight of the controlled substance makes a difference in the level of crime. But here's the odd thing about that. Crack cocaine is made by mixing it with something else, like baking powder, cooking it until it's hard, then breaking up the cake into rocks of crack. So the rock isn't pure cocaine. However, the weight of the entire thing, cocaine, adulterants, dilutants and impurities, is what determines the drug weight for the crime category.

Dennis Hambrick, chemist with the DPS, testified that he looked at the rocks, picked out two or three and tested them. The results said they contained cocaine. The entire collection of rocks weighed in at 3.13 grams, and that placed this crime into the 2nd degree felony category of more than one gram and under four grams.

Getting from "possession" to "intent to deliver"

The mere possession of a controlled substance is a criminal offense, but not nearly as serious as possession with intent to deliver. So the prosecutor had to prove what someone intended to do. And in this case they did it with the testimony of another police officer, Lt. Seth Herman, who after some background questioning, was approved by the judge as an expert in narcotics investigation.

His testimony as an expert was that the typical user would have one or two rocks on him loose in his pocket. And the user would have some paraphernalia like a pipe and some steel wool for getting the drug into his system. His expert testimony was that someone with 20 rocks and no paraphernalia had an intent to deliver.

Verdict

The prosecution witnesses testified for about three hours, and as soon as the jury was seated after lunch, the defense rested having introduced no evidence and put on no witnesses. Both sides presented their closing arguments -- the prosecution went over the evidence with Mr. Flathers calling the crime scene "Crack Central Station."

Mr. Rogers emphasized that Mr. Ervine was arrested for drinking a beer outside, something which wasn't illegal, they didn't check the pill bottle for prints, and there were numerous mistakes in the police reports, all of which should raise some doubt about probable cause to search Mr. Ervine. Furthermore, if someone had 20 rocks of crack on them they may have been just getting ready for the weekend not necessarily trying to sell them.

So the jury heard all the evidence and arguments then went off to deliberate whether Mr. Erving was not guilty, guilty of possession, or guilty of possession with intent to deliver. After about a half hour they returned the verdict of guilty of the harsher of the two possibilities, possession with intent to deliver.

Punishment hearing

Mr. Ervine had elected before trial to let the judge assess the punishment rather than the jury, possibly because the judge has the option of giving him probation whereas the jury could not because Mr. Ervine had been previously convicted of a felony. So the jury was dismissed, and the punishment hearing began without them.

Mr. Flathers read Mr. Ervine's rap sheets from Ector and Midland Counties, and they contained about seven offenses in Ector County and roughly nine in Midland County. They included theft, assault, DWI and a lot of driving-with-suspended-license charges which would seem to follow a DWI conviction. The most serious one was a felony, injury to a minor, ten years ago.

The defense witness was Calvin Riggs, the Associate Minister at Greater Ideal Baptist Church, who testified that Mr. Ervine helped with the cook and clean-up lessons they teach to single parent children. He wasn't able to give a clear answer to whether a person convicted of possession of crack cocaine with intent to deliver would be a good role model for the children.

Mr. Ervine took the stand and in tearful testimony pleaded for leniency because he has two of his six children living with him. The two living with him are 9 and 10 years old. Two others, age 6 months and 2 years, live with someone else.  And two are adults.

He did, however, admit that he committed the crime but said it was a "pass-off" implying that he wasn't really a drug dealer but was merely the delivery guy.

The judge ordered a pre-sentencing report which should be available next week, and he said he might hold a sentencing hearing on or around November 29.

What should happen to him?

So what do you do with a guy like this? He's 49 years old and no stranger to drugs, but he's too old to be involved with something like this. There was nothing in the testimony that told us that he had any work skills.  And he's caring for two kids.

Most of the people in the jury pool said they thought "punishment" was the most important thing about the criminal justice system. But is society going to be any better off if Mr. Ervine goes to the big house for 2 to 20 years for what is essentially a victimless crime? Or would it be better to put him under community supervision where he has to adhere to strict rules and report regularly?

Judge Hyde will certainly have a tough choice ahead of him.

Jury pool

The jury pool in Midland County, Texas, Monday morning consisted of about 200 people who dutifully honored their summoned to show up at the courthouse by 8:30 am. And they all sat patiently until Judge Dean Rucker came in to listen to reasons why they should be excused. A few got off, but most had to stick it out.

The building was originally constructed as an office building some years back. It changed hands a few times finally ending up as county property and getting a courthouse makeover. The airport like security at the entry to the old courthouse was usually very annoying, but entry into this new one was amazingly smooth. The extra metal detector made a big difference, and the guards used a wand for those who set off the alarm instead of making them go back and forth through the poles, stripping a little bit each time.

In the jury room those hard plastic seats gave the impression of government cost consciousness if one didn't think too hard about the total sum absorbed by that monument to justice and land records.

On day one, Monday, three panels were made up with a total of about 120 potential jurors, and the rest were sent away mid morning and ordered back Tuesday. So I there I was on day two, my bottom nestled into the plastic, when they called me up for a panel of 44 to go up to Judge Hyde's eighth floor courtroom to face a voir dire for a trial for cocaine-possession-with-intent-to-deliver.

Next, the trial.

Post Script:  If you are a terrorists, then leave now. For the merely curious, there's a way to smuggle metal past the guards. As I entered the courthouse after lunch I walked in behind a friendly lady wearing a ton of jewelry and a County name tag. She set off the metal detector, but they just smiled amiably and sent her through. So if a person wanting to smuggle something in they could either bribe or blackmail a county employee or utilize a look-a-like with a fake ID. But this is all theoretical. No one would really do that.

Why would someone confess to a crime he didn't commit?

Last night the PBS Frontline show, The Confessions, was about the Norfolk Four -- four guys who had a casual association while in the Navy and who got caught up in a murder/rape investigation in Norfolk, Virginia.

The fact that makes the case unique is that all four, Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Eric Wilson , and Joseph Dick, confessed to the crime but recanted their confessions. Did they do it? Most viewers of the show probably came away believing that the homicide detective who interrogated them obtained false confessions.

So why would someone confess to a crime he/she didn't commit? If the interrogation process is long and arduous enough and it wears down the suspect, the suspect tells the interrogator what he wants to hear just to make the ordeal end. After all, if there's anything we learned from the CIA water-boarding saga it's that torture works. However, the torture victims will lie to make it stop, so it would take some skill to separate the lies from the truth. But if the interrogator is trying to prove an erroneous narrative, then all he gets is someone willing to give him what he wants.

While the Norfolk detective didn't use waterboarding, the physical ordeal of an 8 to 10 hour intense interrogation by intimidating detectives apparently wore these men down. And they repeated back the narrative they were given, rehearsing it several times to get it "right" before the recorder was turned on.

Amazingly, DNA crime scene evidence was obtained, but it didn't match the first guy, so the conclusion of law enforcement was that there was more than one perpetrator. So they kept roping in suspects for a total of seven. Charges were eventually dropped against the three who didn't succumb to the pressure to confess.

By sheer luck, the real murderer was found to be a black serial rapist named Omar Ballard whose DNA matched the evidence. He said he acted alone and didn't know the other guys. The prosecution was faced with either admitting they jailed innocent people or concocting a narrative that included the black guy. So they came up with the theory that the white guys wanted to rape and kill the girl but couldn't get into the apartment. They ran into this black guy in the parking lot, explained to him what they wanted to do, and the black guy joined up with them to break into the apartment to rape and kill the girl.

It was a bizarre theory, but the juries believed the taped confessions and convicted those who didn't take a plea bargain.

They all went to prison, Wilson was released after he served the time given, and Tice, Williams, Dick were released only after a public outcry resulted in a conditional pardon from the governor. But they are convicted felons classified as sex offenders which subjects them to all sorts of conditions. Lawyers are working pro bono to get them cleared, and no doubt there is a civil suit coming.

As for the detective who got the confessions, he's Robert Glenn Ford, and he was convicted last month of extorting thousands of dollars from criminal defendants in exchange for promises of a break in court. Source: HamptonRoads.com which adds that Detective Ford "was responsible for solving nearly 200 homicides."

It's infuriating. Every case Detective Ford "solved" should be reexamined by competent investigators independent of any Virginia law enforcement agency.

Utah Atty Gen tweets about execution

The other evening Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed in Utah by firing squad. The method of execution itself is somewhat remarkable in this day and time, but what seems to have gotten even more attention was that the Utah Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, sent out tweets about it on the night of the execution.

There were three. The first explained that his final nod would give the go ahead, then he said he gave the go ahead. And the third tweet directed followers to the live streaming of his post execution public statement.

As you might have guessed, some outside observers are appalled -- see BBC .

But for those people following the case, such as the family of Mr. Gardner's victim, timely updates might be just what they wanted. The protocol provided for the Department of Corrections to call the Atty Gen to see if there was any legal reason to halt the execution. If there had been a last minute stay of execution then interested parties would have wanted to know immediately. There was no stay, and the Atty Gen gave the go-ahead. So Mr. Shurtleff's tweets made perfect sense.

The tweets went directly to the public, bypassing any media outlets. And maybe there's the reason for the indignation.

Via Techcrunch.

Post script: What did Gardner do to get the death penalty? According to the Salt Lake Tribune, he was on trial in 1985 for murder when someone passed him a gun. He killed an attorney and wounded a unarmed bailiff.

Post post script: It's refreshing that the target of death penalty outrage isn't the state of Texas for a change.

The hit man he hired was an undercover agent

It was just up the road in Brownwood, Texas. Jeffrey Dwayne Harrison, according to the U.S. Attorney's news release, had a drug trial pending in Brown County District Judge Stephen Ellis's court. And the tactic he came up with to beat the case was to hire a hit man to rub out the judge, apparently assuming that a new judge would make a difference in his case.

The cops got a tip from a CI in March about what Mr. Harrison wanted to do, so an ATF agent went undercover and played the role of an Aryan gang member ready to do the deed for ten grand.

Mr. Harrison and the agent had a few telephone conversations, and the agent visited him in the county jail, all the while pretending to be a hit man as they made the deadly deal.

Then in one final display of theatrical talent, the agent was brought in handcuffs into the same interview room as Harrison as if he had just been arrested. Here's how that went down, according to the news release:

When the two were alone, the undercover agent asked Harrison, “did you drop the dime on me?” Harrison responded that he hadn’t and the undercover agent replied that someone had because he was caught an hour outside of town and that they’d found the body. Harrison repeated that he hadn’t said anything.

Mr. Harrison was read his rights, made a few more incriminating statements, and on June 10 he made a guilty plea in federal court to two counts of using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire.

Links: U.S. Attorney's news release and GoSanAngelo.com.

How'd I get on Hannah Giles' mailing list?

You remember Hannah Giles. She and James O'Keefe pulled a sting on ACORN and amazed us all with video of ACORN employees going along with and offering advice on a fictitious plan for converting a house into a house of ill repute.

So I get this letter in the mail from her saying she's being sued by one of the stung ACORN employees.  You can see the envelope on the right.  (Watermarked painter's tape covers the address.)

Liberty Institute is handling her defense, and here's what their website says:

In the summer of 2009, 20-year-old college student Hannah Giles spent her summer working with James O?Keefe to expose ACORN corruption. Together, they released videos from six cities showing ACORN employees encouraging the duo, posing as a prostitute and pimp, to break laws including tax laws and underage prostitution. Since the release of the videos, ACORN and two of its former employees filed a $5 million lawsuit against Hannah, James, and Andrew Breitbart, who helped popularize the videos through his BigGovernment.com website. After the suit was dismissed, a third ACORN official, this one in Philadelphia, filed suit. This case is just starting in Federal Court in Philadelphia. Liberty Institute represents Hannah to protect the free speech of citizen journalists, and has established www.DefendHannah.com as her legal defense fund.

Looks like a good cause, and citizen journalists need all the support they can get. But still, how'd I get on her mailing list?

CSI Effect -- probably not such a bad thing

Anyone who has had the privilege (or obligation) of sitting through a criminal trial voir dire in the past few years has probably heard a prosecutor decry the CSI series of TV shows. People who watch those shows, it is presumed, develop an unrealistic expectation of crime scene investigations.

In The “CSI effect”, the Economist.com cites research by Evan Durnal which purports to show that there is indeed a CSI Effect. To wit:

According to Mr Durnal, prosecutors in the United States are now spending much more time explaining to juries why certain kinds of evidence are not relevant. Prosecutors have even introduced a new kind of witness — a “negative evidence” witness — to explain that investigators often fail to find evidence at a crime scene.

But Mr. Durnal, or perhaps the Economist, went slightly askew. The article cites as an example of the CSI Effect a juror's wrong headed analysis, but in fact the juror may have been onto something. The situation involved a defendant in a murder trial and a bloody jacket. The jacket was not DNA tested, and a juror thought it should have been. Excerpt:

Since the defendant had admitted being present at the murder scene, such tests would have thrown no light on the identity of the true culprit. The judge observed that, thanks to television, jurors knew what DNA tests could do, but not when it was appropriate to use them.

Whoa, not so fast. That's exactly what's going on in the case of Henry (Hank) Skinner -- the Texas death row inmate whose defenders are now screaming bloody murder because DNA testing was not conducted on bloody clothing found at the crime scene. The theory in the Skinner case is that the DNA will implicate someone other than Skinner. Maybe, maybe not. Better to test and remove all doubt than not test, execute and wonder.

So maybe the CSI Effect isn't such a bad thing. It really depends on the juror and his/her ability to think rationally.