Trashing the Truth
What happens when DNA evidence ends up destroyed? Should DNA and evidence be handled independently? Here's the first of a four part series.... The proof of Clarence Moses-EL's guilt or innocence may well have been written in DNA code on two bedsheets, a sexual-assault kit and a pink and black outfit worn by a Denver rape victim. From prison, he won a judge's permission to test the evidence and persuaded fellow inmates to pitch in $1,000 for the lab work. Denver police packaged the items and labeled the box "DO NOT DESTROY." Then, they threw it in a dumpster. The move violated a court order and the Denver Police Department's own evidence policies. More than 19 years after his conviction, Moses-EL remains behind bars, with no way to free himself from a 48-year sentence for a rape he says he didn't commit. He Nearly two decades after the 1988 decision, DNA analysis has evolved into criminal justice's most reliable tool for uncovering the truth. Yet the system continues trashing samples like the ones that so far have exposed more than 200 wrongful convictions. "They broke their own rules and threw out the only key to my freedom," Moses-EL said from Kit Carson Correctional Facility in Burlington. "If that ain't bad faith, man, I don't know what is." Nationwide, the specter of bad faith looms over scores of criminal cases, from unsolved murders to innocence bids such as that of Tim Masters, another Colorado inmate featured last week in The Denver Post. For four days, the paper will detail how the system routinely mishandles biological evidence, undermining justice for victims and prisoners and allowing criminals The law on whether authorities have a constitutional duty to preserve evidence predates the 1990s, when use of DNA became widespread in criminal justice. Critics liken the 1988 Arizona vs. Youngblood ruling to one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most notorious. "It's the Dred Scott decision of modern times," said forensic scientist Ed Blake, referring to the 1857 opinion holding that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery.The Denver PostTrashing the Truth
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1 comment:
In Texas most of the exonerations have come in Dallas and the main reason is they kept their old DNA evidence. Nobody thinks there aren't similar cases in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and elsewhere in the state. But the DNA evidence doesn't exist to test, or there was never any in the first place.
In Houston, the DA requires defendants to agree to destruction of evidence as part of a guilty plea, even in capital cases! So if an innocent person takes a plea to avoid the death penalty, they can't later prove it wasn't them when new technology would allow testing. Nice, huh?
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