Well, election season is on us, and the good folks of Ohio may well be the people to decide for the entire country whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is President. I'm not going to dedicate time here tonight to argue whether the Electoral College is still the best plan. Instead, I will spend a few minutes talking about when politics affect legal decisions.
Last month I was deeply involved in a murder trial. If you read some of my posts, you know that it ended in a hung jury, 10-2 in favor of acquittal. As of yet no decision has been made as to whether or not the defendant in this case will be re-tried. He is out on a much smaller bond, but his future is still in limbo. Will he have to defend himself again? Should he even have to?
This case has always been political in nature. The victim was the Superintendent of schools in a smallish town, that had seen its share of racial division and corruption. He was an outsider that had been brought in to "clean up" the town, and also implement Brown vs Board of Education, which was long overdue. He had his run-ins with the School Board, and they wanted him gone. He ended up dead less than 24 hrs before a controversial meeting was to take place,
The defendant, a 17 year old high school student at the time, had no connection to the victim, the Board, or even the community. His family had recently relocated there. Neither he, nor his parents, were part of these controversies. Yet, due to some circumstantial evidence that placed him near the scene of the crime at approximately the same time as the murder, he became a person of interest. He was investigated, and dropped as a suspect, twenty years ago.
The problem is that now there is a D.A. that is aggressively trying to clean up cold-cases. The defendant was asked to give a DNA sample, which he did. The State got an arrest warrant on the strength of a "DNA match." This so-called match not only proved later to not be a match, it tended to show that the defendant could NOT have been the killer.
Nevertheless, the D.A. pursued this case with a fervor. She fought to make sure the defendant's bail was unattainable ($1M), and insisted in taking this matter to trial even when the lab that suggested there could be a match came back with a report saying there was not one.
Why would someone do this? Well, it may just be a coincidence, but the D.A.'s name has made a lot of headlines with her high-profile prosecution of this and other cases. Oh, and she is up for re-election in a couple weeks.
Since the hung-jury, she has kept silent about the case, and has let the Assistant D.A. who was the lead here take all the criticism. As for whether or not the Defendant would be re-tried? No word. No one is expecting anything until after the election. If her challenger wins, everyone expects the case will be dropped. If she wins, she may re-try it? Who knows?
The sad thing is that the victim's family is no closer to justice than they were twenty years ago. The defendant--a real person, with a wife, with hopes for a family, with hopes for regaining his life--sits and waits. This is not justice, and justice should never have to be put on hold due to someone's political aspirations.
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
All About Alleles
Day Two in my new life as a blogger. I have been involved in a criminal case for the past two and a half years. It is a cold-case murder, and I have been volunteering my legal services to the accused. I am not the primary defense attorney in this case. The case is being tried in Georgia, and I am not licensed there. (Remember My Cousin Vinny?) However, I have been donating time and mental energy to the research and strategy involved.
As it turns out, I have been able to provide a fair bit of help on the dna evidence the prosecution has introduced. I always loved math and science in my earlier academic years, and I still do today. So, I did quite a bit of work analyzing and discussing the data with our forensic expert.
We are still in the prosecution's case-in-chief, so I certainly have to be careful about saying too much about the strategy we are using, and/or what I cannot say. However, I can say at this point that there is a lot about dna evidence that most people probably never realized. When you think of a dna match, you tend to think about that 1 in a billion, 1 in a trillion sort of odds that essentially means that statistically there is no way anyone on Earth committed this crime except for you, your identical twin, or your clone that was sent back to the present from the future.
Actually, that is inaccurate. I will try and put this in simple terms, as I am no expert myself, and I want to be careful not to stray beyond what I think I know. Human beings share a great deal of their genetic code with each other--over 99%. However, there are a number of different sites (loci) on the dna molecule where you can find the differences that make us unique. Much like a fingerprint, we all have these sites, but they may have different values represented there. These values are the "alleles" that are the traits represented at that site. (Eg: hair color, skin color, etc). However, a similarity or a match at one site is hardly conclusive, as we share so many of the same alleles. Imagine, there are many people with black hair, but that does not mean they all also have the same eye color, or skin color.
So, if my dna matches evidence at one particular loci, it does not mean I will match at other loci. The more matches I have with that evidence, the higher the statistical probability that my dna actually matches the evidence in question. Now, two important things about that: 1) just because I can be a contributor of that allele does not mean I AM the contributor of that allele--this is particularly important in mixed samples; and 2) it is possible to exclude a person as a contributor to a sample if they do not share the same alleles.
Of course, there is a lot in between, which is why someone might be considered a probable match, a likely match, a possible match, or not a match at all. Knowing how many of the sites match is very important in knowing how strong of a case you do (or don't) have if it is predicated partially or wholly on this dna evidence. So when handling a case like this, get a good expert. Make sure you truly understand what they're telling you, so you properly can handle the direct or cross examination. It is likely many/most of the jury won't know this any better than you do, and you need to be able to get them to understand your point. This can really make or break a case!
Jay
As it turns out, I have been able to provide a fair bit of help on the dna evidence the prosecution has introduced. I always loved math and science in my earlier academic years, and I still do today. So, I did quite a bit of work analyzing and discussing the data with our forensic expert.
We are still in the prosecution's case-in-chief, so I certainly have to be careful about saying too much about the strategy we are using, and/or what I cannot say. However, I can say at this point that there is a lot about dna evidence that most people probably never realized. When you think of a dna match, you tend to think about that 1 in a billion, 1 in a trillion sort of odds that essentially means that statistically there is no way anyone on Earth committed this crime except for you, your identical twin, or your clone that was sent back to the present from the future.
Actually, that is inaccurate. I will try and put this in simple terms, as I am no expert myself, and I want to be careful not to stray beyond what I think I know. Human beings share a great deal of their genetic code with each other--over 99%. However, there are a number of different sites (loci) on the dna molecule where you can find the differences that make us unique. Much like a fingerprint, we all have these sites, but they may have different values represented there. These values are the "alleles" that are the traits represented at that site. (Eg: hair color, skin color, etc). However, a similarity or a match at one site is hardly conclusive, as we share so many of the same alleles. Imagine, there are many people with black hair, but that does not mean they all also have the same eye color, or skin color.
So, if my dna matches evidence at one particular loci, it does not mean I will match at other loci. The more matches I have with that evidence, the higher the statistical probability that my dna actually matches the evidence in question. Now, two important things about that: 1) just because I can be a contributor of that allele does not mean I AM the contributor of that allele--this is particularly important in mixed samples; and 2) it is possible to exclude a person as a contributor to a sample if they do not share the same alleles.
Of course, there is a lot in between, which is why someone might be considered a probable match, a likely match, a possible match, or not a match at all. Knowing how many of the sites match is very important in knowing how strong of a case you do (or don't) have if it is predicated partially or wholly on this dna evidence. So when handling a case like this, get a good expert. Make sure you truly understand what they're telling you, so you properly can handle the direct or cross examination. It is likely many/most of the jury won't know this any better than you do, and you need to be able to get them to understand your point. This can really make or break a case!
Jay
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