Sessions Goes After Science

AG Jeff Sessions' next target? Science! 

Mondays are tough enough without the release of gloomy announcements heralding Department of Justice initiatives that reflect the disturbing dystopian worldview of attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III.

Last Monday a DOJ memorandum announced a "review" of the consent decrees signed between the DOJ and various police departments accused of racially-biased policing practices and systematic excessive use of force.

Yesterday (in addition to reviving Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" mantra) he announced he's going after the science behind DNA testing used to exonerate people wrongly accused or prosecuted for crimes they didn't actually commit.

A move with unmistakable racial and socio-economic undertones.

As Spencer Hsu reported in a Washington Post article on Monday, Sessions announced that the DOJ will not renew an independent advisory panel comprised of attorneys, judges, lab technicians and scientists known as the National Commission on Forensic Science.

Not only will Session's actions terminate a partnership with the NCFS, a community of experts dedicated to raising the standards of DNA use in criminal cases, it will also halt a review of FBI testimony on various types of scientific evidence

Effectively terminating a legal reform effort begun under the Obama administration in 2013 to ensure that DNA evidence is being used fairly and accurately in criminal convictions.

Innocence Project co-founders Barry Scheck
and Peter S. Neufeld

As one of the two co-founders (including Barry Scheck) of the Innocence Project, Peter S. Neufeld has been involved with efforts to use DNA evidence and science to help free and exonerate over 343 different people from wrongful convictions.

An astounding 20 of those people were on death row facing execution - take a minute to click the link above and read about some of those people.

As he observed in Hsu's WaPo article, the results of Sessions' decision are a mockery of the lofty ideals of the American justice system:

"the (DOJ) has literally decided to suspend the search for the truth. As a consequence innocent people will languish in prison or, God forbid, could be executed."

Session's reprehensible efforts to undermine the use of science to exonerate the innocent and free them from the bowels of America's prison industrial complex aren't necessarily all that surprising given the Trump administration's hostility towards journalists and facts, or the draconian cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But part of what's particularly troubling is that the Innocence Project, and widespread efforts to introduce DNA evidence in criminal prosecutions, were based
(according to Wikipedia), on a groundbreaking cooperative study conducted by the Department of Justice, the U.S. Senate and the Cardozo School of Law "which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions."

In his book "Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong", author Brandon L. Garrett's in-depth study of the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA evidence after being wrongly convicted, he found that a stunning 76% of those cases hinged on eyewitness identifications that were later proved to be false.

Darryl Hunt reacts after being exonerated in 2004
after serving 19.5 years for rape and murder  

So what would compel Jeff Sessions to terminate an independent advisory panel whose goal is to raise the standards of the science used to find and prosecute criminals?

Is he really willing to use his authority to try and quash science in order to reshape the Department of Justice to reflect the rigid ideology of the Trump administration and the modern Republican Party?

Is ideology more important than ensuring a justice system based on the pursuit of truth for this chaotic administration?

Even in the midst of the most politically divisive moments of the Obama presidency, when Republicans were unified in doing everything possible within their power to torpedo virtually every part of his legislative agenda, there was still an issue that had bipartisan support:

Meaningful reform of the American justice system.

In the wake of landmark works like "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, a cross-section of conservative, libertarian, centrist, progressive and liberal lawmakers alike from around the nation joined legal experts, scholars, clergy, activists and concerned citizens of all races and from all socioeconomic backgrounds to support efforts to address the warehousing of men, women and children on a massive scale in the prison industrial complex.

Are there blocks of hardcore conservatives determined to ensure that mass incarceration continues?

Sure there are, including Donald Trump.

As CNN Money reported back on February 24th, stocks in the major private prison corporations are up over 100% since Trump took office, fueled in part by his fiery "law and order" rhetoric and efforts to ramp up the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants - efforts from which he'll profit personally from his own stock holdings.

The prison industrial complex, which includes private prison companies, prison guard unions, food suppliers, gun manufacturers and local municipal governments, is an imposing lobby in Washington with a vested interest in maintaining the pipeline that funnels non-violent people into U.S. prisons and jails.

And in Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they've certainly got a friend who's willing to undermine science to keep that human pipeline flowing.

It begs the question, just whose attorney general is this anyway?

Tony Wright Is Still In Jail & NRA Opposes Prison Reform

Tony Wright with son Tony, Jr. (left) in 1991

Consider what you have been doing since March of 2015, or the past 25 years.

It was March 2,  2015 when Rolling Stone published Paul Solotaroff's stunning article, "Why Is This Man Still In Jail?" an expose about Tony Wright, a Philadelphia man who Philly cops wrongly pegged and indicted for the brutal murder of a 77-year old woman name Louise Talley.

Solotaroff, a Pulitzer Prize nominated former Village Voice editor, examined how an innocent man got trapped deep inside the dark recesses of a broken criminal justice system.

In painful and meticulous detail, he examined how Wright could still be incarcerated after 25 years despite the fact that DNA evidence exonerated him and overturned his conviction in a court of law in 2014 with the help of The Innocence Project.

Yet he's still behind bars. Click the link above if you've never read about this travesty of justice, the basic facts are truly disturbing.

Wright had a tough upbringing in North Philadelphia. At age 20 he'd finally turned his life around with the help of extended family, was on the right path and had a steady job when Philly cops knocked on his door in 1992 and asked him to come down to the station; 25 years later he's still in jail - the problem is he didn't do anything.

Philly cops, including Detectives Martin Devlin and Frank Jastrzembski used a false confession, illegal interrogation techniques, concocted false evidence, used testimony of two children and coerced two crackheads who didn't even know Wright to frame him for the brutal rape and stabbing of Louise Talley.

Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck

The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992 as a means to use DNA evidence and modern forensic science to help clear innocent people from crimes for which they (mostly poor black defendants) have been found guilty, intervened on Wright's behalf.

Based on their work, Wright was granted a new trial back in 2014; albeit one that's yet to take place.

Not surprising when you look closer at the facts of the case, and the potential bombshell it would mean for the Philly PD as well as the prosecutors in the original case.

DNA evidence clearly proved that Wright did not rape and kill Louise Talley.

DNA taken from semen samples lifted from Talley's body at the scene matched the DNA of a violent former crackhead with a lengthy rap sheet named Ronnie Byrd who used to live in the alley directly behind Talley's Philadelphia home.

The Philly police ignored witnesses who could prove Wright wasn't at the scene at the time of the attack, and the discarded clothes cops presented as those of the culprit didn't even fit Wright.

Despite Louise Talley being raped and stabbed ten times, and her home robbed, his fingerprints were never found anywhere in her house, or on the knife that was used to kill her.

Shannon Coleman (left)

Despite all that, Philadelphia prosecutors are still stubbornly determined to keep him incarcerated, possibly because of the potential lawsuit the city would be facing for wrongly incarcerating an innocent man for over a quarter of a century.

Paul Solotaroff's Rolling Stone article brought renewed global attention to the case and caught the attention of Louise Talley's niece Shannon Coleman of Philadelphia.

Coleman was so outraged at the miscarriage of justice that she's started her own petition on Change.org calling for Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams to release Wright - which you can sign too.

She also calls on Williams to cease the absurd efforts to retry Wright for a crime that DNA evidence proves beyond a doubt that he did not do.

As she notes in her petition, in a city so strapped for funds that it's a challenge to properly fund the public school system and repair infrastructure, it's hard to imagine a bigger waste of taxpayer funds than retrying a man whose conviction was overturned by science two years ago.

Wright's case not only illustrates the need for criminal justice reform in the United States, it also offers troubling insight into the root causes behind mass incarceration based on biased policing, dysfunctional law enforcement procedures and systematically flawed prosecutors and courts.

Oh and guess who is starting a campaign against criminal justice reform?

As the gun law advocacy group Trace.org reported on Monday, at last month's annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, the group aligned itself with GOP front runner Donald Trump in opposing measures to release non-violent offenders and reduce mass incarceration.  

As Alex Yablon reported, vilifying criminal justice reform is a time-honored tactic to deflect public attention from the epic gun violence in America and a sure-fire way for the NRA to align itself against Hillary Clinton who has called for mandatory background checks for gun purchases and reforming mandatory sentencing laws.

Leave it to the NRA to use senseless fear tactics to lobby their members to oppose the reduction of mass incarceration when we're finally getting some rare bipartisan traction on the issue. Pathetic.

This country never ceases to amaze, the latest Affluenza poster boy, former Stanford swimming star Brock Turner, was found raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster by two witnesses, is found guilty by a jury and gets sentenced to 6-months by a judge who's a former Stanford lacrosse team captain.

Did you hear that Turner may not even serve the full six months?

Anthony Wright is convicted of a murder despite no physical evidence he committed the crime and DNA evidence that proves another man did it - and he's been in jail for 25 years.

Justice, American style.