The Medill Justice Project probes expert witnesses in ‘shaken-baby’ murder conviction

March 19, 2013

Undergraduate journalism students at Northwestern University investigating a former Chicago-area day care worker’s first-degree murder conviction are raising questions about the role of expert testimony in a 2005 Will County, Ill., trial. Jennifer Del Prete is accused of violently shaking a 3 ½-month-old infant at a Romeoville, Ill., day care, causing head injuries that led to her death nearly a year later.

Students in a winter investigative journalism class led by Prof. Alec Klein, director of The Medill Justice Project, formerly the Medill Innocence Project, report in a story published today on www.medilljusticeproject.org that:

• The defense’s expert medical witness was drastically unmatched in his qualifications compared to the prosecution’s expert witness, a nationally acknowledged child-abuse expert. The defense expert, who was not board certified in pediatrics and had not worked in a pediatric family practice in 22 years, appeared to miscalculate the timing of the infant’s injuries. It was a key assertion that has since been undermined by a battery of medical experts for the defense and prosecution who now acknowledge the infant’s chronic brain bleed began two to three weeks—or perhaps even weeks earlier—before she became unresponsive under Del Prete’s care. That means the infant’s injuries could have been sustained before she was under Del Prete’s care. In a sidebar, the students detail new medical evidence which has emerged since Del Prete’s trial about eight years ago.

Read more here:

http://news.cision.com/medill—northwestern-university/r/the-medill-justice-project-probes-expert-witnesses-in–shaken-baby–murder-conviction,c9387451

Bipartisan Legislation To Give Judges More Flexibility For Federal Sentences Introduced”

Blessings of Low Taxes Remain Unproved

By EDUARDO PORTER

Innocence Blog

Oregon Supreme Court Establishes New Procedures to Determine the Admissibility of Eyewitness Identification Evidence

Posted: November 29, 2012 5:45 pm

In State of Oregon v. Samuel Adam Lawson, the Oregon Supreme Court established new procedures to determine the admissibility of eyewitness identification evidence today. The case revised previous reliability tests and will now require that courts review eyewitness testimony in a manner consistent with the vast research in the area of eyewitness identification andmemory. The court’s ruling reflected many of the legal arguments set forth by the Innocence Network in its friend-of-the-court brief.
 
Lawson, who will now receive a new trial, was convicted of murder based largely on an eyewitness’ account from the victim’s wife two years after the incident. The identification was aided by the lead investigator in the case who showed her a picture of Lawson and then escorted her to a pre-trial hearing so she could get a second look.
 
The Oregon Court of Appeals found Hilde’s identification to be valid based on a 33-year-old case, State v. Classen. However, the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed in an 80-page opinion by Justice Paul J. De Muniz citing serious concerns regarding the reliability of the identification. TheOregonian reports:

“In light of current scientific knowledge regarding the effects of suggestion and confirming feedback,” De Muniz concludes that questions about the reliability of the ID evidence admitted at trial are impossible to ignore and remands the case to trial court for a new trial.

…
Among Classen’s many problems, De Muniz notes, is that the law’s “burden-of-proof structure improperly requires defendants who have filed pretrial motions to exclude eyewitness identification evidence to first establish than an identification procedure was suggestive, even though the state — as the administrator of that procedure — controls the bulk of the evidence in that regard.”

The ruling comes soon after a similar landmark decision from New Jersey’s Supreme Court required major changes in the way courts are required to evaluate identification evidence at trial and how they should instruct juries. The Oregon decision goes further than the New Jersey court in protecting againstwrongful convictions based on misidentification in several important respects.  The new Oregon test shifts the burden to the state to establish that the evidence is admissible. If the state satisfies its initial burden, the court charges that judges may still need to impose remedies, including suppressing the evidence in some circumstances, to prevent injustice if the defendant establishes that he or she would be unfairly prejudiced by the evidence.   
 
Read the full article.
 
Read the full opinion. 

“The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11”

Journal Article, International Security, volume 37, issue 1, pages 81-110

Summer 2012

Authors: John Mueller, Mark G. Stewart

Belfer Center Programs or Projects: Quarterly Journal: International Security

SUMMARY

The reaction of Americans to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been massively disproportionate to the actual threat posed by al-Qaida either as an international menace or as an inspiration or model for homegrown amateurs. An examination of the activities of international and domestic terrorist “adversaries” reveals that exaggerations and distortions of the threat have inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent. The result has been an ill-conceived and remarkably unreflective effort to react to an event that, however tragic and dramatic in the first instance, should have been seen to be of only limited significance at least after a few years. Not only has the terrorism delusion had significant costs, but the initial alarmed perspective has been so internalized that anxieties about terrorism have persisted for more than a decade despite exceedingly limited evidence that much fear is justified.

Read the full article at MIT Press.