More problems with the Houston crime lab, as a man in prison 22 years after being convicted of a rape and robbery looks to be innocent.

A jury convicted Gary Alvin Richard in a 1987 attack on a nursing student in a trial based largely on blood-typing evidence from the Houston Police Department crime lab. But, prosecutors and the defense attorney agree, new tests completed Friday show that an HPD analyst misled jurors at Richard’s trial and failed to report evidence that may have helped him.

Based on the new tests, both sides will ask a judge next week to release Richard on bond while they sort out what happened in his case.

“This is a new chapter, among many, of mistakes that were made, of sloppy work at the crime lab,” said Bob Wicoff, Richard’s lawyer. “Most troubling are the results that were not passed on to people who needed them.”

Richard’s case abounds with issues common to wrongful convictions. Among them:

The victim identified him some seven months after the attack. HPD crime lab analysts came to conflicting conclusions about the evidence, but reported only the results favorable to the case. Physical evidence collected in what is known as a “rape kit” has been destroyed, a victim of poor evidence preservation practices, leaving nothing for DNA testing now.

“The real crime is that another rape kit has been destroyed or discarded,” Wicoff said. “The standards for preserving evidence were less stringent in 1987, but that is no excuse.”

Without the rape kit, analysts at a California lab tested Richard’s body fluids and drew conclusions that Wicoff said establish his innocence.

“He could not have been the source of the semen at the crime scene,” Wicoff said.

Prosecutors have agreed that Richard should be released for the time being, but aren’t yet conceding that he’s innocent.

Richard’s case is one of more than 400 reviewed after investigators found evidence of corruption, mishandled evidence, and general incompetence in the Houston crime lab. So far, at least three other people have been wrongly convicted because of mistakes by the people working in it.

Fresh from a proposal to charge residents extra fees for street lights, D.C.’s latest effort to generate revenue is to ticket residents for parking in their own driveways.

No, that isn’t an exaggeration:

Beverly Anderson is mad as hell. She just started to get tickets for parking in her own driveway.

That’s right. The District of Columbia is ticketing people who park their cars in their own driveways.

“This is clearly an attempt by the city to extort money out of property owners,” Anderson tells WTOP.

Anderson has received two of the $20 tickets in the past month. Anderson has owned the Capitol Hill house (and the driveway, so she thought) for more than ten years and has never gotten a ticket. And she’s not alone.

It turns out that D.C. has an odd, obscure law stating that the land between the front of your house and the street, otherwise known as your driveway and front yard, falls under a bizarre classification known as “private property set aside for public use.” Essentially, though owners have to pay for its maintenance and upkeep (they can be fined if they don’t), it’s considered public property. Which apparently means that, technically, you can’t park your car on it. The city recently dusted off the law, and began writing parking tickets if any part of a resident’s car is parked between the front facade of their house and the street, even if it’s parked in the driveway.

When Anderson complained, one D.C. official told her that if she wanted, she could pay the city to lease the land between the front of her house and the street, which would allow her to park her car there legally.

In November 2007, I wrote about how D.C. was phasing out due process rights for people who want to contest parking tickets in person.

Last night’s event at Maryland went well. Not a huge showing, but about 30 people turned out. Here’s a write-up from a campus newspaper.

I learned a couple of new things from Mayor Cheye Calvo’s presentation. The first is that we’re now nine months removed from the raid on his home, and he still hasn’t been given a copy of the police report. Nine months later, and they still won’t give an innocent man the report describing how and why his home was invaded, his pets slaughtered, and his family terrorized.

Calvo also said that there’s a provision in the SWAT team transparency bill he was able to push through the Maryland legislature this year that specifically requires police departments to report when they killed a household pet during a raid. He said that in addition to opposing the transparency bill in general, Maryland’s police organizations waged a second campaign aimed specifically at getting the pet provision removed from the bill. I found that interesting.

I also spoke with a woman from a Maryland dog owners organization who said she’s been trying for years to get the state’s police departments to tell her how many dogs are shot by police officers. Despite the state’s relatively strong open-records laws, they’ve refused to turn the information over to her. I’ll have more on her efforts a bit later.

Rat Pack week, which I’d imagine had all the contestants salivating. The genre is built for improvisation and chops-showing. No surprise, then, that this was the strongest week of the season. All five remaining contestants were really strong. If I had to rank them….

Adam Lambert. Another week, another show this guy blows everyone else away. And the thing about this week is that everyone else was also really good. So when is hair rock week? I want to hear him do some Slaughter.

Danny Gokey. This is the first time I’ve really liked what he sang, as opposed to just admiring the guy’s talent. It would be terrific if he did put out an album of this stuff. Terrific to listen to, I mean. Probably wouldn’t be as terrific for his bank account.

Kris Allen. Really starting to get over my dislike of Allen, mostly I think because he’s dropped the John Mayer mannerisms and found his own groove on stage. He was great this week.

Allison Iraheta. My only problem with her this week was her diction, which is something she’s had some trouble with in the past. Her vocals were amazing, and much as she seems to be a fit for rock, she’s got a gruff, smoky tone that, if she wanted, could just as easily put her in the same section of Barnes & Noble as Diana Krall. But she didn’t enunciate well. That stood out this week, partly because crooner tunes are so much about phrasing, and partly because everyone else left very little margin for error.

Matt Giraud. I think “My Funny Valentine” got away from him a bit. He was good, but it just didn’t feel like he had the came command of his song the other contestants did. That’s probably in part because it’s a much more difficult song to sing. But I think part of it is also that he doesn’t project the confidence the other three men do. Giraud said he feels like this is his genre, but he seemed a bit short on the confidence and swagger needed to convincingly come off like an old school crooner.

If I had to guess, I’d say Iraheta and Giraud are the bottom two. And I think the last girl will stick around for another week. Should be the end of the line for Giraud, though I’d think he’ll still be putting out a CD next year. I’d be shocked if Gokey, Allen, and Lambert aren’t the final three. I’ve thought for a while now that it would come down to Lambert and Gokey, but I’m not so sure, now. Allen’s been impressive the last several weeks.

Here are the details:

Event: “Analyzing SWAT Team Use With Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko”
What: Lecture
Host: Students For Sensible Drug Policy
Start Time: Tuesday, April 28 at 7:00pm
End Time: Tuesday, April 28 at 9:00pm
Where: Margaret Brent Room, Stamp Student Union

It’s open to the public.

So yeah, color me unimpressed.

“War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’”

Here’s your answer.

(Via Reddit)

I’m going to watch the movie, based on the real-life experience of Regina Kelly, tonight.

So far, it’s getting pretty good reviews. The negative reviews seem to focus on the film’s heavy-handed plot and lack of character development, which without having seen the film, I’d have to say is not entirely fair. There’s not much the filmmakers could do with the plot while still staying true to Kelly’s story. And sometimes, bad people don’t change, even after enduring an experience that ought to change them.

Still, until the movie comes to your area, you can brows mostly positive reviews from the NY Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, the Onion’s A.V. Club, and Roger Ebert.

The full text of my interview with Sandy Gonzalez, the DEA whistleblower in the House of Death case, is now up at Reason.

I have a piece up at Reason taking swipes at Chuck Hurley, MADD’s CEO and Obama’s nominee to head up the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Walter Olson also has much more on Hurley, as does this Washington Times editorial, which includes more detail on Hurley’s advocacy for red light cameras:

Mr. Hurley is a former board member of the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running. The innocuous-sounding outfit frequently testifies at congressional hearings as if it were a nonprofit victim’s advocacy group. In reality, it is a well-heeled lobbying shop for big business.

The so-called National Campaign’s phone number – (202) 828-9100 – is answered by a receptionist at the public-relations firm Blakey and Agnew. Among that firm’s big-ticket clients are the traffic-camera companies Redflex Traffic Systems of Australia, Gastometer BV of the Netherlands and Lasercraft Inc. of Britain. These foreign corporations all seek to rewrite state laws to allow machines to issue traffic-camera tickets, thus reaping huge profits for the companies that operate them – including Redflex, Gastometer and Lasercraft.

Last August, I described how the campaign recruited Ladies’ Home Journal to solicit letters to Congress from its readers calling for more red light cameras, without ever disclosing that red light camera manufacturers had underwritten the entire thing.

According to Maye’s lawyers, this is good news, but only in the sense that it would have been really bad news if the court had declined to hear oral arguments. The arguments are scheduled for June 4. You’ll be able to watch a live webcast here.

My October 2006 Reason feature on Maye’s case here. And here’s Reason’s award-winning documentary on Maye’s story:

It was 90 in D.C. today, so we took the dogs to the wet dog park. This is the end result of a long day of swimming, playing, and sunshine.

These guys need their own show. Somewhere.

#8 on our Bob Dylan countdown: “Tangled Up in Blue,” from Blood on the Tracks.

This is very strange. And it made me laugh.

Spencer Ackerman asks the question, in reference to two American journalists currently being held there.

The sad thing is, I suspect that if pressed, Cheney & Co. would actually rather argue that it’s perfectly acceptable for foreign governments to use these methods on American citizens than forego the ability of the American government to use them. We don’t know the full extent of the use of waterboarding. So far, federal officials have admitted to using it on only three high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

But the analogy with respect to stress positions and other methods isn’t strained at all. There’s evidence that several Gitmo detainees subjected to prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure were later determined to be innocent. Which means there really is very little moral distinction between our using those methods on them, and North Korea using similar tactics against innocent Americans.

The Innocence Project of New York has asked for a review of an old Pennsylvania rape conviction based largely on dubious bite mark testimony. John Kunco was convicted in 1992 of the brutal rape of a 55-year-old woman. The woman survived the attack. Kunco is serving a 45 to 90 year sentence.

The main evidence against Kunco was the woman’s identification of his voice (he apparently has a lisp) and testimony from two bite mark analysts who claimed they could definitively match marks on the woman’s shoulder to Kunco’s dentition. Blood and hair samples collected at the crime scene were inconclusive.

Two forensic odonotologists, or bite mark experts, named Michael N. Sobel and Thomas J. David testified that they were able to use ultraviolet light to isolate and photograph the woman’s wounds. Based on that photograph they were able to match the wounds to Kunco’s teeth, to the exclusion of anyone else. Their testimony grows more absurd when you consider that the photograph was taken five months after the rape, after the wounds had mostly healed.

Sobel and David wrote an article about their analysis in the Kunco case for a 1994 edition of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. In that article, they explain that “the technique used followed the recommendations developed by other odontologists.” One of the two footnotes to that sentence points to an article written by none other than . . . now-disgraced Mississippi bite mark expert, Dr. Michael West.

The Innocence Project is trying to get the bite mark testimony thrown out while lawyers await the results of more sophisticated DNA testing unavailable at the time of Kunco’s trial.

As I noted in February, a congressionally-commissioned report published by the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year states emphatically that there’s no scientific evidence to support the notion that an expert can match bite marks made on human skin to the dentition of a single suspect.