I mentioned it on Twitter, but I forgot to post it here: I’m now writing a weekly criminal justice column for the Reason website.

The inaugural column is up now. It’s on what I think is a fascinating little story: The city of El Paso has a huge population of illegal immigrants, lax gun control laws, high poverty levels, and is right across the border from one of the most violent cities in the world.

Yet last year, there were just 18 murders in El Paso, an incredibly small number for a city its size. Over the last decade, El Paso has had the second or third lowest violent crime rate of any large city in America. The kicker: Immigration may actually be the reason the city is so safe.

In part four, I talk about my reporting on Dr. Hayne and West and the problems with the forensics system.

In part five, I suggest five ways to reform the criminal justice system.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors aren’t obligated to turn over DNA for testing after someone has been convicted, even if the state acknowledges that a DNA test would prove conclusive as to guilt or innocence, and even if the defendant agrees to pay for the testing himself.

Representing the convicted man, the Innocence Project argued that a right to access a simple test that could establish actual innocence would be covered by the Constitution’s due process clause.

I wrote about the case, District Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne, for The Daily Beast last March.

MORE: I’m troubled by how many people say “I don’t see how you can read a right to DNA testing into the Constitution.” The Constitution isn’t an exhaustive list of your rights. It’s a document that delegates powers to the federal government, and through the Fourteenth Amendment, prevents some states from violating certain rights. One of those is the due process rights of each state’s citizens. If “due process” means anything, I would think it would mean the right of an innocent person to access evidence so he can perform a simple test to prove he isn’t guilty. Yes, the facts of this specific case were unfortunate. It wasn’t the ideal test case. That doesn’t make the ruling any less troubling.

I’m traveling, so I haven’t had time to read the opinion thoroughly, but at first blush it would seem that after Osborne, a state legislature that just realized some serious flaws in its criminal justice system and sees possible exonerations and lawsuits coming down the pike could simply pass a law making it difficult or impossible to obtain DNA evidence post-conviction, and head the looming crisis off at the pass. Seems to me this decision puts a heck of a lot of faith in the political process to keep something like that from happening. And we’ve all seen how good the political process in say, Mississippi, has been at making sure its courts are delivering justice, and not merely convictions.

MORE II: Steve Verdon has a more thorough analysis.

Conor Friedersdorf was kind of enough to interview me for my thoughts on criminal justice reform for his new Ideas blog at The Atlantic.

Here’s part one.

It’s only Monday evening, but I’m officially designating this my favorite news story of the week.

Hawkins was a felon, convicted of second-degree murder and assault, and a heroin addict who spent most of his adult life in and out of prison and on and off parole. The system lost track of him one day in July 2007, after he had been out on parole for about two years and failed a drug test at his rehab center. Although parole officers spent countless hours making more than 340 attempts to find him — phone calls to relatives and friends, certified letters, arrest record checks, visits to his last place of employment (Goodwill) and his last known address (the Samaritan Inn), sometimes with police officers in tow — they never found him.

Hawkins died one year later, in July 2008, at 54, of metastatic lung cancer. His family has the death certificate and certificate of cremation to prove it.

The system still hasn’t found him.

But it’s still trying…

The case is still active, Len Sipes said yesterday. Sipes is the spokesman for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, or CSOSA, the federal agency that took over the D.C. parole office nine years ago when the federal government assumed responsibility for the city’s prison system. According to its records, a warrant for Hawkins’s arrest, issued in April 2008, is still outstanding. He is to be supervised on parole until April 27, 2016.

Last month, Hawkins’s parole officer called one of his sisters to ask whether she had seen him lately.

“They said they were trying to get in touch with him because he’d been violating parole and they needed a number for him,” said Maria Watson, Hawkins’s younger sister. “I said, ‘Well, you can call 1-800-G-O-D.’ “

…The phone call was only the latest frustrating twist for Hawkins’s family. Parole officers have called other siblings for the past several months, they said, and they have all told the officers the same thing: Edward is dead.

I can see how the parole officers might have had some difficulty piecing together such puzzling, ambiguous hints about Hawkins’ whereabouts. If only the family had been more cooperative.

Oh, and here’s the punchline…

CSOSA’s 344 or so community supervision officers, or parole officers, are responsible for keeping track of 15,000 parolees at any one time. The most potentially dangerous — currently about 800 — are fitted with ankle bracelets equipped with GPS tracking devices. Officers keep tabs on the rest through the Supervision and Management Automated Recording — or SMART — system.

But the system must be smart, right? I mean, it says so right there in the acronym.

Incredible story from Orlando, where police and prosecutors were apparently convicting people of violent crimes based almost exclusively on the “testimony” of a police dog whose handler claimed has extraordinary powers.

Last weekend, we looked at the case of Bill Dillon, the Brevard County resident imprisoned for 27 years before DNA tests set him free…

At least two other men suffered the same fate — and another shared link: a dog.

Not just any dog. A wonder dog helped convict all three men: a German shepherd named Harass II, who wowed juries with his amazing ability to place suspects at the scenes of crimes.

Harass could supposedly do things no other dog could: tracking scents months later and even across water, according to his handler, John Preston.

Judges and juries apparently bought this crap for years. It finally came to an end when Judge Gilbert Goshorn ordered the dog to perform a basic tracking test after Preston claimed the dog had alerted to a suspect’s scent at a crime scene six months after the murder. The dog failed.

So far, three people have been cleared after collectively spending more than 50 years in prison, all of whom were convicted primarily due to the dog’s alerts, despite other evidence exculpating them. Florida criminal justice activists say there may be as 60 more people wrongly convicted thanks to Preston and his dog.

Yet Florida officials don’t seem to care, and have no plans to proactively look for other people who may have been wrongly imprisoned.

In a statement, [Florida State's Attorney] Wolfinger’s office said it didn’t have a list of the cases in which Preston testified — nor even the records that would allow the office to compile such a list.

Essentially, Wolfinger contends it’s up to defendants to raise questions about these decades-old cases.

“Defendants have had rights in Florida to challenge their convictions through a well established post-conviction process,” the statement said.

A similar response came from Crist’s office, which said: “We believe this is a judicial issue and should be handled on a case-by-case analysis through the judicial system.”

A spokeswoman for the state’s top cop, Attorney General Bill McCollum, simply declared the matter beyond her boss’s “jurisdiction.”

It’s gut-check time for the left.

Vice President Joe Biden may have crossed the line when he assured national law enforcement groups Monday that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor “has your back.”

The remark quickly stirred criticism in the legal world, since Biden was making a pledge that a fair and objective justice would not necessarily be able to keep.

Biden made the remark at an assembly of eight law enforcement groups after he detailed Sotomayor’s tough-on-crime record in the courtroom.

“There’s a part of her record that seems to be, up to now, been flying under the radar a bit. And that’s her tough stance on criminals and her unyielding commitment to finding justice for the victims of crime,” Biden said.

He then repeatedly said, “She gets it,” and sought to assure the law enforcement groups that she would be on their side.

“So you all are on the front lines. But as you do your job, know that Judge Sotomayor has your back as well,” Biden said.

Biden is of course known to shoot his mouth off. But he wouldn’t have said this unless he had some reason to believe it. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone on the left speaks up on this, or they’ll give her criminal justice record a pass and fall in line with the party.

I mentioned the other day that the emerging image of Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is not one of an “empathetic” or “activist” judge, but one of a left-leaning authoritarian, sort of a mirror image of Samuel Alito. She’ll be a reliable vote to uphold government power, be it for cops, prosecutors, regulatory agencies, or the executive.

It’s looking more and that way. From today’s L.A. Times

Though her critics portray the Supreme Court nominee as a liberal activist, her colleagues and legal opponents in the early 1980s draw a picture of her as a zealous prosecutor whose experiences combating crime have made her, according to experts who have studied her legal decisions, something of a law-and-order judge, especially when it comes to police searches and the use of evidence…

Gerald Lefcourt, a high- profile criminal defense lawyer in New York, appeared before Sotomayor while she was a federal district court judge. “She always seemed to be leaning toward the government — not outrageously so, but if you look at a lot of her criminal law cases you can see she’s pretty conservative,” he said.

Lefcourt wasn’t surprised. He had faced off against Sotomayor when she was an assistant district attorney.

Sotomayor was “very police-like,” he said. “Dismissive of what the defendant had to say about anything.”

Mary Beth Buchanan’s expensive, high-profile, politically-loaded pursuit of Pittsburgh-area medical examiner Cyril Wecht has finally come to an end.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says it’s time for her career to do the same.

When it finally came time to acknowledge the inevitable and seek to dismiss the charges, the U.S. attorney couldn’t resist taking one last stab at vindication, saying of Dr. Wecht, “He wasn’t acquitted of anything. It was a hung jury. However, in our society, everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”

Indeed. And as Ms. Buchanan spectacularly failed to prove Dr. Wecht’s guilt, that last insinuation of guilt was inappropriate. It is time for Ms. Buchanan to take responsibility for her failure and resign before President Barack Obama asks for her resignation, which he could not now be blamed for doing.

If President Obama is reluctant to pursue any sort of sanctions against the people who politicized the Justice Department for fear of appearing vindictive, he should at least take the time to review possible incidences of wrongful prosecution by the Bush administration’s more bloodthirsty U.S. attorneys.

He could start with Buchanan and the case of Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer.