More welcome skepticism of junk science in the court room.

Lawsuits filed in Victoria, Texas, allege that Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Pikett and his team of hounds — James Bond, Quincy and Clue — failed controversial sniff tests known as “scent lineups.”

Much like in traditional lineups, the dogs link human scents left at crime scenes to samples from suspects.

In each case, the suits allege, Pikett’s dogs called attention to the wrong person. Both former suspects have been cleared.

This part is fun:

Ken Sparks, county attorney in Colorado County, Texas, an enthusiastic supporter of Pikett’s work, says he understands some of the skepticism.

“Everybody who encounters it the first time says, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Sparks says. “That’s what I said before I first saw it work.”

Pikett says the lawsuits are just attempts to win large awards. “It’s all about money,” he says.

One of the men wrongly identified by the police dog was jailed for three months before being exonerated by DNA testing. The greedy bastard actually thinks he should compensated for that.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about another police dog in Orlando whose “testimony” has come under fire.

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.

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.”

That’s a quote from Jeffrey Deskovic, who served 16 years for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. He was finally exonerated by DNA testing.

When Deskovic appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, Judge Sonia Sotomayor co-wrote a two-page opinion that refused to even consider the evidence of Deskovic’s innocence because his lawyer was four days late filing the petition. So Deskovic spent an extra six years in prison awaiting a DNA test.

Scott Greenfield reflects on the pending execution of Troy Davis.

The New York Times reports that prosecutors are too often blocking access to DNA tests that could exonerate the innocent, even in states where legislatures have specifically passed laws allowing access to testing.

In some cases, they’re saying the tests are unnecessary because jurors reached their verdict based on other evidence, even though that other evidence—eyewitness testimony, for example—is much less reliable than DNA. In others, they’re arguing that the possibility of multiple DNA samples or the fact that there are multiple defendants means a DNA test would prove inconclusive, even though technological advances in testing would in many cases be able to sort all of that out.

Continued resistance by prosecutors is causing years of delay and, in some cases, eliminating the chance to try other suspects because the statute of limitations has passed by the time the test is granted.

Mr. Reed has been seeking a DNA test for three years, saying it will prove his innocence. But prosecutors have refused, saying he was identified by witnesses, making his identification by DNA unnecessary.

A recent analysis of 225 DNA exonerations by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, found that prosecutors opposed DNA testing in almost one out of five cases. In many of the others, they initially opposed testing but ultimately agreed to it. In 98 of those 225 cases, the DNA test identified the real culprit.

In Illinois, prosecutors have opposed a DNA test for Johnnie Lee Savory, convicted of committing a double murder when he was 14, on the grounds that a jury was convinced of his guilt without DNA and that the 175 convicts already exonerated by DNA were “statistically insignificant.”

The other argument prosecutors often give is “finality,” meaning that for the sake of the victim and the system, sometimes it’s best to just declare a case closed, even if there remains doubt about the verdict.

“It’s definitely a matter of drawing the line somewhere,” said Peter Carr, the assistant district attorney who handled the case of Mr. Wright, who was accused of raping and killing a 77-year-old woman. The defendant did not request testing until 2005, three years after the statute was passed, Mr. Carr said, and in his view there was no possibility that the test would show innocence.

“There’s also the idea that you want finality for the victim’s sake,” Mr. Carr said. “If someone else’s semen was found at the crime scene, we’d have to talk to the victim’s family about whether the victim was sexually active.”

This argument rings hollow. If they didn’t look into whether or not the victim was sexually active before the initial trial, that’s some pretty poor police work. An innocent person shouldn’t have to rot behind bars to spare a victim’s family uncomfortable questions that should have been asked a long time ago.

Meanwhile, there have been two more exonerations in the last couple of weeks, one in Virginia, and one in Tennessee. The man in Tennessee spent 22 years on death row. The man in Virginia was exonerated for one of three rapes for which he was convicted. His attorneys believe the same man, a serial rapist, committed all three crimes. They’re now trying to reopen the other two cases as well.

I wrote about new research casting doubt on eyewitness testimony here. I wrote about a case currently under Supreme Court review that could establish a right to post-conviction DNA testing here.

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.

You’d think a group that advocates for criminal justice reform could find worthier people to honor than Janet Reno, the woman who sent an innocent man to prison for 11 years, gave us 76 charred bodies at Waco, wrongly tried to imprison a 14-year-old kid in a fit of anti-occult hysteria, presided over the Justice Department investigation and media leak that ruined Richard Jewell’s life, and built her career on a series of highly questionable child abuse convictions won on manufactured evidence.

You’d think. But Reno keeps raking in the honors, and from organizations for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect.

Disappointing.

I have a piece at Reason today looking at new research and the renewed debate over eyewitness testimony.

Cole was wrongly convicted of rape more than 20 years ago.

Though a repeat rapist confessed to the crime in 1995, prosecutors refused to reopen Cole’s case. He died in 1999, his family says due to his inability to get proper treatment for his asthma while he was incarcerated.

Cole was formally vindicated yesterday, 10 years after his death.