• Funny how quickly this kid gets it. Makes you wonder why there’s a controversy.
• Houston judge rules that death penalty procedures are unconstitutional because innocent people have likely been executed.
• New York City Council (finally) raises concerns about NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.
• Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema reviews the vending machines in the paper’s offices.
• The rare sensible, fact-based media piece on childhood obesity.
• Bruce Graham, RIP. He’d responsible for much of Chicago’s modernist skyline.
• The rare sensible, fact-based media piece on the Toyota recalls.

Denver Post columnist Susan Greene details what looks to be a railroading in progress.

Residents were alarmed last summer by a rash of thefts, trespasses and burglaries in Stonegate, a neighborhood in Douglas County.

Fear turned to panic in July after an intruder reportedly climbed into a second- story window and groped an 8-year-old girl in her bed.

A sicko was on the loose and pressure was on to catch him.

Soon enough, they found their man. Police arrested Tyler Sanchez, a 19-year-old who is both hearing impaired and mentally disabled. After 17 hours of questioning over a 38-hour period, Sanchez confessed, though according to Greene, his confession consisted of no more than the details of the crime the police revealed to him during interrogation. In announcing their success, prosecutors noted Sanchez’s “pattern of escalating behavior,” by which they meant he had been arrested as a juvenile for graffiti, then violated his probation by consuming alcohol. If only they had locked up this monster sooner.

Unfortunately, the state’s case then took a hit when DNA testing on evidence culled from the 8-year-old’s underwear pointed to an unknown male, but excluded Sanchez as that male. No matter. District Attorney Carol Chambers insists she still has the right guy. How can she be so sure? Well, because kids can be such sluts these days.

“With the low-cut jeans that girls wear, she could have picked up anyone’s DNA off any surface her panties touched while they may have been riding up above her pants. I hate those low-cut pants,” Chambers said…

“Depending on how long she had been wearing those panties and where, they could have rubbed up against the back of her chair at school, a restaurant, the couch at home that someone else had been sitting on, a bus seat, someone’s toilet seat if she did not pull them down far enough — there are many ways to get unknown DNA on clothing. Another kid could have snapped the elastic on her underwear — kids do that sort of thing.”

Don’t be too hard on Chambers, though. She probably knows that in Colorado, sending potentially innocent people to prison is how prosecutors become judges.

My crime column this week looks at the pending executing of Hank Skinner.

The frightening thing is not only that the answer to the question above may be yes, but that Texas officials don’t seem to have much interest in finding out.

ABC News reports on the case of Koua Fong Lee, a Laotian immigrant serving eight years in a Minnesota prison for vehicular manslaughter. Lee was driving a 1996 Toyota Camry, when he accelerated to 70-90 mph, ran two stop signs, then struck another car, killing three of its occupants. Lee says the car accelerated on its own, and testified that he exclaimed to his family that the car’s brakes weren’t working in the run-up to the crash. The family’s of the victims are joining the effort to win Lee’s release:

“I was angry for a moment, but when I came to my senses and thought about it, I didn’t understand it,” said Quincy Adams whose son and grandson were among those killed. “I can’t believe that a guy with his pregnant wife, a kid in a car seat, his father-in-law and a brother-in-law in the car, would purposely be speeding up this ramp like that,” said Bridgette Trice, whose seven-year old daughter later died from injuries suffered in the accident.

She said the news stories about Toyota’s problems led her to reconsider what happened in the accident that killed her daughter.

“Maybe there is something to what Mr. Lee said was going on with him in his car, that he couldn’t stop, that he tried his hardest, and the brakes, that his car wouldn’t stop,” said Ms. Trice.

“He’s never wavered on his story that his brakes were bad,” she added.

The 1996 Camry isn’t part of Toyota’s recent massive recall, but it was subject to a separate recall in the 1990s due to sudden acceleration related to the cruise control feature. That recall was not introduced at Lee’s trial. The article notes that there have been 17 acceleration complaints about the model Lee wasdriving, though it doesn’t say if that’s an unusually high number in comparison to other makes and models.

If the car was defective, Lee was of course wrongly convicted and imprisoned, and deserves not only release, but a hefty payout from both Toyota and the state of Minnesota. He was convicted in 2006, and we’re now learning that both Toyota and federal regulators knew about the acceleration problem as early as 2003.

But it’s also worth asking why prosecutors decided to hit Lee with such a severe charge in the first place. He wasn’t under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the crash. He wasn’t drag racing or showing signs of road rage. As noted, he was driving his family—including his pregnant wife and child—home from church when the accident occurred. The article doesn’t indicate any theory from the prosecution as to why Lee would have suddenly, willfully driven so recklessly, but under Minnesota law they didn’t have to. This is the problem with felony crimes that don’t require the state to show intent. The Minnesota law requires only  a show of”reckless disregard for the rights and safety of others,” which could likely have been satisfied merely by showing how fast Lee was driving.

Cultural bias may have also had something to do with it, too. Lee is Hmong. As a commenter at the ABC News site notes, Lee’s trial came months after the highly-publicized trial of a Hmong man who massacred three Wisconsin hunters in 2004. Now one state over, you have a Hmong man who took out three people while driving well in excess of the speed limit. Lee also testified through a translator, and according to the ABC article his trial judge expressed doubt about Lee’s remorse. Maybe Lee really wasunremorseful , though it also seems possible that an emotion like remorse could be expressed differently in different cultures or be lost in translation.

Whatever their reasons, the prosecutors seemed set on making Lee pay a heavy price for the three deaths, and paid too little consideration to his actual level of criminal culpability.

Larimer County, Colorado will pay Tim Masters $4.1 million for his 1999 wrongful murder conviction. Masters was released last year after he was exonerated by DNA testing. The money will come from the county’s risk management fund and from a payment from the county’s insurer. The former is funded by taxpayers, and the latter will almost certainly raise the county’s premiums, also paid by taxpayers.

More interesting is who won’t be paying. Former prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair convicted Masters on flimsy evidence (some drawings he’d made and testimony from an alleged expert on sexual deviants). They were also actually censured by Colorado Supreme Court for not bothering to look into evidence undermining their case against Masters, as well as for withholding exculpatory evidence from Masters’ attorneys. The censure was an unusual reprimand for misbehaving prosecutors. But it was largely symbolic. As noted, Gilmore and Blair won’t have to pay a dime to Masters. And both will get to keep their current jobs: They’ve both since moved on to become judges in Larimer County District Court, where they preside over other criminal cases.

Both negligent-prosecutors-promoted-to-judge said through their attorneys that they oppose the settlement, and are confident they’d have won if the lawsuit had been brought to trial. The way the law stands now, they’re probably right.

My crime column this week looks at that question in light of the 25oth DNA exoneration last week.

Freddie Peacock, 60, of Rochester, New York has become the 250th person exonerated by DNA testing. Peacock was convicted of rape in 1976 and paroled in 1982. He tried to remain on parole so he’d still have access to the courts to clear his name.

The Innocence Project breaks down the 250 exonerations over the last 20 years:

• There have been DNA exonerations in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

• The top three states for DNA exonerations are New York (with 25), Texas (with 40) and Illinois (with 29).

• 76% of the wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification.

• 50% involved unvalidated or improper forensic science.

• 27% relied on a false confession, admission or guilty plea.

• 70% of the 250 people exonerated are people of color (60% are black; nearly 9% are Latino; 29% are white).

Dallas County, Texas alone has had 19 DNA exonerations, in part because it’s one of the only jurisdictions in the country with a district attorney who is actually seeking out false convictions. That’s a pretty good indication that the 250 figure would be higher if there were more DAs like him.

One other point: The subset of cases for which DNA testing is dispositive of guilt is pretty small. So it also seems safe to say that whatever flaws in the criminal justice system that allowed these wrongful convictions to happen are just as prevalent in the much larger set of cases where DNA isn’t a factor.

Commenting on Martha Coakley’s role in the Gerald Amirault case, M. LeBlanc at Bitch, Ph.D. writes:

So, what’s the moral status of advocating that someone who is likely innocent remain in prison? It’s a tough question. As far as I known, it’s something that’s routinely done by prosecutors everywhere…

I don’t have a major problem with prosecutors who lobby for people to serve more time in prison, whether it’s at the indictment, sentencing, or parole stage. My main concern is with systems that are overly deferential to prosecutors, that disadvantage defendants, and that make it extremely difficult for convicts to make the case for their own parole. I do think the criminal justice world would be a lot more just if more prosecutors declined to prosecute more often. Particularly in high-profile or embattled cases, where it seems that all evidence points to innocence, but the prosecutors insist on, for example, re-trying a case after a trial has been thrown out years after the fact by a judge. You see this all the time: prosecutors’ stubborn insistence that they’ve got the right guy in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Nevertheless, being a prosecutor who is stalwart when presented with evidence of innocence or prosecutorial misconduct is so common as to be banal. Which is why I think her lobbying for Amirault’s continued incarceration isn’t, in itself, enough to make her a morally suspect choice for senator…

A lot of the criticism of Coakley’s involvement in the Amirault case seems to center on the fact that she was clearly stepping up the pressure on the governor for her own political gain. Being seen as a law-and-order sort is almost uniformly a political advantage, no matter where you hold office. Hardly anyone ever fails to be elected because they were too hard on criminals. Take, for example, Joe Arpaio (extremely popular!) vs. Michael Dukakis (Willie Horton!). But it’s not really enough to blame politicians for exploiting this tendency of Americans to thirst for more and more justice-blood. And I’m not particularly moved by allegations that people are behaving in politicized ways. Justice is political, and the more we recognize and appreciate that, the better we can be honest with ourselves as a society and government about how we want to proceed.

I’m floored by this reaction. A leftist could make a respectable argument that even though Coakley was grievously out of bounds in the Amirault case the need for her vote on health care reform, filibuster prevention, and other issues is more important than the troubling decisions she made as a prosecutor. A leftist could also plausibly argue that when it comes to actually making criminal justice policy as a senator, Coakley isn’t likely to be any worse than her opponent, and therefore she deserves support because she’s more progressive on everything else.

But LeBlanc isn’t arguing either of those positions. She’s arguing something far more repugnant: She’s conceding that the Amirault case was a travesty of justice, and that Coakley was wrong for her extraordinary efforts to keep Gerald Amiralut in prison. But she’s then arguing that Coakley deserves a pass specifically for her actions in the Amirault case, anyway, because all prosecutors do it, and because it’s what Coakley had to do to accumulate political power and move on to higher office.

That is one hellaciously disturbing statement of values. LeBlanc is either arguing that she believes the accumulation of power and advancement of one’s career is more important than justice—more important than ensuring that innocent people don’t rot behind bars—or that she’s willing to give a pass to politicians who do.

Actually, not just a pass, but a promotion.

I’m also not convinced LeBlanc’s assumptions about the political pressures Coakley faced in the Amirault case are accurate. The parole board voted 5-0 to free Gerald Amirault in 1999. That came three years after Dorothy Rabinowtiz won her Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her columns exposing the case against the Amiraults and other sex abuse injustices. Recovered memory therapy; the leading, repeated, and persistent questioning of children; and the various other tactics prosecutors used in the sex abuse hysteria cases of the 1980s and early 1990s had been exposed and debunked. Coakley had plenty of political cover to do the right thing in this case.

LeBlanc is right that generally speaking, prosecutors fight like hell to protect convictions, even when there’s overwhelming evidence of innocence. But not all of them do. There are plenty of cases where prosecutors have dropped charges and freed the wrongly convicted. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is actively seeking out innocence cases, and he’s doing it in a jurisdiction that’s a hell of a lot more conservative than Middlesex, Massachusetts. Perhaps it’s too much to expect Coakley to have Watkins’ moral courage. But then, she isn’t being criticized for not going as far as someone like Watkins. She’s being criticized for going well above and beyond the call of duty the other way, including fighting outside the courtroom by orchestrating a PR campaign to persuade then-Gov. Jane Swift to keep Amirault in prison. Coakley wasn’t bowing to political pressure, she was creating it.

Broadly speaking, LeBlanc’s also right that “hardly anyone ever fails to be elected becasue they were too hard on criminals.” But I don’t know of a single incident in which a prosecutor suffered bad publicity or was attacked politically for failing to fight the release of an innocent person. “Tough on crime” positions on parole, sentencing, the death penalty, and so on are policy positions on which reasonable people can disagree. Obstinacy in the face of overwhelming evidence of someone’s innocence is a moral failing, regardless of motivation.

Moreover, Coakley’s also being criticized for failing to bring charges against a man who sexually assaulted his young niece with a curling iron. Coakley’s successor put him away for two life terms. Why would Coakley—so aware of the political pressure to be tough on crime, so protective of her own ambition for higher office, and who carefully cultivated an image for herself as a defender of children—not throw the book at a man accused of raping a toddler with a curling iron? I’m just guessing here, but it may have something to do with the fact that Keith Winfield was also a police officer. That suggests a blind allegiance to law enforcement that we should find troubling in a U.S. Senator who will be making and voting on criminal justice policy.

There’s a broader point here, too. Even the left—even the far left—seems to find it difficult to hold bad prosecutors accountable, at least when they happen to be Democrats. So long as prosecutors are rewarded for aggressiveness and never punished when they overstep, we’ll continue to see the very sort of behavior LeBlanc claims to find troubling.

It’s worth noting that the person who actually convicted the Amiraults was Coakley’s predecessor in the Middlesex County DA’s office, Scott Harshbarger. How was Harshbarger punished for his mistakes? For starters, like Coakley, he went on to become Massachusetts Attorney General. In 1998, well after the injustice in the Amirault case was well known both in and out of Massachusetts, he was the Democratic nominee for governor. He was later hired to head up the liberal interest group Common Cause. Of course, there’s also Janet Reno, who went on to become U.S. attorney general, despite her own history of dubious sex abuse convictions.

I’m glad LeBlanc believes “the criminal justice world would be a lot more just if more prosecutors declined to prosecute more often,” and that she’s troubled by “prosecutors’ stubborn insistence that they’ve got the right guy in the face of overwhelming evidence.” But frankly, she’s part of the problem. If even a leftist blogger like LeBlanc is unwilling to hold overly aggressive prosecutors accountable, is willing to overlook a grave injustices so long as they’re committed out of political ambition, and can later support the same bad actors’ election to higher office, how does she expect the criminal justice system’s flawed incentive structure to change?

In the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on dubious sex abuse cases, lays out Martha Coakley’s role in the notorious Fells Acres convictions.

Rabinowitz concludes:

Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was “formidable” and that she was entirely convinced “those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants.”

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley’s concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Lefty criminal justice blogger Jeralyn Merritt chimes in here, and states in an earlier post of Coakley, “I wouldn’t vote for her for dog catcher.”

My article on Coakley’s record as a prosecutor here.

Citing “the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment,” the American Law Institute has retracted its guidelines for administration of the death penalty in the United States.

Adam Liptak argues in the New York Times that this may have been the most important death penalty story of 2009. The organization of 4,000 judges, lawyers, and academics essentially provided the scholarly heft behind the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the death penalty 30 years ago.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states…

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

My crime column this week bids good riddance to Kern County, California District Attorney Ed Jagels, who announced in October that he’s retiring after 26 years on the job . . . and after sending at least 25 innocent people to prison.

Jagels’ career is probably the starkest example to date of how the criminal justice is incapable of holding bad actors accountable.

Last week, James Bain was released from a Florida prison after serving 35 years for a crime he didn’t commit. DNA testing finally cleared Bain of raping a young boy in 1974.

Bain is the 12th exoneree in Florida since the onset of DNA testing. Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell, who has pursued the phony Florida dog handler cases I’ve written about previously, is calling on the state to set up an innocence commission.

Already, three men convicted with help from a discredited dog handler — who manufactured bogus evidence to connect suspects with crimes — have been exonerated after spending years, even decades, behind bars.

But the dog handler testified in many more cases. And judicial activists are convinced others were wrongfully convicted.

Yet the men who could actually do something about that — Gov. Charlie Crist, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Brevard-Seminole State Attorney Norm Wolfinger — have refused to conduct an investigation.

Instead, these three career politicians have argued that it’s up to the defendants themselves to prove their own innocence … from behind bars … and without resources.

Then, in cases where the wrongfully convicted are finally freed, they respond: See, the system works!

The lack of shame and humanity is appalling…

“If there’s one thing these guys have in common,” said Centurion Ministries attorney Paul Casteleiro, “it’s that they are all guys nobody will miss.”

They didn’t have the resources to mount vigorous defenses when they were first charged — or knowledgeable attorneys who could combat the tactics, such as jail-house snitches, that are so often used to convict them.

This is a common refrain from state officials and prosecutors. “It isn’t our job to find innocent people in the prisons.” Even in jurisdictions where there’s every reason to believe an unusually high number of innocent people have been convicted. They threw the state’s resources at putting the people behind bars in the first place, but argue it’s the responsibility of the wrongly convicted themselves or cash-strapped non-profit groups like the Innocence Project to bring the cases to the attention of the courts—usually as the same prosecutor offices fight them every step of the way.

It makes what Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins is doing all the more remarkable—and commendable.

Related: The Washington Post has a strong editorial decrying the delayed justice in the case of Donald Gates, also freed last week after serving 27 years for a rape and murder in Washington, D.C. He was convicted due to testimony from a fraudulent FBI crime lab worker and lies from a paid FBI informant. DNA testing showed he didn’t commit the crime.

Caught the documentary Witch Hunt last night, in part as research for my crime column next week. It’s a look at a string of at least 34 wrongful child molestation convictions in the 1980s in Bakersfield, California. It’s one of the more affecting and moving documentaries I’ve ever seen. If you ever want to show someone just how terrifyingly random and unfair the criminal justice system can be, sit them down and show them this movie. It’s available on iTunes. Trailers and a promo for the Documentary Channel below.