October 14, 2020 • 37 mins
Josh Dubin talks about Tool Mark Analysis with Tim Requarth, a freelance journalist who often writes about the intersection between science and criminal justice and a lecturer in science and writing at New York University.
The notion that tools leave a unique mark on a surface is commonly presented to unsuspecting juries. But, it turns out that it's not necessarily the case at all.
Learn more and get involved.
“Forensic Science Put Jimmy Genrich in Prison for 24 Years. What if It Wasn’t Science” By Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-crisis-of-american-forensics/
www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/junk-science
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Valentine's Day. You don't usually observe the greeting card holidays.
You think they're kind of silly, and besides, most of
the time, you and your partner are both busy working.
You're always buried in your client's cases, and your partner
is off and on call, running back and forth to
the hospital to treat patients. Your friends are always remarking
(00:24):
that you're the classic power couple, but sometimes it seems
like it's all power and not so much couple. So
this year, you make dinner, put out a tablecloth, and
even light a candle. At the end of dinner, you
do the dishes and your partner takes out the trash.
The TV is on low in the background, but something
(00:46):
makes your ears perk up. You glance over and see
the newswoman reporting from a parking lot not too far
away from your house. She says, an explosion went off
not long ago. A man was hitting his leg by
shrapnel that exploded off a pipe bomb. It detonated thirty
yards away from where the man was walking. Listening to this,
(01:10):
you slowly shake your head. It's not uncommon in Grand Junction, Colorado,
for people to mess around with explosives. After all, it's
a mining town and people know how to use dynamite.
The reporter says, the man that was hit will probably
be Okay, you hope this is just some kid's joke
gone wrong. But then a few weeks later there's another
(01:33):
news report. A twelve year old girl named Maria gets
into a van with her parents to go shopping, and
as the family sets out for the mall, a bomb
hidden near one of the rear tires explodes. Shrapnel is
flung through the back of the van seat and into
Maria's body. It wedges into her heart. Her parents frantically
(01:55):
pull her out of the car, but she dies right there.
Three months after that, husband and wife Henry and Suzanne,
finished general at a local restaurant. They drive by a
strange looking object. Henry slows the car down and reaches
out to see what it is. His arms are blown
(02:18):
off his body and he dies instantly. After that third
bomb goes off, everyone in Grand Junction is extremely anxious.
You check under your car every single time before you
(02:39):
get in, and you continue to follow the news coverage
as it unfolds. The police department declares that out of
thirty initial suspects for the bombs. They've narrowed it down
to just one person. They don't announce who it is,
but a camera crew must have gotten tipped off because
they start following around a young man with big glasses.
(03:01):
Then you get a phone call from a man who
identifies himself as Jimmy. He tells you he is the
suspect in these bombing cases. His words come quickly and
in fragments of sentences, he sounds scared. He says he
hasn't done anything wrong, and he hasn't been arrested yet,
(03:21):
but with cameras following him, he thinks it's a good
idea to get an attorney. He asks, will you help me?
You take all of this in and think, do I
really want to be involved offending someone who might have
done something so horrific? But then again, what if he's
actually innocent? Everyone deserves an opportunity to defend themselves. Ultimately,
(03:47):
you agree to take on his case. Soon after you
become Jimmy's attorney, he gets a knock at his door.
The police enter his house with a warrant. They turn
his place inside out, Detectives vacuum the couch and carpet
to see if they can pick up any gunpowder nothing
all they found, or some everyday tools suppliers, wire strippers.
(04:12):
The tools that are taken from Jimmy's house are brought
down to the police station and tested in the forensics lab,
and the results come back. Police arrest Jimmy and he
gets charged with murder. Of all the people to open
this on, you do understand why they're targeting Jimmy. He's
(04:32):
somewhat of a loner, definitely an oddball. He often goes
on late night walks by himself. He can be found
sitting alone at bars and getting pretty drunk. Prior to
the trial, the prosecution discloses the evidence they intend to
use against Jimmy to prove their case, and it looks
pretty bad. You spend countless days pouring over the main
(04:55):
piece of evidence, the conclusion of a tool mark examiner.
The report of this examiner says that the impressions taken
from the tools they found in Jimmy's apartment can be
scientifically linked to the tool marks left on all three
of the bombs. In all your years as a criminal
defense attorney, you've never heard of this type of forensic analysis.
(05:19):
You didn't even know it existed, But you studied science
and undergrad before you decided to become a lawyer, so
you know how to analyze these scientific documents. You dig
up everything you can find on tool mark evidence, data, statistics, studies, experiments.
You find nothing. How are you supposed to defend against this?
(05:41):
If someone has a standard set of needle nose players,
aren't they likely to match up with the impressions made
by other needle nose players. At trial, the jury has
shown a video by the prosecution. A tool mark expert
walks the jurors through it. He tells them each tool
has you nique microscopic characteristics. You can see how the
(06:03):
tools we found in the defendant's home aligned perfectly with
marks found on fragments of the exploded bombs. The jury
is mesmerized by the videotape shown by the tool mark examiner.
After closing arguments, when they begin their deliberations, the first
note they send out his request to see that video.
(06:26):
They view it over and over and over again, and
then the bailiff informs you that the jury has done deliberating.
Jimmy is brought back into the courtroom from a holding cell.
You see the trepidation in his face as he takes
his seat, and you can actually hear him take a
big nervous swallow. The jury files into the courtroom, and
(06:51):
a vein on your temple begins to pulsatean twitch. Jimmy
is convicted of multiple counts of murder. He is sentenced
to life in prison. The story you just heard is
based on the true events of the bombings and Grand Junction,
Colorado and the subsequent trial of Jimmy Genrich. Jimmy has
(07:15):
been imprisoned for more than twenty five years, serving a
life sentence. His latest appeal has been taken up by
the Innocence Project. I'm Josh Dubin, civil rights and criminal
defense attorney, an innocence ambassador to the Innocence Project in
New York. Today, on wrongful Conviction junk Science, we examine
(07:38):
tool mark analysis. It turns out the crime that popularized
tool mark analysis was also committed on Valentine's Day over
ninety years ago, when three dozen former Brooklyn Navy yard
workers found themselves irreparably poisoned by the asbestos they used
(08:00):
in the construction of the battleships that won World War Two.
Perry Whites and Arthur Luxembourg literally putting everything on the
line to successfully represent them. Since then, they've championed the
rights of over fifty thousand regular Americans injured through the
negligence and malfeasance of mainly large corporations. Their ability to
level the playing field against seemingly insurmountable odds has led
(08:23):
them to litigate against opponents as diverse as Big Pharma
all the way to those responsible for rendering the water
of Flint, Michigan undrinkable. Whites and Luxembourg ticket personally when
there's a miscarriage of justice anywhere, and therefore they feel
a sense of responsibility to support bronqul conviction podcasts. You
can learn more about them by visiting whites lux dot com.
(08:45):
That's w E I t Z l u x dot com.
You've all heard of the legendary mobster Al Capone. During
the Roaring twenties, he was the leader of the Chicago Mafia.
Anything corrupt or illegal. He controlled it, from bootlegging to speakeasies,
(09:11):
gambling to prostitution. Capone owned it all. But there was
one rival gang that Capone couldn't quite shake, the Irish
Mafia led by George bugs Moran. They were manufacturing and
selling alcohol, stepping on Capone's business. Now Capone wasn't gonna
(09:31):
have it. He got ahold of some police uniforms, and
on February fourteenth, Valentine's Day, four of Capone's men, dressed
as police officers, went over to the garage where bugs
Moran's gang was producing and selling alcohol. Capone's crew took
the Irish mob by surprise. They started screaming with their
(09:52):
guns drawn, line up against the wall, hands where I
can see him. You're all under arrest. All seven of
the Irish gangsters lined up against the wall, hands on
their heads while Capone's crew shot them all dead in
broad daylight. By the time the real police arrived, Capone's
gang was long gone. The cops had more than a
(10:16):
hunch about who was responsible for this, but they needed
the hard evidence to prove it, so they rated the
home of one of Compone's top guys, who went by
the name of Frank Killer Burke. They took his gun
and sent it off to what was one of the
first crime labs in the country. They're an examiner named
(10:36):
Calvin Goddard shot some test bullets out of the confiscated gun.
He put one of the test bullets and one of
the bullets found at the massacre under a special microscope
that allowed him to compare two images at once. This
examiner actually invented this technique of comparing bullets. He claimed
that no two revolvers leave the same mark, and that
(10:59):
by examining the grooves on the bullets he cleaned, he
could identify the gun that shot them. According to Goddard,
the bullets of the confiscated gun indeed match the bullets
found at the scene of the crime, but the police
couldn't do much with that evidence. They could improve that
the owner of the gun, Frank Killer Burke, had been
(11:20):
at the scene of the crime, and so no one
was ever charged for what became known as the Valentine's
Day massacre. The analysis that Calvin Goddard invented is now
known as tool mark and firearm analysis. Forensic analysts had
follow in his footsteps believe that just as each gun
leaves a unique mark on every bullet that it shoots,
(11:42):
each tool leaves unique mark on the surface that's used on.
But no one had closely examined the false assumptions behind
to a mark identification. What was being presented to juries
was this notion that a tool will leave a unique
mark on a surface. But it turns out that not
necessarily the case. If two people own a similar wrench,
(12:04):
for instance, both wrenches will leave behind a similar mark,
So matching a mark to a tool owned by a
suspect has very limited value. Nevertheless, these experts were claiming
that a tool found at the home of a suspect
was the precise tool that was used, for example, to
cut wires during the construction of a bomb. This kind
(12:27):
of flawed evidence continued to be presented in courtrooms across
the country to link suspects to crimes, leading to several
wrongful convictions, including that of Jimmy gin rich In. It
was just so obvious to me that this was not,
(12:49):
you know, this was not a foundationally strong field, and
I was absolutely stunned because the consequences of this stuff
can't be higher. You know, people go to prison for
for years there, their sentenced to death. I mean, essentially
for this to be totally unproven science, I just absolutely
could not believe it. Today we're talking to Tim Riquarth.
(13:13):
Tim is a freelance journalist who often writes about the
intersection between science and criminal justice. He's also a lecturer
in science and writing at n y U. We're particularly
excited to talk to him today because he wrote about
Jimmy Genrich's case for an article published by The Nation.
He and his co author extensively researched the case, along
(13:35):
with the tool mark evidence that was used to convict Jimmy. Now,
a lot of this episode is based on this article
that Tim wrote, So after listening to this episode, if
you want to learn more about tool mark evidence in
Jimmy's case, you can find the article on our show notes. So, Tim,
tell us about your background. How did you get into
(13:55):
writing about science? Except for undergraduate I studied literature and writing,
and it wasn't until after I had graduated UM. I
happened to be living across the street from a medical
school in Chicago, and at the same time, my father
was suffering from dementia and the books and articles that
I was reading on dementia didn't quite satisfy me, and
(14:17):
so I decided to volunteer in a lab that studied dementia.
And it was at that point that I was first
introduced to research and I was hooked. So I went
back to school, took all of the basic science classes
that I hadn't taken in undergrad and eventually rolled in
a masters. And you know, ten years later I found
myself and probably with a PhD in neuroscience. The sort
(14:40):
of breadth of questions and material that you could really
dive into as a journalist or a writer just felt
so much more expansive than what I could do as
a as a scientist. And so I sort of had
the realization later on in my PhD that research, heavy,
investigative type of pieces where really good fit for somebody
(15:01):
who's trained in answering big questions. So before writing this
story about tool mark evidence, what did you know about
any forensic signs? Before that the first story I did
about forensic science, I didn't know a lot about it
at the time. Then, you know, anybody might from watching
Law and Order or cs I. We profiled the specific
(15:24):
case and it involved tool mark evidence, and we looked
at all of the research in the forensic journals. I mean,
we went through and found every single study, and most
of them were very small sample sizes, very theoretical, or
had all kinds of methodological design problems. And I was
(15:46):
absolutely stunned because this is like a solved problem. Like
we know how to do strong empirical scientific studies to
see if something works or not. Like take a medical study,
which if you want to see if a drug has
an effect, you randomly select two groups of people and
you assign one of them to get the drug and
(16:06):
another one to get a placebo which has no effect.
You blind both the people so they don't know that
they're getting the drug, and you also blind the researchers
so they don't know who is getting the drug. You
decide ahead of time what analysis you're gonna do, what
outcomes you're going to look for, and then you test
those using rigorous hypothesis testing and statistics to see what happens.
(16:30):
And in forensic sciences that just it doesn't exist. The
practitioners doing them are often not blinded, the sample sizes
are very low, there's conflicts of interest, so it it's
not following some of the most basic tenants that you
know would be reflexive to your typical scientists in the university,
(16:54):
I mean most people, especially lay people on a jury.
Here the words forensic science, and you know they imagine
this very pristine process in which things are tested and retested,
because you know, we all think of the scientific method
that we learn about in school, and it's kind of
startling to know that that's not actually the case. So
(17:17):
what you said really underscores what we've been saying throughout
the show and how big of a problem it can
be when jurors confuse what's really junk science presented in
courtrooms with traditional science that's used to develop medicines, for example.
And I'm not sure that our listeners are aware of this,
(17:39):
but I want you to think about this for a
for a moment. In cases where people were later proven
to be innocent based on DNA, um, of those wrongful
convictions are based on some misapplication of forensic science. Imagine
if this were the f d A right. Imagine if
a drug didn't work fifty at a time and had
(18:02):
horrible side effects, they wouldn't just say, well, you know,
we already approved it, so let's just leave it on
the market. That's not how it works in medicine, but
that is how it works in the law. So let's
get into Jimmy's case. I want you to tell us
about the crime that led to his arrest and the
town that had happened, and why did they even decide
to zero went on Jimmy in the first place. Grand
(18:24):
Junction is a sort of mining town of about thirty
thousand people at the time, and there was a series
of pipe bombs that went off in the town. There
were three of them, and one of them killed a
twelve year old girl. It was it was very tragic,
and they had they were seemingly random and they had
no no suspect, And so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
(18:48):
and Firearms was called in and they helped the local
police force to a bomb investigation to try to figure
out who this was. They had a list of, you know,
something like thirty suspects. There was this guy, Jimmy, who
was sort of a loner. Lived in a in a
boarding house near downtown, in a twelve by twelve room.
I think he was a bus boy in a restaurant,
(19:08):
but was on and off of jobs. His mother would
bring him, you know, meals in a in a cooler,
and he was a little bit um. You know, he
had some problems with with mental illness. There was one
event in particular that put him on the police's radar.
Which was he walked into a bookstore one day and
asked them to order a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook,
(19:31):
which contains a diagram of a pipe bomb, and the
bookstore owners had called the police, and once they sort
of pieced all of this together, that put him at
the top of the suspect list. They then rated his
boarding room and found some electronic parts, some wire strippers
(19:52):
and pliers that could conceivably have been used to construct
a bomb. And at that point they worked to link
him to the bomb, and they didn't find any other
physical evidence, never found an Anarchist cookbook. They painted a
picture of him as the kind of person who would
do this. But you have to have physical evidence that
(20:12):
links people to crimes in you know, very the objective ways,
and they didn't have that in this case other than
the tool mark analysis, which both the prosecutor and the
judge acknowledged in the trial transcript. They both acknowledged that
the entire case hinged on the tool mark analysis, and
if it were thrown out, there would be no case.
(20:41):
So how do they claim to identify Jimmy's tools as
the tools that were used on these bombs? They look
at these microscopic scratches or striations on the bomb parts,
and then they look at the suspects tools and they
make a mark on some other piece of metal using
(21:02):
a microscope. They compare the marks on the metal like
there test marks, to the marks on the actual evidence,
and if those line up in the examiner's you know,
subjective judgment, they declared a match, and they say that
this was you know, the only tools that could have
made these marks, and therefore the owner of these tools
must have been the person who built the bombs. You know,
(21:23):
they use the word certainty, and that's very compelling to jurors,
but the truth is they don't know how certain it is.
These aren't exotic bomb making tools. Their three dollar pair
of pliers that you know, we're sold at the local
hardware store. Perhaps, so you could imagine that, you know,
a tool mark examiner could say something like, oh, it
(21:44):
was a really large pair of pliers versus a small one,
or you know, it's consistent or something like that, but
they don't say that they individualize it. They say that
this is an exact match. And this isn't really a
possible conclusion to come to, because you'd either have to
a test every other tool in the world and see
if this indeed was a unique mark that was being made,
(22:07):
or you would have to know the kinds of variations
that we see in tools, Like how common is it
that two tools can look about the same but aren't
the same? Is it you know, two tools that are
made by the same brand. Is it two tools that
come off the same you know, a lot in a
in a factory. So there's all of these things that
(22:29):
you need to quantify, And even if you did do that,
you'd have to say, you know, there's a one in
a hundred chance that this is a different tool. There's
a one in two d chance, right, something like that. Right,
So you're saying that one issue is how many tools
can be said to match a mark left behind? And
we really don't know the answer to that. But I
guess another issue is the examiners doing the matching. And
(22:53):
the fact of the matter is that these examiners never
really have to prove whether or not they can effectively
match a tool to its mark. And there are possible
ways to test this, right, I mean, if a lab
wants to test how good someone is that this kind
of tool matching, they would send a tool mark examiner
some tools along with some wires or pieces of metal
(23:16):
tool marks on them, and the examiners would then be
asked to match the correct tool to the marks, and
the lab would have all of the correct answers, so
they'd be able to tell how good these examiners actually are.
That kind of testing, which would show how good these
tool mark examiners aren't. Their job seems like a simple
(23:39):
thing to do, right, right, The real test is how
well do you examiners actually do in reality? Um, And
you would say, you know, tool mark examiners make a
mistake one out of ten times, one out of a
hundred times, one out of a thousand times. That's what
you really want to know is how often do they
make a mistake? So why don't they actually do these tests?
(24:00):
If that comes back and it's really, really, it's not
so good, right, you make an error of the time
or at the time, you're out of a job. You know,
what are these examiners going to do if this becomes
a technique that is no longer a valid technique in court?
And you know, I think that it's easy to have
(24:22):
this narrative that you know, these are unscrupulous scientists who
are manipulating data in a bloodthirsty way to get convictions.
And I think that's a very cartoonish way to think
about it. There are certainly cases of misconduct, and there
are cases of uh, you know, bad motives, but in reality,
these are people who really believed that that what they
(24:45):
were doing is true. And you actually talked to the
too Mark examiner in Jimmy's case while you were researching
your article. So what impressions did you have after talking
to someone that actually specializes in this stuff. I guess
the thing that struck me the most as a scientist
is that there was an extreme lack of humility. There's
(25:07):
an extreme lack of acknowledging that these could not be
as infallible as as they thought. They have a very
strong interest improving that these techniques are very powerful. There's
a very strong sense of justice. There's a very strong
sense of righteousness. The posture of the forensic scientists and
(25:27):
and prosecutors they spoke to is it was a bit defensive, right.
The venue for these is a court of law, which
is an adversarial system, and to admit any kind of
fallibility or weakness is to weaken the case, and that's
it's just so against the culture to do that. So
in Jimmy's case, how does it all work? How did
(25:48):
the examiner present this tool mark evidence to the jury,
and how do you think they were able to convince
the jury that the results were correct? You know, that
that Jimmy's tools match the more on those bombs. The
presentation of the tool mark evidence was a video presentation,
and I believe it was the defense attorney that said
(26:10):
she thought it was one of the first in the nation. Again,
this was in the in the early nineties, so there
this was the first sort of video presentation of this
kind of evidence. Because the way that they do this
again is looking under a microscope and they line up
these little microscopic markings from the evidence with their little
test cuts. You know, it looks really convincing. You pick
a little part where they do line up and you're like, ah,
(26:32):
that must be it, and then you ignore all the
parts where they don't line up, you know, which is
you know, part of the problem. During deliberations, the jury
asked to watch that video, you know, I think dozens
of times. So it was it was a very convincing presentation.
So in addition to tool mark examiners, you also talked
to some of the prosecutors who used this type of
analysis in their cases. What were their thoughts about using
(26:56):
this kind of evidence. The same cognitive sentence that would
exist for forensic examiners also exists for prosecutors. It's a
lot to face that these tools that you've relied on
for so many cases may not be as accurate as
you thought they are, meaning some of the people that
you convicted were maybe not guilty um, and that you
(27:17):
shouldn't use them moving forward. It's a really hard it's
a really hard pill to swallow. I think one of
the things that I was most stunned by when we
were interviewing prosecutors was the way in which they would
rely on legal rulings as a substitute for scientific evidence.
So what I mean by that is we would say,
(27:37):
you know, look, we've looked at all of the evidence
and like, they have not validated this in a scientifically
rigorous way, and the prosecutors retort to that would be, well, yes,
but we've used them, and we've convicted guilty people, and
it's gotten lots of lots of legal rulings in our
favor and so therefore it must be true. And so
(27:58):
it's a very circular kind of read sitting. It's almost
like an invasive species. You have this thing that's made
its way into the courtroom and it gets locked in
there by precedents, and it's really really hard to get
it out. And so that's the reason that this stuff
stays in courts. You know, science evolves. Even if you
thought something was true thirty years ago and you decide
it's not true today, you update, you know, you revise,
(28:22):
and the courts just don't want to do that. They
want to keep things the same. You know, we often
ask our guests to tell our listeners what they can
do to make sure this type of evidence stops being
presented to juries in our criminal justice system. So what
would you tell people, um a juror, for instance, who
(28:42):
has to make a decision about someone's guilt or innocence
when they are presented with forensic evidence. If I had
any advice to adjure, you know, it's it's to realize
that there have been major reports by scientific bodies that
have found deep problems with these techniques. As convincing as
(29:05):
it sounds, they're only telling you a partial picture, and
yet the courts have been unable to bar them from
being used. If you have a justice system where the
ends justifies the means, right, uh, it's it's not going
to function fairly. And so we should all be concerned
when somebody is convicted by dubious means, because even if
(29:29):
that person was guilty, somebody else isn't going to be
and they're going to get convicted by those dubious methods
as well. You know, it's easy to be pessimistic and
almost fatalistic about the state of forensics in the courtroom,
but there are some bright spots. You know, there are
some rulings that seem really enlightened on the part of
(29:49):
the judges who are acknowledging that maybe these things do
need to be revisited. And this is even true with
regard to Jimmy's case. Uh, the Innocence Project has picked
up as appeal and are trying to set a new
kind of precedent. They are going to have an evidentiary hearing,
which means that they'll have some reevaluation of the quality
(30:11):
of the tool mark evidence. So in that sense, you know,
it's from a legal sense, it's it's progress whether you
know this will pan out for for Jimmy, is you
know that's still up in the air at this point.
So we often make a plea at the end of
every episode. Please write your local judges question the so
(30:31):
called science. Don't try to get out of jury service,
but rather serve as a conscientist juror, et cetera, and
so on. Today, I'm going to ask you to do
something different, So I'd like you to consider this. In
the seventeen sixties, an English judge named William Blackstone wrote
an article entitled Commentaries on the Laws of England. In it,
(30:55):
he wrote something extraordinary. It is better that ten guilty
person and escape than that one innocent suffer. This profound
expression of humanity, of the recognition that the sacrificing of
one innocent person should not be the cost of administering
justice in any civilized society, is at least to me,
(31:18):
the personification of empathy. This concept became known as Blackstone's ratio,
and it's made its way into the criminal justice system
virtually every Western society. William Blackstone somehow realized that because accusing, convicting,
and condemning an innocent person to prison for a crime
(31:39):
they did not commit is the height of human suffering,
the most unimaginable nightmare that no man or woman should
have to bear. You've heard stories on this podcast about
terrible crimes and the junk signs that was used to
convict innocent men and women, and we mentioned their names
(32:00):
like Sante Tribble and Keith Allan Harwood and Jimmy gin
Rich and many others. But I think they're suffering gets
lost in the shoffle. Wrongful convictions often get discussed in
pop culture. They certainly have a light shined on them,
but we often hear about them when the person that
(32:20):
was wrongfully convicted is getting out, when their nightmare is
coming to an end. We don't talk much about what
they have to endure in prison, everything from physical and
sexual assaults, constant fear of losing their life, the unthinkable
living conditions, the isolation from family, friends, alienation from the world,
(32:45):
advances in technology, and even after they're exonerated, the pain
never really goes away. I once wrote an article about
an exonrere named Walter Swift in Detroit, and I tried
to capture are in it some of that suffering, and
I really don't think I can top it, so I'll
just read to you what I wrote. The sad reality
(33:09):
is that Walter has struggled terribly since his exoneration. He,
as many of the wrongfully incarcerated to do, has battled
substance abuse. He has had a difficult time holding down jobs,
and has suffered from the type of profound psychological issues
that are the product of the inhumane confinement of an
innocent man to a cage for more than a quarter century.
(33:33):
Be exonerated are often angry, paranoid, and suffer from debilitating depression.
I've done this work for quite some time, and it
still brings me to the edge of crying even to
think about it. And I still don't get it, and
I don't think I ever really will. They're suffering is
(33:57):
on a level that is not meant to be comprehended.
It is too raw to piercing, too much for the
mind to process. Hopefully these stories, our words, will make
a difference. My hope is always to get people to
(34:18):
think about the presumption of innocence and its importance in
the same way William Blackstone did. So today I'm going
to ask you to do something a little different. I
asked that if you ever find yourself picked to serve
on a jury, whether you try to get out of
it or not, that you really consider the consequences of
(34:38):
your verdict. Think about what condemning an innocent person actually means.
Think about the suffering of that individual. Try to even
shut your eyes and picture the tearing away from their
life spouses, children, grandparents, aunts, uncle's friends, the confinement, the fear,
(35:06):
the loneliness, the slow bleed of time, months, years, decades,
the absolute obliteration of a life. Maybe then we'll all
realize that we better be sure, beyond all reasonable doubt,
(35:28):
that we are getting it right, that indeed it is
better that ten guilty people go free than have one
innocent person suffer. We know the listeners of this show
(35:48):
have already heard a lot about course confessions through another
show in our stream, Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. On our
show next week, we're going to take a deep dive
into the psycho bology of course confessions to show how
and why officers methods are so effective and pulling a
false confession out of an innocent person. We'll explore the
(36:11):
junk science of course confessions with David Rudolph civil rights
lawyer and hosts of the podcast Abuse of Power. Wrongful
Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good
Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to
our executive producer Jason Flom and the team, it's Signal
(36:31):
Company number One executive producer Kevin Wardis and senior producers
Kara Cornaber and Brit Spangler. Our music was composed by
j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at duban Dot.
Josh followed the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
It's Valentine's Day. You don't usually observe the greeting card holidays.
You think they're kind of silly, and besides, most of
the time, you and your partner are both busy working.
You're always buried in your client's cases, and your partner
is off and on call, running back and forth to
the hospital to treat patients. Your friends are always remarking
(00:24):
that you're the classic power couple, but sometimes it seems
like it's all power and not so much couple. So
this year, you make dinner, put out a tablecloth, and
even light a candle. At the end of dinner, you
do the dishes and your partner takes out the trash.
The TV is on low in the background, but something
(00:46):
makes your ears perk up. You glance over and see
the newswoman reporting from a parking lot not too far
away from your house. She says, an explosion went off
not long ago. A man was hitting his leg by
shrapnel that exploded off a pipe bomb. It detonated thirty
yards away from where the man was walking. Listening to this,
(01:10):
you slowly shake your head. It's not uncommon in Grand Junction, Colorado,
for people to mess around with explosives. After all, it's
a mining town and people know how to use dynamite.
The reporter says, the man that was hit will probably
be Okay, you hope this is just some kid's joke
gone wrong. But then a few weeks later there's another
(01:33):
news report. A twelve year old girl named Maria gets
into a van with her parents to go shopping, and
as the family sets out for the mall, a bomb
hidden near one of the rear tires explodes. Shrapnel is
flung through the back of the van seat and into
Maria's body. It wedges into her heart. Her parents frantically
(01:55):
pull her out of the car, but she dies right there.
Three months after that, husband and wife Henry and Suzanne,
finished general at a local restaurant. They drive by a
strange looking object. Henry slows the car down and reaches
out to see what it is. His arms are blown
(02:18):
off his body and he dies instantly. After that third
bomb goes off, everyone in Grand Junction is extremely anxious.
You check under your car every single time before you
(02:39):
get in, and you continue to follow the news coverage
as it unfolds. The police department declares that out of
thirty initial suspects for the bombs. They've narrowed it down
to just one person. They don't announce who it is,
but a camera crew must have gotten tipped off because
they start following around a young man with big glasses.
(03:01):
Then you get a phone call from a man who
identifies himself as Jimmy. He tells you he is the
suspect in these bombing cases. His words come quickly and
in fragments of sentences, he sounds scared. He says he
hasn't done anything wrong, and he hasn't been arrested yet,
(03:21):
but with cameras following him, he thinks it's a good
idea to get an attorney. He asks, will you help me?
You take all of this in and think, do I
really want to be involved offending someone who might have
done something so horrific? But then again, what if he's
actually innocent? Everyone deserves an opportunity to defend themselves. Ultimately,
(03:47):
you agree to take on his case. Soon after you
become Jimmy's attorney, he gets a knock at his door.
The police enter his house with a warrant. They turn
his place inside out, Detectives vacuum the couch and carpet
to see if they can pick up any gunpowder nothing
all they found, or some everyday tools suppliers, wire strippers.
(04:12):
The tools that are taken from Jimmy's house are brought
down to the police station and tested in the forensics lab,
and the results come back. Police arrest Jimmy and he
gets charged with murder. Of all the people to open
this on, you do understand why they're targeting Jimmy. He's
(04:32):
somewhat of a loner, definitely an oddball. He often goes
on late night walks by himself. He can be found
sitting alone at bars and getting pretty drunk. Prior to
the trial, the prosecution discloses the evidence they intend to
use against Jimmy to prove their case, and it looks
pretty bad. You spend countless days pouring over the main
(04:55):
piece of evidence, the conclusion of a tool mark examiner.
The report of this examiner says that the impressions taken
from the tools they found in Jimmy's apartment can be
scientifically linked to the tool marks left on all three
of the bombs. In all your years as a criminal
defense attorney, you've never heard of this type of forensic analysis.
(05:19):
You didn't even know it existed, But you studied science
and undergrad before you decided to become a lawyer, so
you know how to analyze these scientific documents. You dig
up everything you can find on tool mark evidence, data, statistics, studies, experiments.
You find nothing. How are you supposed to defend against this?
(05:41):
If someone has a standard set of needle nose players,
aren't they likely to match up with the impressions made
by other needle nose players. At trial, the jury has
shown a video by the prosecution. A tool mark expert
walks the jurors through it. He tells them each tool
has you nique microscopic characteristics. You can see how the
(06:03):
tools we found in the defendant's home aligned perfectly with
marks found on fragments of the exploded bombs. The jury
is mesmerized by the videotape shown by the tool mark examiner.
After closing arguments, when they begin their deliberations, the first
note they send out his request to see that video.
(06:26):
They view it over and over and over again, and
then the bailiff informs you that the jury has done deliberating.
Jimmy is brought back into the courtroom from a holding cell.
You see the trepidation in his face as he takes
his seat, and you can actually hear him take a
big nervous swallow. The jury files into the courtroom, and
(06:51):
a vein on your temple begins to pulsatean twitch. Jimmy
is convicted of multiple counts of murder. He is sentenced
to life in prison. The story you just heard is
based on the true events of the bombings and Grand Junction,
Colorado and the subsequent trial of Jimmy Genrich. Jimmy has
(07:15):
been imprisoned for more than twenty five years, serving a
life sentence. His latest appeal has been taken up by
the Innocence Project. I'm Josh Dubin, civil rights and criminal
defense attorney, an innocence ambassador to the Innocence Project in
New York. Today, on wrongful Conviction junk Science, we examine
(07:38):
tool mark analysis. It turns out the crime that popularized
tool mark analysis was also committed on Valentine's Day over
ninety years ago, when three dozen former Brooklyn Navy yard
workers found themselves irreparably poisoned by the asbestos they used
(08:00):
in the construction of the battleships that won World War Two.
Perry Whites and Arthur Luxembourg literally putting everything on the
line to successfully represent them. Since then, they've championed the
rights of over fifty thousand regular Americans injured through the
negligence and malfeasance of mainly large corporations. Their ability to
level the playing field against seemingly insurmountable odds has led
(08:23):
them to litigate against opponents as diverse as Big Pharma
all the way to those responsible for rendering the water
of Flint, Michigan undrinkable. Whites and Luxembourg ticket personally when
there's a miscarriage of justice anywhere, and therefore they feel
a sense of responsibility to support bronqul conviction podcasts. You
can learn more about them by visiting whites lux dot com.
(08:45):
That's w E I t Z l u x dot com.
You've all heard of the legendary mobster Al Capone. During
the Roaring twenties, he was the leader of the Chicago Mafia.
Anything corrupt or illegal. He controlled it, from bootlegging to speakeasies,
(09:11):
gambling to prostitution. Capone owned it all. But there was
one rival gang that Capone couldn't quite shake, the Irish
Mafia led by George bugs Moran. They were manufacturing and
selling alcohol, stepping on Capone's business. Now Capone wasn't gonna
(09:31):
have it. He got ahold of some police uniforms, and
on February fourteenth, Valentine's Day, four of Capone's men, dressed
as police officers, went over to the garage where bugs
Moran's gang was producing and selling alcohol. Capone's crew took
the Irish mob by surprise. They started screaming with their
(09:52):
guns drawn, line up against the wall, hands where I
can see him. You're all under arrest. All seven of
the Irish gangsters lined up against the wall, hands on
their heads while Capone's crew shot them all dead in
broad daylight. By the time the real police arrived, Capone's
gang was long gone. The cops had more than a
(10:16):
hunch about who was responsible for this, but they needed
the hard evidence to prove it, so they rated the
home of one of Compone's top guys, who went by
the name of Frank Killer Burke. They took his gun
and sent it off to what was one of the
first crime labs in the country. They're an examiner named
(10:36):
Calvin Goddard shot some test bullets out of the confiscated gun.
He put one of the test bullets and one of
the bullets found at the massacre under a special microscope
that allowed him to compare two images at once. This
examiner actually invented this technique of comparing bullets. He claimed
that no two revolvers leave the same mark, and that
(10:59):
by examining the grooves on the bullets he cleaned, he
could identify the gun that shot them. According to Goddard,
the bullets of the confiscated gun indeed match the bullets
found at the scene of the crime, but the police
couldn't do much with that evidence. They could improve that
the owner of the gun, Frank Killer Burke, had been
(11:20):
at the scene of the crime, and so no one
was ever charged for what became known as the Valentine's
Day massacre. The analysis that Calvin Goddard invented is now
known as tool mark and firearm analysis. Forensic analysts had
follow in his footsteps believe that just as each gun
leaves a unique mark on every bullet that it shoots,
(11:42):
each tool leaves unique mark on the surface that's used on.
But no one had closely examined the false assumptions behind
to a mark identification. What was being presented to juries
was this notion that a tool will leave a unique
mark on a surface. But it turns out that not
necessarily the case. If two people own a similar wrench,
(12:04):
for instance, both wrenches will leave behind a similar mark,
So matching a mark to a tool owned by a
suspect has very limited value. Nevertheless, these experts were claiming
that a tool found at the home of a suspect
was the precise tool that was used, for example, to
cut wires during the construction of a bomb. This kind
(12:27):
of flawed evidence continued to be presented in courtrooms across
the country to link suspects to crimes, leading to several
wrongful convictions, including that of Jimmy gin rich In. It
was just so obvious to me that this was not,
(12:49):
you know, this was not a foundationally strong field, and
I was absolutely stunned because the consequences of this stuff
can't be higher. You know, people go to prison for
for years there, their sentenced to death. I mean, essentially
for this to be totally unproven science, I just absolutely
could not believe it. Today we're talking to Tim Riquarth.
(13:13):
Tim is a freelance journalist who often writes about the
intersection between science and criminal justice. He's also a lecturer
in science and writing at n y U. We're particularly
excited to talk to him today because he wrote about
Jimmy Genrich's case for an article published by The Nation.
He and his co author extensively researched the case, along
(13:35):
with the tool mark evidence that was used to convict Jimmy. Now,
a lot of this episode is based on this article
that Tim wrote, So after listening to this episode, if
you want to learn more about tool mark evidence in
Jimmy's case, you can find the article on our show notes. So, Tim,
tell us about your background. How did you get into
(13:55):
writing about science? Except for undergraduate I studied literature and writing,
and it wasn't until after I had graduated UM. I
happened to be living across the street from a medical
school in Chicago, and at the same time, my father
was suffering from dementia and the books and articles that
I was reading on dementia didn't quite satisfy me, and
(14:17):
so I decided to volunteer in a lab that studied dementia.
And it was at that point that I was first
introduced to research and I was hooked. So I went
back to school, took all of the basic science classes
that I hadn't taken in undergrad and eventually rolled in
a masters. And you know, ten years later I found
myself and probably with a PhD in neuroscience. The sort
(14:40):
of breadth of questions and material that you could really
dive into as a journalist or a writer just felt
so much more expansive than what I could do as
a as a scientist. And so I sort of had
the realization later on in my PhD that research, heavy,
investigative type of pieces where really good fit for somebody
(15:01):
who's trained in answering big questions. So before writing this
story about tool mark evidence, what did you know about
any forensic signs? Before that the first story I did
about forensic science, I didn't know a lot about it
at the time. Then, you know, anybody might from watching
Law and Order or cs I. We profiled the specific
(15:24):
case and it involved tool mark evidence, and we looked
at all of the research in the forensic journals. I mean,
we went through and found every single study, and most
of them were very small sample sizes, very theoretical, or
had all kinds of methodological design problems. And I was
(15:46):
absolutely stunned because this is like a solved problem. Like
we know how to do strong empirical scientific studies to
see if something works or not. Like take a medical study,
which if you want to see if a drug has
an effect, you randomly select two groups of people and
you assign one of them to get the drug and
(16:06):
another one to get a placebo which has no effect.
You blind both the people so they don't know that
they're getting the drug, and you also blind the researchers
so they don't know who is getting the drug. You
decide ahead of time what analysis you're gonna do, what
outcomes you're going to look for, and then you test
those using rigorous hypothesis testing and statistics to see what happens.
(16:30):
And in forensic sciences that just it doesn't exist. The
practitioners doing them are often not blinded, the sample sizes
are very low, there's conflicts of interest, so it it's
not following some of the most basic tenants that you
know would be reflexive to your typical scientists in the university,
(16:54):
I mean most people, especially lay people on a jury.
Here the words forensic science, and you know they imagine
this very pristine process in which things are tested and retested,
because you know, we all think of the scientific method
that we learn about in school, and it's kind of
startling to know that that's not actually the case. So
(17:17):
what you said really underscores what we've been saying throughout
the show and how big of a problem it can
be when jurors confuse what's really junk science presented in
courtrooms with traditional science that's used to develop medicines, for example.
And I'm not sure that our listeners are aware of this,
(17:39):
but I want you to think about this for a
for a moment. In cases where people were later proven
to be innocent based on DNA, um, of those wrongful
convictions are based on some misapplication of forensic science. Imagine
if this were the f d A right. Imagine if
a drug didn't work fifty at a time and had
(18:02):
horrible side effects, they wouldn't just say, well, you know,
we already approved it, so let's just leave it on
the market. That's not how it works in medicine, but
that is how it works in the law. So let's
get into Jimmy's case. I want you to tell us
about the crime that led to his arrest and the
town that had happened, and why did they even decide
to zero went on Jimmy in the first place. Grand
(18:24):
Junction is a sort of mining town of about thirty
thousand people at the time, and there was a series
of pipe bombs that went off in the town. There
were three of them, and one of them killed a
twelve year old girl. It was it was very tragic,
and they had they were seemingly random and they had
no no suspect, And so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
(18:48):
and Firearms was called in and they helped the local
police force to a bomb investigation to try to figure
out who this was. They had a list of, you know,
something like thirty suspects. There was this guy, Jimmy, who
was sort of a loner. Lived in a in a
boarding house near downtown, in a twelve by twelve room.
I think he was a bus boy in a restaurant,
(19:08):
but was on and off of jobs. His mother would
bring him, you know, meals in a in a cooler,
and he was a little bit um. You know, he
had some problems with with mental illness. There was one
event in particular that put him on the police's radar.
Which was he walked into a bookstore one day and
asked them to order a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook,
(19:31):
which contains a diagram of a pipe bomb, and the
bookstore owners had called the police, and once they sort
of pieced all of this together, that put him at
the top of the suspect list. They then rated his
boarding room and found some electronic parts, some wire strippers
(19:52):
and pliers that could conceivably have been used to construct
a bomb. And at that point they worked to link
him to the bomb, and they didn't find any other
physical evidence, never found an Anarchist cookbook. They painted a
picture of him as the kind of person who would
do this. But you have to have physical evidence that
(20:12):
links people to crimes in you know, very the objective ways,
and they didn't have that in this case other than
the tool mark analysis, which both the prosecutor and the
judge acknowledged in the trial transcript. They both acknowledged that
the entire case hinged on the tool mark analysis, and
if it were thrown out, there would be no case.
(20:41):
So how do they claim to identify Jimmy's tools as
the tools that were used on these bombs? They look
at these microscopic scratches or striations on the bomb parts,
and then they look at the suspects tools and they
make a mark on some other piece of metal using
(21:02):
a microscope. They compare the marks on the metal like
there test marks, to the marks on the actual evidence,
and if those line up in the examiner's you know,
subjective judgment, they declared a match, and they say that
this was you know, the only tools that could have
made these marks, and therefore the owner of these tools
must have been the person who built the bombs. You know,
(21:23):
they use the word certainty, and that's very compelling to jurors,
but the truth is they don't know how certain it is.
These aren't exotic bomb making tools. Their three dollar pair
of pliers that you know, we're sold at the local
hardware store. Perhaps, so you could imagine that, you know,
a tool mark examiner could say something like, oh, it
(21:44):
was a really large pair of pliers versus a small one,
or you know, it's consistent or something like that, but
they don't say that they individualize it. They say that
this is an exact match. And this isn't really a
possible conclusion to come to, because you'd either have to
a test every other tool in the world and see
if this indeed was a unique mark that was being made,
(22:07):
or you would have to know the kinds of variations
that we see in tools, Like how common is it
that two tools can look about the same but aren't
the same? Is it you know, two tools that are
made by the same brand. Is it two tools that
come off the same you know, a lot in a
in a factory. So there's all of these things that
(22:29):
you need to quantify, And even if you did do that,
you'd have to say, you know, there's a one in
a hundred chance that this is a different tool. There's
a one in two d chance, right, something like that. Right,
So you're saying that one issue is how many tools
can be said to match a mark left behind? And
we really don't know the answer to that. But I
guess another issue is the examiners doing the matching. And
(22:53):
the fact of the matter is that these examiners never
really have to prove whether or not they can effectively
match a tool to its mark. And there are possible
ways to test this, right, I mean, if a lab
wants to test how good someone is that this kind
of tool matching, they would send a tool mark examiner
some tools along with some wires or pieces of metal
(23:16):
tool marks on them, and the examiners would then be
asked to match the correct tool to the marks, and
the lab would have all of the correct answers, so
they'd be able to tell how good these examiners actually are.
That kind of testing, which would show how good these
tool mark examiners aren't. Their job seems like a simple
(23:39):
thing to do, right, right, The real test is how
well do you examiners actually do in reality? Um, And
you would say, you know, tool mark examiners make a
mistake one out of ten times, one out of a
hundred times, one out of a thousand times. That's what
you really want to know is how often do they
make a mistake? So why don't they actually do these tests?
(24:00):
If that comes back and it's really, really, it's not
so good, right, you make an error of the time
or at the time, you're out of a job. You know,
what are these examiners going to do if this becomes
a technique that is no longer a valid technique in court?
And you know, I think that it's easy to have
(24:22):
this narrative that you know, these are unscrupulous scientists who
are manipulating data in a bloodthirsty way to get convictions.
And I think that's a very cartoonish way to think
about it. There are certainly cases of misconduct, and there
are cases of uh, you know, bad motives, but in reality,
these are people who really believed that that what they
(24:45):
were doing is true. And you actually talked to the
too Mark examiner in Jimmy's case while you were researching
your article. So what impressions did you have after talking
to someone that actually specializes in this stuff. I guess
the thing that struck me the most as a scientist
is that there was an extreme lack of humility. There's
(25:07):
an extreme lack of acknowledging that these could not be
as infallible as as they thought. They have a very
strong interest improving that these techniques are very powerful. There's
a very strong sense of justice. There's a very strong
sense of righteousness. The posture of the forensic scientists and
(25:27):
and prosecutors they spoke to is it was a bit defensive, right.
The venue for these is a court of law, which
is an adversarial system, and to admit any kind of
fallibility or weakness is to weaken the case, and that's
it's just so against the culture to do that. So
in Jimmy's case, how does it all work? How did
(25:48):
the examiner present this tool mark evidence to the jury,
and how do you think they were able to convince
the jury that the results were correct? You know, that
that Jimmy's tools match the more on those bombs. The
presentation of the tool mark evidence was a video presentation,
and I believe it was the defense attorney that said
(26:10):
she thought it was one of the first in the nation. Again,
this was in the in the early nineties, so there
this was the first sort of video presentation of this
kind of evidence. Because the way that they do this
again is looking under a microscope and they line up
these little microscopic markings from the evidence with their little
test cuts. You know, it looks really convincing. You pick
a little part where they do line up and you're like, ah,
(26:32):
that must be it, and then you ignore all the
parts where they don't line up, you know, which is
you know, part of the problem. During deliberations, the jury
asked to watch that video, you know, I think dozens
of times. So it was it was a very convincing presentation.
So in addition to tool mark examiners, you also talked
to some of the prosecutors who used this type of
analysis in their cases. What were their thoughts about using
(26:56):
this kind of evidence. The same cognitive sentence that would
exist for forensic examiners also exists for prosecutors. It's a
lot to face that these tools that you've relied on
for so many cases may not be as accurate as
you thought they are, meaning some of the people that
you convicted were maybe not guilty um, and that you
(27:17):
shouldn't use them moving forward. It's a really hard it's
a really hard pill to swallow. I think one of
the things that I was most stunned by when we
were interviewing prosecutors was the way in which they would
rely on legal rulings as a substitute for scientific evidence.
So what I mean by that is we would say,
(27:37):
you know, look, we've looked at all of the evidence
and like, they have not validated this in a scientifically
rigorous way, and the prosecutors retort to that would be, well, yes,
but we've used them, and we've convicted guilty people, and
it's gotten lots of lots of legal rulings in our
favor and so therefore it must be true. And so
(27:58):
it's a very circular kind of read sitting. It's almost
like an invasive species. You have this thing that's made
its way into the courtroom and it gets locked in
there by precedents, and it's really really hard to get
it out. And so that's the reason that this stuff
stays in courts. You know, science evolves. Even if you
thought something was true thirty years ago and you decide
it's not true today, you update, you know, you revise,
(28:22):
and the courts just don't want to do that. They
want to keep things the same. You know, we often
ask our guests to tell our listeners what they can
do to make sure this type of evidence stops being
presented to juries in our criminal justice system. So what
would you tell people, um a juror, for instance, who
(28:42):
has to make a decision about someone's guilt or innocence
when they are presented with forensic evidence. If I had
any advice to adjure, you know, it's it's to realize
that there have been major reports by scientific bodies that
have found deep problems with these techniques. As convincing as
(29:05):
it sounds, they're only telling you a partial picture, and
yet the courts have been unable to bar them from
being used. If you have a justice system where the
ends justifies the means, right, uh, it's it's not going
to function fairly. And so we should all be concerned
when somebody is convicted by dubious means, because even if
(29:29):
that person was guilty, somebody else isn't going to be
and they're going to get convicted by those dubious methods
as well. You know, it's easy to be pessimistic and
almost fatalistic about the state of forensics in the courtroom,
but there are some bright spots. You know, there are
some rulings that seem really enlightened on the part of
(29:49):
the judges who are acknowledging that maybe these things do
need to be revisited. And this is even true with
regard to Jimmy's case. Uh, the Innocence Project has picked
up as appeal and are trying to set a new
kind of precedent. They are going to have an evidentiary hearing,
which means that they'll have some reevaluation of the quality
(30:11):
of the tool mark evidence. So in that sense, you know,
it's from a legal sense, it's it's progress whether you
know this will pan out for for Jimmy, is you
know that's still up in the air at this point.
So we often make a plea at the end of
every episode. Please write your local judges question the so
(30:31):
called science. Don't try to get out of jury service,
but rather serve as a conscientist juror, et cetera, and
so on. Today, I'm going to ask you to do
something different, So I'd like you to consider this. In
the seventeen sixties, an English judge named William Blackstone wrote
an article entitled Commentaries on the Laws of England. In it,
(30:55):
he wrote something extraordinary. It is better that ten guilty
person and escape than that one innocent suffer. This profound
expression of humanity, of the recognition that the sacrificing of
one innocent person should not be the cost of administering
justice in any civilized society, is at least to me,
(31:18):
the personification of empathy. This concept became known as Blackstone's ratio,
and it's made its way into the criminal justice system
virtually every Western society. William Blackstone somehow realized that because accusing, convicting,
and condemning an innocent person to prison for a crime
(31:39):
they did not commit is the height of human suffering,
the most unimaginable nightmare that no man or woman should
have to bear. You've heard stories on this podcast about
terrible crimes and the junk signs that was used to
convict innocent men and women, and we mentioned their names
(32:00):
like Sante Tribble and Keith Allan Harwood and Jimmy gin
Rich and many others. But I think they're suffering gets
lost in the shoffle. Wrongful convictions often get discussed in
pop culture. They certainly have a light shined on them,
but we often hear about them when the person that
(32:20):
was wrongfully convicted is getting out, when their nightmare is
coming to an end. We don't talk much about what
they have to endure in prison, everything from physical and
sexual assaults, constant fear of losing their life, the unthinkable
living conditions, the isolation from family, friends, alienation from the world,
(32:45):
advances in technology, and even after they're exonerated, the pain
never really goes away. I once wrote an article about
an exonrere named Walter Swift in Detroit, and I tried
to capture are in it some of that suffering, and
I really don't think I can top it, so I'll
just read to you what I wrote. The sad reality
(33:09):
is that Walter has struggled terribly since his exoneration. He,
as many of the wrongfully incarcerated to do, has battled
substance abuse. He has had a difficult time holding down jobs,
and has suffered from the type of profound psychological issues
that are the product of the inhumane confinement of an
innocent man to a cage for more than a quarter century.
(33:33):
Be exonerated are often angry, paranoid, and suffer from debilitating depression.
I've done this work for quite some time, and it
still brings me to the edge of crying even to
think about it. And I still don't get it, and
I don't think I ever really will. They're suffering is
(33:57):
on a level that is not meant to be comprehended.
It is too raw to piercing, too much for the
mind to process. Hopefully these stories, our words, will make
a difference. My hope is always to get people to
(34:18):
think about the presumption of innocence and its importance in
the same way William Blackstone did. So today I'm going
to ask you to do something a little different. I
asked that if you ever find yourself picked to serve
on a jury, whether you try to get out of
it or not, that you really consider the consequences of
(34:38):
your verdict. Think about what condemning an innocent person actually means.
Think about the suffering of that individual. Try to even
shut your eyes and picture the tearing away from their
life spouses, children, grandparents, aunts, uncle's friends, the confinement, the fear,
(35:06):
the loneliness, the slow bleed of time, months, years, decades,
the absolute obliteration of a life. Maybe then we'll all
realize that we better be sure, beyond all reasonable doubt,
(35:28):
that we are getting it right, that indeed it is
better that ten guilty people go free than have one
innocent person suffer. We know the listeners of this show
(35:48):
have already heard a lot about course confessions through another
show in our stream, Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. On our
show next week, we're going to take a deep dive
into the psycho bology of course confessions to show how
and why officers methods are so effective and pulling a
false confession out of an innocent person. We'll explore the
(36:11):
junk science of course confessions with David Rudolph civil rights
lawyer and hosts of the podcast Abuse of Power. Wrongful
Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good
Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to
our executive producer Jason Flom and the team, it's Signal
(36:31):
Company number One executive producer Kevin Wardis and senior producers
Kara Cornaber and Brit Spangler. Our music was composed by
j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at duban Dot.
Josh followed the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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