Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: We're joined today by Chris Fabricant, the director of strategical
Litigation for the Innocence Project and author of Junk Science
and the American Criminal Justice System.
Speaker 3: Chris, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 6: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 3: First of all, start.
Speaker 5: Us off by Tom talking to us about the work
that you do with the Innocence Project. There may be
some people out there who aren't familiar with the Innocence Project,
So give us an overview of what it is, where
did it start, and what do you all do.
Speaker 7: So fundamentally, the Innocence Project works to free the many
thousands and tens of thousands of people that we believe
have been wrongfully convicted and are serving time in our
naissance prisons. The Innocence Project was founded thirty three years
ago by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who were very
well known defense attorneys at the time and one of
the very few scientifically literate defense attorneys, and they were
some of the first to understand the truth seeking power
of DNA evidence. And what they understood about DNA was
not just that it would be useful to convict the guilty,
but it could also prove innocence and free people who've
been wrongfully convicted. So they established the Innocence Project as
a clinic at Cardo's, a law school initially, and they
opened the doors, as I say, thirty three years ago,
thousands of people immediately applied and have never stopped applying
to the Innocence Project for our help. And one of
the really important things to know, or that really the
decisions that were made right at the beginning was the
intake criteria for getting help from the Innocence Project for
us to take on the case. What was unusual and
really prescient ultimately was that they decided that they were
going to make no subjective judgment about the guilt or
innocent of anybody that applied for help. The only criteria
that they were going to look at is whether or
not they could find biological evidence DNA evidence and test
that evidence if it came back as an exclusion, would
that prove innocence? Would we be able to identify the
actual perpetrator in a particular case.
Speaker 2: And as a.
Speaker 7: Result, we took cases there whether there are five eyewitnesses
that were all pointing to our clients saying that's the man,
I'll never forget that face. We took cases where detailed
confessions by our clients that include apologies to their alleged victims.
We took cases with all kinds of forensic evidence pointing
out our client's guilt. And what we established what was
really revolutionary beyond the simple fact that innocent people are
convicted every day by our criminal justice system, but the pillars,
the me pieces of evidence that we have relied on
for centuries in this country and others to convict eyewitness identification,
confession evidence. Forensic sciences were not just unreliable, but they
were the leading contributing factors to wrongful conviction.
Speaker 6: What we were really.
Speaker 7: Relying on was unreliable, and DNA was the first opportunity
that we had that we would know ground truth. We
could tell with the scientific certainty that our clients were innocent.
That put the lie to a lot of this evidence.
And so my work at the Innocence Project depart from
freeing the innocent that have been convicted primarily on junk science,
but also my department that the Innocence Project Strategic Litigation
works on all of these cases that involve misidentification on
false confession evidence. And there are three lawyers just in
my department that are only working on forensic sciences. So
we work to prevent future wrongful convictions by urging courts
to properly exercise their gatekeeping function and exclude unreliable eyewitness testimony,
unreliable confessions, and especially junk science.
Speaker 2: Is it fair to say, Chris, then, that DNA is
the first scientific evidence available that's truly reliable?
Speaker 6: I get asked this a lot.
Speaker 7: Is it all junk science or is it can we
only rely on DNA evidence? Yes?
Speaker 2: And no.
Speaker 7: I mean is that you can take a something like
fingerprint evidence. You know, fingerprint evidence is fairly reliable, but
it can be made very unreliable depending on the quality
of the evidence, right, And so you can take what
is an otherwise unreliable technique and turn it into junk
science because of its u particular case. So, an example
that I write about in my book is the famously
the Brandon Mayfield case.
Speaker 6: And so Brandon Mayfield.
Speaker 7: Was identified as the perpetrator of the bombing of the
Madrid commuter train in two thousand and four, and seventy
people died or so and many thousands were injured in
this case. And they found a latent fingerprint on the
blast caps that had been used to blow up this train,
and they were traced back and matched to Brandon Mayfield.
Brandon Mayfield is this mild manner lawyer in Portland, Oregon,
had never been convicted of a crime, had never even
left the country, and didn't own a passport. And the
only reason that his fingerprints were in the database was
because he had once been in the military. But when
the FBI looked at the biographical details of the person
that they had met to this, they saw that he
had recently converted to Islam, he had married an Egyptian national.
He had once represented a man that had been convicted
of providing material aid to a terrorist organization. So did
the FBI the thing, this is the profile the guy
that we're looking for. So that piece of information they
arrested and charged him with mass murder and held in
communicato four weeks, and he came into court with his
lawyer finally and was insisting so that they could not
be my fingerprint could not be I had left the country.
Speaker 2: And so he has never never been to Spain, never
traveled internationally. It's never been on this train. You shall
yourself Wait a minute. I get why they would take
a look at him because of his background, But where's
the screw up with the fingerprint.
Speaker 7: One was a failure to investigate those facts before they're
making the arrest, and the other was that when they
came to court and mister Mayfield was insisting that it
was in his print, the court did something very unusual
and it appointed an independent expert to reac analyze the evidence.
So the independent expert came back with the same conclusion
as the FBI, saying that yeah, this is Brandon Mayfield's print.
And so then the defense team hired yet another latent
fingerprint expert.
Speaker 6: All of these folks.
Speaker 7: Had lots of certification years and years of experience, highly qualified,
and mister Mayfield's own expert came back and concluded that
it was his print. So only when the Spanish authorities
identified another suspect and known terrorists who had been on
the run for many years as the much more likely
culprit did the FBI finally admit that they made a
mistake and released Brandon Mayfield. So what we took is
fingerprint evidence. Good evidence if you have high quality prints
and it's not influenced by biasing information that has nothing
to do with the actual evidence at issue. And with
a lot of these subjective techniques like fingerprints, like bite marks,
tire tread evidence like bud spatter, evidence like hairmic see
some DNA evidence, all these subjective techniques, they're influenced by
the examiners or influenced by totally irrelevant information. If you
let me tell you, like about a really compelling scientific
study on this is that after this happened, a cognum
neuroscientist named doctor et L. George conducted a study and
to see whether or not examiners were to be empirically
demonstrated besides this anecdotal evidence that examiners would be influenced
like this. And what he did is he took a
group of very experienced, highly qualified latent fingerprint examiners and
he gave them casework and asked them to do evaluations
on these cases. What was clever was that he didn't
tell these experts that they were examining their own prior casework.
Speaker 6: In other words, they had already come.
Speaker 7: To conclusions yeah, and reported them out. And the only
thing that he changed, though, was totally irrelevant information included
in the case files. So something like the suspect confessed,
or that there was another evidence, there is an witness,
or whatever. Three fifths, three fifths of the experts in
this change their opinion from identification to exclusion, and the
other two fifths changed it to an inconclusive So they
all changed their minds. So I'm totally irrelevant information. And
so when I'm asked is it all Jock, I was
like you can make junkie DNA evidence if it's contaminated
or there's too much subjectivity, or there's not enough, or
that's not properly calibrated, you know. I mean, forensic science
is so powerful in court. We have to be so
careful with the way that it's used that even reliable
methods have the ability to convict the innocent.
Speaker 5: I was absolutely astounded reading your book at every piece
of evidence, every study, everything that you put forward to
show me, Oh my gosh, the stuff that we have
been relying on for years in the true crime space,
that we thought was infallible is really not. I eventually,
as I started reading your book and I finally old
habit style I'm a teacher during the day, I finally
just started picking up a highlighter and started highlighting whole
entire paragraphs because there's so much good information there, and
so much of it is just groundbreaking. How can the
average person, say, someone who gets called onto jury duty,
for example, the spot when forensic science is being used
inappropriately or abused I guess would probably even be the
better term. How are we supposed to be able to
know that if we are just called to a jury.
Speaker 7: That's a great question. That's it's a tough question. What
do I want to talk about the true crime space
before I answer that question, please, is that I have
three clients whose cases were featured in forensic files as
to like, how wonderful the forensics were that busted this
bad guy in all three one one, this guy's conviction overturn,
and Alfred Twin in Connecticut, whose case is also featured
all innocent and you could still watch these forensic files
that show the claiming that they're guilty. I'm asked a
lot about how a joy or a lager. Like most
of us, I don't have a heart science background. I
have a degree in political science. You know what I
mean is that, and I had to learn science as
part of my job, and so I'm living proof that
we're all capable of learning. But as a juror, it's
not really your job to go and learn a new field,
you know what I mean. And our answer this in
two as one is that the Innocence Project advocates for
upstream fixes on forensic sciences.
Speaker 6: You know what I mean.
Speaker 7: We need something like the FDA that approves everything from
toilet paper to aspirin before it's used by American consumers
to demonstrate it's safe and that it's reliable. Right, we
don't have anything like that for forensic sciences at all. Right,
we care in this country more about the safety of
toilet paper than we do about forensic sciences that can
be used to take away somebody's life or liberty. So
that is really a systemic fix. But should you find
yourself in a jury box and listening to an expert witness,
a lot of the evidence demonstrates that jerors tend to
we all tend to turn off our critical thinking skills
when somebody is designated as an expert, Why on scientific
jargon and somebody's credentials.
Speaker 6: To defer to the expertise.
Speaker 7: But there's a few things you can ask yourself, and
this is true in the jury box or just in
life when somebody's making claims about what science says, and
really fundamentally is like what's.
Speaker 6: The air rate?
Speaker 7: How often do you get this right? How often do
you get it wrong? How often do you get it
right and get it wrong under the circumstances of this
case right with like a poor quality latent fingerprints or
something like that, And how often does your field get
it right and get it wrong? And are there standards
in this field? In other words, there are usually best practices?
Are there rules that you're required to follow to come
up with a conclusion in a particular case?
Speaker 6: Were those rules followed?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 6: I mean?
Speaker 7: And you can also think, is there any way that
this opinion could be disproved? So in other words, I
come in, I said, that's a bitemark on that body?
It was just like, so, how am I supposed to
critically think about that? You tell me it's a bitemark?
I guess it's a bitemark, But how does anybody know
it was bike mark?
Speaker 6: Nobody was there?
Speaker 7: I can't falsify that there's no I just have to
take your word for it, or that the dog scented
a dead body in this building, so the dog order.
But we can't really falsify.
Speaker 2: That we don't know.
Speaker 7: I mean, in science, that's called it'sy DIXI you know
what I mean, And what that means is essentially roughly
translated from the Latin as it is because I say so.
And if you're getting an opinion like that and there's
no air rate and they know how many standards? You know,
I mean, it's like pretty strong indications, And what I'm
channeling here is like the most important Supreme Court decision
on scientific evidence that exists, the Dabert decision, And it
looks like it should be called Dobert, but I know
people know the Daberts.
Speaker 6: That's the way they pronounce their name.
Speaker 7: And it laid out some factors to consider about when
you're trying to decide whether to go a piece of
scientific evidence is reliable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just turned to that part in your book.
Speaker 5: I was reading over this, and again I told you
off air, I'm getting such an education from this. Like,
for example, I did not know about I did not
know about the decision that your referenced. I did not
even know that we had a National Academy of Sciences
or that they had that there was a study done
in two thousand and six that basically said, hey, let's
talk about the state of forensic science. I'm so glad
that it happened, because as I went on and continued reading,
I was really alarmed about the lack of real scientific
grounding in most of these junk sciences that you were
talking about.
Speaker 3: It's really unreal. So let me ask you this, then.
Speaker 5: Who or what ultimately determines when a former forensics has
become unreliable unless falls into that category of junk science.
Speaker 7: That's a huge part of my job, you know, I mean,
is that because overwhelmingly the cases that I work on
in post conviction are people believe are innocent that do
not have DNA evidence, but have been convicted on junk science.
And so you have to persuade a court that this
particular piece of evidence has been discredited by the mainstream
scientific community. Fundamentally, there are really there are two ways
that this happens, and they're of course not mutually exclusive.
Is one, and this is the terrible way for it
to be established as wrongful convictions, you know, I means
that they use as and they were wrong. The other,
of course, is scientific research. And you pointed out that
you were alarmed about the way that these methods have
been developed. And the reason that is is that because
mainstream science is done in a laboratory and scientists come
up with a hypothesis and then they test that hypothesis
using the scientific method you know, I mean, And so
that means you develop hypothesis, you develop an experiment that
isolates some of these variables. Then you'd conduct the experiments,
then you interpret your results, and you publish your results
in review journal, and then other people criticize it and
try to fallse by it and try to replicate your results.
Speaker 6: That's how real science is done in forensics.
Speaker 7: That doesn't happen often in that the forensics these fields
are often developed by law enforcement for law enforcement purposes.
They aren't subject to the same rigor that some of
these other fields are done. And because a lot of
it is because they're very useful tools for prosecution. Most
people who are convicted of crimes are guilty. People always
shocked when I actually say that, You know, I mean,
but if you imagine that we lived in a society
where that wasn't true. A lot of these forensics practitioners
became very confident in the ability, and so did courts,
and so did mainstream media. Became very confident in these
forensic techniques because they seem to be convicting guilty people.
So what's the problem. The problem, of course, is it's
also convicting a lot of innocent people. And you think
about the scale of our criminal justice system in this country,
right we have two point two million people in various
forms of incarceration in this country by far the highest
incarceration rate in the world, and yet we're still not
a very safe society. So somehow locking up all these
people has not worked. Nonetheless, two point three. So if
you think that one percent of people have been wrongfully convicted,
which I think is a conservative number, we're talking about
tens of thousands of innocent people. Just to be clear
that when I say most people are guilty that are
convicted true, also true tens of thousands of people are
likely innocent and serving time in prison right now as
we're sitting here that a field is that it has
been discredited. We really have to rely on scientific research
and it has to be tested due to scientific method.
Otherwise we're relying on biases and irrelevant information and whistling
past the graveyard hoping that we get it right, you
know what I mean, And.
Speaker 6: As I hope that the stories.
Speaker 7: I try to do a lot of storytelling in my
book talking about like the hardcore science, because I wrote
the book to try to create essentially a new of
untrue crime, you know what I mean, And that it's
like that we have to be careful. These are also
very compelling stories, but they just.
Speaker 2: End differently, Chris, forher the person who hasn't read the
book but is now going to buy the book because
of this interview. What are some of the big categories
of science that may have been accepted at one point
as proving guilt or innocence in a court of law
and are now looked upon as junk science. What are
some examples of categories You mentioned bite marks, but there
are a number of others that you cover in the book.
Can you just give us a couple of key areas
where you think these have fallen off the table in
terms of being regarded as reliable.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so, dog scent evidence is often unreliable, blood spatter evidence,
hair micros besee shaking, baby syndrome, voice spectrometry compared to
bullet lead analysis, polygraph analysis, handwriting analysis, footwear impression evidence.
Speaker 6: The list goes on and on.
Speaker 7: Really, there many unreliable plus these other fields that can
be reliable but are often applied unreliably. You mentioned the
National Academy of Sciences study. One of the real kind
of fundamental takeaways from that study, which was published in
two thousand and nine, was that there's no forensic technique,
zero that are capable of identifying the source of crime
scene evidence, and we have accepted in criminal courts for
more than a century all these fields claim the ability
to identify the gun, the tool, the person. Right that
can't be done. The statistical foundation for that does not exist.
So we don't know how rare or how common it
is when we say these two things matched. And so
that is you mean that that cuts across basically all
forensic sciences.
Speaker 2: So something like when they talk about tool marks, and again,
all three of us are lay people here. I was
wincing as you were going through that quick list. In
the Colonial Parkway murders, my sister is unsolved murder case,
a number of those categories have already been mentioned as
part of the investigative process. They've identified one deceased suspect
who has been linked to one of the couples that
was murdered in the Colonial Parkway murders. When I'm listening
to you talk about these kind of discredited categories in
our case, which stretches back thirty eight years, I've heard
any number of references from our FBI agents talking about
evidence that they're looking at in those categories. So are
all those things to be scrapped or do they have
any utility, any usefulness.
Speaker 7: Some often forensic practitioners and law enforcement often make this
arguments about that this is good for an investigative lead,
even in an unreliable fields. And the bristle at that
because if it's the search for the truth is never
advanced through the use of junct science, which is not
that's why it's chuck science. But many of these techniques
can be used to exclude. If there's footwear impression evidence
and the suspect as Adidas and it appears to be
an Ike shoe at the scene, we can exclude that, right,
Same with hair comparison, right, same with fiber testimony, same
with many of these other fields, right, same with firearms
and tool marks right tool where it's very difficult to
get exclusions in either of those fields, so they just
call them inconclusive when maybe the suspect should have.
Speaker 6: Been released rather than an inconclusive.
Speaker 7: So I'm not saying that they're worthless as far as exclusions,
but they should certainly not be relied on for a conviction.
And it's a very iffy proposition to be using any
of these unreliable fields as an investigative lead when they're not,
you know, I mean, and a lot of it goes
back to I imagine, fiber comparison and footprints and hair
comparison and that kind of those types of leads.
Speaker 2: Were all the actually everything you just mentioned and more.
Speaker 6: Like the traditional fields.
Speaker 7: One is that they're very subject to the biases that
we talked about there, capable of providing some information, you know,
I mean, is that the perpetrator was wearing shoes, that
they had a waffle pattern, you know, I mean, it's okay,
that's something. But all these fields, basically the nominator is missing. Right.
We don't know how rare are our common and association
or a match is you know what you do with that?
It's not a lot.
Speaker 5: Do you think that the prevalence of shows like CSI
and Forensic Files contribute to the idea that these sciences
are sound and.
Speaker 3: Useful and are good to be used in court?
Speaker 6: Yes? Absolutely.
Speaker 7: I wrote the book to try to counter this pop
culture narrative around the infallibility.
Speaker 6: Of forensic sciences, and this is true today.
Speaker 7: I just worked on a case in New Jersey where
the defense attorney was precluded from asking the potential jurors
what their previously conceived ideas of the reliability of forensic
sciences were. And I was shocked that a judge would
not allow that that line of questioning for because it's
so important to understand what people have taken in from
pop culture and from the paper of record, the Times.
You read the Times all the time, and they'll talk
about ballistics match to this gun without totally without any
skepticism or without any like that's the gun, right. All
those individualization conclusions that I was talking about previously are
reported in mainstream media and the rest. And then I
was just talking about Alfred Swinton's case in Forensic Files, right.
Speaker 6: I reached out to Bill Curtis.
Speaker 7: The host, after he was exonerated, and was like, you know, hey, Bill,
how about we take this episode down and maybe printer
retraction or broadcast retraction, you know, I mean, it would
do a lot to undo the arm that this show
caused by believing that not only was it fantastic evidence,
but it helped catch a serial killer.
Speaker 6: Totally wrong.
Speaker 2: You're listening to mindover Murder. We'll be right back after
this word from our sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder.
Speaker 6: Idia is hugely complicit.
Speaker 7: And that's why I wrote about the Ted Bundy case
in my book is It sent bititemarks into the stratosphere.
Speaker 6: It turned celebrities out of junk scientists.
Speaker 2: What did Forensic Files say when you said, actually, I think,
from my perspective, is the brother of a murder victim.
I think that would be a fascinating episode to do
a follow up and say, we've had a significant development
here in the Wintland case in Connecticut and he's been
found innocent as a result of significant strides that were taken.
They weren't interested, So Bill never got back to me
our communication.
Speaker 7: Folks had an email, and so I pitched it to
the Washington Post, and the Washington Post wrote a story
and then they took it down. They took the episode down,
they stopped showing it. But that's as far as as
far as it went. Yeah, no, so too. His family
was also very interested in being taken down. The Jimmy
Genritt case in Colorado, which was just reversed a few
weeks ago. It's also on Forensic Files and the pop
culture plays and think about this, It's like, when was
the last time that you watched a criminal procedural show
of any kind while on order friends would name anything
c yes, I Miami, any of it right, where the
forensics were anything other than absolutely infallible, object to reliable, precise,
wrap up, catch the bad guy in an hour?
Speaker 6: Done, yeah, forty.
Speaker 2: Eight minutes later by extremely fashionably dressed examiners.
Speaker 7: Hot too, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The women are all beautiful, the men are all handsome,
and apparently they never get blood, guts or anything else
that's unpleasant on their design and out.
Speaker 7: It's a great gig if you can get it.
Speaker 5: So, Chris, you had said that one of the things
you wanted to try to do was counteract the CSI
effect if you well in writing the book, Do you
have other reasons why you decided now was a very
good time to write a book, or had it been
something that was on your mind for a while.
Speaker 7: In the paperback update, I actually wrote a little bit
about my motivation for it is that was one of
the essential characters and stories of the book with Stephen
Cheney was my first Innocence Project client, and as I wrote,
I had been a public defender for a long time,
and I was a law professor right before I came
to the Innocence Project.
Speaker 6: But so I had represented literally thousands.
Speaker 7: Of people, and in that work a few things is
that you're not doing exonerations, You're not. The way that
you represent your clients is entirely different, and it's a
lot of triage work and a lot of clients you
will never meet again after meeting them, maybe want in arrangements,
or sometimes you work on a case for a couple
of years, but then never again. And I had lots
of clients to prison and I just never saw them again,
you know, I mean sometimes for life. And when I
started at the Innocence Project, I had a lot of
client contact. Of course, my father was a public defender.
Speaker 6: It was like in the.
Speaker 7: Family right when I I didn't I don't know why
I didn't think about it more when I was flying
to Texas. But when I had my meeting with Stephen
Cheney for the first time, I realized what I represented
to him was he thought that I could wave a
magic wands on open prison doors, and he had won
like the lawyer lottery, and in ways that he did.
Considering how many people or a small shop compared to
the scale of the justice system. I was very moved
by and overwhelmed by that experience and felt this awesome responsibility.
Speaker 6: I've always written.
Speaker 7: I wrote another book in five so that's kind of
part of what I've done. I do a lot of
scholarship at the IP too, but the it's a and
so I just started taking notes on it, and the
more that I got and they became in the backbone
of the stories, and I was like, people are going
to be interested in this. This is like as a
maunter of interest, and then the way that people are
interested in good stories.
Speaker 6: But then as I worked in.
Speaker 7: More and more in junk science and I learned more
and more, it was just.
Speaker 6: Like people need to be shocked.
Speaker 7: People really need to understand not just how bad the
situation is, but the effect that it has on people's lives.
Speaker 2: As a quick aside, Chris, one of the things that
jumped down at me was you mentioned several times in
the book sitting outside these very grim jails with death
row setups and sitting in your rental car with a
legal pad. And I thought to myself, you didn't write
this whole book out, longhand did you.
Speaker 7: I have really demanding day job and I have two kids, right,
and so the way that I wrote the book is that. Yes,
it was a lot of long hands in yellow pads,
and then whenever I was traveling, if I didn't need
to prep for litigation on planes, trains, our hotel rooms,
whenever I was away from my family. So I just
it took me four years, you know, I mean to
get it down. So it was, Yeah, thank you for asking.
It was a lot, but it was.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I have that habit though.
Speaker 6: I always have a legal pad with me.
Speaker 3: Were you able to call all of the research for
the book from cases that you personally worked or did
you go around to folks at the Innocence Project and
say give me your best stories.
Speaker 7: No, I only wrote about my cases. The three cases
that I focus on are Eddie Lee Howard, Stephen Cheney,
and Keith Harward, and they all represented different aspects of
our working. Like Keith Harward is traditional kind of slammed
on DNA exoneration where we identified the actual perpetrator I
meaning he did thirty three years in prison for the
horribook the crime that he was convicted of. Is how
I opened the book. That's it's a trigger warring for
anybody who's going to continue to read that this is
it's true crime, right, and they are undrew.
Speaker 6: But the and so what I did.
Speaker 7: I had all the transcripts, all the forensic reports, I
had personally been involved, So I I had a lot
of material to draw on. And if you look, I
was really careful with the endnotes or like thirty pages long, yeah,
because I want to lay all the dialogue that is there.
None of it is invented. It's what happened either on
court or from my notes and so and so I
have cited that, and also I need names throughout the book,
and so of course I didn't want to be sued,
and so I had a lot of andnotes on that.
And then the other cases that were not like the
Ted Bundy case or some of the other high profile
cases that I do write about that weren't mine and
that weren't Innocence Project cases. I was very careful about
citing those. And of course I talked to my colleagues
about any case that I referenced that was happened to
be an Innocence Project case that I didn't work on.
Speaker 6: But there are primarily my cases.
Speaker 2: Does somebody end up going through it and reading through
carefully and you're dealing with a lot of delicate stuff here,
and obviously for family members who were convinced and you
referenced this in the book, that a particular individual is
responsible for the murder of their loved one, they then
have to accept the fact, often years later, that the
person that was convicted was wrongfully convicted and therefore look
back at square one in some of these examples.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was thinking, because I know that both you
and Kristen have been touched by violent crime and bring
that perspective to your show and into your audience, which
is such a hugely important piece of everything that is
involved in wrongful conviction and regular convictions. We at the
Innocent Project are very sensitive to this and work with
victim advocates to try to ease the pain of an
exoneration because for most of us it's his great salvatory,
finally free moments, and then for the victim's family a
mirror in.
Speaker 2: The mirror image of that, but in a very imagine
a very unhappy way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, it's very challenging toe even accept the reality, right.
So often the victim's family can't accept that the wrong
person was convicted because it's usually very persuasive me. Most
of our clients were not picked out of phone books.
There was reasons to suspect them or and then most
of them sat through a trial, watched them get convicted,
and can't believe that they didn't get justice, you know
what I mean? And I tell the story sometimes and
we like the Alfred Swinning case again in Connecticut. I
remember the day that he was going to be exonerated
in court that day, and he had been convicted of
killing a sex workers living in a very marginalized lifestyle.
She had family, people who loved her who are also
marginalized in the community as far as that goes, and
are regularly the victims of poverty and everything that relates
to being poorant the United States.
Speaker 6: One was brutally murdered, and.
Speaker 7: They have believed that they had gotten justice, right, and
so you know, in a lifetime that the way that
I was interpreting the victim's family here was that in
a lifetime of a lot of unfairness, that at least
their sisters.
Speaker 6: Or their daughters or their murderer had.
Speaker 7: Been put away, you know, I mean, they had got
some justice there. So we knew that this was going
to be a really painful and sensitive topic, you know
I mean, And a lot of district attorneys are reluctant
to kind of do the right thing because victims' families
are invested in the conviction, and so we often will
try to have and we don't personally talk to because
there's social workers that can are better in handling those
types of conversation to prepare somebody something like this. But
when it doesn't happen, when it's not handled well, like
it wasn't here. I told the court officers when I
was standing in court and you could feel the tension in.
Speaker 2: The room, I imagine.
Speaker 7: And you could just feel that something was going to happen.
And I told him, is you really need to separate
this victims families from us, you know what I mean,
because something will happen on this It's not the first
time that I have been in court like this.
Speaker 6: They didn't do anything about it.
Speaker 2: Oh they didn't, even though you told them to expect
an explosion of emotion at a minimum.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And so when we walked out of the courtroom
door and the victims family made a b line for
us and spat on us, and the truth was, I
wasn't even mad at them, and neither was mister Swinton,
who was a shock. He'd just been seventeen years in
prison for this crime. He was just like, didn't even
know what to make of it, and you could just
feel the pain.
Speaker 6: Of course is revolting, but the but.
Speaker 2: You also understand their anger because they believed in the
process person was being freed a man.
Speaker 7: So it's nobody wins in wrongful conviction. It's painful for everybody,
you know what I mean. And mister Swinton, like a
lot of our clients and some of the clients that
I write about in the book, I shortly after being exonerated, right,
because prison health is abominable, and I think the emotional
pressure of decades of wrongful conviction.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: It's like you, yeah, it shortens your life.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, Chris.
Speaker 5: What can our listeners do to number one, support the
Innocence Project because the work that you do is so important.
Speaker 3: What can we, as people in the true crime.
Speaker 5: Space do to call attention to the prevalence of junk
science so that we can maybe lessen your workload.
Speaker 7: Hopefully our goals to go out of business, of course,
but sadly it doesn't look likely. Your listeners, of course,
please donate to us where Innocence Project dot org VI
and they make that very easy as far as a
and thank you for having me on and for being
receptive to this. Other really important aspect of the criminal
justice system fundamentally is that is injecting and notice skepticism
into We can't just assume because somebody who was convicted
that they necessarily got the right person, you know, I mean,
and particular things that that we know to be unreliable
evidence like eyewitness identification, be skeptical just because somebody knows
it lads to have confessed.
Speaker 6: Do we know that's a reliable confession?
Speaker 7: Does it match up with the physical evidence in the case,
for example, what kinds of techniques were used during the interrogation?
Speaker 6: And then of course drunk science.
Speaker 7: So you know, when a lot of the case identification
work that we do in strategical litigation, which is a
little bit different than the other legal department that does
all our DNA exoneration work, is that when we're looking
at a case and I see something that involves the
leading contributing factors to wrongful conviction, inevitably these are innocence cases, right,
And if they're relying on this type of evidence so
often an innocent person, particularly in not every idea, not
every confession, not every piece of forensics. But if I'm
looking at an idea and it's cross racial identification and
it was done months or years after the incident, or
here's a confession and there are some mistakes.
Speaker 6: Made about like.
Speaker 7: The factual details in this confession that we're just kind
of paper over during trial, or these junk science, there's
skepticism that it's appropriate. And when people ask me about
your I would give you a much more detailed answer
about how to think about science as a juror, but
as the short answer is just to be skeptical, you know.
I mean, it's really important to maintain critical thinking skills.
That's what jurors are there for, that's what your listeners
are there for.
Speaker 2: You mentioned across racial identification. For people that might not
have heard that expression before, Can you explain a little
bit more about where we all get tripped up?
Speaker 7: Sure, it doesn't really have anything to do with racial bias.
It's really it's your own race bias. To the extent
that it has to do about racial bias, it's probably
because we live in highly segregated societies. What the science
shows is that we're much better at identifying people of
our own race than.
Speaker 6: Those of other races.
Speaker 7: So white people are better identifying white people, and black
people are identifying black people. And so when you're we're
identifying somebody from the other race and other race, other ethnicity,
somebody doesn't look like you, it's less reliable.
Speaker 2: And all the jokes and cliches about it. But if
that's not your world that you've grown up in. Typically, yes,
our families in society can be more blended as we
move forward, But if you're a white person, you might
not be able to identify someone from another race as readily,
but simply because you haven't been exposed to them as much.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's just is there are lots of jokes about
picking up white people looking like white people to people
who aren't white, you know, I mean, there's just another
white guy, you know. I mean that is what the
science demonstrates, and it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.
Speaker 6: For example, and I don't know.
Speaker 7: How robust the research is here, it's something that I've heard,
so you can quote me on it, but quote me
in saying it's something that I heard, not something that
I research, but I have heard when I was in Hawaii,
which is one of the most multi cultural places that
I've ever been, and that people in Hawaii are really
good at identifying ethnicities or mixed race people like which races.
And that seemed to me when I heard this, that
would speak to what we're talking about. Right, these folks
are exposed to people multicultural people every day with them
and have some familiarity with you know, what a Filipino
looks like as compared to a Japanese person, as compared
to a Native Hawaiian as compared to another.
Speaker 6: You know, I mean that a lot of white people
have no idea.
Speaker 7: Most white people wouldn't be able to tell you, like
beyond somebody being Asian, you know what I mean, you know,
and Asian folks certainly can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they get the distinctions. And by the way, it's
a proud graduate of Pearl Harbor Elementary School in Honolulu, Hawaii.
This is true. They call Hawaii they're the melting pot,
and there are a lot of different people from all
over the world who've come to Hawaii to live and work.
But you're absolutely right. I think people they would get
the nu once is then the differences. We're somebody that
might not be exposed to specific islanders and named dozens
of different categories of wonderful people. They might not really
have that much familiarity with what does a Filipino person
look like versus Japanese, American or any other category.
Speaker 7: And these problems are exacerbated by suggestive lineup procedures and
identification procedures that are used all the time, you know,
I mean in a huge part of our agenda at
the Innocence Project is attempting to get law enforcement to
use scientifically validated, non suggestive appropriate identification procedures, like a
series of recommendations that we make, and we do it
a lot on litigation, asking courts to reconsider the way
that they're evaluating the reliability of an eyewitness identification before
they introduced it at trial. Because there's nothing more forensic sciences,
confessions and I identification, which again are the leading factors
through offical conviction. There's also nothing more persuasive than those things. Right,
Somebody getting on the stand saying I'll never forget that face.
It seared it to my mind, right, that type of
testimony is actually probably a statement almost asserting its.
Speaker 6: Unreliability because often when we're talking.
Speaker 7: About is like a gunpoint robbery or something like that,
or that coart a weapon being.
Speaker 2: Inherently a stressful situation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And what the research demonstrates is that those inherently
stressful situations corrupt our memories and make the ability to
encode the memory of the perpetrator's face very difficult, particularly
if there's a weapon involved, because there's something called weapon focus.
Speaker 6: Right, if you ever had weapon pointed.
Speaker 7: At you, yes, what you were looking at, I imagine
was the weapon and not the person's face.
Speaker 2: Sure, I was in a store and we were held
up at gunpoint, and I wrote, I can tell you
a lot of details about what happened that day, and
no one got hurt. But man, I wouldn't be able
to pick those two guys out of a lineup no
matter what, because first of all, they ordered us to
turn away, and we did. And you, when someone sticks
a gun in your face, you tend to do what
they tell you to do. And then if we add in,
it's often dark and these things happen quickly. You might
only get a glance at someone and you're terrified.
Speaker 7: You really want to make an identification you know, I mean,
because you want the perpetrator to be caught. Of course,
these have an idea. They and crime victims want the
police to catch the bad guy and trust the police
to have identified an appropriate suspect, which makes a suggestive
lineup procedure all the more pernicious. And police, I mean,
I'm not here to slag them for this, but they
believe that I'm not trying to typically trying to frame
innocent people, you know what I mean. But there are
ways to actually test the witness's memory, and there are
ways that a lineup or identification procedure of any kind
are not going to test the witness memory. They're just
there to confirm the police aspect.
Speaker 5: Chris tell us where our listeners can find your book?
I actually found it in a wonderful little indie bookstore
in Stanton, Virginia. But I assume that not everybody has
a little indie bookstore at their disposals, So if they
do not have one as such, where can they find yours?
Speaker 2: Everywhere?
Speaker 7: Books are sold online and my book tour was almost
entirely in indie bookstores. So I am very proud to
have gotten the support from the indie bookstores, which I love,
and that started right.
Speaker 6: Here in Brooklyn at the green Light Books.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Please. And I still pop up once in a while
on around the country. Yeah, and I'm not I used
to be active. I was on Twitter for a little while,
but then everything went crazy, and but I think sometimes
i'll post things on Instagram about where I'll be.
Speaker 3: Do you have any other writing projects in your near future?
Speaker 5: Because I got to tell you, Chris, you're a hell
of a writer and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, so.
Speaker 3: I hope you have more in your future.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 7: Maybe I'm not sure if I would have written it
if I had known how much work.
Speaker 6: It would have been.
Speaker 7: Absolutely as I said at demanding day job, but I
get the itch and I'll probably write something again at
some point when you know when it happens.
Speaker 5: I think it's so important that you did write it,
because it's all stuff that really needed to be said.
And I would say to our listeners, this is the
best education on forensic science that you didn't know you needed.
But I'm here to tell you that you need it,
so please do pick up the book. It is junk
Science and the American Criminal Justice System.
Speaker 3: Chris, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your time.
Speaker 7: I really appreciate you having me. Thank you so much
for really thoughtful questions.
Speaker 3: That is going to do it for this episode of
mind Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Disease, Kiko
and Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.