Wouldn't it be a drag to get arrested for something you did not do based solely on the word of a lying, mentally ill drug addict?
That's what happened to Regina Kelly in rural Hearne, Texas in 2000. Ensnared in a mass arrest of suspected drug dealers at her housing project, the young single mother was charged with selling drugs in a school zone. Despite her insistence that she was innocent, her court-appointed attorney pressured her to accept a plea bargain to avoid many years in prison and the loss of her children. With no criminal record and no drugs found on or near her, she refused.
Instead, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union she filed a class action suit, Regina Kelly v. John Paschall. Since the case settled four years ago, the local drug task force has been disbanded.
As it turns out, bogus statements by "snitches" trying to curry favor with police are a leading cause of wrongful convictions (along with faulty eyewitness evidence and wrongful confessions). In the U.S. Drug Wars, this especially affects those who, like Kelly, are poor and Black. Texas seems like an unlikely leader in the campaign to reform such practices. But, prompted by the Hearne case and another mass drug arrest the year before in Tulia, the Lone Star State became the first in the United States to enact legislation requiring that the statements of confidential informants be corroborated by other evidence.
The case was reported by PBS' cutting-edge Frontline back in June 2004; a similar documentary was made about the more infamous bust in Tulia, Texas. But now, a fictionalized version of Kelly's story is set to reach a broader, mainstream audience. Co-director Bill Haney says that when he heard about Kelly's case on National Public Radio as he was driving along, it so moved him that he pulled his car over to the side of the road and cried.
In American Violet, "Dee Roberts" (Nicole Beharie) is the plaintiff in a class-action case over racial discrimination in drug enforcement. Tim Blake Nelson plays David Cohen, the ACLU lawyer who sues racist district attorney Calvin Beckett (Michael O’Keefe) on her behalf.
Kelly says the film is "90 percent accurate." The depositions, the courtroom scene in which she fights to retain custody of her children, and many other scenes are word-for-word accounts.
"I'm hoping that somehow, this film is going to get the message out there for someone to look in on this town and other towns that go through the same thing that we go through," Kelly told the Chicago Tribune. "Because something has to happen, and this has to stop."
With this film, Kelly may get her wish. Like Clint Eastwood's magnificent The Changeling (see my review HERE), this tale of a defiant woman's struggle against corrupt law enforcement strikes a universal chord. But unlike The Changeling, American Violet also addresses present-day criminal justice themes of racial profiling and coerced plea bargaining.
Get out and catch it.
The L.A. Times has an informative review HERE. Grits for Breakfast has compiled a list of links to other media reviews. For more information on the true case, see Kelly's website. Or, you can watch Kelly on YouTube. My prior posts on confidential informants are HERE.
Profiling the Drug Wars
DNA science on trial
My least-favorite crime show is CSI. And my least-favorite line in that show is "The science never lies." Talk about a whopper!
With all of the revelations lately about faulty science -- from handwriting identification to fingerprint evidence, ballistics, arson investigation, and even bite marks -- it is reassuring that at least one type of scientific evidence rests on a solid foundation.
That's DNA, of course. After all, as I have heard DNA experts testify many times in court, the likelihood of a wrong DNA match is something along the lines of one in 1.1 million, or less.
But what if that's just one way to run the math? What if you can run it another way, and the odds of a wrong match rise to a whopping one in three? And what if the FBI knows this, and is working feverishly to keep such information hidden from the public and out of the courts?
That is the alarming cover story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes in this month's California Lawyer magazine.
As Humes cogently explains, the problem is not so much with the matching of crime scene DNA to a known suspect. The problem is with the cold cases, when a database spits out a match to an offender who is not already identified as a suspect. The larger the databases get, the greater the odds of a wrong match by pure chance. Especially if the crime scene DNA is degraded, and fewer than the ideal 13 loci (DNA locations) are available for comparison.
This problem was confirmed by a technician at a DNA lab in Arizona back in 2001. Running an experiment by comparing all 60,000 offenders in her state's database, she was shocked to find about 90 coincidental matches. The FBI, unhappy over her disclosure, "began threatening sanctions against crime labs that shared such information with anyone outside of law enforcement," Humes reports.
Experts maintain that wrong matches are becoming more and more inevitable, given the increasing sizes of DNA databases. In California, for example, with the third-largest DNA databank in the world, a new policy of profiling everyone arrested for -- not just convicted of -- a felony is enlarging the database by 35,000 profiles per month.
Donald Kennedy, a former Food and Drug Commissioner who contributed to the recent National Research Council report critiquing the management of government forensic labs, confirmed that the science "is being shut out of court."
That may be forced to change, depending on the outcome of several appeals around the United States. For example, a 71-year-old wheelchair-bound man convicted of a 1972 rape-murder in San Francisco is appealing his conviction on the grounds that the jury was not allowed to hear the alternate statistics. Although John Puckett had other sex offense convictions, only a cold hit to some badly degraded DNA at the crime scene tied him to this one. There were no eyewitnesses, footprints, fingerprints, or confessions. (The case is People v. Puckett, No. A121368, Cal.Ct.App., 1st District, May 1, 2008.)
The National Research Council goes in calling for change. In their February report, they recommend improving reliability and transparency by taking the databases out of the hands of law enforcement and prosecutors entirely.
In the meantime, jurors -- hearing only the cheerleading version of the science -- will keep believing the CSI mantra that the science never lies.
Edward Humes' report in the California Lawyer is online HERE.
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