Why is this controversial?

It is hard to believe that preventing the incarceration of innocent people is controversial. But that is the state of justice in Pennsylvania.

Today the advisory committee on wrongful convictions released its report. Committee chair Professor John Rago of Duquesne University School of Law and committee member Judge William Carpenter of Montgomery County presented the report to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have yet to read the report (it's available here), but Professor Rago and Judge Carpenter talked about some of their recommendations, including blind photo lineups, in which the officer presiding over a witness with a photo lineup does not know who the suspected perpetrator is, and audio and video recording of confessions.

This sounds like common sense. Who in their right mind would accept the incarceration of innocent people? Well, an independent response to the committee's report has been issued by prosecutors, police, and victims' advocates. I have not yet seen that report either, but a reporter tells me that the independent report claims that passing the committee's recommendations will give defense attorneys more room for shenanigans. (Update, 5:50pm: This Associated Press story further explains the position of those who oppose the study and its recommendations.)

Senator Stewart Greenleaf, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the primary sponsor of the 2006 resolution that formed the advisory committee, pre-empted that argument in today's meeting, noting that recording confessions will make it more difficult for defense attorneys to challenge the legitimacy of confessions. He also said that implementing checks to stop wrongful convictions will give appeals attorneys less avenues and will keep guilty people from walking free on the streets.

Opponents of these recommendations need to explain why they fear accountability in the system and why they prefer a system that risks the incarceration of innocent people.

Looming over this, of course, is the imminent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia. No physical evidence links Davis to the murder of Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. Seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted, with some saying that they were coerced by police to identify Davis. Of the remaining two witnesses, one is a possible suspect in the killing.

This morning the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Davis's request for clemency. Davis's execution is scheduled for tomorrow, and the governor has no clemency powers. The state of Georgia is willing to execute a man on no physical evidence and extremely flimsy witness testimony, at a time when the reliability of eyewitness testimony is increasingly called into question.

National ACLU has suggested action steps in response to the board's decision on its blog.

This problem is not isolated to Georgia. There are cases in Pennsylvania that are as weak as Davis's case and as questionable as the case of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania opposes the incarceration of innocent people. Apparently in Pennsylvania, that's a controversial statement.

He's done it again: Pete Shellem frees another innocent man

Extraordinary.

That single word best describes the work of reporter Pete Shellem of The Patriot News. For the fifth time, Pete's investigative work has freed an innocent person from jail. This time it was Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs of Lancaster County, who served five years of a 12-to-40 year sentence for a sexual assault that someone else committed.

Dubbs went free on Wednesday. Today's Patriot News features a commentary by Shellem that addresses this latest miscarriage of justice.

The case first came to my attention when Brown pleaded guilty last November and was sentenced in Dauphin County Court. It came out at that hearing that Brown had confessed to crimes for which Dubbs was wasting away in prison still proclaiming his innocence.

When I asked about it afterward ­- assuming they were going to free an innocent man - I got the exchanged glances, awkward smiles and the "no comments."

It was after that I got the proverbial bug in the ear. The cops figured it was a no-brainer, but Totaro’s office didn’t want to hear it. Maybe it had something to do with the election year.

True, Totaro’s first assistant at the time, Heidi Eakin, pointed out the similarities between the cases. But when members of the task force investigating the serial rapes presented her with Browns’ 60-page confession, she got her back up.

When I interviewed her in May, she was adamant that Dubbs was guilty and called his alibi defense "a joke." She speculated Brown was a copycat who committed 13 subsequent rapes after reading about Dubbs’s arrest and conviction.

Eakin said she specifically told the police not to reinterview the victims. When asked what she was doing to investigate the confession she told me "that’s not my job."

You can read Shellem's original piece from May by clicking here.

The Framers intended for the free press to be a watchdog of the government. It's a relief to know that there is still at least one reporter- Pete Shellem- who takes that role seriously.

Andy in Harrisburg

Withholding evidence doesn't pay, to the tune of $101 mill

Whoa, two people and the estates of two others in Boston were awarded a $101 million judgment for being wrongly convicted and serving nearly 30 years in prison. The FBI sat on documents that would have cleared the men.

I like this:

US Justice Department lawyers have argued that the FBI was not liable because it had no obligation to share internal documents with state prosecutors or defense lawyers, and that the state prosecuted the four men after conducting an independent investigation.

"The government's position is, in a word, absurd," Gertner said. (my bold)

Andy in Harrisburg

Duke lacrosse players get it

When the North Carolina Attorney General announced several months back that all charges would be dropped against the Duke lacrosse players, I heard one radio report that quoted one of the players saying that he knew that he only managed to find justice because his family had the money and that he recognized that there are many people who are done wrong by the criminal justice system because they cannot afford an attorney. I was very impressed by this but didn't hear it again in any of the media coverage.

In a column on June 22, Connie Shultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that the three players- Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann- attended a fundraiser for the Innocence Project on April 24:

They didn't want to talk to reporters, (Eric) Ferrero (of the Innocence Project) said. "We had about 20 exonerees at the dinner, and they [the former Duke students] kept saying the focus should be on those men. They kept mentioning how they would have gone to prison if they hadn't had the money to fight. We were all impressed that they could acknowledge that."

These guys get it. Too often, people don't get it until it affects them personally, but that's why we're out there doing the work we do. And we're grateful for people like Senator Stewart Greenleaf, who created the advisory committee on wrongful convictions; Pete Shellem of The Patriot News, who has freed four innocent people through his investigative journalism; and death row exoneree Ray Krone of York County, who is out there constantly talking with the public and the powers-that-be about how innocent people are convicted of crimes.

Andy in Harrisburg

Back to the beginning

CARLISLE- The last time Juan Melendez was in Carlisle, he was about to start his descent into hell. On May 2, 1984, Melendez, who was then a migrant worker who worked the orchards of Cumberland County, was arrested for a murder someone else committed. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death in Florida.

Last night Melendez returned to Carlisle for the first time since his arrest and told his story to a crowd of more than 70 people at Penn State Dickinson School of Law. The event was co-sponsored by the ACLU chapter at DSL, the Latino/a Law Student Association, the Black Law Student Association, the Amnesty International USA chapter, and Books 2 Prisoners.

Melendez was convicted on the testimony of two "witnesses." One was a police informant, aka a snitch, who claimed that Melendez had confessed to him. The other "witness" was the alleged co-conspirator, who struck a deal to testify against Melendez and was given two years probation.

The trial started on a Monday. By Thursday, Melendez was convicted, and by Friday, he was sentenced to death.

During his talk, he described the conditions on death row. The jail was infested with rats and roaches. Mealtime was always an adventure. Meals were placed in a slot in the cell door, and it was a race to see who could get the food first, the inmate or the rats and roaches.

"Breakfast? Forget it," Melendez said. If you weren't awake to get it, you weren't getting it, he added.

His experience on death row nearly led Melendez to suicide. He was severely depressed and even acquired the materials he needed to hang himself. When he was ready to go forward, he thought, 'I better think about this some more.'

Melendez was exonerated and released in 2002 when his new attorney discovered a taped confession from the real killer. The tape had been in the possession of both the prosecutors and the original defense attorney one month before Melendez's original trial. The judge threw out the conviction and chastised the trial judge, the district attorney, and the original defense attorneys in a 72-page opinion.

"I was not saved by the system," Melendez said. "I was saved in spite of the system."

Last night Melendez was clear about his feelings on the death penalty.

"The worst of all is when the government kills," he said. "Believe me, (more death row prisoners) are innocent."

Melendez encouraged the audience to join him in fighting capital punishment.

"The problem with the death penalty is it's about education," he said. "It's about the details. We've got to teach people about it. We've got to teach them it's cruel. We've got to teach them it's racist. We've got to teach them it's not a deterrent to crime."

The ACLU of PA encourages community groups, schools, and anyone who can possibly do so to host a talk with a death row exoneree. These talks can be arranged through our ally, Witness to Innocence.

Andy in Harrisburg

No question where they stand

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley drew a clear line where he stands on the death penalty in today's WaPo.

In Maryland, since 1978, we have executed five people and set one convicted man free when his innocence was discovered. Are any of us willing to sacrifice a member of our own family -- wrongly convicted, sentenced and executed -- in order to secure the execution of five rightly convicted murders? And even if we were, could that public policy be called "just"? I do not believe it can.

The movement to repeal the death penalty in Maryland is accelerating with hearings today at the state capitol in Annapolis. Gov O'Malley is among the witnesses.

Then there's this powerful op-ed from two women with a Pennsylvania connection. Vicki Schieber's daughter, Shannon, was raped and murdered while she was a grad student at Penn, and Vicki and her husband Sylvester, who are practicing Catholics, opposed the death penalty for Shannon's killer and clashed with Philly DA Lynne Abraham over the issue.

Carolyn Leming of York County nearly lost her son, Ray Krone, to a wrongful execution in Arizona. In 2002, Ray became the 100th person exonerated after spending time on the row when DNA evidence cleared him.

We write as mothers who have been scarred by the death penalty.

Our stories are very different, but they are both stories of justice gone wrong. They are stories that convince us the capital punishment system in Maryland and across the country is broken beyond repair.

Let's recap: New York has an indefinite halt to executions after a state court declared it unconstitutional in 2004. New Jersey has a moratorium and a state commission that studied the issue called for abolition. Maryland is considering repeal. West Virginia has no death penalty. Ohio has an abolitionist governor and an attorney general who has publicly questioned how capital punishment is applied.

And Pennsylvania? Stickin' out like a sore thumb.

Andy in the HBG

Tip of the Hat: Patriot News reporter, Dauphin County DA

A sad story of injustice had a happy ending in Harrisburg on Friday when David Gladden, a man with mental retardation who was wrongly convicted of the murder of a city woman 12 years ago, was released from prison after Dauphin County District Attorney Edward Marsico decided to drop all charges against him.

More often than not, the ACLU and our allies working for some semblance of justice find ourselves at odds with district attorneys, the PA District Attorneys Association, and the Attorney General. Time after time, we have seen DAs who refuse to admit when their office got it wrong and refuse to recognize that an innocent person was convicted. With that in mind, Marsico and his top assistant, ADA Fran Chardo, deserve a round of applause for recognizing the reality of Gladden's wrongful conviction and releasing him after 12 long years of incarceration.

In a story with several heroes, the biggest one is Patriot News reporter Pete Shellem. It was Pete's dogged work that got this ball rolling. Without his series of articles in December 2005, Gladden would just be another case shuffling through the criminal justice system. This is the fourth time that Pete's work has directly led to the release of an innocent person.

And his article in today's paper reminds us that for the exonerated the story continues as they try to adjust to life on the outside.

The homecomings are always surreal...

They were all joyful moments, but in each case I was struck by overwhelming sadness watching these bewildered souls being thrust back into a life from which they were torn when the justice system ran them over.

In a day of media consolidation, declining newspaper circulation, and massive layoffs at some of the state's leading papers, we need reporters like Pete Shellem more than ever.

Andy in Harrisburg