August 20 TEXAS: Pearland woman's killer gets life A Houston jury spared the life of a man who gunned down an interior decorator during a violent crime spree. Lamar Baskin faced either life in prison or the death penalty for the robbery and murder of Laura Higgins. The jury chose life Friday. Defense attorneys had argued that Baskin wasn't eligible for the death penalty because he is mentally deficient. Baskin was convicted 2 weeks ago of killing Higgins, 28, inside her company's southeast Houston warehouse. Baskin is a career criminal who terrorized Houston in the winter of 2002. Investigators suspect Baskin killed at least 1 other woman and raped and robbed at least 7 more. He is also suspected in several robbings in which some victims were shot. Baskin's brother is serving life for capital murder in an unrelated case. (source: KHOU News) ***************************** Kinky Friedman Turns To Politics "I saw miles and miles of Texas, all the stars up in the sky..." sings a well-known Texas music maker. Of all those bright Texas stars, reports Correspondent Lee Cowan on CBS News Sunday Morning, that music maker is one with a mouth like a sailor, a wardrobe like Johnny Cash, and a cigar like Winston Churchill. And he's got cowboys talking and politicians nervous. He's Kinky Friedman, as much a part of the Lone Star state's landscape as cattle and sagebrush, who's now decided the Texas governor's mansion would be a fitting place to hang his hat. Friedman insisted to Cowan that he's "absolutely, very serious" about winning. "We're number one in executions, and we're number 49 in funding public education," Friedman tells Cowan. "I mean, we're lagging behind Mississippi. When you're behind Mississippi, ya know you've got a problem." Freidman chuckled at the thought. And if you think Mississippi was offended, stick around. Friedman has made a career of shooting from the lip. Everything, and everyone, is fair game, Cowan points out. Answering a reporter's question at a recent news conference, Friedman said, "I support gay marriage, because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us!" The line drew laughs. His candidacy may sound like a joke, Cowan observes. He may even look a bit like one at times. But he's counting on a change in attitude in Texas politics, summed up flatly by longtime humorist Molly Ivins this way: "On the matter of Kinky for governor, my response is, why the hell not!" After all, notes Cowan, he does have his positions, and certainly his passions. On education: "Our teachers are getting screwed, blued and tattooed by this system, and our government does not seem to care about what's happening to them." On the death penalty: "I am not anti-death penalty, but I'm damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting executed." He's even got a pretty clear fiscal policy: "Before he died, an accountant asked my father what are you financial goals? And he said, 'My financial goals are for my last check to bounce!'" Friedman laughed, "And that's pretty much my financial abilities, too." Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith, who allows Friedman a column every month, says it may well be the most interesting campaign Texas has seen in years. > "He speaks his mind," Smith remarks. "He is proud to be politically incorrect. He offends people almost as a matter of chemicals in his body. He can't help himself." And some voters can't seem to get enough of it. While Cowan was there, the phone rang off the hook with strangers offering campaign slogans. "Got a new campaign slogan," Friedman laughed. "'Kinky Friedman, he never broke his word to the Indians.'" "You getting a lot of suggestions like that?" Cowan asked. "Yeah," Friedman responded. "That's not a bad one. Never broke my word to the Indians. That's true. That's absolutely true! Oh, Lord." He invited Cowan out to his boyhood ranch in the Texas Hill Country, where he lives with his four dogs, who he lovingly calls "The Friedmans." He was cooking bacon for them when Cowan arrived. Quite frankly, Cowan concedes, he expected a day full of entertaining one-liners, but ones largely empty on substance. But, Cowan adds, he found someone much different.Friedman says the ranch "is the place where I learned, where I learned to ride and to shoot straight, and to tell the truth." He's actually someone oddly serious, Cowan observes, who's devoted much of his adult life to offering second chances. At the Utopia Rescue Ranch, he's saved more than 1,000 dogs and cats from being euthanized, strays who now live on his ranch until they're adopted. Nancy Parker, who runs the place, says what donations don't cover, Friedman pays for out of his own pocket: "That guy, besides rescuing animals, he will not tell you this, but he rescues people. And he's rescued more than you could imagine." But Friedman's under no illusions that a big heart may not be received very well in the world of big politics. He admits his candidacy is "a long shot, sure. It's Don Quixote. No question about it. But we picked a big enemy. The enemy is not the governor. The enemy is the whole system, the whole paper, plastic, same old, politics as usual. If you're tired of that, you vote for Kinky." Friedman does move to a different beat, Cowan says, no doubt about it, in more ways than one. If you've already heard of Friedman, it's probably because of his music. Some call it country, some call it satire, a lot of people call it distasteful. His song, "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore" raised as many eyebrows as it got toes tapping. The only thing that seemed to irritate people more was the name of his band: Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew Boys. He even jokingly compared himself to Jesus on stage: "Neither of us actually held a job during our lives. We both just traveled the countryside basically irritating people." That line got laughs. Says columnist Ivins: "He's exactly who he says he is. He is a Texas Jew Boy. And he's just as Jewish as he is Texan, and there's no contradiction." His father, Tom Friedman, once said that he wasn't too fond of the "Jew Boys" name his son chose for the band, but he says, it did exactly what Kinky wanted it to do...shock people. "I said," Tom Friedman recalled, "that's a terrible name. It's a negative, hostile, peculiar thing, and if you called somebody that, it would be an insult. He said, 'That's great. That's what I wanted.'" Which, it seemed, he wanted with his lyrics too. There were ones such as, "You uppity women I don't understand, why you have to go and act like a man." "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed" offended a lot of women, but sold a lot of albums. Friedman soon grew a cult following. Tens of thousands wanted to "get Kinky." Among them, Willie Nelson. They did several songs together, traveled together, and he remains one of Friedman's confidants. In fact, Friedman has promised Nelson a job in the governor's mansion if he's elected. But, says Cowan, Friedman's fan base really grew when he really started writing. Not lyrics. But books, mystery novels, with himself as the main character. "It's a lotta books," Friedman said to Cowan. "I can't believe I wrote all this stuff." Everything from, "The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover" to "Road Kill," a murder mystery about his travels with Nelson, which made it on the New York Times bestsellers list. There were nearly 2 dozen comic mysteries in all which, Cowan notes, attracted a whole new following, most notably Bill Clinton, who liked Friedman so much he invited him to the White House. And Mr. Clinton says Friedman rewarded him with a gift: "We're standing in this huge crowd, and Kinky Friedman pulls out this Cuban cigar, which is still illegal in America you know, and he said, 'I want you to have this, Mr. President.' I said, 'Do you know what you're doing to me?' "Everyone is looking at me. There's like 50 or 60 people staring around. He says, 'Don't think about it as helping their economy, think of it as burning their fields.' And the whole crowd just cracked up." Next month, Simon and Schuster, a subsidiary of Viacom which also owns CBS, will release "Ten Little New Yorkers." It will be Friedman's 18th and last novel. He'll be trading in book tours for campaign stops or, as he likes to say it, literature's loss will be politics' gain. But those closest to him worry his sarcastic wit, irreverent gestures, and distain for being politically correct may overshadow the man they know. Friends such as fellow composer Billie Joe Shaver know it's probably going to get ugly, quickly: "The political people are going to throw hardballs and curves and all kind of things at him, and trash, and anything you can think of." "And," asked Cowan, "are you guys ready for that?" "Of course," says Shaver. "It happens all the time. They throw tomatoes at him on his own stage anyway!" Shaver laughed. So, comments Cowan, say what you will about Friedman's sense of music, his timing, his dress, his manners, his politics, even his cigar. He is what he is, and even if he doesn't win, he's certainly going to have an impact. "It would be a marvelous way to make some really effective points about the inanity of the political process, the stupidity of the speeches one repeatedly hears, and the lack of real ideas in Texas government," Ivins says. "It would just be a ball!" Editor Smith chimes in that, "Kinky is not plastic. Kinky is real. And at a very gut level, he connects with those people. And I think, whether it's Willie Nelson and Dwight Yoakam or the man on the street in some small town, Kinky speaks to them. And that's why he ultimately cannot be written off." "I wanna do the best I can for the people of Texas," Friedman asserts, "and I want that to be in a place that's above politics. That's a beautiful place if we can find it, and I think we can." And perhaps, Cowan speculates, nowhere is that more likely than somewhere in the vast elbowroom of Texas. As the song goes, "I saw miles and miles of Texas, gonna live here 'til I die, all right!" (source: CBS News) USA: State Justices Defend Attorney-Client Privilege ---- Judges also speak out for habeas rights, innocence projects Threats to attorney-client privilege, federal habeas corpus rights and the need to improve procedures for hearing post-conviction claims of innocence were some of the topics that top state high court judges and top court administrators addressed at their recent annual meeting. Wisconsin Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson, the outgoing president of the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) -- one of the 3 organizations that gathered -- said that many of their joint resolutions were of critical importance to the courts and the public. "We dealt with issues at the heart of our justice system," she said, describing the July 30-Aug. 3 joint meeting in Charleston, S.C., of the CCJ and the Conference of State Court Administrators. Noting that "some law enforcement and regulatory authorities" had adopted policies that could erode the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine, a resolution said that the concern for corporate integrity does not override the "confidential relationship between attorney and client." The newly installed CCJ president, Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard, observed that because pressure to waive the privilege occurred outside the court's presence, many judges were unaware that a defendant was subjected to it. "Being able to talk candidly to your lawyer is a good thing," Shepard said. "It's not only good for the legal interest of the client but it also benefits third parties by preventing violations from ever happening." Regarding habeas procedures, the resolution notes that legislation pending in both houses of Congress could severely curtail federal habeas review of state convictions. The resolution, among other things, urges Congress to consider other "targeted methods [to] ameliorate ... documented problems" rather than deprive the "federal courts of their traditional jurisdiction without more supporting evidence." Noting that litigation engendered by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 was just now subsiding, Shepard urged Congress to be cautious. "The extent of public examination of these new provisions has been far too brief," he said. Recognizing that "innocence projects and commissions [had identified] and demonstrate[d] methods of improving reliability" of convictions, the conferences resolved to improve "appropriate procedures for hearing and considering post- conviction claims of innocence," and to support public officials' efforts to prevent wrongful convictions. Louisiana Chief Justice Pascal F. Calogero Jr. said the point of the innocence projects resolution was "to increase reliability and accountability and thereby public confidence in the criminal justice system." Other joint resolutions that came out of the conference: - Urging Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and to make it stronger. - Asking Congress for funding for court security. - Encouraging each of its members to provide leadership in eliminating racial and ethnic bias in its courts. - Resolving to develop court-performance measures to promote "prompt and efficient case administration, public access and service, equity and fairness." (source : The National Law Journal) ******************************* Revisiting capital punishment Recent statements on capital punishment by John Paul Stevens, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, to the American Bar Association could reignite the debate on this important issue. His statements followed several exonerations of death-row inmates through scientific evidence. He said these exonerations are significant "not only because of their relevance to the debate about the wisdom of continuing to administer capital punishment but also because they indicate that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice." Stevens made these statements in his home state of Illinois, where controversy flared in 2000 following a series of wrongful convictions that had led then-Gov. George Ryan to halt all executions. Stevens' statements also come at a time when some conservative lawmakers and members of the judiciary are concerned about a series of overturned convictions and public perception of unfairness in the application of the law. The American Bar Association has repeatedly called for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty on the grounds that the risk of convicting, condemning and executing the innocent is too high, that in some cases incompetent lawyers are provided to the defendants, and on the prevalence of race discrimination. According to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington DC, since 1973, 119 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. DNA testing has proven to be an extremely useful tool in this regard, and has shown significant flaws in the administration of capital punishment. In Texas, which has the unenviable position of being the state that has carried out the most executions, 3 defendants were condemned to death while their lawyers slept during their trials. In all 3 cases the convictions and death sentences were upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. As Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, remarked at the time, "This gives a new meaning to the idea of a 'dream team.'" In addition, there are several instances of misconduct by law enforcement officials, including investigatory mistakes, coerced confessions and other similar behaviors. In 1999, a Chicago Tribune article reported how prosecutors stood silent while informants lied in court -- a situation that has resulted several times in the reversal of death-penalty convictions. It has been argued that the death penalty deters homicide. However, levels of poverty have proven to be more closely connected to violent-crimes rates than other factors. Most criminologists reject the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. Texas, which has the highest number of executions in the country, has among the highest rates of violent crime. According to statistics, minorities are far more likely than whites to be imprisoned, condemned to death and wrongfully convicted. At the national level, prosecutors are more prone to request the death penalty and juries are more likely to impose it in those cases where the victim is white or the defendant is black. As professor Jeffrey Pokorak has indicated, 98 % of the chief district attorneys in death-penalty states are white; only 1 % are black. A Justice Department study showed that minorities made up 75 % of the defendants for whom federal prosecutors sought the death penalty between 1995 and 1999. As professor Stephen B. Bright has stated, "Waging a war on crime has led us to tolerate gross racial discrimination in the criminal justice system that would not be tolerated in any other area of American life." By his remarks, Judge Stevens has made capital punishment an issue of current politics -- not a legal abstraction or an issue of progressive jurisprudence. His statements give the death-penalty debate an undeniable momentum, one that may hopefully lead to the abolition of this barbaric measure. (source: Japan Times - Cesar Chelala, M.D., writes extensively on human-rights issues.) VIRGINIA: For justice to prevail, prosecution must be just There is this wrong-headed notion in Virginia that, if we could just get better-paid criminal defense lawyers with more administrative and investigative resources, we would have criminal justice. That's just not the case. Assuring the accused of a decent defense in Virginia is but a small part of the failure of our so-called criminal justice system. We are convicting innocent people in Virginia because of false eyewitness testimony, false confessions, over-eager snitches, faulty forensics, bad defense lawyers but also, and this is the worst of all, because of prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct. In this last category, what we often mean by misconduct is that the government is concealing or destroying evidence that is exclusively within its possession that demonstrates, or tends to demonstrate, that the accused is innocent or his accusers are not reliable. The commonwealth will fight to hold onto its information, keep it confidential from the accused, even at the risk of convicting the innocent. When I was a puppy prosecutor and other prosecutors would ask my advice as to whether they should turn over evidence to the defense counsel, I'd ask why they were asking the question. It must have been, so I thought, that the information might tend to help the accused and, consciously or not, that these eager advocates -- my colleagues -- were reluctant to yield that advantage. I always thought the impetus for such questions led to only 1 obvious answer -- that the information must be handed over. The best defense lawyer in the nation, ignorant of a client's factual innocence because the commonwealth is sitting on the evidence of his innocence, is helpless to save his client from prison or death row. We know that the innocent have been convicted in Virginia because DNA evidence now allows us to exclude individuals as suspects in crimes -- if the DNA evidence has been preserved. Arthur Lee Whitfield spent 22 years in prison for the double rape of 2 women in Norfolk within the same hour. Both women positively identified him. Whitfield pleaded guilty to one of the charges to get a lesser sentence. The commonwealth had destroyed the DNA. But one serologist had violated lab protocol and saved a sample that exonerated Whitfield and implicated another prison inmate for the crime. Former Independent Counsel Ken Starr is now fighting to save the life of death-row inmate Robin Lovitt, who is charged with killing an Arlington pool hall manager with a pair of scissors. DNA analysis of the scissors failed to link Lovitt to the murder. Starr has raised serious questions about the evidence, relying on an independent audit of the state crime lab that revealed it was wrong in the case of another death-row inmate. But the court clerk has since destroyed the scissors, precluding further DNA examinations. Will the Supreme Court release Lovitt for execution in October when it reconvenes? Or question the destruction of this critical evidence? We must reform a system that provides less information to a person accused of a crime than a party would get if sued for a $200 bad debt in civil court. And we must reform the notion that a criminal prosecution is some sort of sport that is all about winning a conviction, rather than doing justice. I was instructed when sworn in as a federal prosecutor of the enormous power that had been delegated, that it could destroy an individual's life with a misspent word, and was further instructed, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland: "The [Prosecuting] Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor -- indeed, he should do so. But while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction, as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one." (source: Editorial, Roanoke Times ---- John P. Flannery, of Lovettsville, is a former federal prosecutor, former director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and former special counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.) PENNSYLVANIA: Death sentence: Why not?----Some convicted killers will never face the death penalty in a courtroom. Many people wonder why that is. Local prosecutors say the issue just isn't that simple. 3 people were tortured before they died. 2 victims were murdered just so they couldnt testify in court. 4 other people were intentionally murdered after their killers committed other serious crimes. Now, 7 Lancaster County men are on death row: Orlando Baez and Landon May, who tortured their victims; Francis Harris and Kevin Dowling, who killed witnesses; Robert Zook, a burglar; and Tedor Davido and Freeman May, who raped or tried to rape their victims. But not all violent crimes end in a death sentence. With last weeks announcement that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty against the man accused of killing Cortney Fry, some asked why. Why would the district attorney not seek death for someone who allegedly had a history of domestic violence with the victim and who police said killed the young mother of a 2-week-old baby, tossed her body out a window and then set her on fire? The answer is in Pennsylvanias death penalty law. The law is written so that the death penalty is not imposed randomly. First, a person must be convicted of 1st-degree murder - an intentional killing. Then at least one of 18 specified aggravated circumstances must be present before prosecutors can ask that the death penalty be imposed. If none of those aggravated circumstances is present, the penalty is life in prison without parole. "In any case where an aggravating circumstance exists," said Lancaster County District Attorney Donald Totaro, "our office files a notice of intent to seek a sentence of death, which then allows the jury to determine the appropriate sentence." Totaro said seeking the death penalty every time its appropriate avoids accusations from defense attorneys "that we arbitrarily discriminate for or against certain defendants." But, Totaro continued, "we do take into consideration other factors...While certain homicides may qualify for the death penalty, we have been faced with situations where family members of victims have expressed a preference for a life sentence rather than death." "Some want a guaranteed guilty plea to life in prison, believing that is worse than a sentence of death. Some have stated they have religious reasons for opposing the death penalty. There are also those who dont want to deal with a lengthy trial and many years of appeals. "Our office gives great deference to the wishes of crime victims and their families," Totaro said. In the Cortney Fry case, prosecutors said, none of the specified aggravating circumstances is present in the young Columbia womans case. If new evidence of aggravating circumstances is revealed, Assistant District Attorney Christopher Hackman said last week, prosecutors may change their position. Not only must there be at least one aggravating circumstance, but the jury must decide if it outweighs any mitigating circumstances. Mitigating circumstances include such things as the defendants age, a lack of significant prior criminal history, an impaired ability to appreciate that actions are criminal, or actions taken under extreme mental or emotional disturbance. Aggravating circumstances are more specific. - If, in the cases of Harris and Dowling, the victim was a prosecution witness to a serious crime committed by the defendant and was killed for the purpose of preventing his or her testimony in court - that is an aggravating circumstance. Daryl Martin, a 22-year-old store clerk who lived with his mother, had witnessed Harris, now 38, assault a woman and was scheduled to testify against him in court. Before that could happen, Martin was lured to a Columbia Avenue restaurant and murdered in the parking lot in 1997. Jennifer Myers, a York County shopkeeper and the mother of 2 young boys, had been robbed and sexually assaulted in 1996 by Dowling, of East Petersburg, who is now 47. The day before she was to testify against him the following year, she was murdered. - If, as in the case of Zook, now 45, the defendant committed a killing while in the perpetration of a felony, specifically burglary, that is an aggravating circumstance. Since Zook killed two people, he was sentenced to death twice. Paul Conard, 55, and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Sandra Wiker, were bound and gagged before Zook and his friends killed them in Conards North Queen Street typewriter repair shop during a burglary in 1985. The elder May, now 57, also was sentenced to death for killing during a felony crime, in his case, attempted rape. May was arrested and convicted for taking 2 Lancaster County girls to a wooded area of Lebanon County in December 1982 where he raped one and stabbed both. They survived. Six years later, the skeletal remains of another Lancaster woman, Kathy Lynn Fair - who had been missing since September 1982 were discovered in the same Lebanon County location. May was convicted and sentenced to death for her murder and attempted rape. Davido, now 29, was convicted of raping and killing his estranged girlfriend, Angelina Taylor, in the Lancaster City home they shared in 2000. - If, as in the case of Baez, now 44, and the younger May, now 23, each tortured their victims before killing them, that is an aggravating circumstance. Baez was sentenced to death for torturing Janice "Sissy" Williams in 1987. Police said she was also raped and beaten. Williams would have been alive and conscious, prosecutors said, while she was stabbed more than 80 times. Her small children, who were in the next room during her murder, were left alone with the body. The younger May was sentenced to death for torturing Terry Smith and sexually assaulting Lucy Smith before killing them while burglarizing the couples Ephrata home in 2001. Police said he bound his victims with duct tape, then stabbed, shot and suffocated the couple. The torture, along with the sexual assault of Mrs. Smith, were considered 2 aggravating circumstances in Mays case. In an unusual twist, 1 of the mitigating arguments the younger May used in his defense was that his father is already on death row. - A contract killing, whether the person paid someone else or was paid to kill someone else. In Lancaster County, Roderick Frey, now 68, was sentenced to death for hiring a man to kill his estranged wife, Barbara Jean, in 1979. In 1997, the state appeals court decided the judges instructions to the jury were ambiguous and changed his sentence to life in prison without parole, like the sentence of the two men convicted of killing the woman. - If the defendant was the subject of a protection from abuse court order restricting his behavior. In 1998, Leroy Stallworth, now 31, was sentenced to death for gunning down his estranged wife, Natasha Turner-Stallworth, in her Lancaster City home. But the sentence was later changed to life in prison when the state appeals court said that Stallworth had not received notice of the PFA, so it could not be used as an aggravated circumstance. - In a pending homicide case, Christina Colon, of Lancaster, was 5 months pregnant when she was found murdered in a York County quarry last summer. Her boyfriend, Damien Schlager, is awaiting trial in the case and prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty. A victims pregnancy is an aggravating circumstance under the law. - Other aggravating circumstances that can be used include whether the victim was a law enforcement officer or someone else in authority and killed in the line of duty; If the victim was under 12, a government informant, a hostage, or was killed while the defendant was hijacking an aircraft; If the killing was connected to a drug deal or placed someone, in addition to the victim, at risk of death; If the defendant has a significant history of felony convictions involving violence; If the defendant had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, murder, or any other crime in which the sentence could have been life in prison. Each death penalty case is automatically and carefully reviewed by the state Supreme Court. There are currently 218 men and women on Pennsylvanias death row. The last person executed in the state, by lethal injection, was in 1999. (source: Lancaster New Era) ILLINOIS/VIRGINIA: Mistakes by state DNA firm alleged----The Illinois State Police, 'outraged' by findings, end their contract with the firm The Illinois State Police broke a $7 million contract with a Virginia DNA testing firm yesterday, alleging it committed serious errors. The Virginia firm, Bode Technology Group of Springfield, calls itself the largest forensic DNA company in the nation. It performs work for the Virginia Department of Forensic Science and developed the DNA profiles of some 160,000 felons for the Virginia DNA database. At least 10 other states and the U.S. Department of Justice have hired Bode to perform DNA work, Illinois State Police says. The state police says Bode reported it found no sperm in 1,200 of the biological samples Illinois sent to the company. However, when the state police looked at a sample of 51 of those 1,200 cases, it found sperm present in 11 of them, it said. Illinois authorities did not allege Bode incorrectly identified someone as a suspect in a crime. Instead, they said, Bode failed to recognize the existence of semen that could then have been subjected to DNA testing. Now, the Illinois authorities say, they must retest all 1,200 samples. Dr. Kevin McElfresh, executive director of Bode, said in a prepared statement that the company is disappointed by the Illinois State Police decision. Illinois authorities said their 3-year contract with Bode was for both DNA casework and older methods of biological identification testing. McElfresh said yesterday that the Illinois complaint does not involve DNA testing. "Rather, the dispute is over the state's reliance on an older methodology known as serology that requires a person to see a sperm cell under a microscope instead of using the more prevalent, highly accurate DNA test which Bode recommended," he said. In Virginia, Bode developed the DNA profiles of some 160,000 criminals for the state's DNA data base and is currently conducting DNA testing of 31 old Virginia cases that had not undergone such testing before. None of them involve sperm searches. Virginia's DNA databank, which now holds the profiles of more than 236,000 criminals and arrestees, is searched by computer in criminal cases where DNA evidence has been recovered. If the evidence matches someone's DNA profile in the database, that person may then be considered a suspect in the new crime. Paul B. Ferrara, director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, said yesterday that Virginia has never contracted with Bode to perform criminal-case work. "We have always elected to keep crime-scene evidence in-house," he said. Ferrara said he had no reason to question the quality of the work performed by Bode on the 160,000 DNA databank profiles. "We reviewed all their work before entering data into the system. Very extensive quality control was required by the contract," he said. That included the blind testing of random samples. However, Betty Layne DesPortes, chairwoman of the jurisprudence section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, said the errors reported by Illinois authorities involved fundamental laboratory work: "the recognition and identification of biological fluids." "If the laboratory's internal quality control procedures are disabled, the laboratory cannot be trusted to provide reliable results," said DesPortes, who is also a Richmond-area defense attorney. Because the U.S. Justice Department and other states use Bode for DNA work, Larry Trent, director of the Illinois State Police, wrote letters to law enforcement officials in the 49 other states about what his state had discovered. "We will not tolerate errors in this type of work. I am outraged that a company with their reputation would conduct business in this manner, and we're not going to let them get away with it," Trent said yesterday in a prepared statement. Bode and the Virginia state lab have worked closely together over the years. In a 1999 Internet promotion from a company that manufactures DNA testing technology, McElfresh noted Bode's 1998 contract with Virginia to run tests on the 160,000 databank samples. "There is a fundamentally close relationship between [Bode] and the state. Because the commonwealth of Virginia considers The Bode Technology Group to be an extension of the Virginia laboratory, it makes the relationship work quite successfully," he said. Gov. Mark R. Warner recently appointed McElfresh to the newly created, 13-person scientific advisory committee for the Virginia Department of Forensic Science. The committee was created in the wake of an independent study that found errors in testing performed by the then Virginia division of Forensic Science in the case of former death-row inmate Earl Washington Jr. The discovery of those errors this year led to an independent review of more than 160 other DNA cases handled by the state lab. That review is still in progress. Washington was nearly executed for a 1982 rape and capital murder in Culpeper. State DNA testing in 1993 and in 2000 led to his pardon and implicated a convicted rapist now in prison for another rape. DesPortes said the problem allegedly identified by Illinois is the same problem found by independent auditors in the Washington case -- errors were made analyzing the evidence, and the state lab failed to recognize and correct the errors. Bode has enjoyed a high reputation. In 1991, the company began DNA testing for the military to identify the remains of servicemen and servicewomen killed in Vietnam, Korea and World War II. In 1998, the company identified the remains of the Vietnam War's unknown soldier. The company also worked to help identify the remains of those killed in the World Trade Center attacks. (source: Richmond Times-Dispatch)
