Congressional lawmakers have proposed legislation that would create federal grants to establish forensic science standards in an effort to reduce wrongful convictions. The Forensic Science and Standards Act is sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. The…
LaMonte Armstrong is trying to put his life back together. However, freedom has not come easily. Armstrong was released at the end of June after a judge threw out his murder conviction due to prosecutorial misconduct. He was originally implicated…
An Alameda County Grand Jury has found serious problems with the Oakland Police Department’s (OPD) crime lab. The report details a huge backlog of evidence waiting to be tested, inadequate facilities, and a severe staffing shortage. In 2011, the Forensics…
Along with the known causes of wrongful conviction of mistaken eyewitness identification, jailhouse informants, and faulty scientific evidence, Florida’s Innocence Commission has added a new leading cause: lack of adequate funding. In its 171-page final report, the 23-member commission said…
Marcus Lyons was wrongly convicted of rape in 1987. He was later exonerated through DNA evidence in 2007, received a full pardon in 2008 and last month he received a $5 million settlement from the town of Woodbridge for his…
Here is a link to Sussex Commons Associates, LLC v. Rutgers, today’s decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court concluding that the Rutgers Environmental Litigation Clinic is not required to disclose client-related documents, clinical case files, or information about the…
Compensation for wrongful conviction is already hard to obtain in many states but a bill recently passed by the North Carolina state legislature places even more obstacles in front of exonerees who have already endured so much harm. The new…
In an editorial in the Albany Times Union, the editorial board calls for the New York legislature to finally pass bills aimed at protecting defendants from wrongful conviction. “For all the law-and-order bills that move through legislatures like New York’s…
Larry Sims’s rape conviction was overturned last year after serving more than 24 years in prison for a crime that most likely never happened. But what he really wanted was to be declared actually innocent. Sadly, Sims died earlier this…
This conference is a follow-on to our successful Fall 2011 conference, Defense 2.0: New Strategies for Patent Risks. This time, we’ll focus on software patents and how to address the problems they create. Developments involving software patents regularly make headline…