ATTORNEYS FOR the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court. This position is alien to the history and premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which assumes that opposing lawyers will challenge one another's arguments.
Ahmed Abu Ali was arrested in June 2003 in Saudi Arabia. He and his family claim the arrest took place at the behest of U.S. officials who, though unable to bring a case against him, have encouraged the Saudis to keep him locked up. The facts are murky, and Judge John D. Bates refused in December to dismiss the case, writing that he needed more information before he could decide whether a U.S. court has jurisdiction.
Since then, the U.S. government has acted to frustrate all reasonable searches for answers. It has moved to stay discovery based on secret evidence. It has proposed adding to the facts at Judge Bates's disposal by submitting secret evidence that Mr. Abu Ali's attorneys would have no opportunity to challenge. Most recently, it urged that the case be dismissed on the basis, yet again, of secret evidence -- this time supplemented with what a Justice Department lawyer termed "legal argument [that] itself cannot be made public without disclosing the classified information that underlies it."
Judge Bates is cautious and generally deferential to government concerns. Yet he was evidently disturbed by this argument, at one point asking whether the government could identify "any case in which . . . even the legal theory for dismissal is not known to the other side?" The government could not....
So now the government is stating not only that it should be entitled to have US citizens arrested using secret evidence, but using a legal argument that itself is so secret that they can't tell the opposing counsel what they're arguing.
Seriously, what on earth does the government think it's doing? That argument wouldn't fly in the most right-wing, deferential court in the land. (Perhaps especially not in a right-wing court, as the right-wing tends to be a tad tetchy about government interference in most things.)
What will be interesting to see is what happens once the government has a judgement against it, as is almost inevitable in this case. There will be appeals, of course; this administration does not accept loss. But surely, even if he'd known anything, at this late date, there's no useful information that Ali could have. Assuming that he was somehow affiliated with a terrorist group, anything he knew couldn't be used in evidence against him at trial; it would be irretrievably contaminated by the torture he's undergone in Saudi Arabia's prisons. There is simply no point in the government continuing with this case, except to establish the principle that it is within their purview to capture and torture American citizens at their whim.
The administration will, of course, capture and torture anyone it pleases. We can only hope that the courts will deny it any semblance of legality, and eventually, a sane administration may replace this one.
(Previous entry on this topic: American Gulag, January 3 2005)
Posted by iain at 12:17 PM
The British papers are ever so encouraging today.
Papers reveal Bagram abuse
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and James Meek
Friday February 18, 2005
The Guardian
New evidence has emerged that US forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking "trophy photographs" of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation.
Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation near the southern city of Kandahar. The documents also indicate that US soldiers covered up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq - even after the Abu Ghraib scandal last year.
A thousand pages of evidence from US army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.
Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents show....In a separate case, which the Guardian reveals today, two former prisoners of the US in Afghanistan have come forward with claims against their American captors.
In sworn affidavits to a British-American human rights lawyer, a Palestinian says he was sodomised by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Another former prisoner of US forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days.
Both men were freed from US detention last year after being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Neither has been charged by any government with any offence.
I should think that the soldiers involved would have destroyed photographs after Abu Ghraib, yes. I'm certainly not saying that it was the right thing to do; however, it's certainly what one would do in the interest of self preservation.
Mind, one wonders at the mental process of people who not only torture, but then take pictures of it. I can see how showing them to the person being tortured would be even more mental torture piled on to the rest of it -- "Oh, look! here's a picture of you having all these wonderful things being done to you, and we'll be showing them to your relatives now!" -- but why would you keep them? Why would you want to look at them? Why would you be proud of all this?
A British resident has been blinded in one eye by American military police at Guantanamo Bay, his lawyer claimed today.
Omar Deghayes' family appealed for the British Government to intervene and secure his release, almost 25 years to the day since his father was assassinated by Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya.
Mr Deghayes mother Zohra Zewawi, from Brighton, wept as lawyer Clive Stafford Smith described the injuries the detainee has allegedly suffered at the Cuban base.
"In March 2004 the Emergency Reaction Force in Camp Delta came into his cell," he said.
"They brought their pepper spray and held him down.
"They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes. Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks but he gradually got sight back in one eye. He's totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky - he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the US in Guantanamo."
Mr Stafford Smith added that one of the officers also pushed his finger into Mr Deghayes' eye. It was a combination of the pepper spray and the gouging which led to loss of his sight, the lawyer claimed. [...] The lawyer's statement describes other incidents in which Mr Deghayes was abused in Guantanamo. In one case another prisoner's faeces was smeared on Mr Deghayes' face by one of the officers. Mr Stafford Smith said his client had also had his head pushed in the toilet by US guards, in a separate incident he was kneed in the nose and slammed face down on the concrete surface of a recreation yard.
But the British papers aren't the only ones having all the fun these days, oh no no no!
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 18, 2005; Page A16
Members of an Army Special Forces unit allegedly punched, slapped, kicked and beat Afghan civilians in two villages southeast of the capital of Kabul last May, prompting official complaints from two senior Army psychological operations officers who were present and said they witnessed the incidents.
The allegation is detailed in internal Army criminal files, released yesterday, that also document other allegations of abuse in Afghanistan as recent as last year. Previous abuse allegations have mostly concerned U.S. military activities in Iraq in 2003; these documents detail parallel conduct in Afghanistan in 2004. In one strikingly similar event, the Army last year found about half a dozen photographs that depict masked U.S. soldiers standing with their weapons pointed at the heads of handcuffed and hooded or blindfolded detainees at a base in southern Afghanistan and, in one case, pressing a detainee's head against the wall of a "cage" where he was brought for interrogation.
The photographs were found on a compact disc left in one of the unit's offices, and the discovery set off a lengthy search by the Army for additional copies in the cars, homes, barracks, computers and cameras of members of the unit, part of the 22nd Infantry Regiment based in Fort Drum, N.Y.
None of the photos have been published -- unlike a set of photos the news media obtained last summer depicting similar acts of abuse and humiliation in Iraq -- and an Army spokesman said yesterday that they are being withheld from release "to protect the privacy" of the Afghan victims....
"To protect the privacy of the Afghan victims" ... well. Yes. Quite. That it also prevents the public from seeing US soldiers conducting such viscerally revolting actions is just the lagniappe, isn't it?
OUTSOURCING TORTURE
by JANE MAYER
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07
On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.” [...] Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition—becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, “an abomination.” What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects—people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants—came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms “illegal enemy combatants.” Many of them have never been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to obtain. “I’ve asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers,” he said. “They refuse to answer. All they will say is that they’re in compliance with the law.” [...] The extraordinary-rendition program bears little relation to the system of due process afforded suspects in crimes in America. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. This jet, which has been registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing, of Portland, Oregon, has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts. [...] Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, “shock the conscience” of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world....
New Twist In Terror Justice
Andrew Cohen
CBSNews.com
Feb. 18, 2005
"Extraordinary rendition" sounds like a phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan or Charles Dickens. But it is a controversial legal concept that is moving quickly to the front-burner of the legal and political world. Never mind the ongoing fight over the rights of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, the intensifying debate over the constitutional propriety of extraordinary rendition already looms as the most important battle of the year in the legal war on terrorism.
Thanks mainly to the fine work of journalist Jane Mayer in the last issue of The New Yorker magazine, more and more people, including important lawmakers, are paying closer attention to the government policy wherein terror suspects are transferred from U.S. control into the control of foreign governments, so that interrogation methods that are not permitted under U.S. law may be applied to the suspects. In other words, when our government decides that a particular suspect may have information that is of particular use, and that this information must be obtained quickly, it farms the suspect out to governments that permit, or at least do not explicitly outlaw, torture. And apparently it does this despite a 1998 law that seems to prohibit the practice. [...] Now, apparently, the CIA itself is "seeking to scale back its role as interrogator and custodian of terrorist leaders who are being held without charges in secret sites around the world." In part, the Times' article reports, the CIA's change of tack is motivated by increasingly shaky legal support for the detentions, especially in the wake of the two terror-case rulings last June by the United States Supreme Court which recognized certain due process rights for detainees. Those landmark rulings – in which the justices famously told the president that "a state of war is not a blank check" – have spawned several lower court rulings that slowly but surely are stemming executive branch control over terror suspects. [...] But it isn't just the genuine (and warranted) fear of bad results in court that has intelligence officials and lawmakers looking to change its dynamic when it comes to detention, interrogation, and rendition. The CIA's newfound interest in washing its hands of these men also stems from practical considerations as well, the Times and others have reported. Many of the terror suspects they are holding now no longer have much intelligence value, yet they are still unlikely ever to be turned over to any prosecutor for trial. It's unclear whether they ever have committed any domestic crimes and, even if they did, the interrogation methods they purportedly endured surely would generate heartburn for federal judges. Now that they may have been tortured, in other words, they very likely cannot be successfully prosecuted....
There is one theoretically bright spot regarding torture in recent news:
Slamming the government for shipping terror suspects like former Framingham resident Maher Arar to nations known to use torture, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey filed legislation to outlaw such extraordinary rendition. "Extraordinary rendition is outsourcing torture, and it is morally repugnant to allow such a practice to continue," said Markey, D-7th. His proposed bill would direct the U.S. State Department to compile a list of countries that commonly torture and degrade suspects during interrogation and detention and then prohibit U.S. officials from sending suspects there.
Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian resident born in Syria, said U.S. officials nabbed him in a New York airport as a presumed al Qaeda terrorist in October 2002 and sent him to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months. He was never charged with a crime and is suing the United States for violating laws including the Torture Victim Protection Act.
The legislation Markey filed yesterday still would permit legal treaty-based extradition, in which suspects can appeal in court to block their extradition because of a likelihood they would be tortured or treated inhumanely. [...] Markey, a senior member of the Homeland Security Committee, has not been able to determine how many other terror suspects have been subjected to extraordinary rendition by the Bush Administration.
This is only a theoretically bright spot for a few reasons.
First, the bill will never pass. The House leadership will likely quietly table the bill or send it into some committee where it will die a quiet, unnoticed death. The House leadership will do this at the quiet request of the White House, which wants to keep its options legally open without being seen to do so. If the bill were to proceed to debate, the White House would then be required to state, on the record, again, that they think that torture is just peachy-keen, thanks, and they really really like being able to do stuff like that, because it deters US citizens from even thinking about protesting against their government! (What? You thought this was meant to send a message to foreign terrorists? How? They thought that this was what the US was like in the first place. And if you're determined to martyr yourself, it scarcely matters to your audience if you do it by blowing yourself up, getting yourself killed, or getting yourself captured by the Great Satan. The only people this message can possibly be meant for is us.)
Second, if, by some means, this bill does make it to debate, this administration has shown that it is oddly willing to shoot itself in the foot by stating that it wants to keep torture officially on the table. This despite the fact that according to existing US law and international treaties, it was never on the table in the first place.
Third, if this bill somehow manages to pass with a vetoproof majority -- because this president will never ever sign the thing -- the administration will simply ignore it. Everyone knows this. They practice secret rendition now; it's not as though they were ever going to suddenly say, "Well, we're sending these people here off to Syria -- yes, yes, the Axis of Evil country, but evil has its uses -- to be tortured for a while until we get something useful out of them."
It would be nice to have this law on the books to be used against any administration that ignored it ... but it simply won't happen.
Posted by iain at 12:09 PM
Apparently, Firefox, Google, AOL and Yahoo between them finally made Microsoft blink.
BILL GATES: Well, good morning. It's great to be here to talk about the progress that's been made in the last year and some of the challenges ahead, both in terms of what Microsoft is doing and the work we're doing with partners to set new standards, enforce new laws and make sure that the full potential of the digital revolution is not held back by security problems. So I titled my speech today "Raising the Security Bar."
[...]The response to all the particular enhancements to Internet Explorer have been very positive. We're also going to dialogue about what more can we do, because browsing definitely is a point of vulnerability. Allowing people to have the richness and the extensibility, and yet be protected, that's a challenge. You don't want to lock things down so you can't ever get to rich Web sites, and yet you still want to make sure this is not the path that security threats are coming in through.
We have a dialogue to make sure that we're understanding exactly what people would like to have us do in Internet Explorer, and what we've decided to do is a new version of Internet Explorer, this is IE 7, and it adds a new level of security. We will be able to put this into beta by early in the summer. And, one thing to be clear on, this will be in the Internet Explorer that's available to people using Windows XP SP 2. Of course, as well, we'll include these capabilities in the next release of Windows scheduled for 2006, which is our "Longhorn" release. But we decided we're going to have the new capabilities even available befor having the Windows license to the install base here. Some of the advances include things focused on fishing, where people use URLs that appear to come from another location, things related to malware. So, it will be another important advance here, and we're excited we have the dialogue to make sure we're putting exactly what customers want into this...
There were enhancements to IE? Huh. Who knew?
By "fishing", I assume he means phishing, which isn't quite what he says it is and tends to involve email at its front end. (Logically, this would also imply upgrades to Outlook and Outlook Express as part of its IE 7 master plan.)
To be sure, most of this talk seems to be about making a secure web experience for all sorts of rich client interaction that hasn't quite appeared, as yet. If Microsoft can get into the rich client market early enough, they can grab back what browser share they've lost -- between 5-20% to Firefox primarily, with a smidge to Opera, over the past five months alone, depending on which stats you read.
Mind, given that the browser isn't going to be really separate from the operating system, but will still function as a sort of front end to the whole thing, IE will still have vulnerabilities that browser which sit on top of the OS lack. It comes with the integration. Of course, the integration is what makes it appeal to a lot of people who just don't want to deal with installing a lot of software and making things work. Browser there? Keen! To the web we go! ... hey, why is my computer so slow all of a sudden? ... and so on.
Posted by iain at 04:19 PM
Well ... Alan Keyes may be a total wingnut who terrifies his own party but you cannot say that he doesn't abide by his stated principles.
How unfortunate.
Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown to Chicago to be with her dad on a grand adventure. Even though she disagrees with him on "almost everything" political, she worked hard for his quixotic and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Now Maya Keyes -- liberal, lesbian and a little lost -- finds herself out on her own. She says her parents -- conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn -- threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her. Maya, 19, says her parents cut her off because of who she is -- "a liberal queer." Tomorrow, she will take her private dispute with her dad into the open. She is scheduled to make her debut as a political animal, speaking at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby.
She plans to talk about "what it was like for me growing up as a liberal queer in a very conservative household. I've known so many other people in a position like mine, where their families really don't want much to do with them. Maybe I can help by talking about it." [...] If she could talk to her parents now, she would tell them she does not intend to hurt them by going public. "I wish the fact that I was gay was not something that would hurt them either," she says. "It wasn't anything they did that made me this way. I really don't see why what I think should affect him in any way."
It does seem that the world is going out of its way to hurt her, somehow. Her parents, first and foremost. People on the right emailing her to tell her she's going to burn in hell. People on the left telling her that she's being "a whiny brat" because she'd like to have a relationship with her parents again.
I will admit, I do wonder about parents who can manage to do this. More often, you see parents who hang on to their children far too long, parents who excuse truly horrible things that their children do, parents who really should cut their children off and don't.
Posted by iain at 12:39 AM
Media Relations: terror tits-r-us / February 7, 2005
Posted by iain at 12:17 PM
Well ... Scalia did predict, given the decision in Lawrence vs Texas, that this particular roast squab would come home to roost, if not necessarily in this particular way.
A lawyer for polygamous former Hildale police officer Rodney Holm urged the Utah Supreme Court on Thursday to lift a ban on plural marriage, and justices responded with sharp questions about whether the ban is constitutional.
Attorney Rodney Parker argued his client has a right not only to believe in a religious tenet of polygamy but also to practice his belief in a meaningful way. "The ban on plural marriage affects so many fundamental rights," he said, contending that tens of thousands of Utahns are forced to hide their relationships for fear of prosecution. Parker asked the high court to decriminalize polygamy, allowing its adherents to have a legal marriage with a first wife, then enter into religious unions with other women as a way to reach the highest degree of heaven.
He stressed Holm is not asking for legal polygamy, which would make marriage to each wife state-sanctioned. Under his request, married individuals could also live as a spouse to other partners without being considered part of a common-law marriage and, therefore, bigamists. "This issue deserves to be dealt with head-on," Parker said.
The justices launched into a spirited discussion on the legal intricacies of the case and society's changing relationships. They aimed numerous questions at Assistant Attorney General Laura Dupaix, asking how the Utah bigamy law is applied, whether only religious practitioners are targeted and the difference between cohabitating and purporting to marry. Chief Justice Christine Durham wondered if living together as husband and wife is sufficient to have a legal marriage, or if a religious, non-state-sanctioned ceremony has to have occurred before someone can be guilty of bigamy. Associate Chief Justice Michael Wilkins asked about possible constitutional conflicts between religious tolerance and a prohibition on polygamy. Justice Jill Parrish wondered if a man living with a fiancee while waiting for his divorce to be finalized is a bigamist. Other comments centered on a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law as a violation of the privacy rights of consenting adults.
Dupaix defended the constitutionality of the Utah bigamy statute, which was used to prosecute Holm for his polygamous marriage with three women. She denied the law tramples on freedom of religion or association. "No one is telling Mr. Holm that he can't belong to a church that believes in polygamy," Dupaix said.....
I must admit, the comments of the Utah Supreme Court justices as reproduced in this article are rather ... odd.
Why, absent a state-issued marriage certificate, is the state involved in this discussion at all? If you get married over and over and over again in your particular church, but only the first is given a marriage license, then as far as the state is concerned, technically you cannot have committed bigamy. Especially if all parties know about it, there is no intent to commit fraud. If the ceremony is, as one justice says, "religious and nonsanctioned", then the state technically can't even notice its existence without treading dangerously close to unlawful interference in religious practices.
For Assistant Attorney General Laura Dupaix to say, however, that "No one is telling Mr. Holm that he can't belong to a church that believes in polygamy," is really rather impressively sophistical. Belonging to a church that believes in polygamy isn't, and never was, the issue; the practice of polygamy is the issue, and to what extent the state is justified in forbidding said practice if it's not required to sanction the relationship.
Purely a side note:
The four were members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which embraces polygamy.
I guess every religion has its conservative fundamentalists. It never occurred to me that there were different flavors of Mormonism, but why wouldn't there be?
Posted by iain at 10:52 AM
A trio of Swiss businessmen have launched a new drink for gay people called Queer Beer.
Michael Hutmacher, 32, came up with the idea with two friends and has now founded a company, Lemonhead, to market it. He said: "My business partner, who is gay, and I were talking about how to corner the homosexual market and came up with the idea for a drink aimed specifically at gay men and women.
"It really was just a crazy idea at first, but we've now come up with a product."
Hutmacher, from Zug. added: "Our beer is a humorous attempt to identify with the gay scene and we hope it will help people to feel relaxed with their sexuality and not hide away." And he added despite its provocative name the lager wasn't just aimed at homosexuals but also straight people....
Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Freakin' OW!
Sprained something rolling my eyes that hard. Didn't know it could hurt that much.
Slightly more seriously: yes, I did see the "humorous attempt to identify with the gay scene" statement. (OW!) Nonetheless.
Then again, we can always use it to terrify the heterosexuals. Just the really bad ones, of course, the ones who seem to think that we're lesser people than they are. Pour it into a glass, let them drink it, then show them the can and say, "You know, it's a documented fact that Queer Beer turns you gay." Then run!
I can think of about 40 senators I'd like to try that on, just to see what would happen.
Posted by iain at 06:12 PM
New DNA tests end life sentences for 2 BY DON BABWIN Chicago Sun-Times/AP
More than a decade after two men were sentenced to life in prison for the sexual assault and murder of a Chicago woman, prosecutors dismissed the charges Monday and set one of the men free, saying new DNA testing had failed to link them to the crime.
Dan Young Jr., now 44, left the state prison in Pontiac Monday afternoon. The other man convicted in the 1990 attack, Harold Hill, 31, has three years left to serve in an armed robbery case, said Cook County State's Attorney's spokesman John Gorman. [...] The dismissal raises questions about the conduct of Chicago police investigators who said Hill and Morgan confessed. Both men contended they confessed only after being mistreated by police.
"Once again we have the situation of false confessions," Zellner told reporters after Monday's hearing.
Allegations that Chicago police detectives have obtained false confessions, sometimes after torturing suspects, have plagued the department in recent years. Just before he left office, former Gov. George Ryan pardoned four ex-death row inmates who claimed they had confessed only after they were beaten, suffocated and electrocuted by Chicago detectives.
Detectives have denied the claim that they mistreated Hill and Morgan or a third man whom they said had confessed to the crime. That man, Peter Williams, was later released after investigators determined he had been in jail at the time of the murder....
Forensics under the microscope: 2 men exonerated in 1990 murder
By Steve Mills and Jeff Coen
Chicago Tribune staff reporters
Published January 31, 2005, 5:38 PM CST
(Registration may be required)
Cook County prosecutors today dropped murder charges against two men who have spent more than 12 years behind bars, after DNA test results undermined their confessions and testimony from a dentist who implicated the two through a bite mark and a hickey.
Dan Young Jr. and Harold Hill were exonerated after a forensic dental expert reexamined the bite mark on the victim's body, and a final round of DNA tests again came back and failed to implicate the two defendants.
The case against Young and Hill was featured in the Tribune's October 2004 series, "Forensics Under the Microscope," which exposed the use of faulty forensics in the courtroom. The series showed how bite mark testimony has been used as a prosecutorial tool though there is no accurate way to measure its reliability, and the story quoted a dentist used by the prosecution against Young and Hill as saying he felt "pushed" to testify in a harsh light. The Tribune first wrote about questions surrounding the case in 2001, in a series that investigated how police obtained false confessions. [...] Dr. David Sweet, considered one of the top forensic dental experts in the world, said in a report sent Dec. 13 to defense and prosecution attorneys that a bite mark on the victim was not suitable for comparison because the body had been damaged by a fire apparently set to cover up the crime. The report rebutted testimony given by Park Ridge dentist John Kenney that Young and Hill were responsible for marks on Morgan.
The state's attorney's office and Zellner had jointly agreed upon Sweet to analyze the evidence and to accept his opinion. Hill had sought a new trial based on the dental examination as well as previous DNA tests that failed to link them to the crime. The DNA tests that have been completed to date have identified the genetic profiles of two other unknown men. Latest test results of DNA taken from the victim's clothing again came back negative for the two defendants, prosecutors said today. The only other evidence linking Young and Hill were alleged confessions to detectives. Those confessions have been questioned because police at the time said a third man, Peter Williams, had confessed as well. After police learned Williams was in jail at the time of the crime, he was released.....
According to WFLD broadcast news from the night of Monday, January 31, 2005, Young has an IQ of 55.
So let's see. Two men allegedly confessed to a crime despite not knowing each other, and provably not being the people who committed the rape Another confessed despite having the most ironclad of alibis, witnessed by actual law enforcement officials. Yet the Chicago police state that they did nothing wrong.
These men were incredibly lucky. They caught the wave, so to speak. They got into the right part of the system at the right time in the right place. They had people to help them when they'd essentially exhausted their appeals; as lifers, rather than death row inmates, they had far fewer appeals available to them. The state's attorney's office not only cooperated with the inquiry, but paid half the cost of the testing; since those men weren't on death row, the state would not normally have paid any of the cost of innocence testing.
They were incredibly, unspeakably lucky men.
Luck shouldn't have anything to do with this, somehow.
Posted by iain at 12:10 AM
