Related Research Articles
In jurisprudence, double jeopardy is a procedural defence that prevents an accused person from being tried again on the same charges following an acquittal or conviction and in rare cases prosecutorial and/or judge misconduct in the same jurisdiction. Double jeopardy is a common concept in criminal law. In civil law, a similar concept is that of res judicata. Variation in common law countries is the peremptory plea, which may take the specific forms of autrefois acquit or autrefois convict. These doctrines appear to have originated in ancient Roman law, in the broader principle non bis in idem.
Robert Baltovich is a Canadian man who was wrongly convicted in 1992 of the murder of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain, in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. He spent eight years in prison and nearly another decade trying to clear his name, before being found not guilty in a retrial on April 22, 2008.
Kevin Cooper is an American man currently imprisoned at San Quentin State Prison's death row. Cooper was found guilty of four murders in the Chino Hills area of California in 1983. Cooper's conviction has garnered repeated attention from both Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and Erin Moriarty on the CBS News program "48 Hours." There have been accusations that Cooper received an inadequate defense, as well as prosecutorial misconduct such as destruction of evidence, withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense, planting of evidence, brainwashing to witnesses, and perjured testimony by the Sheriff's Department. There have also been practical questions raised, such as how Cooper, at 155 pounds, and allegedly acting alone, overpowered a 6-foot, 2-inch ex-military policeman and his athletic wife, both of whom had loaded firearms close at hand. It has also been questioned why a single perpetrator would use 3 or 4 different weapons to commit the murders, and why none of the victims were able to run away while the others were being attacked.
Michael Iver Peterson is an American novelist who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his second wife, Kathleen Peterson, on December 9, 2001. After eight years, Peterson was granted a new trial after the judge ruled a critical prosecution witness gave misleading testimony. In 2017, Peterson submitted an Alford plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to time already served and freed.
Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) is a controversial subjective practice that consists of the study and analysis of bloodstains at a known or suspected crime scene. This is done with the purpose of drawing inferences about the nature, timing and other details of the crime. It is used mostly to study homicide or other violent crimes in which blood is present and is claimed to help in crime scene reconstruction. Since the late 1950s, BPA experts have claimed to be able to use biology, physics, and mathematical calculations to reconstruct with accuracy events at a crime scene, and these claims have been accepted by the criminal justice system in the US.
Billie-Jo Margaret Jenkins was an English girl who was murdered in Hastings, East Sussex in February 1997. The case gained widespread media attention and remains unsolved. Her foster father, Siôn Jenkins, was originally convicted for the crime, but after two retrials in which the jury was unable to reach a verdict he was formally acquitted. He has been denied compensation on the grounds that there is no evidence to prove his innocence. He holds the rare distinction of having been acquitted despite never having been found not guilty by a jury. A second charge, relating to lies he had conceived about his qualifications in order to get his job as a deputy headteacher, was left to lie on file. Since his acquittal for murder, Sussex Police have maintained that there are no plans to re-open the murder investigation.
False evidence, fabricated evidence, forged evidence, fake evidence or tainted evidence is information created or obtained illegally in order to sway the verdict in a court case. Falsified evidence could be created by either side in a case, or by someone sympathetic to either side. Misleading by suppressing evidence can also be considered a form of false evidence ; however, in some cases, suppressed evidence is excluded because it cannot be proved the accused was aware of the items found or of their location. The analysis of evidence may also be forged if the person doing the forensic work finds it easier to fabricate evidence and test results than to perform the actual work involved. Parallel construction is a form of false evidence in which the evidence is truthful but its origins are untruthfully described, at times in order to avoid evidence being excluded as inadmissible due to unlawful means of procurement such as an unlawful search.
Roger Keith Coleman was a convicted murderer and rapist from Grundy, Virginia, US, who was executed for the rape and murder in March 1981 of his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy. That day, he had been laid off from work.
The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court starting in 1994, in which O. J. Simpson, a former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor, was tried and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The pair were stabbed to death outside Brown's condominium in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on the night of June 12, 1994. The trial spanned eleven months, from November 9, 1994 to October 3, 1995.
David Ray Camm is a former trooper of the Indiana State Police (ISP) who spent 13 years in prison after twice being wrongfully convicted of the murders of his wife, Kimberly, and his two young children at their home in Georgetown, Indiana, on September 28, 2000. He was released from custody in 2013 after his third trial resulted in an acquittal. Charles Boney is currently serving time for the murders of Camm's wife and two children.
Frederick Salem Zain was an American forensic laboratory technician in West Virginia and Bexar County, Texas, who falsified serology results to obtain convictions.
Amanda Marie Knox is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years in an Italian prison following her wrongful conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation.
Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that it was a violation of the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation for a prosecutor to submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the person who performed the test. While the court ruled that the then-common practice of submitting these reports without testimony was unconstitutional, it also held that so called "notice-and-demand" statutes are constitutional. A state would not violate the Constitution through a "notice-and-demand" statute by both putting the defendant on notice that the prosecution would submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the scientist and also giving the defendant sufficient time to raise an objection.
The murder of Linda Cook was committed in Portsmouth on 9 December 1986. The subsequent trial led to a miscarriage of justice when Michael Shirley, an 18-year-old Royal Navy sailor, was wrongly convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992 his case was highlighted as one of 110 possible miscarriages of justice in a report presented to the Home Office by the National Association of Probation Officers and justice groups Liberty and Conviction. His conviction was eventually quashed in 2003 by the Court of Appeal after the DNA profile extracted from semen samples recovered from the victim's body was proven not to be his. Cook's murder took place shortly after six sexual assaults had been committed in the Buckland area of the city, and the killer was initially dubbed the Beast of Buckland by the news media. When police revealed that footprint evidence had been recovered and launched a search for matching shoes, the case became known as the "Cinderella murder". Because of the brutal nature of the murder and the preceding sex attacks, Hampshire police were under public pressure to quickly make an arrest.
Danilo Restivo is an Italian serial killer. Restivo is serving a life sentence with a 40-year tariff for murdering his neighbour Heather Barnett in 2002. Investigators' suspicions that Restivo had murdered Barnett were raised because of his alleged involvement in the 1993 disappearance of Elisa Claps in Potenza, Italy, but he was not charged due to insufficient evidence. Subsequent to the 2010 discovery of Claps's body, Restivo was tried for the murder of Barnett, with evidence of similarities in ritualistic placing of hair on the bodies of Claps and Barnett being heard by the English court. He was found guilty of murdering Barnett, and later found guilty in his absence for murdering Claps by an Italian court.
Investigating Innocence is a nonprofit wrongful conviction advocacy organization that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates in the United States. Investigating Innocence was founded in 2013 by private investigator Bill Clutter to assist nationwide Innocence Project groups in investigating innocence claims. "Once we have a case that meets our criteria, we'll put private investigators to work on it. A lot of these cases need investigators," said Kelly Thompson, executive director of Investigating Innocence. Prior to his work on Investigating Innocence, Clutter was one of the founders of the Illinois Innocence Project. Investigating Innocence also has a board composed of exonerees that reviews incoming cases.
Hae Min Lee was a Korean-American high school student who was last seen alive on January 13, 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland. Her body was found four weeks later in Leakin Park; she had been killed by manual strangulation.
Juan A. Rivera Jr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted three times for the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Illinois. He was convicted twice on the basis of a confession that he said was coerced. No physical evidence linked him to the crime scene. In 2015 he received a $20 million settlement from Lake County, Illinois for wrongful conviction, formerly the largest settlement of its kind in United States history.
The murder of Tair Rada, a 13-year-old Israeli schoolgirl, was committed in 2006, in the girls' bathroom of her school in Katzrin. Roman Zdorov, a Ukrainian and a resident of Israel, was convicted of the murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 14, 2010. His prosecution and conviction have been a source of controversy, receiving much media coverage, as well as being the focus of an Israeli documentary TV series called Shadow of Truth that has gained worldwide attention on Netflix. On August 26, 2021, Zadorov was released from prison to house arrest after many appeals.
With no witnesses to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, DNA evidence in the O. J. Simpson murder case was the key physical proof used by the prosecution to link O. J. Simpson to the crime.
References
Books
- Mollett, Thomas; Mollett, Calvin (2014). Bloody Lies. South Africa: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780143538479.
- Altbeker, Antony (2011). Fruit of A Poisoned Tree. Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Websites
- "Inge Lotz - Murder Investigation". truth4inge.com. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
- Thamm, Marianne (11 June 2014). "Inge Lotz murder: Nine years later, two amateur forensic sleuths once again point fingers at Fred van der Vyver". Daily Maverick. Retrieved 24 October 2023.