The LACP Question of the Week ... the community response

The following input is related to the article "To DNA or not to DNA" and is the community response to the LACP Question of the Week ...

"DNA Crime Lab ... is bigger better?"

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John Sprung, Hollywood - March 26, 2003

DNA technology is still new and rapidly changing. One interesting thing to consider is the extent to which criminals will learn to fake or thwart the use of DNA. For instance, would it be possible to use medical waste to contaminate a scene with so much different DNA that an identification becomes impossible?

I remember hearing about a case in which a prisoner had his semen smuggled out for some such purpose. There may be several rounds of measures and countermeasures that need to be played out before we know what we should be doing with DNA technology.

J.S.

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From the New York Times - August 26, 2002

Confession Had His Signature; DNA Did Not
By JODI WILGOREN

DETROIT, Aug. 23 - Eighteen years ago, Eddie Joe Lloyd confessed in horrific detail to the rape and murder of 16-year-old Michelle Jackson, solving a case that had terrified this city after a wave of fatal child abductions in the area.

Mr. Lloyd's account, in a six-page statement and an audiotape, was chillingly accurate. It described Michelle's Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and half-moon earrings, the red-handled knife used to threaten her, the long johns that strangled her, the dirty green bottle left in her rectum. The only false thing about the confession was the confession itself.

At a hearing in Detroit on Monday, the judge who sentenced Mr. Lloyd to life in prison in 1985 overturned the conviction based on recent DNA tests which showed that Mr. Lloyd could not have been the killer.

"Thank you,'' Mr. Lloyd said after Judge Leonard Townsend of the Wayne County Circuit Court issued his ruling. Judge Townsend, who lamented when sentencing Mr. Lloyd 17 years ago that Michigan did not have the death penalty, put part of the blame on Mr. Lloyd today for the years he spent in prison.

"Even though he may have lied about what he did, the fault falls on him,'' Judge Townsend said. "I never heard this gentleman say he didn't do it.''

Mr. Lloyd, who was in a mental hospital at the time of his arrest and had contacted the police about Michelle's case, has maintained since his conviction that the confession was a ruse he cooked up with the detective to smoke out the real killer. "I knew the statement was false, and he knew the statement was false,'' Mr. Lloyd, 54, said in an interview at the downtown jail. "I was trying to help. I was thoroughly tricked. Inveigled, enticed, tricked. Sometimes the pressures on you to sign a statement is not them twisting your arm. It can be psychological and mental.''

Mr. Lloyd's exoneration - the 110th nationally based on DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law in New York - occurs as federal investigators continue their inquiry into whether the Detroit Police Department systematically violated civil rights laws. The inquiry is focusing on excessive force, prisoner deaths and the widespread detention of witnesses but includes at least one other case of a confession.

It also highlights the growing concern over false confessions, which have played a role in about 20 percent of the DNA exonerations. The question of coercion is a central focus of efforts to change the criminal justice system, like the Innocence Protection Act pending in Congress, which calls for all interrogations of suspects to be videotaped. Videotaping is now required in just two states, Alaska and Minnesota.

"When the police believe somebody's guilty, they conduct a particularly aggressive investigation - they make the person look guilty,'' said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College who has studied false confessions for 15 years. "The question you need to ask in these cases is: Did the suspect produce anything in that statement that the cops didn't already know? If not, you have to wonder.''

Barry C. Scheck, the co-director of the Innocence Project and Mr. Lloyd's lawyer, said that the detective in the case, Thomas De Galan, should be criminally prosecuted. Mr. Scheck also called for misconduct investigations into William Rice, the sergeant who oversaw the case, and the prosecutor, Timothy Kenny, because biological evidence available at the time that could have cleared Mr. Lloyd was never pursued.

"This cop had to know, he had to know, that he was feeding a paranoid schizophrenic guy, a guy with a mental disorder, in a mental institution, facts in order to clear a major homicide so everybody could look good,'' Mr. Scheck said. "If you permit this kind of questioning, you're going to end up not just with innocent people in jail but the real perpetrators still out there.''

Mr. De Galan, who retired in 1998 after 28 years on the job, declined to discuss the case. Mr. Rice, now an inspector, referred calls to a police spokeswoman, Deputy Chief Tara Dunlop, who said she did not believe the confession was coerced or that the department had a systemic problem with false confessions.

"I'm sure if something unjust happened it will be discovered,'' Chief Dunlop said.

Mr. Kenny, now a chief judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court, said the exoneration made the case "baffling'' but denied any misconduct.

"There was certainly no withholding of any evidence by any means,'' Judge Kenny said. "Certainly it is appropriate to find out exactly what happened in regards to the death of this particular woman and in terms of the investigation that took place.''

Michelle Jackson, an honor student, disappeared before dawn from a bus stop on the snowy morning of Jan. 24, 1984. When she did not come home, neighbors organized a search and found her strangled, mangled body in an abandoned garage. Months passed with no arrest.

That fall, Mr. Lloyd, who had written copious letters to the police, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Jackson file. He said he had overheard someone at a party store mention a bottle, a detail that had not been released to the public but may have been known to those in the search party. Detective De Galan had three interviews at the mental hospital with Mr. Lloyd, who had been involuntarily committed there for evaluation after a violent dispute with a clerk in a welfare office a few weeks earlier.

"He provided me with quite a bit of information about the case,'' Mr. Lloyd recalled. "He said, 'What kind of jeans was she wearing?' I said, 'I don't know.' He said, 'What kind do you think?' I said, 'Jordache.' He said, 'No, Gloria Vanderbilt.'''

Mr. Lloyd said Mr. De Galan similarly provided the date of the crime, and guided him through a sketch of the garage, among other details. "The emphasis was on, 'You want to help us, right?''' he said. "I said, 'Sure, I want to help any way I can.'''

The lurid confession was released with great fanfare, and the jury deliberated less than half an hour. Upon his conviction, Mr. Lloyd shouted: "God be with you, Michelle Jackson, God be with us all. I'll be back.''

Mr. Lloyd, who suffers from an enlarged prostate and uses a cane because of surgery to bypass arterial blockages in his leg, first wrote to Mr. Scheck in 1995, after seeing him discuss DNA on "Donahue.''

Most of the police files had disappeared, but the long johns used in the strangulation survived. DNA tests showed that the semen stains on them - as well as on the green bottle and a piece of paper attached to the bottle - could not have come from Mr. Lloyd. The police later found slides with more samples and retested them. Not him.

"That's God's signature,'' Mr. Lloyd said. "God's signature is never a forgery.''

Michael E. Duggan, the Wayne County prosecutor, who plans to argue the motion for Mr. Lloyd's release personally, said the case was a fluke.

"We don't think the police were unreasonable in concluding that he did it,'' Mr. Duggan said, noting the good reputations of all involved. "I don't think even his defense attorney believed he was innocent.''

On Thursday, Mr. Lloyd signed a consent form in hopes of enrollment in a county program that provides mentally ill homeless people with apartments and therapy, and discussed with Mr. Scheck which talk shows they might appear on. He told his lawyer his collar size, 15, and his shoe size, 9, so he would have something to wear on his release. "What about loafers?'' he suggested. "With some tassels on them, in black.''

Meanwhile, Michelle Jackson's murder has been reopened by the prosecutor's second-shot task force. The DNA evidence does not match anyone in the F.B.I. database.

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Everett Littlefield, Silverlake - August 18, 2002

Dear Bill and Bobbie,

Thank you for posting the question of the week "DNA Crime Lab ... is bigger better?" I agree that a new improved DNA crime Lab is needed to better identify suspects, post-arrest exonerations, post conviction testing, and an improved ability to solve old cases. Besides getting a new improved DNA crime lab, whether it is a big state-of-the art facility, or whether it is shared with the LAPD and the LA County Sherrif's Dept., it is important in the meantime to address a couple of other things.

One issue that I am concerned about is pointed out on "The Innocence Project" web site. "Causes and Remedies of Wrongful Convictions" at http://www.innocenceproject.org/causes/index.php states that "...those exonerated by DNA testing have revealed disturbing trends in our criminal justice system."

It's disturbing that the most common factors leading to wrongful convictions found in the first 70 DNA exonerations were: DNA Inclusion 2; other Forensic Inclusions 6; False Confessions 15; Informants / Snitches 16; False Witness Testimony 17; Microscopic Hair Comparison Matches 21; Bad Lawyering 23; Defective or Fraudulent Science 26; Prosecutional Misconduct 34; Police Misconduct 38; Serology Inclusion 40; Mistaken Identification 61.

What I surmise from the above data is that if more DNA evidence was submitted as evidence it would help to eliminate a lot of wrongful convictions, especially from prosecutional and police misconduct. In the meantime at least until a new state of the art DNA crime lab is built, whether big or small, more effort can be put on training police officers and prosecutors to avoid and be held accountable for utilizing improper techniques of securing convictions.

See types of misconduct at: http://www.innocenceproject.org/causes/policemisconduct.php

"The Innocence Project" recommends a creation of a disciplinary committee that focus exclusively on misconduct of police officers and prosecutors. Does the LAPD or the courts have such a disciplinary committee for misconduct? That is my question for the week, and until a new DNA crime lab is built, much improvement can be made first in the criminal justice system itself.

Everett