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 Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 7:41 am Post subject: |
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Second Sight 2
Parasomnia
DVD
| Quote: | Superintendent Lawson (to DCI Ross Tanner): Whatever the plea, we have to get our ducks in a row. Convicting on scientific evidence alone - it's a lottery. Lack of motive is our deficit ... the black hole down which we could all fall. You and your team must remain proactive on this. Specifically, go after evidence of premeditation - that's the key.
Tanner: And if we find evidence to the contrary - she wasn't fully aware or conscious of what she was doing?
Lawson: Then we have a problem. Our effectiveness on a case of this significance and profile - I don't have to state the obvious, do I? It won't just enhance the reputation of the SMU (Special Murder Unit), it will safeguard its future. I'll wait to hear from you.
Tanner: Sir .. (getting up to leave) |
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| Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:40 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Profiles in Panic
With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.
By Michael Shnayerson
January, 2009
| Quote: | Philip K. Howard, a New York lawyer and social critic whose new book is Life Without Lawyers, sees a sea change which was overdue. Every 30 years or so, he notes, the country has to redefine its social values. We’ve just reached the next time. “So this end of the new gilded era—it’s like a bucket that spilled, and finally the money spilled out, and we were left with a culture whose sense of purpose and responsibility were lacking. And now there’s a real need for people, and society as a whole, to rethink and re-structure their values.”
“I may be the only one who’s thrilled by this recession,” says the wife of one London private-equity manager who took his lumps this fall. “It just means we’ll have to get possibly another job. But the bottom line is that it is just money. When you realize that you have enough—your health and a roof and good food and your family—you have to just feel lucky.” (-- pgs. 75-146) |
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| Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:14 pm Post subject: |
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He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again - Hamlet, Act I, Scene II.
In Other Words
Hardcover
Alas, the final book of Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | My first client was a husband longing for a divorce but unable to persuade anyone to commit adultery with his wife. He was reduced to the terrifying expedient of putting on a false moustache and a pair of dark glasses and creeping publicly into his own mobile home, pretending to be his own co-respondent. Regrettably, when this was discovered, he was sent to prison for 'perverting the course of justice.'
It was occasions such as this which led my father to quote A.E. Housman's poem about the strange business of making laws.
'The laws of God, the laws of man"
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
(-- pgs. 31-33) |
Obituary:
The Economist
Sir John Mortimer, barrister and freedom-fighter, died on January 16th, aged 85
Jan. 29/09
| Quote: | Every true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D’Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone’s head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of “my darling” Prince Kropotkin.
Mr Mortimer’s great service to his country was to sum up in one person both the weight of the law and a sharp, rollicking scepticism of it. He was an eminent lawyer, entering chambers in 1948 and becoming, in time, a Queen’s Counsel and a master of the bar. Few excelled him in cross-examination (the art of which, he liked to say, was “not to examine crossly”). Yet the law was only his day job, giving him the money and the material to write novels. At the bar he dressed scruffily, lest anyone take him for a conventional lawyer. He made fun of the “old sweethearts” on the bench, who would pass a death sentence and then go out for buttered muffins. And as for the law itself, “the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages”,
[it] is a subject which, I may say, never interested me greatly. People in trouble, yes. Bloodstains and handwriting, certainly…Winning over a jury, fascinating. But law! The only honourable way to pass a law exam is to make a few notes on the cuff and take a quick shufti at them during the occasional visit to the bog.
Those words were not exactly his, but those of Horace Rumpole (seen above right, played by Leo McKern), whose adventures at the criminal bar Mr Mortimer tirelessly depicted in books and TV plays from 1975 onwards. He denied that Rumpole was entirely himself. There was much of his barrister-father in him, especially in his habit of quoting poetry to ward off unwelcome conversation, as well as borrowings from colourful colleagues. Rumpole was a cheroots-and-cheap-claret man (“Pommeroy’s claret keeps me astonishingly regular”), where Mr Mortimer favoured cigars and, at the dawn of the writing day, champagne. He often lost his cases, where Mr Mortimer was notably successful. Home for Rumpole was a mansion flat off Gloucester Road, where he lived in a state of miserable, snappish fidelity to Hilda, “She Who Must be Obeyed”. Mr Mortimer graced the well-heeled, pretty Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames, where children, stepchildren, a love-child, two wives called Penelope and the “Mortimer-ettes”, a claque of intelligent, charmed women, paid court to him and he to them.
A golden thread
Where Rumpole and Mr Mortimer fused together was in their sense of how lawyers should behave. Both were freedom-fighters. They refused to prosecute: their role was to defend the individual against the weight and follies of the law. Rumpole, grubbing round the Old Bailey cells with their “perpetual smell of cooking”, refused to let his clients plead guilty while the smallest doubt remained. He liked to quote Lord Sankey’s words on the presumption of innocence, the “single golden thread” that ran through English law.
Mr Mortimer, also tracing that thread, took on the most celebrated free-speech cases of the 1970s, and won them all. Largely thanks to him, the lord chamberlain’s censoring hand was lifted from the theatre. Thanks to him, Englishmen could read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Inside Linda Lovelace”, could see Rupert Bear with an erection in Oz magazine, and could endure a Roman soldier’s tryst with the body of Jesus in Gay News. Mr Mortimer hated pornography. But “Liberty is allowing people to do things you disapprove of.”
He took that conviction into politics, too. It led him to support foxhunting and to resume smoking in old age, just to defy the ban. He played the devil’s advocate on behalf of freedom everywhere, from the Oxford Union to the dinner table. Bishops were a favourite target, rapiered for the “absurdity” of life and the worse absurdity of heaven, which had to resemble “the lounge of a Trusthouse Forte hotel”. People, he thought, should be regularly shocked. Offence “makes society move”.
All this, he admitted, came close to anarchism. Yet at its base was something different. He took up the law, which made all else possible, out of obedience to his father. Clifford Mortimer was blinded when John was 13, yet continued his law practice and his life as though nothing had happened. For his son—as he explained in his play, “A Voyage Round My Father”, in 1971—a career at the bar was an extension of all the other duties he assumed for his demanding, unseeing parent, from tying up the dahlias and trapping earwigs to handing him his boiled egg, or his coat.
He walked with his hand on my arm. A small hand, with loose brown skin. From time to time, I had an urge to pull away from him, to run into the trees and hide…But then his hand would tighten on my sleeve…He was very persistent…
The freedom-fighter defied most laws but not this one, family love. (-- p. 94) |
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| Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 10:52 am Post subject: |
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A Tale of Two Cities
Paperback
By Charles Dickens
| Quote: | "In short," said Sydney, "this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one. No man's life here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people to-day may be condemned to-morrow. Now, the stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win is Mr. Barsad."
"You need have good cards, sir," said the spy.
"I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold. -- Mr. Lorry, you know what a brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy."
It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful -- drank off another glassful -- pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.
"Mr. Barsad," he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking over a hand at cards: "Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer, so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name. That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic English, the enemy of France and freedom. That's an excellent card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so difficult to find. That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad?"
"Not to understand your play," returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.
"I play my ace, denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't hurry." ...
"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time."
It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. ... (From A Hand at Cards, pgs. 295-297) |
Barsad earlier on the witness stand:
| Quote: | | Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation. What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody's Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors' prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors' prison? -- Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever been kicked downstairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true? Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not more than other gentlemen do. ... (From A Disappointment, p. 75) |
Listen:
A Tale of Two Cities
Abridged, alas!, Audio CD
Narrated perfectly by Scottish actor Ian Richardson, who assumes a different voice for each character and with extraordinarily excellent diction throughout!
View:
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With screen legend Ronald Colman
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With actor/author Dirk Bogarde
Go mad!
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 2:03 pm Post subject: |
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Perry Mason
Season One, Vol. 1
Episode: The Case of the Empty Tin
DVD
| Quote: | Alan Neil (nephew representing his wealthy former gunrunner uncle Hocksley, who is hoping to locate his only daughter via a newspaper personal. To a hopeful respondent claiming to be Doris Hocksley, legateee): ... All that money going to a cold, heartless foundation. Almost makes you want to gamble. How do you feel about gambling?
Respondent claiming to be Doris Hocksley: I don't think I understand.
Neil: Are you familiar with the game of draw poker?
Respondent: Yes.
Neil: Suppose - and mind you, I say suppose - the dealer was friendly to you and managed to deal you the winning hand. Would you feel inclined to tip him?
Respondent: Just as a matter of curiosity, how much would the dealer say his services are worth?
Neil: Half the pot.
Respondent: Half of two million dollars?
Neil: Well, without the dealer, your hand is worthless. You think it over, Miss Hocksley. If you decide you're still in the game, let me know. |
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| Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 2:42 pm Post subject: |
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Trial & Retribution III
DVD
| Quote: | Reporter: Mrs. Greenway, can I have a few moments? Won't take a second.
Mrs. Greenway: You were at the court.
Reporter: That's right. So tell me, what did you feel when you picked out Karl Wilding?
Mrs. Greenway: I went straight for number five. That's my number, you see. I'm a five-five girl. Born on the fifth of May. I always pick the number five. It's my lucky number. I got it right, too! That police officer told me I got it right after I picked him out. That's what I told them in court.
Reporter: Bet you play five at the bingo. Do you?
Mrs. Greenway: I don't play bingo, but I always have it on my lottery tickets. |
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:30 pm Post subject: |
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Judge Not
Hardcover
By André Gide
Translated from the French and with an Introduction and Notes by Benjamin Ivry
| Quote: | We proceeded to the choice of jurors: a notary, an architect, and a retired schoolteacher. All the rest were recruited from among shopkeepers, tradesmen, laborers, farmers, and modest landlords. One of them could barely write, and on his voting ballot it would be difficult to tell a yes from a no. But apart from two people who didn't give a hang about anything and kept getting themselves excused anyway, everyone seemed determined to apply his full conscience and awareness.
The farmers, distinctly in the majority, were resolved to be very strict. The exploits of tragic thieves like Bonnot and others have been in the public eye recently, and the watchword, prompted by the newspapers, was now "Show no mercy!"; the gentlemen of the jury represented Society and were resolved to defend it.
One of the jurors was missing. No letter of excuse was received from him, and there was not reason for his absence; he was fined the statutory amount - three hundred francs, I believe. We were already drawing names to see who would sit on the first case when the defaulting juror turned up, drenched in sweat; he was a poor old farmer right out of Labiche's La Cagnotte. Loud laughter broke out when he explained that he had been circling the courthouse for a half-hur, unable to find the entrance. The fine was withdrawn. (-- p. 2) |
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:59 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The Vancouver Sun
The quality of justice and the right sentence
Critics complain when judges don't appear to apply the law,
and complain louder when they do
By Peter McKnight
April 14/07
| Quote: | In the early 19th century, preacher Lorenzo Dow condemned his fellow ministers for giving their followers contradictory messages. "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't," Dow said of the no-win no man's land into which some preachers cast their flocks.
Were Down's sermon delivered two centuries later, he could well have been referring to the unfortunate situation of modern courts. Critics routinely accuse the courts of judicial activism, of usurping the role of elected officials, and finger-waving politicians and the public regularly admonish the courts not to make law, but to apply it.
Yet when the courts do apply the law, rather than acting like elected officials by responding to the desires of the public, they face an even greater barrage of insults and invective. Witness the outrage that greeted the recent British Columbia Court of Appeal decision reducing the sentence of Darnell Pratt, the aboriginal youth who pled guilty to manslaughter in the "gas and dash" death of gas station attendant Grant de Patie. (See DePatie family outraged over reduction of Darnell Pratt's sentence at News1130 April 3/07).
... The court did discuss provisions of the Criminal Code and the YCJA (Youth Criminal Justice Act) that require judges to pay "particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders," and "respond to the needs of aboriginal young persons," but those provisions had little effect on the trial judge's sentence (of nine years) or the Court of Appeal decision (to reduce sentence by two years).
The wording of the Code and the YCJA can result in an oboriginal offender receiving a more lenient sentence than a non-aboriginal offender, which strikes many people as two-tiered justice...
Now, in interpreting the law, the Supreme Court of Canada has said that in cases involving serious and violent offences, the sentencing principles of denunciation and deterrence will predominate, so there will be no difference in the sentences handled to aboriginal and non-aboriginal offenders. (-- p. C10) |
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| Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 2:40 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The Trials of Darryl Hunt
DVD
| Quote: | In December 2003, Willard E. Brown confessed to the 1984 rape and stabbing death of Deborah Sykes after DNA testing linked him to the crime. His confession led to the release of Darryl Hunt, who had served about 18 years of a life sentence for a crime he always denied committing.
On February 6, 2004, Superior Court Judge Anderson Cromer vacated Hunt's murder conviction in the case. Cromer dismissed the case against Hunt "with prejudice," meaning he can never be tried in the murder again.
Over the course of its inquiry from 2005-2007, a citizens committee revealed mistakes made by law-enforcement officers in the handling of the Sykes case and three other rape cases that occurred in the same time frame. In February 2007, their report was released and the city issued a formal apology to Darryl Hunt.
» Sykes Committee Report (PDF)
» City of Winston-Salem's Apology (PDF)
(From From Murder, Race, Justice, The State v. Darryl Hunt accessed Sept. 28/09) |
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| Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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From Famous Four-Flushers:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Trial by fire
Did Texas execute an innocent man?
By David Gann
Sept. 7/09
| Quote: | Not long after (Todd) Willingham’s arrest, authorities received a message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” The case against Willingham was considered airtight. ...
fter speaking to Stacy (Willingham's wife), (Elizabeth) Gilbert (French teacher/playwright from Houston, Willingdon's death row penpal) had one more person she wanted to interview: the jailhouse informant Johnny Webb, who was incarcerated in Iowa Park, Texas. She wrote to Webb, who said that she could see him, and they met in the prison visiting room. A man in his late twenties, he had pallid skin and a closely shaved head; his eyes were jumpy, and his entire body seemed to tremble. A reporter who once met him described him to me as “nervous as a cat around rocking chairs.” Webb had begun taking drugs when he was nine years old, and had been convicted of, among other things, car theft, selling marijuana, forgery, and robbery.
As Gilbert chatted with him, she thought that he seemed paranoid. During Willingham’s trial, Webb disclosed that he had been given a diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress disorder” after he was sexually assaulted in prison, in 1988, and that he often suffered from “mental impairment.” Under cross-examination, Webb testified that he had no recollection of a robbery that he had pleaded guilty to only months earlier.
Webb repeated for her what he had said in court: he had passed by Willingham’s cell, and as they spoke through a food slot Willingham broke down and told him that he intentionally set the house on fire. Gilbert was dubious. It was hard to believe that Willingham, who had otherwise insisted on his innocence, had suddenly confessed to an inmate he barely knew. The conversation had purportedly taken place by a speaker system that allowed any of the guards to listen—an unlikely spot for an inmate to reveal a secret. What’s more, Webb alleged that Willingham had told him that Stacy had hurt one of the kids, and that the fire was set to cover up the crime. The autopsies, however, had revealed no bruises or signs of trauma on the children’s bodies.
Jailhouse informants, many of whom are seeking reduced time or special privileges, are notoriously unreliable. According to a 2004 study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions, at Northwestern University Law School, lying police and jailhouse informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases in the United States. At the time that Webb came forward against Willingham, he was facing charges of robbery and forgery. During Willingham’s trial, another inmate planned to testify that he had overheard Webb saying to another prisoner that he was hoping to “get time cut,” but the testimony was ruled inadmissible, because it was hearsay. Webb, who pleaded guilty to the robbery and forgery charges, received a sentence of fifteen years. Jackson, the prosecutor, told me that he generally considered Webb “an unreliable kind of guy,” but added, “I saw no real motive for him to make a statement like this if it wasn’t true. We didn’t cut him any slack.” In 1997, five years after Willingham’s trial, Jackson urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Webb parole. “I asked them to cut him loose early,” Jackson told me. The reason, Jackson said, was that Webb had been targeted by the Aryan Brotherhood. The board granted Webb parole, but within months of his release he was caught with cocaine and returned to prison.
In March, 2000, several months after Gilbert’s visit, Webb unexpectedly sent Jackson a Motion to Recant Testimony, declaring, “Mr. Willingham is innocent of all charges.” But Willingham’s lawyer was not informed of this development, and soon afterward Webb, without explanation, recanted his recantation. When I recently asked Webb, who was released from prison two years ago, about the turnabout and why Willingham would have confessed to a virtual stranger, he said that he knew only what “the dude told me.” After I pressed him, he said, “It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.” Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. “Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy,” he said. “My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that.” He paused, then said, “The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?” |
Yes, and get this on evidence of arson:
| Quote: | ... Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. Gilbert had come across Hurst’s name and, along with one of Willingham’s relatives, had contacted him, seeking his help. After their pleas, Hurst had agreed to look at the case pro bono ...
After Hurst had reviewed Fogg (Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection) and (Manuel) Vasquez’s (one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, deputy fire marshal) list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity: the positive test for mineral spirits by the threshold of the front door. But why had the fire investigators obtained a positive reading only in that location? According to Fogg and Vasquez’s theory of the crime, Willingham had poured accelerant throughout the children’s bedroom and down the hallway. Officials had tested extensively in these areas—including where all the pour patterns and puddle configurations were—and turned up nothing. Jackson told me that he “never did understand why they weren’t able to recover” positive tests in these parts.
Hurst found it hard to imagine Willingham pouring accelerant on the front porch, where neighbors could have seen him. Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the fire roared onto the porch during post-flashover. By the time Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill. At the trial, he insisted that he had never been told of the grill’s earlier placement. Other authorities were aware of the grill but did not see its relevance. Hurst, however, was convinced that he had solved the mystery: when firefighters had blasted the porch with water, they had likely spread charcoal-lighter fluid from the melted container.
Without having visited the fire scene, Hurst says, it was impossible to pinpoint the cause of the blaze. But, based on the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire—one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. It explained why there had never been a motive for the crime. Hurst concluded that there was no evidence of arson, and that a man who had already lost his three children and spent twelve years in jail was about to be executed based on “junk science.” Hurst wrote his report in such a rush that he didn’t pause to fix the typos. ...
December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.” |
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