If John Allen, also known as J. Bennett Allen, had not contacted me through this In Justice blog, I might never have known about his existence.

A resident of southern California, Allen and his wife design custom database solutions for mid-size businesses. Previously, he worked as an aerospace engineer.

He has been called for jury duty lots of times. The fourth time, Allen says, he cast the only “not guilty” vote among a dozen jurors, then played a role in shifting the vote to 10-2 in favor of not guilty. After the hung jury, the prosecution tried the defendant again. Convinced that the prosecutor was traveling a path to wrongful conviction, Allen says he volunteered to help the defendant, uncovering evidence that led to another hung jury and freedom from prison for the accused–although the accused then had to deal with a $500,000 debt owed to defense lawyers.

That experience changed Allen’s life. You can see how by visiting www.skepticaljuror.com

When I can find time, I plan to move beyond Allen’s fascinating Web site to read his first full-scale book, self-published, about the alleged injustice suffered by Byron Case.

Some societal dysfunctions are so ingrained that fixing them seems impossible–racism and sexism, for example. Other dysfunctions are repairable, but the budgetary costs are politically unrealistic. Then there are the problems that can be fixed for reasonable amounts of money, with huge benefits to society.

One of the repairable problems is the backlog at crime laboratories across the nation. Most of the labs are part of law enforcement agencies. Because of relatively small budget shortfalls, many of the labs encounter testing backlogs that stretch for years. If the tests could be run within a day or so, police would be able to identify rapists, murderers and other criminals quickly. The arrests that would follow would mean fewer rape victims, fewer murder victims.

In hundreds of jurisdictions, however, legislators who allocate money and law-enforcement bureaucrats who channel the allocations give short shrift to crime labs. Instead, money ends up paying for prison systems that do little but send criminals back into society, so-called drug wars that never yield meaningful victories, and other idiotic uses.

The National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Justice Department, has just published a report titled “Making Sense of DNA Backlogs–Myths vs. Reality.” The report can be found, at no cost, by visiting www.ojp.usdoj.gov./nij

It is filled with clear explanations and common-sense recommendations. Making such a study–funded by the very legislators who will not allocate adequate money for crime labs–will actually read it and then act sensibly.

False confessions are difficult for sane women and men without criminal records are understand. Yet solid research demonstrates that false confessions have led to dozens of wrongful convictions; extrapolating from those undeniable findings, false confessions possibly have led to hundreds of wrongful convictions.

Suspects confess falsely for lots of reasons, some of them linked to varieties of mental illness. Some suspects confess falsely because they undergo torture by police interrogators. During the 1980s, numerous suspects interrogated at a specific police station in Chicago said they had been tortured in unimaginably ugly ways. A police commander named Jon Burge appeared to be the torture ringleader.

The allegations came largely from men with criminal records, so they found it difficult to be heard. Eventually, even Chicago police officials decided where smoke appeared, perhaps fires had been set. In 1993, Burge’s police career ended, but Cook County prosecutors would not file criminal charges against him.

Non-criminal litigation arose against Burge. In his answers to questions posed to him, he denied the torture. Earlier this week, a jury decided Burge lied. Burge could end up in prison because of his behavior.

For years, I have studied the Burge case from afar. Based on my admittedly less than perfect knowledge, combined with what just came out in the trial of Burge, I would have convicted him as a juror.

Whatever his punishment will be, it is too little and too late.

Still, some value will linger: Journalists, defense lawyers, prosecutors and police supervisors might be more willing in the future to listen carefully when suspects–even those with long criminal records–allege torture by police.

In the wrongful conviction realm, incompetence and dishonesty at police agency crime laboratories rank among the most difficult problems to repair.

Why?

Because it is expensive to purchase state-of-the-art equipment like what the citizenry is accustomed to seeing on fictional television dramas such as “CSI.”

Because the hiring process for lab workers (who call themselves “criminalists”) has been flawed for decades; after an incompetent or dishonest criminalist is hired, firing becomes difficult.

Because supervisors in many crime labs lack the ability or the budget or the will or all of the above to monitor the day-to-day tests run by the criminalists.

Because the labs are housed within police agencies, where a natural bias toward finding suspects guilty exists.

The poster child for dysfunctional crime labs leading to miscarriages of justice is Houston, Texas. For many years, journalists there have documented the situation. When the city mothers and fathers finally recognized the scope of the mess and vowed to solve it, I hoped they meant what they said. But continuing stories in the Houston Chronicle and other local media show the mess might never be solved without a massive housecleaning of the laboratory, police department supervisors and additional budget allocations.

Just last week (June 22), the Chronicle (www.chron.com) published a piece by reporters Moises Mendoza and James Pinkerton under the headline “Parts of HPD Fingerprint Lab Remain in Disarray.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors live with uncertainty whether they can mount a reliable case against suspects implicated in part or in full by the criminalists, defense attorneys wonder whether their clients can receive a fair hearing, actual perpetrators stand better odds of resuming their lives of destruction, and the risk remains high that more wrongful convictions will occur.

Sheila M. Murphy is an Illinois judge with the guts to scold prosecutors for egregious behavior. Her scolding arrived not in a court opinion, but in a letter to Chicago magazine. I just read that letter in the April 2010 issue of the magazine. (Okay, I’m behind in my periodical writing–so many superb magazines, so little time to keep up with their exposes and explanatory features.)

In the magazine’s February issue, readers learned from writer Bryan Smith about an investigation by the Cook County (Chicago) prosecutor into the investigative tactics of David Protess, a Northwestern University journalism professor, and some of his students who examine potential wrongful convictions in exchange for academic course credits.

Murphy realized from the magazine feature that the current prosecutor relied in part on law-enforcement criticism of Protess and students from an earlier semester to mount the current examination of the professor. The previous case involved alleged rapists/murderers known as the Ford Heights Four.  Protess and his students played a significant role in finding evidence to exonerate the Ford Heights Four.

Murphy served as a judge on the Ford Heights Four case. She states without equivocation that because of the prosecutor’s behavior, “had the Supreme Court of Illinois not intervened, the innocent would have been executed.” The Ford Heights Four prosecutor should have felt an obligation to dispense justice. But, judge Murphy notes, the prosecutor failed to observe the rules:

“The jury in the case should have been told about the promises made to the only alleged eyewitness in return for her testimony. In addition, I was told that there was no DNA evidence available, when indeed there was.”

Rather than criticizing Protess, the judge says, those who care about the validity of convictions should honor the professor and his students. She suggests, perhaps only half ironically, that Protess and his students be honored with statues in the lobby of the Criminal Court building.
Such an event, Murphy says, might alert everybody about the significance of the statues. “This would serve as a reminder that justice is sometimes achieved by those with no license to practice law in Illinois.”