Recently in DNA Category

Would you confess to a crime you did not commit?  You may say you would never falsely confess to a crime under any circumstance (especially those with great penalties), but the truth is, false confessions happen more often than you realize. 

For instance, take the case of Eddie Lowery.  Although Eddie Lowery deep now knew he was innocent of rape, he inevitably confessed and consequently spent 10 years of his life in prison until DNA evidence and the help of the Innocence Project exonerated him.

False confessions can occur for numerous reasons and some people may be more susceptible to falsely confess.  For example, the mentally ill and children are highly influenced by police during interrogation and subsequently confess more often than individuals who are not mentally ill or are adults.  Other circumstances, such as being deprived of food, water, and the restroom, being interrogated for hours on end (which happened in Lowery's case - he was interrogated for more than 7  hours), and in some instances being beaten,  also lead to more false confessions.   

Interrogations can also plant false memories in the suspect's head to the extent to which they become real (much like the lost in the  mall study described in class).  According to Professor Garrett who studies cases such as Lowery's, facts about the case can be intentionally or accidentally brought up in interrogation which plants a seed in the suspect's memory.  With constant contamination to the suspect's memory, these "seeds" can grow into evidence that one would think only the person responsible for the crime would know. 

Much like you and me, Garrett was shocked by the amount of contamination that had occurred in the cases he studied.  Interestingly, more than half of the cases he studied, the suspect was "mentally ill, under the age of 18, or both."  Along with that, most of the interrogations were lengthy and held in a pressuring environment.  Even more interesting, none of the cases Garrett studied had a lawyer present during interrogation. 

Although in some cases evidence that is leaked during interrogations in accidentally, Eddie Lowery felt that the police intentionally contaminated his memories.  According to Lowery, after he confessed, the police insisted he recall the process of the crime and corrected him when he got key facts incorrect.  For example, Lowery recalled this from his interrogation: "How did he get in (police asking Lowery how the rapist got into the house)" "I kicked in the front door" - Lowery, "But the rapist had used the back door" - Police.  Consequently, Lowery changed his story and admitted to going through the back door.

Why are false confessions so important? -- because juries are highly influenced by them when deciding on a verdict.  Despite being cleared by DNA evidence prior to going on trial, 8 of the individuals in Garrett's study were still found guilty and sent to jail.  Because juries are mostly interested in the details of the case and because false memories have been implanted in the suspect's brain, jury members tend to ignore other facts in the case and focus on the highly detailed confession.

If false confession are so common, what can be done to prevent them?  Some police departments have started videotaping interrogations, especially ones that could result in severe punishments (death penalty).  Ten states require videotaping and many supreme courts are encouraging tapings of interrogations. 

Keeping the case of Eddie Lowery and many others in mind, how do you feel about videotaping interrogations?  Do you feel it is necessary for all interrogations (even those where the consequence if found convicted is not severe) or just crimes that could possibly cause someone to serve the rest of their life in prison or even be put to death?  Are there better ways to reduce the occurrence of false confessions?  What do you feel can and/or needs to be done to free the dozens of innocent people currently serving time behind bars?

 

Here is a link to the article and more about Eddie's case.

(Thank you Alyssa for sharing!)

This article is about the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback being accused of sexual assault for the second time. I think this ties into the class because the case has been dropped from the DA for the lack of any evidence, so it seems that it is all hearsay evidence. This could be a case where the girl was trying to take advantage of the superstar by accusing him of assualting her, or it could be a case in which the prosecution just didnt have enough evidence to satisfy the burden of proof to convict Ben. Either way he is not going to get in trouble by the law for whatever happened however he may be suspended by the league for violating the players code of conduct policy. Ben has been accused of assaulting a girl before and it makes people wonder if girls are just trying to take advantage of a celebrity or is he getting away with these assaults because of lack of evidence. The prosecution pretty much said in their press conference that they are confident that Ben assaulted the girl but cannot prove without a reasonable doubt to a jury that he is responsible, also it did not help that the girl, for some reason, did not want to press charges. The medicial examiner said they found male DNA but not enough to make a DNA profile. I think this would have come to a different outcome if they were in fact able to get a DNA profile from the sample.The case shows that there is in fact a burden of proof that needs to be satisfied for the DA to persue a case, and do not just go after people to punish them for supposably committing crimes.  

This website is very informative and goes through everything from the crime scene to identifying the suspect.  What I thought was very informative is the identifying of the victim and how long the victim has been dead.  It goes through a time line of 0 days to 31+.  When looking at a time line for when a victim has been dead you must look at the body temperature, hardening, the eyes, skin color, pooling of the blood, the digestive system, and forensic entomology. 

Forensic entomology is the use of insects to determine the time line of death.  In this website it shows the physical appearance of a person in cooperation with insects present of the stage relative to the time of decomposition. 

When looking around this website it also shows the different stages of a case and what to do during theses stages, not just forensic entomology. The first stage is the crime scene.  It goes through discovering the scene, identifying the scene, recording the incident, to searching for the evidence.  The second stage goes through the autopsy which goes though the cause of death, time of death, manner of death, marks of violence, to storing the evidence.  The third stage is the identity of the victim.  This goes through facial reconstruction, DNA and dental matching, and blood analysis.  The fourth stage is the evidence, which is pretty much self explanatory. The next stage the suspect.  This goes through lists of suspects, psychological profiling, fingerprinting, and both spoken and written evidence.   The last stage goes through the weapons that can be used by the suspect.  

This website can be very useful in order to understand the different aspects of solving a case starting from the crime scene to the capture of the suspect.

After our class discussion on false confession during Tuesday's class I have been noticing the integration techniques we discussed is class. One news report on the E channel stood out above the rest. Kevin Fox's 3 year old girl was said to be missing on the morning of June 6^th 2004. Kevin's wife Melissa was in Chicago for the weekend therefore he was home by himself with Tyler and the later missing daughter Riley. Police investigated the crime scene however, when police continued the investigation they ignored a lot of the evidence indicated there was an intruder. Instead investigators went after father Kevin Fox. The interrogation of Kevin Fox lasted 14 ½ hours. Over this time Kevin had asked to speech to his brother and a lawyer. Police told him that he did not need to speech to anyone and just needed to confess that he killed and sexually assaulted his daughter Riley. Police used tactics such as telling Kevin that if he didn't confess then there were some inmates in jail that would make him pay for what he did. They even went as far as to lie by stating that Melissa was going to divorce him if he did not cooperate with them. The interesting this about this statement is that Melissa stayed by Kevin's side throughout the entire investigation and police never said she would divorce him if he didn't tell the truth, they said she would divorce him if he did "cooperate" with them.  Eventually after this horrible interrogation Kevin admitted to killing his daughter using the information authorities gave him during his interrelation to make up his story.

 

After the confession investigator told the FBI to stop DNA testing. Kevin spent 8 months in jail before he would be cleared through the DNA testing that the FBI stopped.  Interestingly enough this is also the same procedure that was used during the interrogation of JonBenet Ramsey. Both fathers in this cases we told the killing of their daughter was an accident and they were trying to cover it up, and both fathers were exonerated by DNA evidence that in both cases were originally never carried out.

 

 

Below are a couple of links to some highlights of the ABC broadcast of the situation. The whole hour version of the episode in the links below because they were presented in parts and I was unable to find all the video clips. However, if you are interested there is a lot of information about the case on the ABC website if you search for either Kevin Fox or Riley Fox.

 

Introduction to the Case and the 911 phone call

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6210664

 

News article:Kevin Fox and his statements on the integration process.

http://www.truthinjustice.org/kevin-fox.htm

 

Video Clip about DNA exoneration of Kevin Fox

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6210784

 

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/02/thousands-of-sex-offenders-unlisted/ 

In this article it states that there are 63,000 sex offenders that are not registered and 22,000 of those are in California alone. Some of those the state defends are "low risk in general" yet there are innocent people killed by those low risk offenders. And the main one I want to talk about is Chelsea King whose body they found yesterday.

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/TheLaw/accused-killer-chelsea-king-john-albert-gardner-pleads/story?id=10002541 

This article goes more into detail about the case it self and explains that this may be a capital punishment case because it was a rape and murder case. If the DA decides to take the death penalty off the table then it is still 25 to life in prison. The reason for his arrest was due to DNA evidence found on his clothing.

The psychiatrist for the case wants the offender to be put in prison for as long as possible because of his previous charge that he served 6 years in prison for before paroled in 2008.

To those that take the time to read the article I would love to get your opinion on what should be done about our system the allows sex offenders to slip through the cracks and commit worse crimes then before and also I question if a person has show to be capable of such evil once if they should be allowed back into society without strict supervision?

 

For my criminology class I had to read an article about the personality traits of a criminal, and if those traits make certain people more prone to criminal activity.

The article is called "Personality and Crime: Are Some People Crime Prone?" The article was researched and written by many criminologists and psychologists, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, Phil Silva, Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, Robert Krueger, and Pamela Schmutte. The article stated that the researchers found that it's not just genetic factors that lead people to become criminals, but it's genetic factors influenced by environmental factors.

The researchers conducted a study in New Zealand where they did a longitudinal study of kids from birth to age 18. At 18, the kids were given a self-report personality inventory. The researches studied these self-report inventories along with official data sources concerning each individual's delinquency record.

The researchers used a modified version of the Multidimensional Personality Questionaire (MPQ). The MPQ is designed to assess individual differences in affective and behavioral style. "The 177-item version of the MPQ yields 10 different personality scales...The 10 scales constituting the MPQ can be viewed at the higher-order level as defining three superfactors: Constraint, Negative Emotionality, and Positive Emotionality (Tellegen, 1985;Tellegen and Waller, press)..."

People high on the constraint factor usually have conventional social norms, avoid thrills, and act cautiously, and tend to have a restrained manner. People ranking high on negative emotionality have a low threshold for negative emotions (fear, anxiety, anger, etc.), and usually break down under stress. People ranking high on positive emotionality scale have a low threshold for positive interaction in work and social environments, and have a positive outlook on life.

The research shows that "..positive emotionality was not associated significantly with delinquent behavior.." and "...persons involved in serious criminal behavior scored significantly lower on MPQ Constraint and significantly higher on Negative Emotionality..." (Caspi et al, 1994)

The second study the researchers conducted was in Pittsburgh, and they were studying inner-city youths 12-13 years of age of caucasion and African-American races to see if racial or ecological factors influence delinquency. This study used the California Child Q-sort (CCQ), which is a common language personality assessment given to the caregivers (parents, teachers, and self-reports) of the inner-city youths. The results showed that "Across all three data sources, Constraint and Negative Emotionality emerged as robust correlates of delinquency among both black and white adolescents....The negative correlations with Constraint suggested that delinquent adolescents were likely to be impulsive, danger-seeking, and rejecting of conventional values. Positive Emotionality was not associated robustly with delinquent behavior..."

This article also mentions that a low level of serotonin in the brain produces impulsivity and greater negative affectivity. Inmates in prison have been tested, and inmates who had a history of violence and impulsivity had low levels of serotonin. The effects of low serotonin levels can be linked to low constraint which "generates in turn a vulnerability to criminal behavior." (Caspi et al, 1994)

Unfortunately, you have to sign in to read the full article, but here is the link to get you to the page with the authors' information and an abstract about the article, feel free to sign in if you are interested in reading the full article.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119264723/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

 

Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., Silva, P. A., Stouthamer-Loeber, M., Krueger, R. F., & Schmutte, P. S. 

     (1994, May). Personality and Crime: Are Some People Crime Prone? Criminology, 32(2), 163-196. 

 

 

 

http://www.centredessciencesdemontreal.com/autopsy/flash.htm

Above is a link to an interactive game called, "Autopsy of a Murder."

After a little introduction to the crime, you will be given 5 pieces of evidence to click on.  Once you click on a piece of evidence, you will be asked to click the answer to which you think is the best accessory to analyze the evidence.  You are given 5 choices: photograph, measurements and diagram of the crime scene, polilight, revealing prints, taking samples.  Once you choose one, it will tell you if it is relevant or not, and if it is, give you more information about your choice.

You will also be given the option of 4 labs (genetics, chemistry, ballistics, or fingerprint) to test your evidence in.  Once you have chosen the correct lab, it will give you a little background information before entering the lab.  If you scroll over the name of the lab, it will give you details as to why each lab is important.  You will then click on all equipment available and learn about it (some equipment have animations, so be on the look out for those).  You can also click on the person in each lab and learn about them (training required, their role, as well as what they do).  If you so chose, there is a the pioneer file where you will learn about a person from history who held that position and read a short snippet about a famous case they worked on.

Though it is not the most exciting game ever, I felt it was very informative and I read a lot about information I hadn't previously known.

 

I read a book called Soul by Tobsha Learner about the search for a genetic trait that allows some people to kill and feel no remorse. It's like 2 books in 1, half the book is about Lavinia Huntington a 20-year-old girl in England in the 1860's, and the other is about her great-great-great granddaughter of Lavinia, Julia Huntington. Julia is a genetisist working for the US Defense Department trying to find the genetic trait mentioned above.

Lavinia is accused of murdering her husband and executed. Julia killed a man while working in Afghanistan but only told a couple people, she feels no remorse for killing the man-it was an automatic response.

"Soul is the story of two women, across two eras, and their struggle with obsessive love and revenge. Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, part commentary on genetics and human behaviour, sexual jealousy and betrayal, it is both provocative and unputdownable."

 http://privateramblings.blogspot.com/2007/04/soul-tobsha-learner.html