Posts tagged "evidence"

On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council voted in favor of a massive settlement for 39 California men. Each of the men was subjected to an illegal strip search in public between 2002 and 2009. After years of litigation, these men will have a measure of justice and California authorities will hopefully be more careful to follow constitutional rules on searches and seizures.

Search and seizure questions come up in many criminal cases, often involving drug possession. The United States Constitution puts strong limits on when and how government agents, including police officers, are allowed to conduct searches. Our law seeks to protect the rights of all citizens from invasive searches. Public strip searches are a perfect example of this.

As discussed in the previous post, the news organization ProPublica has been working on an ongoing investigation into the death investigation system in the U.S. One of the areas where the death investigation system in the country can have flaws is in the investigation into the deaths of children.

A recent post discussed how a California grandmother is hoping that Governor Jerry Brown will grant her clemency for her conviction for shaking her grandson to death, which many experts now believe was not how the baby even died.

In addition, a Texas man recently had a conviction for child sexual assault and murder voided by the appeals court of his state because the court said his original defense attorney had failed to do enough to challenge the medical experts testifying on behalf of the prosecution.

Several posts on this blog have discussed some of the in-depth investigations done by the news organization ProPublica into the criminal justice system. A couple of recent posts discussed how ProPublica has looked into the death investigation system in the U.S. and found serious flaws. Some of the hardest cases to determine a cause of death and, therefore, more likely to result in faulty conclusions are investigations into the sexual assault and deaths of children.

Children's bodies are different than adults, which is why there is a whole field of medicine dedicated to children: pediatrics. Children are also more fragile so clues as to how a child died can be more subtle but could also leave bigger marks on the body. Some diseases, such as the blood disorder sickle cell anemia, can look like child abuse in a deceased child if the examiner does not have the expertise to find the right signs and know the difference.

Law enforcement officials say that a 33-year-old California man was the leader of a bay area crack cocaine ring that supplied drugs to cities including San Jose, Oakland and Stockton. The suspect pled guilty to one count of conspiring to manufacture and distribute crack cocaine. On Wednesday a Federal Judge sentenced the man to almost 20 years in prison. Penalties handed down from federal courts are often more severe than those for charges in state courts.

Authorities say that they were able to take down the drug ring by using wiretaps to listen in on cellular phone conversations during which the man allegedly arranged drug sales. As you may know police are required to obtain court approval before they can conduct this type of communications interception. The prosecutors in this case indicated the wiretaps were indeed court approved.

Despite what authorities might want you to believe, breathalyzer tests and other sobriety tests are not 100 percent accurate. In fact, sobriety tests used by law enforcement are often prone to error. Unfortunately, many DUI defendants are unaware of this fact and admit guilt all too quickly.

Now, a faulty breathalyzer may give San Jose DUI suspects new hope. In Santa Clara County, the breathalyzer used during field tests has been proven to be faulty. A manufacturer's defect allows for the possibility of condensation to build up within the tube of the device. The county is considering filing suit against the manufacturer of the device.

The Alco-Sensor V was used in stops by the Palo Alto and San Jose police. In Palo Alto, which had 49 of the questionable cases, it was used from February 2010 to December 2010. In San Jose, which had 809 of the cases, the same device was used from November 2010 to April 2011. Santa Clara County has 7,000 DUI cases per year. Most defendants plead no contest or guilty.

A man famous for his work with some of the best-known pop and rock groups of the 1960s and 1970s will remain in jail for second-degree murder. Phil Spector recently lost a bid to overturn his 2009 conviction for the shooting death of a nightclub hostess in his home.

Spector, who had a signature multi-level "wall of sound" music producing style, met Lana Clarkson in 2003 when she was working in a Hollywood nightclub. Later that same night, Clarkson was found dead in the foyer of Spector's home. Spector's first trial on murder charges ended in mistrial with a deadlocked jury in 2007.

San Jose police recently arrested two suspected gang members for the lunchtime shooting death of an individual outside of a McDonald's restaurant in March. Both of the men facing homicide charges are 18-year-old San Jose natives.

Officials believe that the shooting occurred at approximately 12:05 p.m. on March 16. The two male suspects were allegedly traveling by car when they noticed the victim walking to a bus stop. The suspects confronted the victim and one of them shot the victim in the back of the head. The pair then returned to their vehicle and fled the scene.

In the 21st Century, many of the sex crimes people are arrested and charged with are internet crimes. Because the crimes occur on the internet, that is where many law enforcement officers go when they investigate sex crimes.

Child pornography is illegal material that is now found almost exclusively on the internet. When investigating child pornography cases, officers use what evidence they have available, usually an IP address or an e-mail address, and try to connect that information to an individual. However, there is great deal of conjecture in this process and an innocent person is accused of child pornography possession all too often.

A federal judge recently ruled that a secret recording of a locker room conversation allegedly discussing Barry Bonds, urine tests and injections could be used as evidence in Bonds' perjury trial this coming month. The tape was supposedly recorded in 2003 in the locker room of the San Francisco Giants and could have an influence on the perjury trial of the embattled home run king. The trial is set to begin on March 21.

Bonds is not on trial for taking illegal drugs. Rather, Bonds is accused of lying before a grand jury and impeding the investigation of an alleged steroid distribution ring within professional sports.

With Barry Bonds scheduled to stand trial on March 21, attorneys for the prosecution and the defense are fervently making motions concerning the evidence that can be presented to the jury that will decide Bonds' fate. Bonds faces one count of obstructing justice and four counts of perjury for allegedly lying to a federal grand jury in 2003 about possibly using steroids during his efforts to break baseball's home run records.

With a pre-trial hearing on the evidentiary issues scheduled for March 1, Bonds' attorneys have filed motions seeking to prevent other professional athletes from testifying about their steroid use and how they obtained the steroids from Greg Anderson. Anderson was Bonds' personal trainer, who has admitted distributing steroids through a Bay Area manufacturer.

Part of a defense attorney's job is to prevent the prosecution from using questionable and unfair evidence. To avoid a form of guilt by association, Bonds' attorneys are specifically trying to prevent Jason and Jeremy Giambi, Marvin Bernard, Armando Rios and Benito Santiago from testifying. Bonds' lawyers believe the testimony of these athletes about their use of performance enhancing drugs would cause jurors to reach unfair conclusions about the drug use Bonds is accused of lying about. The fact that Bonds was in a similar position as athletes who may have used performance-enhancing drugs does not mean that Bonds must also have used performance-enhancing drugs.

In 1999, an 83-year-old woman was raped and murdered in her Colton, California home. For many years the crime was an unsolved mystery. Last week William Francis Arroyo was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime. How did this case go from unsolved mystery to conviction? The answer is California's required DNA sampling program.

Arroyo was being held in state custody at West Valley Detention Center on unrelated charges when authorities arrested him for the 1999 crime. Arroyo was connected to the 1999 rape and murder by a DNA sample he was required to give by law. The DNA taken from him was sent to a state database and it matched physical evidence taken from the Colton crime scene.