A case relying heavily on DNA evidence brought a conviction on three counts of aggravated rape against a Winnsboro man. The prosecution relied heavily on DNA matches between the defendant and evidence collected during investigation of the crimes. After the defendant was arrested on a separate charge in another parish, a sample of his DNA was collected under authority of a state law requiring such samples from felony arrestees. The sample was compared to a database of unknown DNA profiles called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, revealing the match. All three cases had remained unsolved until the Franklin Parish Sheriff"s Office learned of the DNA match in 2007. click here for full article Court overrules Michigan v. Jackson
Last week in Montejo v. Louisiana, by a vote of five to four, the Supreme Court overruled Michigan v. Jackson’s (1986) holding that a criminal defendant’s waiver of the right to counsel, following a critical stage, is presumptively invalid. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, said that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel should instead be protected by the procedures the Court has established to secure the Fifth Amendment right to counsel, Miranda and its progeny.
Noting that the benefits of the Jackson rule are “dwarfed by its substantial costs,” but at the same time refusing to embrace the Louisiana Supreme Court’s narrow interpretation of Jackson in the decision below—that a defendant must affirmatively request counsel before the Sixth Amendment’s protections apply—the Court set down an entirely new doctrinal path. Blurring the line between the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to counsel, the Court held that the Sixth Amendment right could be waived “so long as relinquishment of the right is voluntary, knowing and intelligent,” which could be established by the state’s rote recitation of the defendant’s Miranda rights, and the defendant’s un-counseled, voluntary, waiver of those rights.
The Court explained that the aim of Jackson was to prevent the state from “badgering” represented defendants into waiving their right to counsel. That same end, it reasoned, will be achieved by applying the protections of the Fifth Amendment cases Edwards v. Arizona (1981) and Minnick v. Mississippi (1990)—requiring interrogations to stop once a defendant has invoked his or her right to counsel and preventing any subsequent interrogation from taking place—to assertions of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
The Court recognized that these rules will not provide represented defendants any protection against “badgering” when they are not in custody or, alternatively, engaged in a “noninterrogative type[] of interaction” – such as a pretrial line-up – with police. Moreover, it acknowledged that its new rules will not allow represented defendants to “anticipatorily” invoke their right to counsel, but instead will require them to reassert their desire for counsel each time they are interrogated by the state. Nonetheless, the Court found that the existing Fifth Amendment protections are “sufficient” to prevent defendants from being coerced into waiving their right to representation at critical stages.
In addition to rejecting the Court’s reasoning that the goal of Jackson could be achieved through Miranda warnings, Justice Stevens’s dissent also suggested that the Court may now have to revisit these Fifth Amendment decisions in the Sixth Amendment context. He noted that the Miranda warning that one is entitled to counsel may prove too confusing to defendants who have already obtained counsel, and thus their waiver of their Miranda rights may not amount to a “knowing waiver” of their Sixth Amendment rights. The majority did not address this concern.
Finally, underlying the doctrinal developments was a debate over the weight of stare decisis. Justice Scalia, in the majority, argued that here an adherence to stare decisis was unnecessary because Jackson was poorly reasoned, balancing the risks and benefits of its rule improperly. Justice Alito, with whom Justice Kennedy joined, wrote a separate concurrence to note that if the Court could reject stare decisis and overturn New York v. Beltran (1981), as it did with Arizona v. Gant (2009), then the majority was entitled to do the same with Jackson. Justice Stevens’s dissent argued that Jackson was not poorly reasoned, and although Beltran needed to be reversed, Jackson did not. Justice Breyer refused to join part of this dissent to reiterate that, in his view, both this case and Gant were wrongly decided because of the binding nature of stare decisis.
From SCOTUSblog.com.
Sheriff, DA win judgment - Former Death Row inmates lose civil rights suit
The Third Judicial District District Attorney’s office and the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office were victorious against a lawsuit, which if successful, could have financially crippled both.
The plaintiffs – Albert Burrell and Michael Graham, Jr., filed the lawsuit in 2001 after being released from death row at Angola after serving 13 years for a crime the Louisiana Attorney General dismissed in 2000, citing a lack of evidence.
Burrell and Graham each sought compensatory damages totaling $150 million in the trial held in the U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana Alexandria Division.
January 27, 2009 - Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lawsuit by a Los Angeles man wrongfully convicted of murder and gave district attorneys a broad shield against being sued even if their management mistakes send an innocent person to prison.
Thomas L. Goldstein, a former Marine convicted in a 1979 shooting in Long Beach, spent 24 years in prison largely on the word of a heroin addict who had worked as a jailhouse informant for police and prosecutors. Edward F. Fink lied on the witness stand when he denied receiving a benefit for testifying for police, a judge found.
Goldstein was freed in 2004, and he sued former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp and top deputy Curt Livesay, contending they allowed prosecutors to regularly use jailhouse informants and did not take steps to make sure they were telling the truth. In Goldstein's case, the trial prosecutor did not know Fink was lying because other prosecutors in the sprawling district attorney's office did not share information. Click here for full article. Click here for the opinion.
