Making a Murderer Atty Gets Signed Baseball from Robin Yount — "To Laura. Keep Up the Fight"

Robin Yount to attorney working for wrongfully
convicted: "Laura. Keep up the fight."

Laura Nirider is an attorney who represented the wrongfully convicted Brendan Dassey, an innocent 16-year-old goaded into a false confession featured in the Making a Murderer docu-series.

Nirider, CoDirector of Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, works for innocent children preyed upon by law enforcement

Laura Nirider just received kind words from baseball great, Robin Yount, inscribed on a signed baseball from the Brewer Hall-of-Famer, reading: "Laura. Keep up the fight."

Nice.

⁦@SDrizin⁩ and I just got wonderful surprises in the mail from ⁦@LindsayHerf⁩ and the ⁦@ArizonaJP⁩ — signed “keep up the fight” baseballs from former Milwaukee ⁦@Brewers⁩ player and MLB Hall of Famer Robin Yount! Thank you so much. We will! pic.twitter.com/I5bNvA2M2W

— Laura Nirider (@LauraNirider) March 12, 2019

Wrongful Conviction—Missourian David Robinson Walks Free

From left, Jennett McCaster, David Robinson and Pat Jackson
embrace after Robinson's release from the Jefferson City
Correctional facility May 14 in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Photo: Kassi Jackson, Southeast Missourian

"David Robinson walked away a free man Monday night, after nearly 18 years of being incarcerated for a murder he did not commit," writes Bob Miller in the Southeast Missourian.

David Robinson is another victim of police-prosecutor-prison state America. Innocence doesn't matter in a system that is simultaneously mindless and malicious.

Without the work of the Southeast Missourian newspaper bringing this injustice to the attention of the state, Robinson likely would remain in prison for life for a crime he did not commit.

From the AP:

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley reviewed a judge’s ruling in February that found a police detective was 'lacking in candor or competence, or both.' That detective’s investigation helped send Robinson to prison for life in the fatal shooting of Sheila Box in Sikeston in 2001. The detective has resigned.

Hawley also evaluated the evidence available for a retrial. Since Robinson’s sentencing, another man has confessed to killing Box and two witnesses have recanted.

So, we have a system of dishonest cops, dishonest prosecutors, indecent Dept of Corrections bureaucrats in a country of by-standers. The deliverables are obscene.

The local Missouri paper freed this man against every crooked cop, prosecutor and prison bureaucrat for whom taking a human life is a game.

Would you help imprison a man you knew to be innocent? Most people would not, but the fact is we say nothing about those who perpetrate such crimes on routine basis in Missouri, Wisconsin, every state where cruel injustice and lies are objectives.

On May 5, 2018, the Southeast Missourian writes in its lead editorial after the Missouri Supreme Court "ruled that Robinson's constitutional rights had been violated when police and the state prosecution, led at the time by the Missouri Attorney General's Office, unfairly procured and presented testimony they knew to be false.":

Scott County Prosecutor Paul Boyd on Thursday said effectively that Robinson was not exonerated, because the state could continue to hold him and try him again without violating double jeopardy. While technically correct, the Supreme Court has in effect declared Robinson innocent and will now require the state to prove his guilt. With the court's approval of his habeas claim, Robinson no longer has to prove his innocence. Meanwhile, the evidence of the stunningly unjust way the Sikeston Department of Public Safety and the prosecution treated Robinson is there for everyone to see in court documents and this newspaper's extensive reporting on the case. Perhaps some introspection of how the county dispenses justice is in order, or even some contrition toward Robinson and his family are more prudent now than the parsing of the definition of the word exoneration. Maybe it's time for leadership in the county or the city of Sikeston to acknowledge the injustice that has been done. For now, the city of Sikeston has asked for a federal investigation into its past police practices regarding this case, only stating that it respects the Supreme Court's decision. As if it could do anything but.

Robinson's case is a reminder the role our police and prosecutors play in upholding our constitutional principles, and the importance of an impartial appeals system.

It also highlights the importance of attorneys who care about truth and justice. The Bryan Cave Law firm took on Robinson's case pro bono. Congratulations to them for carrying Robinson's torch.

Meanwhile, the Missouri Attorney General's Office has defended the jury's conviction at every turn, perhaps as expected. An exoneration shouldn't come easily, because a jury's decision is essential to our justice system. But it seems like a system that uses our tax dollars to defend a bad conviction for the sake of doing so is not a healthy system.

Judge Darrell Missey, in his scathing review of the handling of this case, quoted a previous ruling, Strickler v Greene, in his report to the Missouri Supreme Court:

"A prosecutor must seek truth rather than victory, 'because the prosecutor is considered the representative of not an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.'"

We couldn't agree more. It's time for the State of Missouri to let Robinson go.

Will anything change in Missouri's 'justice' system? No.

How about around the country where wrongful convictions abound from the same brand of sub-human cops, prosecutors and bureaucrats? No.

We live in a country where state-committed injustice is every bit as unchallenged as in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, pick a monarchy or theocracy.

In Wisconsin, we have innocents Penny Brummer, Branden Dassey, Steven Avery for starters who remain in prison.

You can be sure there are many more. Every jurisdiction needs a Conviction Integrity Unit or a human governor to commute and pardon as in the Penny Brummer, Branden Dassey, and Steven Avery cases.

So WI Department of "Justice" doesn't care about justice in Brendan's case. They want him to rot in prison because they can't admit they went after innocent 16 yr old boy to convict his uncle.#makingamurderer#cjreform https://t.co/hLxeFy3MfC

— Jerome Buting (@JButing) May 10, 2018

Texas Conviction Integrity Unit Hailed as Model

Goya, Saturn devouring a child

As prosecutor-politicians and police advance their careers over the shattered lives of the wrongfully convicted, from Texas comes a report on the success of the country's first conviction integrity unit.

Noah Fromson, (Medill News Service), reports in the Texas Tribune in Austin, Texas:

In 2007, the new district attorney of Dallas County partnered with the Innocence Project of Texas to review over 400 old cases, many involving denied requests for DNA testing, because the county had the highest number of wrongful convictions in the country.

To ensure such mistaken convictions never happened again, District Attorney Craig Watkins established the first conviction integrity unit in the United States later that year.

'We made history ... I still get calls to my private office for individuals that want me to do that,' Watkins said this week of reviewing old cases, 'but I don't have the power to do that anymore.' ...

While they exist in less than 1 percent of the nation’s 3,007 counties, such units were responsible for 39 percent of overturned wrongful convictions in the U.S. last year, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations. That’s 58 of the record-high 149 exonerations in 2015.

The work of reporters and innocence projects has led to a series of exonerations involving the misuse of forensic information by law enforcement, said James Liebman, director of the Center for Public Research and Leadership at the Columbia Law School.

'There is a huge sensitivity now to the misuse of prosecutorial and police processes to convict people who are innocent,' Liebman said. 'Officials have become sensitive to those (innocence) claims and are taking responsibility to do something about it.' ...

As a result, more district attorneys are starting their own units, said John Hollway, executive director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

“As information has spread and (units) have gotten more praise and done more good, you see a rapid uptick,” Hollway said. “More than half of them were started in the last 24 months.”

The units spend a lot of time sorting through requests from the convicted parties, innocence projects and other sources to decide what to review, said Inger Chandler, chief of the Conviction Review Section at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston.

'We try to give every case its due diligence because the last thing you want to do is miss that needle in a haystack,' Chandler said. 'Where we carve people out of eligibility for our review is that you have to be making a claim of actual factual innocence. In other words, 'I wasn’t there' or 'I was misidentified.' Not a justification, not a lesser role, but factual innocence.'

Working to free the innocent. Sounds like a good idea.

Innocence

While the Innocence Project notes some systemic causes of wrongful convictions—Eyewitness misidentification, Unvalidated or improper forensic science, False confessions or admissions, Government misconduct, Informants, Inadequate defense—the fact is the government, the Constitutional Sovereign, in the criminal justice system is implemented by fallible and not-always-decent people.

As such, every base motivation and imperfection to which the human mind is subject—prejudice, hate, complacency, career opportunity, convenience, lassitude, intellectual laziness, tunnel vision—are inflicted onto the suspect and accused.

Conviction integrity units 

Conviction integrity units independent from the District Attorney's office are critical, emphatically when one considers police and prosecutors often stand in the way of exoneration and freedom for the innocent in the face of exculpatory evidence, (Gould, Leo; The Path to Exoneration).

Our local democracies must embrace the fact many in law enforcement will take a conviction of the innocent over the truth, or tragedy results.

When victims, whom police and prosecutors know to be innocent, are impelled onto the criminal justice conveyor belt, law enforcement personnel convince themselves they're just doing their jobs.

As for the innocent people sent into exile to the leviathan about which Robert Jackson presciently warned us about 75 years, their lives are taken and easily forgotten.

Steven J. Phillips published No Heroes, No Villains (Vintage) in 1978, explaining the procedures of criminal law in a gripping account and chronicling of a true-crime murder case in New York. Phillips' thoughtful book no longer bears any relevancy to criminal law procedure in the police-prosecutor-prison-state America.

Today, the villains often wear badges redolent with the myth of purity, defenders against the dangerous class. Prosecutors, judges and court services are bureaucrats working busily like something out of Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil.

Penny Brummer 

In Dane County (Wisconsin), advocates working to free an innocent woman, Penny Brummer—convicted in 1994 and inflicted a life sentence behind bars by an unholy convergence of bigotry, tunnel vision, careerism and demonetization—are cautious to adopt an oops-could-accidents-will-happen and passive-accomplices-just-doing-their-jobs-should-be-excused account of law enforcement in the wrongful conviction and malicious prosecution of Brummer.

The ethics and efficacy of this moral-immunity approach to freeing the innocent Brummer convicted by hatred of lesbians, among other pathologies, are not convincing.

Indifference

But there is another perpetrator beyond law enforcement in Brummer's case: Indifference.

To borrow from a critical study of totalitarian systems edited by Alan L. Berger:

If the many viewed indifference as an neutral act, [Norman] Cohn, on the other hand, points out its lethal quality. It was, he says, 'precisely the mixture of fanaticism of a minority with the indifference of the many that made possible the whole development from the first restrictions to the final extermination.' Indifference, far from being neutral, is always on the side of the executioner. (Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (p. 200). Cited by Roger W. Smith, in Fantasy, Purity, Destruction: Norman Cohn's Complex Witness to the Holocaust in "Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939-1989" (p. 121), edited by Alan L. Berger.)

If the reader considers studies of totalitarianism in 1930s-40s Germany and conquered nations not relevant to Brummer's case, consider what a life sentence of incarceration would mean to someone you know wrongfully convicted of first degree intentional homicide in her young 20s, just months home after a five-year stint serving her country, (straight out of high school), in the U.S. Air Force.

As a Brummer advocate's signature on her emails reads: "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is exercised under cover of law, and with the colors of justice ..." - U.S. v. Jannotti, 673 F.2d 578, 614 (3d Cir. 1982)

An independent conviction integrity unit would have and still can free Penny Brummer and who knows how many other wrongfully convicted (and finally exonerated) Forest Shombergs, Ralph Armstrongs, Anthony Hicks, and Audrey Edmunds, or anyone black and in the wrong place at the wrong time in Dane County.

White papers on conviction integrity units include Conviction Integrity Units: Vanguard of Criminal Justice Reform and An Epidemic of Prosecutor Misconduct.

Writes Mark Godsey, (Daniel P. and Judith L. Carmichael Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law; Director, Center for the Global Study of Wrongful Conviction; Director, Rosenthal Institute for Justice/Ohio Innocence Project) on police, prosecutors as passive accomplices (my words):

What’s scary is how tenaciously police and prosecutors cling to their initial assumptions—and how much this reflects basic human tendencies. ...

It’s natural for police and prosecutors to want to ease public fears. And it’s also natural for them to stick with the evidence that supported their preferred explanations. As University of Wisconsin clinical law professor Keith Findley shows in his excellent 2010 article Tunnel Vision, the phenomenon 'is the product of a variety of cognitive distortions,' chief among them confirmation bias. In other words, we tend to give weight to evidence that confirms our existing beliefs. 'Although such confirmation-biased information is often less probative than disconfirming information might be, people fail to recognize the weakness of the confirming feedback they receive or recall,' Findley writes. He cites studies finding that 'police officers who are convinced that a suspect is lying are very resistant to changing their minds' and often 'rate disconfirming or exonerating evidence as less reliable or credible than guilt-confirming evidence that supports their initial hypotheses.'

I called Brandon Garrett, the law professor who wrote the book on wrongful convictions and why they happen, and he pointed out that police and prosecutors have no obligation to pursue alternative explanations, or even to follow a particular method of investigation or keep a record explaining the course they’re taking. Which means it’s close to impossible to hold them accountable for their errors. 

Errors and the indifference of the many. These features of American society ought instruct the creation of independent integrity units in every territorial law enforcement jurisdiction in the nation.

Brooklyn, NY Woman’s Conviction Overturned after DA Revisits Old Homicide Cases

Penny Brummer - Wrongfully convicted in 1994
because she is a lesbian

New York — Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced that he will move to vacate a second-degree manslaughter conviction from a 1998 jury trial, PIX11 has exclusively learned.

District Attorney Thompson said, "In the interest of justice, I will ask the Court today to vacate the manslaughter conviction of Vanessa Gathers. After a thorough and fair review of the case by my Conviction Review Unit and the Independent Review Panel, I have concluded that this conviction should not stand," Nicole Johnson of PIX-11 reports.

In the interest of justice.

This is a compelling reason to impose truth upon a miscarriage of justice.

Penny Brummer in Madison, Wisconsin

Locally, in Madison, Wisconsin if you have not signed the petition begun in January calling for a new trial for Penny Brummer, wrongfully convicted in 1994, please consider doing so now.

Ms. Brummer is an innocent woman railroaded by police tunnel vision, bigotry and a retrograde conception of lesbianism.

No evidence, no criminal record of Ms. Brummer who joined the U.S. Air Force straight out of high school, no motive, no connection to an unknown crime scene and an unknown murder weapon,  Brummer was nevertheless arrested, prosecuted and convicted of first degree intentional homicide of Sarah Gonstead.

Brummer reportedly wrote a letter earlier this month to Dane County (Wisconsin) District Attorney Ismael Ozanne asking for a new trial.

"Unless something does happen, Penny will die in a Wisconsin prison, damned for a relationship once forbidden in an era of intolerance," noted David Protess, President, Chicago Innocence Project, (Huffington Post).

DA Ozanne could call for a new trial today ... in the interest of justice.

To borrow from Robert H. Jackson's address 75 years ago, "While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst," (U.S. DoJ).

'Prosecutors hell-bent on victory'

"Prosecutorial bias permeates the American judicial system. Prosecutors hell-bent on victory often directly or indirectly prod investigators and experts to get the results they want. It’s refreshing to see a judge recognize this in a well-reasoned, groundbreaking decision," notes Martin Yant commenting at the Wrongful Conviction blog.

The convictions-at-any-costs dynamic in American criminal justice has put away 1,000s of innocents across the country as character assassination becomes one element of the MO of prosecutors. The case Yant comments on is Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. George D. Perrot. See also the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.

For example, in Brummer v. Wisconsin, the (late) and disgraced assistant D.A. Judy Schwaemle said of the accused, Penny Brummer, at trial, "You are not judging a human being."

Such dehumanization is necessary for cases devoid of evidence. If you wish to sign a petition calling for a new trial for Penny Brummer in the name of justice, sign the petition here.

Brummer was arrested and convicted for one reason, she is an out lesbian, and Madison was not a safe place in the early 1990s for out lesbians, and in former DA Brian Blanchard's office, victory and conviction was the only consideration of the office's operation.

With respect to Mr. George Perrot, he spent 30 years in prison for a crime of which he is innocent. He remains in prison, pending the Hampton County (Mass) District Attorney's decision to appeal

No Massachusetts prosecutor stepped up to say the Perrot case is unjust and indecent. To do so would damage careers which is precisely what is occurring now in the fall-out of the Perrot exoneration and the outing of a rogue prosecutor, Francis W. Bloom formerly of the Hampton County (Mass) District Attorney's office.

Notes Yvonne Abraham of the Boston Globe, Perrot's advocates never quit:

Over the years, Perrot and his attorneys have tried many times to have his conviction overturned. Most recently, his case has been taken on by Kirsten Mayer and other attorneys from Ropes and Gray (LLP); The Innocence Project; and The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Until now, none of the egregious and appalling irregularities in this case has proved enough.

For Wisconsin's Penny Brummer and other innocents like George Perrot, never give up.

On Wrongful Convictions and Penny Brummer

Updated - Here is a strong recommendation for Christmas weekend binge watching: The Making of a Murderer (Ricciardi and Demos, Netflix). Wisconsin viewers will recognize many of the players, the chilling police and prosecutor duplicity, the cover-ups, the lies, and the pathological lack of conscience of Wisconsin law enforcement. Raves are pouring in, this is a masterpiece that ought to shake the foundations of the state criminal law system. It won't.
 --
Wrapping up for Christmas Day weekend early, we note here again the findings of the first, systematic empirical study on actual innocence, wrongful convictions and exonerations.

"Police and prosecutors maintain their roles ... serving as the largest combined source of opposition to exonerations," conclude Jon B. Gould and Richard A. Leo in their important Path to Exoneration research paper.

Noted here at this site and across the Madison, Wisconsin press has been the case study of a wrongful conviction: Penny L. Brummer v. Wisconsin (Dane County Case Number 1994CF000617) (1994).

Standing in the way of exoneration are the police and the District Attorney's office.

There have been numerous exonerations in Wisconsin and in Dane County, (Wisconsin Innocence Project) and only a fool can doubt more innocent people remain behind bars today.

Yet, as we read of the exoneration of one Wisconsin citizen after another (Barton, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), there is not widespread outrage from jurists, no public demand for accountability from the police and prosecutors, no call for change in the police-prosecutor state about which the prescient 20th century jurist (and chief prosecutor for the Allied Forces at Nuremberg), Robert H. Jackson, warned our country about 75 years ago.

Instead, we find local police and prosecutors serving as the largest combined source of opposition to exonerations, and as eager foes of liberty.

To Penny Brummer and many other victims, please note in this holiday season: You are not forgotten.

As for Dane County Wisconsin, one step should be the establishment of a Conviction Integrity Unit independent of the District Attorney's office (acting in an advisory capacity) that can serve as a political check on cases such as the shabby investigation, the retrograde bigotry, passive compliance and careerism of law enforcement that caused Penny Brummer to serve year 21 now of a life sentence for an alleged homicide of which I believe prosecutors, police and many others know she is innocent.

To state what should be obvious: The careers of law enforcement officials are trivial in comparison to the life and liberty of the Wisconsin citizenry.

Looking for justice in Wisconsin—Penny Brummer

Research Report: Prosecutors, Police Protect Wrongful Convictions; Ignore Facts

Jon B. Gould and Richard A. Leo have a Research Paper out studying exonerations and wrongful convictions.

The conclusions drawn from the empirical study of exonerations indict the American criminal justice system, and show police and prosecutors will stand by convictions and arrests in the face of any exculpatory evidence.

Not many exonerated Georgia Thompson v. United States and Forest Shomberg v. Wisconsin cases around the nation, in which judges toss out cases and vacate convictions, (Cohen, NYT; Davidoff, Isthmus). Prosecutors can be counted on to defend wrongful convictions, seeking 'wins' over justice. Not many Robert H. Jackson fans around today.

Gould and Leo's abstract from their paper reads as follows:    

This article is the first systematic empirical study of how the American criminal justice system discovers and responds to factual error based on actual innocence. The study analyzes a data set of 260 cases of wrongful conviction of the innocent and 200 near misses (i.e., dismissals and acquittals involving an innocent defendant) to better understand the sources of and bases for exoneration; who is responsible for, as well as who opposes, exoneration; the statistical correlates of exoneration; and the primary methods and mechanisms involved in the path to exoneration.

This study leads to several findings. First, wrongful convictions are difficult to reverse in the absence of dispositive evidence of innocence. The vast majority of exonerations relied on one or two bases, and even then most required DNA evidence. Second, the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system continues from the trial level to subsequent efforts to exonerate the innocent. Police and prosecutors maintain their roles, infrequently playing a central part in investigating or advocating for exoneration and serving as the largest combined source of opposition to exonerations. Finally, exonerations take a long time, even longer when based on DNA evidence, which appears to be the primary basis for clearing defendants.

After examining these findings, the authors advocate for the following changes in the United States criminal justice system: 1) police and prosecutors must take a more active role in the review and reversal of factually erroneous convictions; 2) additional juridical proceedings are needed for the wrongly convicted to prove their innocence even after conviction; 3) efforts must be made to prevent wrongful convictions at the front end because the resources for freeing the wrongly convicted are so limited and the path to exoneration following conviction is filled with formidable challenges.

Wrongful Conviction—$10,000 Reward Offered in Sarah Gonstead Killing; Innocent Penny Brummer Still in Prison

Wrongful Conviction for Reasons of Careerism and Bigotry Against Lesbians 
"They didn't look at (Penny), they just looked at it as let's get another gay person off the street," said Nancy Brummer, Penny's mother (Pabich, WMTV-TV) -

Updated - As Penny Brummer remains in prison, convicted for the 1994 killing of Sarah Gonstead, a $10,000 reward is now being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible for 1994 death of Gonstead and Kelly Nolan.

Tipsters may remain anonymous. Email sheila0326@gmail.com, or call toll-free at 800 407-1178.

Penny Brummer's 1994 conviction remains an outrage perpetrated by the Madison Police Dept, the Dane County Sheriff's Dept., and the Dane County District Attorney's office still protecting the wrongful conviction to this day.

Penny Brummer

Here in Dane County, an innocent woman, Penny Brummer, remains behind bars (in Fond du Lac county), a 1994 prosecution presided over by District Attorney Brian Blanchard's office (2001-2010), and an injustice District Attorney Ismael Ozanne (2010-present) has refused to revisit, though the case lacks evidence of any kind—forensic evidence, crime scene eyewitness accounts, murder weapons, nothing but bigotry and what attorneys call "confirmation bias."

So what happened in 1994? The D.A.'s office says: There's no case?

Brummer was a lesbian and veteran so she likely murdered someone, and police had a theory, who needs evidence?

The judge was former Dane County (Wisconsin) Judge Patrick Fiedler, now a partner with Hurley, Burish & Stanton, S.C., after several decades of prosecutorial work in service to the Republican Party and his career. Fiedler, a rightwinger and typical bigot, agreed with the D.A's office.

A decent judge would have dismissed the case.

It is incomprehensible to me why current DA Ismael Ozanne lets this injustice stand.

"Police clearly had 'tunnel vision' in building a case against Penny, another common feature in wrongful convictions. Witness David Zoromski, who reported seeing a suspicious man standing by the open passenger door of a parked pickup truck exactly where Sarah's body was later found, was told by a Dane County Sheriff's Deputy, 'What you saw is all very interesting, but we have a suspect and it doesn't fit.' The man seen by Mr. Zoromski matched the description of the person Penny said she saw Sarah talking to near the Taco Bell at East Washington Avenue and North Oak Street in Madison, after she dropped her off that night. Police identified him and knew he was a convicted felon with a long history of violence toward women -- but they never followed up on this lead."
- From Who Killed Sarah

To support this innocent woman, see Penny Brummer.

Wisconsin's Jarrett Adams: From Wrongfully Imprisoned to a Clerk Fellowship at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Mark Godsey has the story at the Wrongful Convictions blog.

On Prosecutors Protecting Wrongful Convictions

"I’ve made the argument before that convicting an innocent person of murder ought to be treated like a doctor who amputates the wrong limb. If it wasn’t intentional, perhaps it shouldn’t be a criminal offense. But it should end that person’s career. Yet to actively work to preserve bad convictions, and to work to keep information about those cases from becoming public, is another matter entirely," writes Radley Balko today in the Washington Post.

With a hat tip to Mark Godsey at the Wrongful Convictions blog, I ask Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to read a book: Who Killed Sarah? A True Story of Injustice.

I would be happy to email Mr. Ozanne a copy, if you are reading this. Your office is protecting a wrongful prosecution, and I suspect a man of your intellect realizes this fact.

Your office can afford to be just.

Prosecutorial Reform—70,000 Prosecutors Can Aspire to Be 70,000 Robert Jacksons

University of Wisconsin-Madison Innocence Project
Above are the proven-innocent-after-conviction; wrongful
convictions rarely draw a rush to find out what's wrong. Ask
the innocent Penny Brummer who remains incarcerated.
Ms. Brummer's real offense—Brummer is a lesbian
and victim of the Dane County Sheriff's Department
and a case study in Confirmation Bias, and was
convicted in 1994 on circumstantial evidence only.

Phil Locke calculates that in the United States there are some 70,000 prosecutors. (Wrongful Convictions)

Defense attorneys, civil libertarians and other advocates for those Americans unfortunate enough to enter into the American criminal justice system as defendants witness the dedication of prosecutors to make defendants and those forced into convictions—risk your life and go broke or plead (charge stacking)—spend as much time incarcerated as possible during and after adjudication, with the assistance of the odious Court Services systems around the country.

Some jurisdictions are much better than others, especially now that mass incarceration (Bravin, Wall Street Journal) and police and prosecutorial misconduct are coming to the fore thanks to the work of jurists and reformists such as Mark Godsey, Sidney Powell, Jeff Scott Olson, the Center for Constitutional Rights) and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit) and Richard Posner (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) and the various Innocence Projects around the country, for example.

The denial of liberty is a foundation of the land of the free, and for reasons surpassing understanding the objective of the many prosecutors is to incarcerate, period.

Writes Locke, Science and Technology Advisor for the Ohio Innocence Project and Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic, "I have been doing innocence work for only 7 years, but just in that time, I have seen case after case in which prosecutors withhold evidence, badger or threaten witnesses, make deals with snitches, stack charges to coerce a plea deal, refuse to allow DNA testing, and refuse to allow post-conviction access to evidence. And once the litigation has moved into post-conviction, prosecutors will, without exception, vigorously defend every conviction, no matter how wrongful they might be. I’ve worked 63 cases in eight different states and two foreign countries, and, on top of that, have knowledge of probably 100 other cases; and I find it’s the same all over. Have I seen some exceptions to this 'rule?' Of course, but they’re not common. My belief is that this characterizes the preponderance of prosecutorial behaviors. I can only report what I observe, and clearly there is cause for change."

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne running for Wisconsin Attorney General last year wrote, "I have worked with lawyers from the Innocence Project, and will do so in the future. ... The ultimate goal of the system is not simply to secure convictions, it is to do justice." (Mal Contends)

In the Democratic Primary election Wisconsin voters chose Ozanne's opponent, Susan Happ, who rode a Harley in a frequently run campaign TV spot featuring Happ looking like an extra for Sons of Anarchy (Sutter, FX Productions, Art Linson Productions and Fox 21), despite Happ's sterling CV.

Prosecutors dedicated to truth don't carry much electoral appeal.

Locke has several suggestions, one of the most compelling is: "Let’s have all trial counsel, prosecutors and defense attorneys, sworn in at the beginning of each trial," sworn in to tell the truth.

Here's another, from Mal:

Each prosecutor before assuming office must read the disquisitions on prosecutorial discretion of Robert Jackson.

If at the end of trial the prosecutor determines the quantum of evidence is circumstantial or suffers defects that a reasonable jurist would determine is less the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard, then she must drop all charges.

Wisconsin Watch: Wisconsin lacks standards for incentivized testimony

If one considers the criminal justice and 'corrections' system in Wisconsin, Wisconsin is looking more and more like Alabama.

Mario Koran reports on another deficiency. From the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:

"A state that has no protections against witnesses who are compensated for their testimony is inviting wrongful convictions," says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and author of an award-winning book on the dangers of criminal informant testimony.

It would appear there are a whole range of reasons behind wrongful convictions.

Anytime an innocent spends one minute behind bars, the system has not worked.