A DNA lab mistake sent an innocent man to prison. Las Vegas Sheriff Doug Gillespie states “[t]his mistake should never have happened is unacceptable.” The following you tube video is a statement by the Las Vegas Sheriff’s office acknowledging this error. Still think innocent people can’t get convicted of a crimes they didn’t commit?
Posts Tagged ‘innocent’
An Innocent Man Goes To Prison Because Of A DNA Lab Mistake
Jul
07
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Dealing with Police
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Utah Law Provides Prison Inmates With Another Chance to Prove Innocence
Apr
30
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Constitutional Rights, Utah Crime Related Videos, Utah Law
Utah law provides prison inmates with another opportunity to prove innocence without DNA evidence.
Innocent in Utah
Feb
12
If you’ve been accused of committing a crime in Utah, your criminal defense attorney can demonstrate your innocence to a judge or jury and show that you are not responsible. Far too many people are lying on their backs in a 6×8 cell and do not belong there. Many times this is due to the fact that they weren’t represented by an expert attorney who is experienced in criminal defense or their attorney simply didn’t have a passion for keeping them out of the overpopulated and ineffective prisons.
Understanding the law and knowing what defenses have worked in the past are keys to allowing you to walk freely out the courthouse doors. Your attorney will start with the basics of criminal responsibility. First, he will assess whether your conduct was, in fact, prohibited by law or if there was some element within your actions that causes you to be exempt from prosecution. Then, he will demonstrate why you shouldn’t be held responsible for any act that transpired. Utah Criminal Code states that a person is not guilty of an offense unless “the person acts intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, with criminal negligence, or with a mental state otherwise specified in the statute defining the offense.”
Don’t become another number within the Utah legal system. If you’ve found yourself in times of trouble, give your Utah attorney a call so he can start preparing your defense and keep the blue skies overhead.
Frontline Investigates Why Four Navy Sailors Would Confess to A Murder and Rape They Didn’t Commit
Nov
09
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Dealing with Police, Legal Process, Utah Crime News
Do not miss this thought provoking look at why criminal defendants sometimes falsely confess. The following is the press release for this documentary.
FRONTLINE Presents
THE CONFESSIONS
Tuesday, November 9, 2010, from 9 to 10:30 P.M. ET on PBS
www.pbs.org/frontline/the-confessions
www.facebook.com/frontlinepbs
Eight men charged. Five confessions. But only one DNA match. Why would four innocent men confess to a brutal crime they didn’t commit?
In The Confessions, airing Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2010, from 9 to 10:30 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (Innocence Lost, An Ordinary Crime) investigates the conviction of four men — current and former sailors in the U.S. Navy — for the rape and murder of a Norfolk, Va., woman in 1997. In the first television interviews with the “Norfolk Four” since their release, Bikel learns of some of the high-pressure police interrogation techniques — the threat of the death penalty, sleep deprivation, intimidation — that led each of the men to confess, despite the lack of any evidence linking them to the crime.
Twenty-five-year-old Danial Williams, married for 11 days, was the first to be arrested for the rape and murder of Michelle Bosko. He tells FRONTLINE how he came to confess after 11 hours of interrogation: “Being in a small room, and you have a person sitting over across the table from you that’s getting in your face, yelling at you, calling you a liar, poking you in the chest with their finger, and then turns around and says, ‘Well, I can help you if you tell me the truth,’” Williams explains. “It went on and on and on throughout the night, with them calling me a liar, telling me I needed to tell the truth. And I kept telling them: ‘I am telling you the truth. I didn’t do it.’ I kept telling them over and over. … I should have stood my ground.”
Instead, Williams gave the Norfolk police detectives a confession. And when that confession proved inconsistent with the forensic evidence, detectives went back to him for an additional confession that better fit the facts. And Williams, once again, gave it to them. He got a court-appointed lawyer.
“No one in Virginia believes that you confess to a murder you didn’t commit; no one believes it,” says Danny Shipley, Williams’ attorney. “And to be quite frank with you, when you approach a case, … [the death penalty] changes everything. All your decisions that you make are guided by the fact that, if you make the wrong decision, you make the wrong call, your client is dead.”
Williams’ DNA failed to match the DNA at the crime scene, but that didn’t save him. Police picked up Williams’ roommate, Joe Dick, and began another interrogation.
“They started asking me where I was when this happened, and I told them that I was on the ship,” Dick said. But Dick’s interrogation was conducted by one of Norfolk’s most formidable detectives, Glenn Ford, who had a reputation for getting confessions. “Ford’s saying I’m lying,” Dick tells FRONTLINE. “He’s starting to get ticked off. He’s raising his voice. He keeps coming back with: ‘We know you were there. We can prove you were there. You can get the death penalty.’ I kept denying it. We went and did a polygraph. He comes back with the results, and he says I’m still lying, that I failed the polygraph. … Eventually I’d had enough of him, and I just wanted to tell him anything to get him off my back and to shut him up. I was tired; emotionally, mentally worn down.” He gave a confession.
Then, confused by police theories and interrogations, Dick started to believe in his own guilt. He implicated another sailor, Eric Wilson, who also confessed. In the end, four men would confess to the rape and murder of Michelle Bosko and another three would be arrested before an eighth man, a convicted rapist named Omar Ballard, was found to be the only DNA match for the Bosko murder. The man confessed to the rape and murder of Michelle Bosko, and said that he did it alone — a statement that fit the forensic facts. But with seven other people already in jail, the police and prosecution refused to change course. Instead, they presented a new theory of the crime in which Ballard met the group outside, and all eight men committed gang rape and murder. From an initial theory of one assailant, namely Danial Williams, the prosecution theory now involved eight, including Ballard.
In a recent interview from prison, Ballard tells FRONTLINE that police pressured him to say the other men participated in the crime with him, a statement that he says was not true. “It was made clear from the jump that unless I said somebody else was with me, that it wasn’t going to be the truth,” Ballard says. “The only truth they wanted to hear [was] that I did it with someone else.”
“Even when there’s other evidence of innocence, the confession overrides that evidence. People ignore, jurors ignore that evidence,” says law professor Richard Leo, who has studied false confessions. “If they were rational, objective, fair-minded police and prosecutors, they would have let everybody else go. But they couldn’t admit what was so obvious: [that] they made a mistake, a big mistake. Four people had been interrogated coercively, confessed to a crime they didn’t commit, and instead of acknowledging that mistake and these individuals’ innocence, they tried to link Omar Ballard to these individuals. They tried to make it a group crime.”
All four sailors are now out of prison—one served his sentence, and the other three were granted conditional pardons last summer, after some 11 years in prison. But the men were not exonerated as felons or sex offenders. “I basically built myself a new cell, my bedroom, … because that’s where I’m safe,” Derek Tice, another of the “Norfolk Four,” tells FRONTLINE. “All I did was trade one cell for another.”
Earlier this summer, Detective Glenn Ford was indicted for extorting money from defendants in exchange for getting them a favorable treatment. He was tried in U.S. District Court in Norfolk and took the stand in his own defense. On Oct. 27, Ford was found guilty on two of four extortion charges and one charge of lying to the FBI. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 25, 2011.
The Confessions is a FRONTLINE production with Ofra Bikel Productions. The writer, producer and director is Ofra Bikel.
Warning to Innocent Utahns: Don’t Sleep Naked
Nov
08
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Constitutional Rights, Dealing with Police, Humor, Utah Crime News
Hopefully, our own local Utah headlines won’t read “Highly trained Swat team terrorize innocent people in the middle of the night”. While in Longview, Texas this headline was a reality when two innocent brothers were peacefully asleep in there home when they were suddenly and brutally awakened by a swat team in the middle of the night. Unfortunately for these citizens the Swat team had the wrong house. The two brothers were dragged out of bed and caused unneccessary emotional distress, particularly because one of the brothers is disabled and suffers from diabetes. The Swat team reportedly mistook the housenumber for somebody else. It seems that one of the most highly trained police organizations in the United States can’t seem to properly do their job. Police officers are human and make mistakes, and those Utahns who have been falsely accused of a crime know this all too well.
For Utahns who sleep in the buff, we hope the Utah police Swat team never mistakenly raids your home at night.
University of Utah’s College of Law hosts John Thompson, who was falsely convicted of Carjacking and Murder and Placed on Death Row.
Oct
21
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Constitutional Rights, Legal Process, Utah Court
On November 5th from Noon to 1:30 at the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law will host John Thompson and hear his amazing story of going from death row to freedom.
In 1985, 22-year old John Thompson was convicted of two unrelated crimes in separate trials in New Orleans: a carjacking, for which he received a 49-1/2 year sentence, and a murder of a prominent young businessman, for which he was sentenced to death. After his appeals were exhausted, two young Philadelphia lawyers, Gordon Cooney and Michael Banks, launched post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings on his behalf. In 1999, with all avenues of review seemingly exhausted, Cooney and Banks traveled to Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana to tell their client that his execution was just weeks away. They then learned of a stunning new development — critical evidence that was withheld from the defense and that led the courts to vacate and the carjacking conviction and grant a new trial in the murder case. They retried the murder case in 2003 and Thompson was acquitted after just 35 minutes of jury deliberation. They then won a $14 million verdict in a civil rights suit against the District Attorney’s office; the District Attorney’s appeal from the judgment in that civil case was just argued in the United States Supreme Court on October 6.
Cooney and Banks will discuss the struggle leading to Thompson’s complete exoneration after 18 years in prison in the face of multiple death warrants. They will also discuss the lawsuit against the District Attorney’s office and the issues that were recently argued in the Supreme Court. Thompson will discuss his ordeal as an innocent man wrongly imprisoned and sentenced to die and his experiences since his release, including the non-profit agency that he founded, Resurrection After Exoneration (r-a-e.org) to help others who are exonerated of crimes and released from prison.
What is Double Jeopardy?
Aug
23
Jesse Nix, Utah Criminal Defense Lawyer, on the topic of Constitutional Rights, Utah Legal Definition
The double jeopardy rule arises from the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the relevant clause of which reads:
“nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb”
This clause is intended to limit abuse by the government in repeated prosecution for the same offense as a means of harassment or oppression. It is also in harmony with the common law concept of res judicata which prevents courts from relitigating issues which have already been the subject of a final judgment.
There are three essential protections included in the double jeopardy principle, which are:
• being retried for the same crime after an acquittal
• retrial after a conviction
• being punished multiple times for the same offense
This rule is occasionally referred to as a legal technicality because it allows defendants a defense that does not address whether the crime was actually committed. For example, were police to uncover new evidence conclusively proving the guilt of someone previously acquitted, there is little they can do because the defendant may not be tried again—at least not on the same or a substantially similar charge. Fong Foo v. United States, 369 U.S. 141 (1962).
Although the Fifth Amendment initially applied only to the federal government, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the double jeopardy clause applies to the states as well.
Jeopardy attaches in a jury trial once the jury and alternates are impaneled and sworn in. In a non-jury trial, jeopardy attaches once the first evidence is put on which occurs when the first witness is sworn
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy#United_States)
Dollar Bills in Utah Carry Cocaine
Mar
26
photo: In a N.Y. State Of Mind
Many of the dollar bills you come in contact with in Utah carry cocaine. The American Chemical Society conducted a study in 2009 that found traces of cocaine on 90% of the U.S. paper currency. However, most of the bills were not used to snort cocaine and did not even pass through the hands of a drug kingpin. The bills usually come in contact with the cocaine through indirect methods. The few bills that are actually used for the purposes of cocaine continue to carry some of the drug. Cocaine is an extremely fine powder and when the contaminated bills change hands they leave a trail of cocaine. The largest spread of the drug happens at banks, casinos, and other big gatherings of currency. When the contaminated bills make it to a bank they are often put in a counting machine or ATM. Then, the cocaine passes to the other bills in the machines. More importantly the fine powder is left behind in the machines and continues to transfer to other dollar bills passing through. Such small amounts of the very fine powder would only be detectable on the hands of those who come across very large quantities of dollar bills. This type of environmental contamination from large amounts of currency has occurred in Utah. In the case of the State of Utah v. Dale Moroni Gibbons the Utah criminal defense attorney Clayton Simms argued that the defendant, the Chief Financial Officer of Zions Bank, was surrounded by U.S. currency that was contaminated with illegal substances, including cocaine. In closing arguments at the jury trial, Utah criminal defense attorney Clayton Simms argued that the defendant’s positive hair test for cocaine was a result of environmental contamination. The jury acquitted the defendant of all charges including possession of a controlled substance, and he walked out of court a free man.
Innocent Until Proven Guilty: What does this really mean?
Feb
16
Clayton Simms, Criminal Defense Attorney, on the topic of Constitutional Rights, Legal Process, Utah Law
Photo: Ann Althouse
Our criminal justice system is based upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Until a jury decides whether they believe you are guilty or innocent, the law treats you as an innocent person. During your trial, the prosecution has the burden of proof to convince a jury that you are guilty. The belief behind this system is that if the government is going to take away your liberty, they must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you in fact committed the crime. If they cannot prove you are guilty, you are allowed to keep your liberty. That is the way the system is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, the system isn’t that perfect. When the news reports that a person allegedly committed a crime, most viewers automatically assume that the person is guilty. If the newspaper reports on a teacher who is accused of having sex with his students, people assume that the teacher is guilty.
Even though our criminal justice system is based on “innocent until proven guilty,” the general public always rushes to judgment. During jury selection, the judge or lawyers will usually ask, “Does anyone believe that because a person is arrested and charged with a crime, they probably committed that crime?” Potential jurors often raise their hands. As a defendant, you wouldn’t want that kind of person on the jury deciding your future.
Because the general public has a difficult time with the concept of “innocent until proven guilty,” it is critical that you hire an attorney who can explain this concept to juries. If your attorney can prove that the prosecution cannot prove guilt, then you will be found innocent.
Defenses to Utah Crimes
Jan
05
When you are charged with a crime, you have to plead guilty, not-guilty, or no-contest in some circumstances. If you plead not-guilty, you have to present a defense to the charges. Here are some typical defenses that are used:
I Didn’t Do It
Prove that I did it: The prosecution has the burden of proving that you actually committed the crime because you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. This mean that the prosecution has to convince a judge or jury that you were in the right place, at the right time, and you committed the crime. You, as the defendant, are not obligated to present a case, call witnesses, or even argue that the prosecutor is wrong. If the judge or jury doesn’t believe the prosecution’s story, then you will be found not-guilty.
I Wasn’t There
If you were charged with robbery of a bank at 3pm, your alibi defense would be that you were working across town from 1pm-5pm and couldn’t have robbed the bank. For an alibi defense to work, you will have to convince the jury with evidence that your alibi is truthful.
I Did It, But It Was Self Defense!
Charges of battery (hitting someone), assault, and murder will often result in a self-defense claim. The defendant will argue that their actions were justified because of the other person’s (the victim) threatening actions. The questions that will be important here are (1) who was the aggressor, (2) was the threat that the defendant perceived a reasonable threat, and (3) did the defendant use only the reasonable force necessary to protect himself? If a reasonable person in similar circumstances would have been justified in using the same force that the defendant used, then the defendant has the right to protect himself. But the defendant can only use force that is reasonable to combat the threat (fist vs. fist okay, but shooting someone with a gun who only threatens you with a fist is not okay).
I Did It, But I Was Insane!
This defense rarely works, and when it does, the defendant doesn’t simply go free. To prove insanity, the defendant must prove insanity, which can only be accomplished by involving psychiatrists. The defendant must go through complex testing of their mental state. If the defendant is found not guilty by reason of insanity, the defendant will be moved to a psychiatric hospital where they will be treated. Sometimes, the time spent in this hospital will be longer than the prison sentence they would have gotten with a guilty plea.
In Utah, the insanity defense will not work because the state abolished it. However, a defendant can be found guilty but mentally ill.
Whatever defense you want to present, having the assistance of a skilled Utah Criminal defense attorney will help you to decide what kind of defense is best for you.
