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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (82934)	6/26/2000 11:19:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 108807

Joan, on the death penalty, which seems to be approaching dead horse status here, I stumbled on this link while looking for something else: theatlantic.com Big article, ton of links, it's entertaining to do a quick search on Texas internally in this article. The first one that comes up touches on "The Thin Blue Line" case: But perjured evidence may come from sources far more insidious than convicted felons. In West Virginia, Frederick Zain, a police chemist and a popular expert witness for the prosecution, was accused of repeatedly falsifying laboratory results and presenting perjured testimony at trial. No fewer than 170 rape and murder convictions in West Virginia and Texas, all based in part on testimony by Zain, were called into question, and six men who served a total of forty years in prison have had their convictions overturned. In Texas, the nation's execution capital, where more than seventy-nine people have been executed in the past three years, prosecutors relied for years on the expert testimony of Ralph Erdmann, a forensic pathologist, who repeatedly falsified autopsy reports to support prosecution arguments in death-penalty cases. A special prosecutor's investigation of Erdmann concluded, "If the prosecution theory was that death was caused by a Martian death ray, then that was what Dr. Erdmann reported." Texas prosecutors also repeatedly relied on James Grigson, a psychiatrist who became known as "Dr. Death" because his expert opinion in 124 capital cases contributed to 115 death sentences. One of those sentenced was Randall Dale Adams, whose wrongful conviction was the subject of the movie The Thin Blue Line. Grigson testified at Adams's 1977 trial that the defendant had a "sociopathic personality disorder" and that "there is no question in my mind that Adams is guilty." Asked if Adams was likely to kill in the future, given the opportunity, Grigson replied, "He will kill again." In fact Adams was innocent, and had never killed anyone. He came within seventy-two hours of execution. Cheers, Dan.