(CBS) This is a story about an innocent man who has been in prison for 26 years while two attorneys who knew he was innocent stayed silent. They did so because they felt they had no choice.
Alton Logan was convicted of killing a security guard at a McDonald's in Chicago in 1982. Police arrested him after a tip and got three eyewitnesses to identify him. Logan, his mother and brother all testified he was at home asleep when the murder occurred. But a jury found him guilty of first degree murder.
Now new evidence reveals that Logan did not commit that murder. But as correspondent Bob Simon reports, the evidence was not new to those two attorneys, who knew it all along but say they couldn't speak out until now.
Alton Logan's story cuts to the core of America's justice system.
Full Story here CBS "60 Minutes"Here
Watch "cbs "60 Minutes" Video Here
Here is what The Carnegie Legal Reporting Program @ Newhouse supported by the Carnegie Journalism Initiative says about the "60 Minutes Story"
"60 Minutes" drops the ball in wrongful conviction story
CBS "60 Minutes"
Mon, March 10, 2008
Shame on "60 Minutes," correspondent Bob Simon, and producers Robert C. Anderson and Casey Morgan for squandering a chance to tell an important story well.
Their report last night on the case of Alton Logan was "60 Minutes" at its best (powerful on-camera interviews with all the key players) and at its worst (cheap emotion, lacking any intellectual engagement with the real issues). Logan has served 26 years in prison for the murder of a security guard in a Chicago robbery.
Today a judge hears arguments that Logan is innocent and deserves to be freed or retried. Revelations by two defense lawyers triggered the hearing, and the CBS story.
The lawyers represented a man who confessed convincingly to them, before Logan's conviction, that he was the real killer. They came forward only after their client died last November.
It's a shocking and sad story about an injustice no matter what you think of the lawyers. But, with those two lawyers telling Simon how and why they did what they did, it tees up a story that might answer two key legal questions:
Did they have to keep silent?
And why should client confidentiality trump the truth?Simon and his producers skip past those questions while going long on drama and moralizing. Simon opens the report by describing the defense lawyers' motivation: "because they thought they had no choice.
See what you think." And then he proceeds to deny the viewer any opportunity to think, based on facts and perspective on what Illinois' rules say, about the principles at stake.
The lawyers' on-camera quotes don't help much.
They do make the point, over and over, that their loyalty had to be to their client, Andrew Wilson. But they don't come close to explaining why that's important. "It's just a requirement of the law," one lawyer, Dale Coventry, tells Simon. "The system wouldn't work without it
Well, why not? Simon doesn't ask them -- or anyone else.
At another point, Simon intones that the choice of concealing or revealing the wrongful conviction seems easy.
"It's perfectly obvious to someone who isn't a lawyer," he says to bait his lawyer-interviewees, and to play to the story's blatant lawyer-bashing theme.
Simon, et al., fail to summon any other sources to explain why it shouldn't be perfectly obvious -- or at least arguable -- that we need the system as it is to prevent lawyers from betraying clients whenever they or others decide the betrayal would serve a higher good.
And why has Logan served another four months since Wilson's death without even getting a hearing until now, much less a prompt release? "It's all rather complicated," Simon tells his audience in a patronizing dodge.
Too bad neither he nor his producers and employer see it as their job to turn complicated facts and arguments into a coherent story. Instead, we get spleen-venting and weepy melodrama.
Showing posts with label cbs 60 minutes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cbs 60 minutes. Show all posts
Monday, March 10, 2008
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Lee Wayne Hunt I Am Innocent CBS 60 Minutes "Evidence Of Injustice" Video Link
For anyone who missed Lee Wayne Hunt on CBS 60 Minutes, I have posted a link to the CBS video called "Evidence Of Injustice".
Steve Kroft and The Washington Post's John Solomon report on a flawed forensic tool that has been used in hundreds of court cases, possibly landing innocent people behind bars.
The science, called bullet lead analysis, was used by the FBI for 40 years in thousands of cases, and some of the people it helped put in jail may be innocent.
As correspondent Steve Kroft reports, one of them is Lee Wayne Hunt, who is now serving a life sentence for murder in North Carolina.
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Lee Wayne Hunt says he's been behind bars for over 22 years and 6 months, and maintains he's an innocent man. "What I've said from the word get go that I ain't -- never killed nobody. I didn't have nothing to do with this," Hunt tells Kroft.
Hunt was convicted in 1986 of murdering two people in Fayetteville, N.C., based on the testimony of two questionable witnesses and what turned out to be erroneous ballistics testimony from the FBI lab.
For years, the FBI believed that lead in bullets had unique chemical signatures, and that by breaking them down and analyzing them, it was possible to match bullets, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but to a single box of bullets. And that is what the FBI did in the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, tying a bullet fragment found where the murders took place to a box of bullets the prosecutors linked to Hunt.
"I put it exactly the way it sounded to me, and the way that I believe it to be," Hunt says. "He said that this box of bullets is the same box of bullets that was used to kill these people, made on, about the same time."
"I think everybody in the courtroom assumed that this was valid evidence," Richard Rosen, Hunt's attorney, says.
Asked how important he thinks this was to his client's conviction, Rosen says, "I thought it was very important to our client's conviction. It was the single piece of physical evidence corroborating their story. And it came from, you know, it came from the mountaintop."
The FBI first used bullet lead analysis while investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, trying to match pieces of bullets discovered at Dealey Plaza with bullets found in Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle. Read more Here
CBS 60 Minutes video called "Evidence Of Injustice".
Video URL
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3518353n
Copy the link above to share video.
Also on the video is Barry Scheck On The FBI
Barry Scheck, a director of the Innocence Project, talks about the FBI's duty to notify defendants.
The non-profit group The Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 people who were wrongly convicted -- some because of misleading "expert" testimony based on inadequate "science."
How many more innocent people are waiting to be rescued from prison.
Read More from Washington Post here
FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes
Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007;
Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.
Update
Silent Injustice
Bullet-matching Science Debunked
John Solomon
Staff Writer, The Washington Post
Monday, November 19, 2007; 12:00 PM
At noon ET on Monday, Nov. 19 Washington Post staff writer John Solomon responded to reader questions and comments about "Silent Injustice" his 6-month investigation with 60 MINUTES correspondent Steve Kroft into a flawed science used in the convictions of thousands of defendants, scores of whom may be innocent.
To keep up to date on the latest investigation news and projects in the Post, read the Washington Post Investigations blog.
Steve Kroft and The Washington Post's John Solomon report on a flawed forensic tool that has been used in hundreds of court cases, possibly landing innocent people behind bars.
The science, called bullet lead analysis, was used by the FBI for 40 years in thousands of cases, and some of the people it helped put in jail may be innocent.
As correspondent Steve Kroft reports, one of them is Lee Wayne Hunt, who is now serving a life sentence for murder in North Carolina.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Lee Wayne Hunt says he's been behind bars for over 22 years and 6 months, and maintains he's an innocent man. "What I've said from the word get go that I ain't -- never killed nobody. I didn't have nothing to do with this," Hunt tells Kroft.
Hunt was convicted in 1986 of murdering two people in Fayetteville, N.C., based on the testimony of two questionable witnesses and what turned out to be erroneous ballistics testimony from the FBI lab.
For years, the FBI believed that lead in bullets had unique chemical signatures, and that by breaking them down and analyzing them, it was possible to match bullets, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but to a single box of bullets. And that is what the FBI did in the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, tying a bullet fragment found where the murders took place to a box of bullets the prosecutors linked to Hunt.
"I put it exactly the way it sounded to me, and the way that I believe it to be," Hunt says. "He said that this box of bullets is the same box of bullets that was used to kill these people, made on, about the same time."
"I think everybody in the courtroom assumed that this was valid evidence," Richard Rosen, Hunt's attorney, says.
Asked how important he thinks this was to his client's conviction, Rosen says, "I thought it was very important to our client's conviction. It was the single piece of physical evidence corroborating their story. And it came from, you know, it came from the mountaintop."
The FBI first used bullet lead analysis while investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, trying to match pieces of bullets discovered at Dealey Plaza with bullets found in Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle. Read more Here
CBS 60 Minutes video called "Evidence Of Injustice".
Video URL
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3518353n
Copy the link above to share video.
Also on the video is Barry Scheck On The FBI
Barry Scheck, a director of the Innocence Project, talks about the FBI's duty to notify defendants.
The non-profit group The Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 people who were wrongly convicted -- some because of misleading "expert" testimony based on inadequate "science."
How many more innocent people are waiting to be rescued from prison.
Read More from Washington Post here
FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes
Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007;
Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.
Update
Silent Injustice
Bullet-matching Science Debunked
John Solomon
Staff Writer, The Washington Post
Monday, November 19, 2007; 12:00 PM
At noon ET on Monday, Nov. 19 Washington Post staff writer John Solomon responded to reader questions and comments about "Silent Injustice" his 6-month investigation with 60 MINUTES correspondent Steve Kroft into a flawed science used in the convictions of thousands of defendants, scores of whom may be innocent.
To keep up to date on the latest investigation news and projects in the Post, read the Washington Post Investigations blog.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
60 Minutes Evidence Of Injustice - Flawed Forensics and Wrongful Convictions.
Watch CBS 60 Minutes Sunday, at 7 p.m., for a special joint report from 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft and the Washington Post’s John Solomon on a flawed forensic tool used to convict hundreds of defendants, dozens of whom may be innocent.
In their first joint investigation, 60 Minutes and The Washington Post on Sunday, Nov. 18, will examine the government's failure to notify defendants nationwide that they were convicted with the help of flawed forensic science or inaccurate testimony.
60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and the Post's John Solomon report on scores of cases where defendants may not have received a fair trial because prosecution scientists overstated their conclusions or used faulty statistics.
What's more, none of those defendants has been informed that they may be entitled to have their cases reviewed. The results of their six-month investigation will appear Sunday, Nov. 18, in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes, airing at 7 p.m. ET/PT. The case files and other information gathered during the joint investigation will also be posted on the Post's Web site.
Read more
CBS 60 Minutes web site .
Post Comments HERE
In their first joint investigation, 60 Minutes and The Washington Post on Sunday, Nov. 18, will examine the government's failure to notify defendants nationwide that they were convicted with the help of flawed forensic science or inaccurate testimony.
60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and the Post's John Solomon report on scores of cases where defendants may not have received a fair trial because prosecution scientists overstated their conclusions or used faulty statistics.
What's more, none of those defendants has been informed that they may be entitled to have their cases reviewed. The results of their six-month investigation will appear Sunday, Nov. 18, in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes, airing at 7 p.m. ET/PT. The case files and other information gathered during the joint investigation will also be posted on the Post's Web site.
Read more
CBS 60 Minutes web site .
Post Comments HERE
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