about 25 years ago(around 1985), i called the fire department, for what i soon found, was a guy lighting up a crack pipe. i thought he was trying to burn up the shrubs,
"best laugh we've had all month," the amused firemen and policemen chuckled.
"the u.s. secret service guys are above reproach."
"our magical wall street financiers are responsibly propping up the mortgage markets with mirrors."
maybe someday i'll find an agency to believe in, but now my cupboard is pretty bare.
"FBIness is next to godliness."
even i am not ignorant enough to believe in politicians and preachers; i've been that way for several decades now.
this morning comes an article in the washington post stating that the fbi labs have made mistakes in analyzing evidence, but only saw fit to notify the prosecutors and not the defense attornies.
"By Spencer S. Hsu,
Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.
Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.
In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.
As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.
In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.
The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial."
washington post article continues with link.
Changing the inherent racism in drug sentencing laws would also reduce the prison population. Consider the following:
1) Two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.
2) According to a Fed study in 2002, there were approximately 14 million white Americans who had used drugs in the previous month, compared to about 2.6 million African Americans who had done so. In other words, there were five times as many whites using drugs as African Americans.
3) Despite this disparity, African Americans were admitted to prison for drug offenses at nearly 10 times the rate of whites.
how many folks, especially those of meager funds have been/are wrongfully imprisoned?
this is good enough reason to abolish the death penalty.
a wise old friend writes "FBI lab, of course. The FBI remains incompetent on many levels. "
enigma
the eyes of truth
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