More Law and Order:

Human fallibility and the power and self interest of the government are major reasons I fall into the Due Process Model camp. Here are several headlines that add to the post below:

1.

April 19, 2006
Study Fuels Debate Over Police Lineups
By KATE ZERNIKE

The police lineup is a time-honored staple of crime solving, not to mention of countless cop movies and television shows like "Law and Order." Each year, experts estimate, 77,000 people nationwide are put on trial because witnesses picked them out of one.

In recent years many states and cities have moved to overhaul lineups, as DNA evidence has exposed nearly 200 wrongful convictions, three-quarters of them resulting primarily from bad eyewitness identification.

In the new method, the police show witnesses one person at a time, instead of several at once, and the lineup is overseen by someone not connected to the case, to avoid anything that could steer the witness to the suspect the police believe is guilty.

But now, the long-awaited results of an experiment in Illinois have raised serious questions about the changes. The study, the first to do a real-life comparison of the old and new methods, found that the new lineups made witnesses less likely to choose anyone. When they did pick a suspect, they were more likely to choose an innocent person.

Author Zernike is the Times' crime reporter, and a search ot eh Times' site reveals similar types of articles:

2.

Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug Sting Operation

By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: August 4, 2005

ROME, Ga., July 29 - When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug.

But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

3.

Executed Man May Be Cleared in New Inquiry
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: July 19, 2005

ST. LOUIS, July 18 - The corner of Sarah and Olive looks almost nothing as it did 25 years ago when a 19-year-old drug dealer named Quintin Moss was gunned down from a slow-moving car. The boarded-up houses have been replaced by a new townhouse development marked by sleek stone gates; the drug dealers and prostitutes are gone.

"Every prosecutor conceptually has the notion that someone innocent can be convicted," said Jennifer Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney.

And the man convicted of the killing, Larry Griffin, was executed 10 years ago.

Yet the city's top prosecutor has decided to re-investigate the murder as if it just happened, out of new concerns that the wrong man may have been put to death for the crime.