TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Oklahoma's Wretched Record
on Wrongful Convictions
by Michelle Malkin
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Chairman Goodlatte Prepares Subpoenas
For DOJ/FBI ‘Steele Dossier’ Conspiracy Group
by sundance.
Clarion Assists Police in New Mexico Islamist Compound Tragedy
{ clarionproject.org } ~ Clarion’s Shillman Fellow and Clarion Intelligence Network Director Ryan Mauro explains how we worked hand in hand... with authorities investigating a New Mexico Islamist compound. Reports suggest children kept in the compound were being trained to stage school shootings. Here’s more from Ryan: https://clarionproject.org/clarion-assists-police-in-new-mexico-islamist-compound-tragedy/
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dummycrats-Dem blows up at reporter’s
question about socialism, and it’s caught on video
by Carlos GarciaIn Saudi-Canada standoff, Riyadh should stand down
by Jonathan Schanzer and Varsha Koduvayur.
Danger Ahead: The Game-Changer Drone
by Michael Curtis
{ americanthinker.com } ~ Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. The unease of rulers may result from personal factors, constant worry, lack of sleep, and guilt for past odious actions... but also often from fear of assassination. The list is long of the sad stories of the deaths of murdered kings. The Bible tells the story of Joab, commander of King David's army, who killed the king's rebellious son and rival, Absalom. A quick survey of some of the well known victims illustrates the targeted killings. Phillip II of Macedonia was assassinated in 336 B.C. and Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. For a number of centuries, the 8th through the 14th, an Islamic sect called the Assassins was active in the areas of what is now Iran and Syria, killing, often under influence of hashish, caliphs, viziers, sultans, and Crusaders for political and religious reasons. The Renaissance illuminates a catalogue of tyrannicide. Rulers and challengers for power continued to be subject to assassination, which then influenced official policy: Henry IV in France in 1610; Russian tsars Paul I and Alexander II and Rasputin in 1916; Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in May 1812, the only British prime minister to suffer this fate; Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914; and Leon Trotsky in Mexico City on August 21, 1940. The U.S. has lost four presidents to assassins, and Huey Long in Baton Rouge on September 10, 1935; Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968; and Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. In recent years, other countries have lost leaders or leading figures; among them are Mohandas Gandhi in Delhi on January 30, 1948; Anwar Sadat in Cairo on October 6, 1981; Olaf Palme in Stockholm on February 28, 1986; Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995; and Benazir Bhutto, prime minister in Pakistan and the first woman to head a democratic country in a Muslim-majority nation, in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007...
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Oklahoma's Wretched Record
on Wrongful Convictions
{ townhall.com } ~ "Frontier justice" costs too many citizens of all races, creeds, and backgrounds their freedom and their lives. In the old days of the Wild West, vigilantes worked outside the judicial system to punish rivals regardless of their guilt or innocence. Today, outlaws operate inside the bureaucracy to secure criminal convictions at all costs.
Oklahoma -- the notorious home of "Hang 'Em High" executions -- stands out for its decades of trampling due process, subverting public disclosure, perpetuating forensic junk science, manufacturing false accusations and enabling official misconduct.
Since 1993, 35 wrongfully convicted Oklahomans have been officially exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations; 15 inmates have been freed in the past decade. Almost half of the state's exonerees had been convicted of murder; 17 percent for sexual assault. The reign of prosecutorial terror and forensic error by the late Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy and rogue Oklahoma City police department crime lab analyst Joyce Gilchrist resulted in at least 11 wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project. Those victims included:
Exoneree Curtis McCarty, who was sent to death row for a stabbing and strangulation murder after Macy withheld evidence and Gilchrist falsified blood evidence and destroyed hair evidence.
Exoneree Robert Lee Miller Jr., another death row inmate falsely convicted of two rapes and two murders based on a coerced confession and atrocious forensic misconduct involving junk analysis of semen, blood, saliva, human hair and dog hair.
Exoneree Jeffrey Pierce, who was falsely convicted of rape in 1986 based on Gilchrist's misconduct and won a $4 million settlement from Oklahoma City.
Exoneree David Bryson, who was wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and rape and freed after 18 years in prison when Gilchrist's destruction of evidence was discovered and follow-up DNA testing excluded him as the attacker.
Law enforcement and legal insiders alike have shared stories with me about good ol' boys club corruption that crosses party lines in the Sooner State. Government prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys routinely cut deals. Judges bend over backwards to preserve "harmless errors" caused by flawed investigations, faulty verdicts and clerical incompetence. Police brass retaliate against whistleblowers. And, according to one veteran cop, Oklahoma City is a hopeless "nest of incestuous nepotism."
Unlike neighboring Texas, where Dallas County prosecutors founded the first conviction integrity unit in the country sparking the creation of 30 such agencies nationwide, not a single Oklahoma district attorney's office has established an official mechanism to review tainted convictions. Nor does Oklahoma have anything like the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which investigates professional misconduct by crime labs and other entities that conduct forensic analyses used in criminal proceedings. The Texas panel was created in the wake of the infamous scandal at the Houston Police Department crime lab a decade ago and its audits led to the more recent shutdown of the Austin PD's mess of a crime lab.
Meanwhile, no systemic reform ensued after the Macy/Gilchrist disgrace in Oklahoma. In fact, one of Gilchrist's colleagues who admitted destroying rape kit evidence at her behest was kept on for nearly 15 more years until she mysteriously retired last year amid questions about her DNA testimony.
OCPD crime lab analyst Elaine Taylor's work (challenged by at least eight independent scientists internationally over the past year) was at the center of illegal secret hearings last summer in the high-profile wrongful conviction of former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw. He is serving 263 years for sexual assault allegations solicited by police, who ignored accusers' wild contradictions and discrepancies, long rap sheets and drug-addled testimony during an out-of-control media feeding frenzy before and during trial. Taylor is the mother-in-law of Det. Rocky Gregory, the co-lead detective in the botched Holtzclaw investigation -- a glaring conflict of interest undisclosed by police and prosecutors.
Kathleen Zellner, the nation's most successful exoneration lawyer defending Holtzclaw against accusers' high-dollar civil lawsuits, quipped that she was "surprised they have not put crime scene tape around the OKC crime lab."
While appealing his case, Holtzclaw has faced a series of Keystone Kops blunders every step of the way, with the Court of Criminal Appeals failing to follow its own rules on publicly disclosing court protective orders; a court clerk who simply "forgot" to file a public notice of the state attorney general requesting the secret hearing transcripts and exhibits; the court admitting that Holtzclaw's public defender, James Lockard, shouldn't have been barred from the unconstitutional secret hearings; the court realizing more than a year late that its clerk had never formally filed a critical state attorney general's motion under seal; and the clerk failing to properly tender Holtzclaw's amended motion for an evidentiary hearing despite it being filed with the clerk more than a month ago.
This lackadaisical attitude toward matters of life and liberty pervades Okie culture.
Take the case of the missing sealed envelope in death row inmate Julius Jones' appeal. Jones, a basketball star at the University of Oklahoma, has served 19 years in prison for a murder he steadfastly maintains he did not commit. Recent episodes of ABC's "The Last Defense" spotlighted troubling inconsistencies in the testimony of the prosecution's star witness, who took a plea deal; ineffective counsel by overwhelmed defense attorneys who called no witnesses at trial; and the glaring failure to test a central piece of evidence -- a bandana purportedly warn by the shooter.
Last December, Jones' appellate lawyers filed an application for post-conviction relief and related motions for discovery and an evidentiary hearing to consider newly discovered evidence of racial animus by a juror. Jones' lawyers included supporting exhibits, which a court clerk instructed the legal team to place in a separate envelope labeled "protected material." Through a chain of bureaucratic mishaps, the key exhibits were somehow lost until Jones' investigator, Kim Marks, personally visited the clerk's office in June and unearthed them. The court, which had rejected Jones' appeal without seeing the missing exhibits, was forced to acknowledge two weeks ago that it couldn't ignore its clerk's "mismanagement of the exhibits" and has been forced to reconsider the case.
Chilling exit fact: Despite its wretched record on wrongful convictions the past two decades, not to mention three horrific botched executions in the last three years, Oklahoma's incompetent and corrupted criminal justice system is set to resume putting people to death next year come hell or high water.
Silence over this human rights crisis is complicity.
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