Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice as well as misconduct in office for lying about a romantic relationship with his former Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty. The pair were caught by text messages.

Both had denied the relationship under oath in a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by Detroit police officers. The case was later settled for almost $9 million.

[DA Kim] Worthy began her investigation the day after the Free Press published excerpts of the embarrassing text messages in late January. The messages called into question testimony Kilpatrick and Beatty gave in a lawsuit filed by two police officers who alleged they were fired for investigating claims that the mayor used his security unit to cover up extramarital affairs.

In court, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied having an intimate relationship, but the text messages reveal that they carried on a flirty, sometimes sexually explicit dialogue about where to meet and how to conceal their trysts. Kilpatrick is married with three children. Beatty was married at the time and has two children.

...Documents released last month showed Kilpatrick agreed to the settlement in an effort to keep the text messages from becoming public.

The lawsuit alleged the officers were fired after investigating whether the Mayor's security unit had been used to cover up the affair. Mayor Kilpatrick today said he expects to be exonerated. [More...]

Dr. Steven Hayne, Mississippi's medical examiner for hire, had his faulty forensic work exposed when two inmates, wrongfully convicted in separate child murders, were exonerated a few weeks ago after serving 15 years in prison. The Innocence Project has more on his background and on the two clients recently released.

There's more news today, as the Innocence Project has filed open records requests on Dr. Hayne.

The Innocence Project and the Mississippi Innocence Project today issued 23 formal Public Records Act requests that will show the extent to which discredited medical examiner Steven Hayne is using state facilities to conduct autopsies – and potentially using federally-funded crime labs for forensic work that is fraught with negligence and misconduct.

More...

Harris County, Texas (Houston) has the highest execution rate in Texas. If it were a state, it would have the the second highest execution rate in the nation.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned amidst a personal conduct scandal yesterday. Bye, Bye Chuck.

As TChris wrote here last month:

There are many good reasons to believe that Chuck Rosenthal should not be the district attorney in Harris County, Texas ... or anywhere else. He leads the nation in his aggressive use of the death penalty and refused to change that stance in the face of evidence that the Houston crime lab was falsifying data. When a grand jury asked Rosenthal to recuse himself from the investigation of that scandal on the ground that he was up to his neck in it, he declined. He defended his office's reliance on false testimony to support a conviction although he had the good grace to apologize for one of the many wrongful convictions for which his office is responsible.

Voters like Rosenthal because of his image as a "tough prosecutor" -- they apparently think it's more important to look tough than to be right, or fair. It may not be Rosenthal's official actions, but his racist emails, that finally bring him down.

There's also his incredibly racist e-mails: [More...]

A federal judge in Cleveland has ordered 15 inmates released from long prison terms and more may be coming, due to an DEA informant's lies.

Collectively, the men have served at least 30 years behind bars. They were sentenced to a combined 86 years. Federal public defender Dennis Terez called the release of so many people at one time unprecedented.

Fallout from the case is expected to spread beyond the federal courthouses in Cleveland and Akron, where the men were convicted of dealing crack cocaine in Mansfield.

Uncorroborated snitch testimony is inherently unreliable and our system has depended on it for far too long.

The case is a blow to the federal justice system, which relies heavily on informant-based testimony, lawyers said. The men, some with no prior run-ins with the law, were given long prison sentences based almost exclusively on the word of informant Jerrell Bray and Lee Lucas, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who supervised Bray.

An investigation is ongoing into the conduct of the DEA Agent Lee Lucas who supervised the informant.

Also revealing is that most of the inmates to be released pleaded guilty. Here's why. [more...]

If there is a nightmare that haunts criminal defense attorneys, it is being forced to remain silent when speaking out would prevent an innocent man from going to prison ... or worse. That was Leslie Smith's dilemma after he watched prosecutors coax his client, William Jones, to change his story so that it would match other evidence. Prosecutors used Jones to convince a jury that Daryl Atkins shot a man to death, resulting in a death sentence (later vacated) for Atkins.

“As he began to describe the positions of the individuals and the firing of the shots,” Mr. Smith said last month, referring to his client, a prosecutor “reached over and stopped the tape recorder.” ... The problem was that Mr. Jones’s account did not match the physical evidence. “This isn’t going to do us any good,” Ms. Krinick said, according to Mr. Smith.

For 15 minutes, Mr. Smith said, prosecutors coaxed and coached Mr. Jones to produce testimony against Mr. Atkins that did match the evidence.

After being told by ethics authorities for years that he could not reveal the prosecutor's misconduct, Smith finally received approval from the state bar's ethics authority to tell what he knew.

His testimony caused a state court judge in Yorktown, Va., to commute the death sentence of Daryl R. Atkins to life on Thursday, citing prosecutorial misconduct.

Smith's pursuit of the right result saved Atkins from facing the possibility of a second death sentence. Let's hope both Smith and Atkins can finally sleep easy.

The choice of John Durham to lead the investigation of destroyed CIA interrogation videotapes appears to be sound:

Several defense lawyers compared Durham to respected U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the Northern District of Illinois. "He's Fitzgerald with a sense of humor," said lawyer Hugh O'Keefe of Connecticut.

The question is whether Durham can be as effective as Fitzgerald, in the absence of the independence and resources that Fitzgerald had as special counsel:

Mr. Mukasey pointedly did not designate Mr. Durham as a special counsel, in effect refusing to bow to pressure from Congressional Democrats to appoint an independent prosecutor with the same broad legal powers that were given to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel who was appointed in 2003 to lead the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer’s identity. ... As special counsel, Mr. Fitzgerald had the authority of the attorney general for the matters under investigation.

Mr. Durham will report to the deputy attorney general, an office being held temporarily by Craig S. Morford. Mr. Durham will have the powers of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction that includes C.I.A. headquarters.

The powers of a U.S. Attorney are formidable, but it would be a reassuring sign if Durham didn't have to report to a deputy AG.

The Unitary Executive theory, in vogue during the Bush administration, holds that all executive branch employees serve a president who has unilateral authority to direct their actions, to overrule their decisions, and to fire their butts when they refuse to do the president's bidding. An investigation of an executive agency by another executive agency in a Unitary Executive branch amounts to the president investigating himself.

Patrick Fitzgerald acted with integrity in prosecuting Scooter Libby. He should be the model for John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut who, according to Attorney General Mukasey, will lead an outside criminal investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes. Durham has relevant experience: he oversaw an outside investigation of the FBI’s mishandling of mob informants in Boston.

The announcement is the first sign that investigators believe C.I.A. officers, possibly along with other government officials, may have committed criminal acts in their handling of the tapes, which depicted the interrogations in 2002 of two Al Qaeda operatives and were destroyed in 2005.

Durham's investigation will be conducted in grand jury rooms and in private interviews. Congress needs to conduct its own investigation (without immunizing witnesses who might be appropriate targets of prosecution) into the administration's knowledge or involvement.

Don't miss the Evidence of Misjustice segment on 60 Minutes tonight. It will air the results of a joint investigation with the Washington Post on the use of the discredited comparative bullet lead analysis technique.

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.

Concerns developed over the technique in 1991. TalkLeft wrote about it in 2003 (here too.) In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences concluded the technique was bunk and the FBI stopped using it in 2005. But it has refused to release the list of the 2,500 cases in which the technique was used.

Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.

....The Post and "60 Minutes" identified at least 250 cases nationwide in which bullet-lead analysis was introduced, including more than a dozen in which courts have either reversed convictions or now face questions about whether innocent people were sent to prison.

More....

A federal grand jury indicted Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona on charges of mail fraud and witness tampering. The indictment alleges that Carona and others (including, reportedly, his wife and mistress) used illegal campaign contributions to secure Carona’s election and then used Carona’s official position to enrich themselves.

The details are reported here.

A sickening story out of Los Angeles.

A suburban sheriff’s station has had deputies vying to book the most people and impound the most vehicles, and the Los Angeles County sheriff said Thursday that he had ended the competitions.

Results from the competitions, called Operation Any Booking and Operation Vehicle Impound, had been posted on a wall in the Lakewood station. Two hundred deputies are based in Lakewood, which is the local police force for 120,000 residents in five cities southeast of Los Angeles, Artesia, Bellflower, Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood and Paramount.

L.A. Sheriff Baca says there will be no repercussions.

“They’re not acceptable,” he said. “They’re not appropriate. But no harm, no foul. The only disciplinary action I’ve taken is saying to the lieutenant who organized them, ‘Hey, knock this’” off.

Let's see if the courts agree when the lawyers for those busted during the period of the competition start challenging the arrests in court.

Alabama Judge Herman Thomas, accused among other things of spanking prisoners has resigned.

The allegations:

Authorities are investigating allegations that now-suspended Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas periodically removed prisoners from Mobile County Metro Jail and spanked them in a room at the courthouse, according to courthouse sources involved in the inquiry.

Once inside the room, according to the sources, the judge would ask the young men to drop their pants and prepare to be spanked with what they described as a wooden or fraternity-like paddle.

The resignation may end his upcoming ethics trial, but an investigation by the District Attorney's office in Mobile continues.

It took 25 years to remedy the prosecutorial misconduct that tainted Crossan Hoover's murder conviction. Hoover was convicted of beating a man to death when he was 17, at the direction of his employer, who hoped to turn Marin County "into King Arthur's court, with himself as king and teens as knights."

He might have been found insane if jurors had been given proper instructions and if the prosecutor had not withheld key information from a psychiatric witness, U.S. Magistrate James Larson said in a Sept. 7 ruling.

A court-appointed psychiatrist testified that Hoover was motivated by money, not by mental illness. But prosecutors didn't give the psychiatrist the facts he needed to make an informed judgment.

The psychiatrist, John Buehler, has since said his assessment of Hoover would have been different if he had known that information. "The prosecutor's manipulation of the evidence provided to his expert, Dr. Buehler, so distorted the expert's testimony as to amount to false evidence," Larson said.

If prosecutors decide to bring Hoover to trial again, perhaps this time they'll play by the rules.