No, that's not what they say they did. But whether they realize it or not, that is now what's going to happen.
What the Supreme Court just ruled, 5-4, is that police can take DNA from people they arrest (not convicted yet, obviously) and add it to a database, just as they do with fingerprints. The case involved a Maryland defendant who was identified as a rapist after he was arrested for assault, as a result of the swab of cells taken from inside his cheek and tested against a DNA database including evidence samples from unsolved crimes including rapes.
This is an example of how hard cases make bad law. A scumbag like this needs to be captured and imprisoned. [1] But the precedent it establishes tightens the screw of police power around everyone's necks yet another notch.
The decision split the court in an unusual way. The "conservatives" (reactionaries) and "liberals" (conservatives) didn't line up on opposite sides from each other, but rather some were on each side of the decision. Antonin Scalia, in the minority, decried the decision, so it must be really awful!!
The reason I say this opens the door to DNA frame-ups is because that is what the police and FBI ALWAYS do with their powers. That is what they have done, over and over, with fingerprint evidence, for example.
What? you say. How is that possible?
Very easily, actually.
In the case of fingerprint frame-ups, there is a nearly foolproof method. The police merely claim they lifted a fingerprint of their chosen victim from a crime scene or from a piece of evidence such as a weapon or whatever.
There have been a few cases where the police got caught doing this. In California in the early 1970s there was a case that made the newspapers of a hapless ice cream vendor framed up who served 8 years until the frame-up was unraveled.
More recently, in New York State the State police were caught using planted prints in this manner. [2]
It must happen thousands of times that we don't know about. Since the public is brainwashed to believe that fingerprint evidence is infallible, no one believes someone who protests that that can't be their print. (Ah, it was their print, it just wasn't where the cops said it was!)
Back in the 1970s I read a textbook on fingerprint "science" by one of the recognized experts in the field, Andre A. Moessens. One section dealt with the issue of faking fingerprint evidence. He described a number of methods and why each one could be exposed. Then he came to the last one, where the police could "theoretically" claim to have lifted a print from a place they didn't. He said in that case we just have to trust the integrity of the police not to do that.
Right. Ever hear of "testilying," pal? [3]
Besides claiming to have lifted prints from sites they actually didn't obtain them from, police also misidentify prints, sometimes in good faith, sometimes accidentally. Frontline had a pretty good documentary a few years ago about the unreliability of so-called forensic science. [4] (It's more of a pseudo-science, actually. First, they claim an exactitude that is just false. Then they transfer the inculcated belief in the infallibility and precision of fingerprint "matching" to all manner of things that is just fraudulent, like hair, handwriting, tire tracks, tool marks, barrel marks on bullets, paint chips, even bite marks! There were numerous bogus murder convictions in Georgia based on bite marks on victims' bodies allegedly "matching" a defendant's teeth! You'd think common sense would be enough to refute such nonsense!)
Fingerprint "matching" is actually more of an art than a science, but the police will never admit that, since it would undermine their undeservedly ironclad credibility. The FBI claimed they had a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match to an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who just happened to be Muslim, between him and a print from the 2004 Madrid railway bombing. He had a hellish few weeks, until the Spanish police announced that they arrested the person who actually had the finger the print came from. And since the finger was attached to that man's hand, and not to Mayfield's, it was a bit of an OOPS moment for the FBI.
The FBI had insisted the prints were an "absolutely incontrovertible match." And the FBI touts itself, and with longtime media cooperation has created the myth, that it is some kind of elite police force, the creme de la creme of "law enforcement." So imagine how competent the thousands of state, county, and local police departments are in America. Imagine how it is in poorer countries.
Well, in the Mayfield matter, the FBI apologized, and paid some money (which their victim had to sue them to get, of course- Gee, why are Americans "so litigious?" Could it be because that's the ONLY WAY to get redress for wrongs? Just wondering). Usually the FBI gets away with this sort of thing, and much worse, including political assassinations.
So now they can do the same things with DNA. Since a swabful of inner cheek cells contains a huge amount of detectable DNA molecules, there is plenty to use for purposes of "finding" some at crime scenes, etc. Just like taking a fingerprint and putting it on an evidence card. If the FBI agent or police officer says he got this sample he's submitting to the database for matching from such-and-such a spot, that is very hard to disprove. He merely has to assert it. And in U.S. courts, there is a presumption that police don't lie- even after so many years of evidence to the contrary. (And people not blindly hypnotized by authority are systematically weeded out from jury pools in advance of trials, so there is little skeptism among jurors towards police testimony and "evidence.")
To be sure, DNA could have been used anyway to frame people up, without the Supreme Court's help, by surreptitiously obtaining people's DNA. Perhaps a femme fatale or fake "friend" could serve a victim a drink, and the saliva left on the glass taken, a trick police already use against people in custody. Or government burglars could swab your toothbrush when you're not home. There are myriad possibilites for such a "dirty trick." But it would have also been necessary to "officially" get DNA from the target's body directly, in order to "prove" a "match." So without this legalization of taking DNA from arrestees- and the FBI has arranged countless tens of thousands of pretext arrests, for example the late political activist Abbie Hoffman alone was arrested over 50 times- it would have been harder to frame the person. They would have first had to be convicted of a felony to overtly take DNA from their body. (That was already allowed.)
The number of victims of just FBI political frame-ups is too numerous to list here. Two prominent ones are Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt (eventually exonerated after 30 years in a dungeon) and Leonard Peltier, who is destined to die in a Federal "supermax" torture prison. Peltier was framed with fake FBI "forensic science" evidence that claimed ballistic tests matched his rifle to a bullet taken from a dead FBI agent who had attacked American Indian Movement members. (One of whom, Joe Stuntz, was killed by the agents in the attack, a fact that never gets mentioned for some reason, so I'm mentioning it right here, and secret policemen who don't like it and monitor this site can lump it- I'm sorry, "lump it" won't translate well for those who use the Translate widget on this page. It means "too bad for you, I don't care.")
During appeals, the FBI was forced to admit that the ballistic "match" was bogus, but of course the appeals court let the conviction stand anyway, despite the utter absence of any other evidence proving Peltier shot the agent. The FBI has made clear over the years that releasing Peltier is absolutely unacceptable to it, and people IN the establishment know enough not to mess with the FBI, which has blackmailed and imprisoned many politicians and judges over the years. Plus Federal judges are ideologically hostile to anyone who forcibly resists the oppression of the system.
But a legal system that is part of the enforcement machinery of an oligarchy cannot be relied upon as a vehicle for justice. That means that almost anyone, at any time, not just opponents of the system, can be victimized by such a judicial system- and many are, both those who are victims of criminals where the perpetrators are overlooked, and those framed up as criminal culprits- framed up by lazy and indifferent police and prosecutors, or framed up by criminals with state power.
1] Rapists are particularly dangerous as they are usually repeat offenders. Except maybe for Bill Clinton, who raped Juanita Broaddrick, as a story on NBC revealed some years ago. Clinton had thugs threaten women he'd sexually used or abused- one had her cat killed, and a goon then accosted her while she was jogging and terrified her, for example. His right-hand woman, Betsy Wright, had as one of her tasks suppressing "bimbo eruptions," that is, ensuring that his past paramours would maintain omerta (silence). So it is impossible to know if he only raped one woman in his entire life.
However we do know that he's committed mass murder more than once.
-In Haiti, where he overthrew Aristede and had the CIA create a death squad called FRAPH. (FRAPH stands for "The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti," an amazingly cynical and Orwellian title. It was like a successor to the murderous Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier dictatorship.)
-In Sudan, where he blew up the country's only pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, newly built, which meant death for thousands of poor Sudanese.
-In Iraq, where the sanctions he maintained are credited with killing 500,000 Iraqi children. When Leslie Stahl confronted his Secretary of State, the evil harridan Madeleine Albright, about this on the TV show 60 Minutes, asking "was it worth it?" Albright didn't even dispute the half million dead children Stahl cited and ended her answer with "We think it was worth it." What the "it" was that was allegedly achieved, I still can't figure out. Of course, their goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was not accomplished until Clinton's successor Bush the Younger invaded Iraq.
-In Rwanda, where he ordered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan* to pull out UN troops instead of sending requested reinforcements, which led directly to the genocide there. The commander of the troops said he could have easily prevented the slaughter with relatively few reinforcements. (Most of the killing was by machete and burning people alive. These were mobs, mostly, not modern military forces committing the massacres.) That last one is maybe more of a failure to prevent, although it wasn't mere passivity, but active interference that in effect aided and abetted the murderers.
So that's four mass murders on Clinton's head, three of them very directly and deliberately by him. If you want to add one more failure-to-prevent mass murder to his account, there's his failure to kill Osama bin Laden when numerous opportunities presented themselves, according to former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. Scheuer also faults Bush II for similar failures. (See youtube.com interviews with Scheuer, especially "Conversations With History.") Of course this one wasn't foreseeable, as the Rwandan one was, and is speculative, as killing bin Laden would not have necessarily prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. We're told the "mastermind" of that is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on "trial" in a kangeroo pseudo-court on the military base in occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's not that I necessarily doubt his guilt. I just don't like Stalinist-style show trials that make a mockery of justice and legal process. In fact, such show trials are highly destructive to law and justice, not only in the particular instance, but by discrediting law and justice conceptually and delegitimating them in the eyes of the people.
* Annan was a willing U.S. stooge, in the tradition of UN Secretary Generals. In fact, those aren't so pliable risk death, as happened to Dag Hammarskjold, who was murdered in 1961 when the CIA sabotaged his plane, to prevent him from interfering with U.S. designs in the Congo. See the BBC News magazine story "Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?" Also CIA assassin Dean Selmier, in his book Blow Away, which describes his career as a killer for the CIA, recounts a conversation with a French intelligence officer who tells him Hammarskjold was murdered, and that the Frenchman said he opposed the hit. Barnes and Noble is selling the book online for $1.99. A bargain for a hardcover!
2] Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, "Fingerprints." I recommend the article to interested readers.
"In April 1993, in the New York State Police Troop C scandal, Craig D. Harvey, a New York State Police trooper was charged with fabricating evidence. Harvey admitted he and another trooper lifted fingerprints from items the suspect, John Spencer, touched while in Troop C headquarters during booking. He attached the fingerprints to evidence cards and later claimed that he had pulled the fingerprints from the scene of the murder. The forged evidence was presented during John Spencer's trial and his subsequent conviction resulted in a term of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing. Three state troopers were found guilty of fabricating fingerprint evidence and served prison sentences."
I wonder who did more time in prison, the victim or the police criminals? Wikipedia doesn't say. I don't have time to research it at the moment- but you can.
Of course, the real solution to all this is honest, ethical police and prosecutors with checks on their ability to pursue ideological vendettas and political agendas (whether of personal aggrandizement or repression of dissent and resistance to injustice). That won't happen until they are less powerful and under more external controls. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously phrased it. The problem isn't so much the tools of law enforcement as who wields them, and for what ends.
3] There are so many examples of blatant frame-ups by venal cops and prosecutors over the years, in numerous states, that it would take a large tome just to cover the ones that became prominent in the media. Right now in New York, there is an ongoing review of murder convictions engineered by a Brooklyn, NY detective, who for example used the same drug addict as an "eyewitness" in numerous separate murder cases! The only reason the cases are "under review" is because the New York Times, to their credit, exposed some of the "questionable" cases, thus forcing the venal Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, to order a "review." He's up for reelection yet again, but he needn't worry: TV network CBS has rushed to his rescue with a suspiciously timely multi-episode TV series lionizing his office, including portraying as heroic a vicious prosecutor in his employ who was revealed by the Times series as a frame-up artist. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because Hynes has made himself useful to the powerful Jewish Hasidic community in Brooklyn (which votes as a bloc) and CBS is a key organ of Jewish power in the U.S. This kind of cohesiveness is one key to Jewish power in America. (Contrast that with the fractiousness of African-Americans, who daily gun down other African-Americans for no good reason.)
There are a number of stories on the NYT website, such as "Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered," "Scrutiny on Prosecutors After Questions About Brooklyn Detective’s Work," "Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom," and "In Review of Brooklyn Cases, So Many Obstacles." You can search their website for more. And that's just one example in the U.S. This happens all over, all the time. With the increase in police and prosecutorial power over the last few decades, and the evisceration of rights and protections for the people, we should expect it to get worse.
4] See "Judge Harry T. Edwards: How Reliable is Forensic Evidence in Court?" In fact, there are a number of relevant stories at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ Search with the keywords "forensic science on trial."
What the Supreme Court just ruled, 5-4, is that police can take DNA from people they arrest (not convicted yet, obviously) and add it to a database, just as they do with fingerprints. The case involved a Maryland defendant who was identified as a rapist after he was arrested for assault, as a result of the swab of cells taken from inside his cheek and tested against a DNA database including evidence samples from unsolved crimes including rapes.
This is an example of how hard cases make bad law. A scumbag like this needs to be captured and imprisoned. [1] But the precedent it establishes tightens the screw of police power around everyone's necks yet another notch.
The decision split the court in an unusual way. The "conservatives" (reactionaries) and "liberals" (conservatives) didn't line up on opposite sides from each other, but rather some were on each side of the decision. Antonin Scalia, in the minority, decried the decision, so it must be really awful!!
The reason I say this opens the door to DNA frame-ups is because that is what the police and FBI ALWAYS do with their powers. That is what they have done, over and over, with fingerprint evidence, for example.
What? you say. How is that possible?
Very easily, actually.
In the case of fingerprint frame-ups, there is a nearly foolproof method. The police merely claim they lifted a fingerprint of their chosen victim from a crime scene or from a piece of evidence such as a weapon or whatever.
There have been a few cases where the police got caught doing this. In California in the early 1970s there was a case that made the newspapers of a hapless ice cream vendor framed up who served 8 years until the frame-up was unraveled.
More recently, in New York State the State police were caught using planted prints in this manner. [2]
It must happen thousands of times that we don't know about. Since the public is brainwashed to believe that fingerprint evidence is infallible, no one believes someone who protests that that can't be their print. (Ah, it was their print, it just wasn't where the cops said it was!)
Back in the 1970s I read a textbook on fingerprint "science" by one of the recognized experts in the field, Andre A. Moessens. One section dealt with the issue of faking fingerprint evidence. He described a number of methods and why each one could be exposed. Then he came to the last one, where the police could "theoretically" claim to have lifted a print from a place they didn't. He said in that case we just have to trust the integrity of the police not to do that.
Right. Ever hear of "testilying," pal? [3]
Besides claiming to have lifted prints from sites they actually didn't obtain them from, police also misidentify prints, sometimes in good faith, sometimes accidentally. Frontline had a pretty good documentary a few years ago about the unreliability of so-called forensic science. [4] (It's more of a pseudo-science, actually. First, they claim an exactitude that is just false. Then they transfer the inculcated belief in the infallibility and precision of fingerprint "matching" to all manner of things that is just fraudulent, like hair, handwriting, tire tracks, tool marks, barrel marks on bullets, paint chips, even bite marks! There were numerous bogus murder convictions in Georgia based on bite marks on victims' bodies allegedly "matching" a defendant's teeth! You'd think common sense would be enough to refute such nonsense!)
Fingerprint "matching" is actually more of an art than a science, but the police will never admit that, since it would undermine their undeservedly ironclad credibility. The FBI claimed they had a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match to an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who just happened to be Muslim, between him and a print from the 2004 Madrid railway bombing. He had a hellish few weeks, until the Spanish police announced that they arrested the person who actually had the finger the print came from. And since the finger was attached to that man's hand, and not to Mayfield's, it was a bit of an OOPS moment for the FBI.
The FBI had insisted the prints were an "absolutely incontrovertible match." And the FBI touts itself, and with longtime media cooperation has created the myth, that it is some kind of elite police force, the creme de la creme of "law enforcement." So imagine how competent the thousands of state, county, and local police departments are in America. Imagine how it is in poorer countries.
Well, in the Mayfield matter, the FBI apologized, and paid some money (which their victim had to sue them to get, of course- Gee, why are Americans "so litigious?" Could it be because that's the ONLY WAY to get redress for wrongs? Just wondering). Usually the FBI gets away with this sort of thing, and much worse, including political assassinations.
So now they can do the same things with DNA. Since a swabful of inner cheek cells contains a huge amount of detectable DNA molecules, there is plenty to use for purposes of "finding" some at crime scenes, etc. Just like taking a fingerprint and putting it on an evidence card. If the FBI agent or police officer says he got this sample he's submitting to the database for matching from such-and-such a spot, that is very hard to disprove. He merely has to assert it. And in U.S. courts, there is a presumption that police don't lie- even after so many years of evidence to the contrary. (And people not blindly hypnotized by authority are systematically weeded out from jury pools in advance of trials, so there is little skeptism among jurors towards police testimony and "evidence.")
To be sure, DNA could have been used anyway to frame people up, without the Supreme Court's help, by surreptitiously obtaining people's DNA. Perhaps a femme fatale or fake "friend" could serve a victim a drink, and the saliva left on the glass taken, a trick police already use against people in custody. Or government burglars could swab your toothbrush when you're not home. There are myriad possibilites for such a "dirty trick." But it would have also been necessary to "officially" get DNA from the target's body directly, in order to "prove" a "match." So without this legalization of taking DNA from arrestees- and the FBI has arranged countless tens of thousands of pretext arrests, for example the late political activist Abbie Hoffman alone was arrested over 50 times- it would have been harder to frame the person. They would have first had to be convicted of a felony to overtly take DNA from their body. (That was already allowed.)
The number of victims of just FBI political frame-ups is too numerous to list here. Two prominent ones are Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt (eventually exonerated after 30 years in a dungeon) and Leonard Peltier, who is destined to die in a Federal "supermax" torture prison. Peltier was framed with fake FBI "forensic science" evidence that claimed ballistic tests matched his rifle to a bullet taken from a dead FBI agent who had attacked American Indian Movement members. (One of whom, Joe Stuntz, was killed by the agents in the attack, a fact that never gets mentioned for some reason, so I'm mentioning it right here, and secret policemen who don't like it and monitor this site can lump it- I'm sorry, "lump it" won't translate well for those who use the Translate widget on this page. It means "too bad for you, I don't care.")
During appeals, the FBI was forced to admit that the ballistic "match" was bogus, but of course the appeals court let the conviction stand anyway, despite the utter absence of any other evidence proving Peltier shot the agent. The FBI has made clear over the years that releasing Peltier is absolutely unacceptable to it, and people IN the establishment know enough not to mess with the FBI, which has blackmailed and imprisoned many politicians and judges over the years. Plus Federal judges are ideologically hostile to anyone who forcibly resists the oppression of the system.
But a legal system that is part of the enforcement machinery of an oligarchy cannot be relied upon as a vehicle for justice. That means that almost anyone, at any time, not just opponents of the system, can be victimized by such a judicial system- and many are, both those who are victims of criminals where the perpetrators are overlooked, and those framed up as criminal culprits- framed up by lazy and indifferent police and prosecutors, or framed up by criminals with state power.
1] Rapists are particularly dangerous as they are usually repeat offenders. Except maybe for Bill Clinton, who raped Juanita Broaddrick, as a story on NBC revealed some years ago. Clinton had thugs threaten women he'd sexually used or abused- one had her cat killed, and a goon then accosted her while she was jogging and terrified her, for example. His right-hand woman, Betsy Wright, had as one of her tasks suppressing "bimbo eruptions," that is, ensuring that his past paramours would maintain omerta (silence). So it is impossible to know if he only raped one woman in his entire life.
However we do know that he's committed mass murder more than once.
-In Haiti, where he overthrew Aristede and had the CIA create a death squad called FRAPH. (FRAPH stands for "The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti," an amazingly cynical and Orwellian title. It was like a successor to the murderous Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier dictatorship.)
-In Sudan, where he blew up the country's only pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, newly built, which meant death for thousands of poor Sudanese.
-In Iraq, where the sanctions he maintained are credited with killing 500,000 Iraqi children. When Leslie Stahl confronted his Secretary of State, the evil harridan Madeleine Albright, about this on the TV show 60 Minutes, asking "was it worth it?" Albright didn't even dispute the half million dead children Stahl cited and ended her answer with "We think it was worth it." What the "it" was that was allegedly achieved, I still can't figure out. Of course, their goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was not accomplished until Clinton's successor Bush the Younger invaded Iraq.
-In Rwanda, where he ordered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan* to pull out UN troops instead of sending requested reinforcements, which led directly to the genocide there. The commander of the troops said he could have easily prevented the slaughter with relatively few reinforcements. (Most of the killing was by machete and burning people alive. These were mobs, mostly, not modern military forces committing the massacres.) That last one is maybe more of a failure to prevent, although it wasn't mere passivity, but active interference that in effect aided and abetted the murderers.
So that's four mass murders on Clinton's head, three of them very directly and deliberately by him. If you want to add one more failure-to-prevent mass murder to his account, there's his failure to kill Osama bin Laden when numerous opportunities presented themselves, according to former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. Scheuer also faults Bush II for similar failures. (See youtube.com interviews with Scheuer, especially "Conversations With History.") Of course this one wasn't foreseeable, as the Rwandan one was, and is speculative, as killing bin Laden would not have necessarily prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. We're told the "mastermind" of that is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on "trial" in a kangeroo pseudo-court on the military base in occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's not that I necessarily doubt his guilt. I just don't like Stalinist-style show trials that make a mockery of justice and legal process. In fact, such show trials are highly destructive to law and justice, not only in the particular instance, but by discrediting law and justice conceptually and delegitimating them in the eyes of the people.
* Annan was a willing U.S. stooge, in the tradition of UN Secretary Generals. In fact, those aren't so pliable risk death, as happened to Dag Hammarskjold, who was murdered in 1961 when the CIA sabotaged his plane, to prevent him from interfering with U.S. designs in the Congo. See the BBC News magazine story "Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?" Also CIA assassin Dean Selmier, in his book Blow Away, which describes his career as a killer for the CIA, recounts a conversation with a French intelligence officer who tells him Hammarskjold was murdered, and that the Frenchman said he opposed the hit. Barnes and Noble is selling the book online for $1.99. A bargain for a hardcover!
2] Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, "Fingerprints." I recommend the article to interested readers.
"In April 1993, in the New York State Police Troop C scandal, Craig D. Harvey, a New York State Police trooper was charged with fabricating evidence. Harvey admitted he and another trooper lifted fingerprints from items the suspect, John Spencer, touched while in Troop C headquarters during booking. He attached the fingerprints to evidence cards and later claimed that he had pulled the fingerprints from the scene of the murder. The forged evidence was presented during John Spencer's trial and his subsequent conviction resulted in a term of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing. Three state troopers were found guilty of fabricating fingerprint evidence and served prison sentences."
I wonder who did more time in prison, the victim or the police criminals? Wikipedia doesn't say. I don't have time to research it at the moment- but you can.
Of course, the real solution to all this is honest, ethical police and prosecutors with checks on their ability to pursue ideological vendettas and political agendas (whether of personal aggrandizement or repression of dissent and resistance to injustice). That won't happen until they are less powerful and under more external controls. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously phrased it. The problem isn't so much the tools of law enforcement as who wields them, and for what ends.
3] There are so many examples of blatant frame-ups by venal cops and prosecutors over the years, in numerous states, that it would take a large tome just to cover the ones that became prominent in the media. Right now in New York, there is an ongoing review of murder convictions engineered by a Brooklyn, NY detective, who for example used the same drug addict as an "eyewitness" in numerous separate murder cases! The only reason the cases are "under review" is because the New York Times, to their credit, exposed some of the "questionable" cases, thus forcing the venal Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, to order a "review." He's up for reelection yet again, but he needn't worry: TV network CBS has rushed to his rescue with a suspiciously timely multi-episode TV series lionizing his office, including portraying as heroic a vicious prosecutor in his employ who was revealed by the Times series as a frame-up artist. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because Hynes has made himself useful to the powerful Jewish Hasidic community in Brooklyn (which votes as a bloc) and CBS is a key organ of Jewish power in the U.S. This kind of cohesiveness is one key to Jewish power in America. (Contrast that with the fractiousness of African-Americans, who daily gun down other African-Americans for no good reason.)
There are a number of stories on the NYT website, such as "Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered," "Scrutiny on Prosecutors After Questions About Brooklyn Detective’s Work," "Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom," and "In Review of Brooklyn Cases, So Many Obstacles." You can search their website for more. And that's just one example in the U.S. This happens all over, all the time. With the increase in police and prosecutorial power over the last few decades, and the evisceration of rights and protections for the people, we should expect it to get worse.
4] See "Judge Harry T. Edwards: How Reliable is Forensic Evidence in Court?" In fact, there are a number of relevant stories at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ Search with the keywords "forensic science on trial."
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