Wrongful Convictions Based on Junk Science

Arizona v Ray Krone Background             On December 29, 1991, the body of thirty-six year old Kim Ancona was found nude and fatally stabbed in the men’s restroom of the bar she worked at in Phoenix, Arizona. The perpetrator left behind little evidence, only leaving blood at the crime scene which matched the victim’s type and saliva on her body coming from the most common blood type. No semen was found and no DNA testing was done on the blood or saliva. What investigators did rely on was bite-marks on the victim’s breast and neck.             The police learned from a friend of the victim’s that Ancona was to close up the bar with a regular customer, Ray Krone, that previous night. The police immediately asked Krone to make an impression of his teeth on Styrofoam for comparison. Ray Krone had no previous criminal record, had been honorable discharged from the military, and had ...

Bite-mark Analysis     Forensic odontologists, otherwise known as forensic dentists, study the shape of a person’s bite in order to match them with a known sample. Known samples of bites are found on a victim’s body and are seen as an infallible science used to capture the guilty. In reality, bite-mark analysis, or odontology, isn’t as fool-proof as one believes. Several cases have appeared in which DNA testing has proved a convicted person innocent, even after a ‘careful’ examination of the teeth imprints.     A variety of problems have arose from odontology, the biggest being its claim of infallibility. Odontologists claim that they have 100% accurate matches between the suspects bite-mark and the bite-mark found on a victim’s body. What this statement means is that there is no other person on earth that has the same bite-mark as the suspect, and this is what odontologists truly believe. The problem with this statement is t...

The Case of Ronald Cotton The Crime In July of 1984, in North Carolina, a white woman named Jennifer Thompson was sleeping in her apartment when a man cut her phone lines, shattered her porch light, and broke into her apartment. She woke up to the man standing next to her bed, holding a knife to her throat. Over the next half hour, she was brutally raped, but Jennifer made herself study her attacker so, if she ever got the chance, she would be able to identify him and send him to prison. After tricking her assailant into letting her get up, she escaped and went to the hospital. Her assailant fled the scene, only to rape another woman half a mile away. Investigation and Trial With Jennifer’s help, the police were able to create a composite sketch of her attacker, using the details she studied while she was being attacked. After the sketch was released to the public, tips were received about a man named Ronald Cotton who worked in the area, and had a prior felony r...

Eyewitness Misidentifications In our justice system, there are many crucial points where things can go wrong, and an innocent person can be convicted. Eyewitness testimony is one of those crucial points, which unfortunately happens more often than we would like to admit. In his book, Garrett focuses on 250 people who were exonerated through DNA evidence. These 250 people were wrongfully convicted for various reasons, but Garrett found that eyewitnesses made misidentifications of the perpetrator in 190 of the 250 cases, or 76% of the cases (Garrett 48, 2012). It is often wondered how a victim could falsely identify the person that attacked them, if they weren’t wearing a mask, it should be easy to identify your assailant, right? That is not necessarily true. Of the cases that Garrett studied of those who were wrongfully convicted, he found a few themes common across them all. For one, Garrett found that in most of the cases, police either intentionally or unintentionally ...

The Norfolk Four- False Confessions Background There are many cases that were discovered to have been instances of false confessions in the past couple decades. One of the more famous cases is known as “The Norfolk Four” because there were four men convicted who were from Norfolk, Virginia. Their names were Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph Dick Jr., and Eric Wilson. They were convicted in 1999 of raping and murdering a woman named Michelle Moore-Bosko in 1997 based on giving false confessions. The false confession was surprising for most people because all of the men were active duty Navy sailors and had given no indication of being capable of committing rape and murder. Since the four men were residents of the neighborhood where Moore-Bosko was raped and murdered, they were brought in for questioning. A friend of the victim also told the police that one of the men, Williams, was obsessed with Michelle and that gave more reason to question them all since they we...

False Confessions         Many people don’t understand why someone would make a false confession in court when they didn’t commit the crime, but they don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. There was no proof of how often it occurred until DNA testing was found to exonerate a large amount of people who had falsely confessed. This has brought a large amount of awareness to the problem, and has caused more studies and research to be conducted on why this is. Most of the blame can be attributed, “to psychological pressure placed upon them during police interrogations” (Garrett, p. 18). Police intentionally feed the suspect information regarding the crime which makes it seem like they were at the scene of the crime when they’re in court. This technique is used by the police to satisfy the Criminal Justice system’s need to blame someone for the crime and to make themselves look good at getting confessions. It also allows all parties invo...