"I invite you all to take a look at "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice."
This five-day series was three years in the making. It starts in
today's Mercury News:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/stolenjustice/
Free registration is required to view the Merc's content. I'm not sure yet if this URL will be cumulative or will only point to each day's part. If the latter, I'll work to get the entire package pulled together under one URL.
The Merc's on-line presentation includes a multimedia presentation, with Flash graphics, streaming audio and streaming video.
The project's backbone is reporter Rick Tulsky's review of every criminal appeal originating out of Santa Clara County Superior Court for five years. Rick was aided in his review by staff writers Julie Patel and Mike Zapler.
Rick has a law degree, and he used his legal training to analyze these cases for prosectuorial er! ror, defense error and judicial error. He went over the cases with the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, defense attorneys and judges. He recruited seasoned criminal justice scholars and former judges and prosecutors to review his findings.
Rick's findings: Santa Clara County's criminal justice system, while far from broken, is systemically troubled by serious flaws that bias the system in prosecutors' favor and, in the worst cases, lead to outright miscarriages of justice. Rick found that more than a third of the 727 cases he analyzed were marred by some form of questionable conduct on the part of prosecutors, defense attorneys or judges. He found that California's Sixth Appellate District routinely found prosecutorial and judicial error to be harmless to criminal defendants -- in dozens of instances, resorting to factual distortions and flawed reasoning to reach their conclusions.
This analysis has at least one serious limitation: It doesn't comp! are Rick's Santa Clara County findings with similar data from any other jurisdiction. It would frankly have been impossible, at least within three years, to conduct a similar case review on a broader scale.
To help us examine how Santa Clara County's criminal justice system differs from those of other counties, I captured 10 years' worth of felony arrest disposition data from the Criminal Justice Statistics Center, maintained by the California Attorney General's Office. (http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc/datatabs.htm ).
I hand-keyed another four years' worth of CJSC data that were available
only on paper. (I did a rough estimate at one point and determined that
I'd keyed in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 cells of data.)
This analysis showed us that, within the accuracy limitations of the CJSC data, Santa Clara County stood out for having one of the highest conviction rates and one of the lowest judicial dismissal rates among all counties with populations of ! 100,000 or more.
As Rick's attention turned to the the appellate system, my attention was drawn to an interactive database system maintained by the California Administrative Office of the Courts: http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.gov/ .
I requesed a copy of the underlying database from the AOC, only to be stonewalled. Months of effort on our attorneys' part yielded only one summary spreadsheet from the AOC.
Thanks to discussions on this list and at NICAR conferences, I knew it should be possible to programmatically retrieve the contents of the AOC database. With Aron Pilhofer's and John Perry's Perl scripting tutorials, and with lots of generous coaching from John, I put together scripts that harvested the criminal appeals data from the AOC system and parsed it from HTML into delimited files."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld
Free registration is required to view the Merc's content. I'm not sure yet if this URL will be cumulative or will only point to each day's part. If the latter, I'll work to get the entire package pulled together under one URL.
The Merc's on-line presentation includes a multimedia presentation, with Flash graphics, streaming audio and streaming video.
The project's backbone is reporter Rick Tulsky's review of every criminal appeal originating out of Santa Clara County Superior Court for five years. Rick was aided in his review by staff writers Julie Patel and Mike Zapler.
Rick has a law degree, and he used his legal training to analyze these cases for prosectuorial er! ror, defense error and judicial error. He went over the cases with the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, defense attorneys and judges. He recruited seasoned criminal justice scholars and former judges and prosecutors to review his findings.
Rick's findings: Santa Clara County's criminal justice system, while far from broken, is systemically troubled by serious flaws that bias the system in prosecutors' favor and, in the worst cases, lead to outright miscarriages of justice. Rick found that more than a third of the 727 cases he analyzed were marred by some form of questionable conduct on the part of prosecutors, defense attorneys or judges. He found that California's Sixth Appellate District routinely found prosecutorial and judicial error to be harmless to criminal defendants -- in dozens of instances, resorting to factual distortions and flawed reasoning to reach their conclusions.
This analysis has at least one serious limitation: It doesn't comp! are Rick's Santa Clara County findings with similar data from any other jurisdiction. It would frankly have been impossible, at least within three years, to conduct a similar case review on a broader scale.
To help us examine how Santa Clara County's criminal justice system differs from those of other counties, I captured 10 years' worth of felony arrest disposition data from the Criminal Justice Statistics Center, maintained by the California Attorney General's Office. (http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc/datatabs
This analysis showed us that, within the accuracy limitations of the CJSC data, Santa Clara County stood out for having one of the highest conviction rates and one of the lowest judicial dismissal rates among all counties with populations of ! 100,000 or more.
As Rick's attention turned to the the appellate system, my attention was drawn to an interactive database system maintained by the California Administrative Office of the Courts: http://appellatecases.courtinfo
I requesed a copy of the underlying database from the AOC, only to be stonewalled. Months of effort on our attorneys' part yielded only one summary spreadsheet from the AOC.
Thanks to discussions on this list and at NICAR conferences, I knew it should be possible to programmatically retrieve the contents of the AOC database. With Aron Pilhofer's and John Perry's Perl scripting tutorials, and with lots of generous coaching from John, I put together scripts that harvested the criminal appeals data from the AOC system and parsed it from HTML into delimited files."
That data retrieval underlies the numbers that appear in the final day of this series.
