Ray Krone: His conviction and subsequent exoneration, and what they both mean.

I just looked at the National Registry of Exonerations (see my first post for information about this), and as of today, there have been 1,579 exonerations since 1989. If you don't think wrongful conviction is a chronic problem, I would ask that you go to the registry and scroll through the names of the exonerees, taking the time to read their stories. One of such exonerees is Ray Krone. I think it is important that we learn from the stories of exonerees, that we attempt to conceptualize what they've endured, and that we make a concentrated effort to prevent such suffering in the future, and so I've decided to share Ray's story (to the very best of my ability) in this blogpost.

"A Maricopa County judge sentenced me to death in 1992. At the time of the murder for which I was convicted, the actual perpetrator, Ken Phillips, was on probation for a violent sexual offense. Three weeks after the crime for which I was sentenced to die, he sexually assaulted and choked a 7-year-old girl. He matched the description of a man seen near the location of the murder; it was later determined that shoe prints, palm prints and blood found at the scene matched him as well. After more than 10 years in prison, I was finally exonerated. I walked out of prison with a gate check for $50. I lost my home, U.S. Postal Service job, my personal possessions and 10 years of my life. Arizona has no compensation for wrongful convictions." -Ray Krone 

Who is Ray Krone?

Ray Krone is an Air Force veteran. He had no criminal record prior to his conviction, and he was working as a postal worker at the time of the crime for which he was convicted.

What are the details of the crime?

On December 29, 1991, the victim was found naked and dead in the men's restroom of the bar where she worked. She had been fatally stabbed. There was little evidence found at the crime scene: the blood matched the type of the victim, there was no semen, and the saliva on the victims body came from someone with the most common blood type. No DNA tests were performed. There were bite marks on the victim's breast and neck.

What was the evidence against Ray Krone?

Ray Krone was a frequent customer at the bar where the victim worked. Investigators compared the bite marks from the victim's body to a styrofoam impression of Ray Krone's teeth, and determined that the two matched. This technique, called comparative bite mark analysis, has been widely invalidated by the scientific community. Ray Krone was arrested on December 31, 1991, and charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. He was convicted of kidnapping and murder, and sentenced to death and a concurrent 21 year sentence.

What did Ray Krone do after his conviction?

Ray Krone was granted a new trial on appeal in 1996, but he was again found guilty. In this trial, the judge sentenced him to life in prison, citing doubts about whether Krone was the real killer. In 2002, DNA testing of the saliva found on the victim proved Krone's innocence, and implicated another man, Kenneth Phillips. Phillips was incarcerated for an unrelated sex crime, and in 2006, Phillips plead guilty to murder and was sentenced to 53 years in prison. Ray Krone was released from prison on April 8, 2002, and on April 24, the District Attorney dismissed all charges against him.

What did Ray Krone do after his exoneration?

Ray Krone filled a federal civil rights lawsuit and received $3 million in damages from the City of Phoenix, and $1.4 million from Maricopa County.

Ray Krone has spoken up about his wrongful conviction and subsequent exoneration. As the 100th inmate to be released from death row because of innocence since 1976, Ray Krone is now an advocate for ending the death penalty. He serves as the director of membership and training for Witness to Innocence and also serves on the board of the Arizona Justice Project.

"The idea that the death of one person negates the loss of another is what keeps many people supporting capital punishment. That's just not true.

The death penalty has no place in our society. It is a tool used by prosecutors to justify bigger budgets, win votes and ensure their continued employment. Family members opposed to capital punishment are not allowed to say so during victim impact statements. Only jurors who support the death penalty sit on capital murder trials.

Prosecutors have immunity when they withhold evidence and knowingly present perjured testimony. Innocent people have to fight for compensation.

Prosecutors like to say that an exoneration is proof the system works. I disagree, and I believe that the more than 150 innocent people who have been sentenced to death would disagree as well." -Ray Krone 

I gathered information for this post using the National Registry of Exonerations, the Innocence Project website, and the Arizona Republic website.

Implications of Identification

Many studies conclude that American Indians are arrested and incarcerated at a higher-than-average rate, and that they are sentenced to longer and harsher punishment. For example, one estimate places the "Native American incarceration [rate]...about 38% higher than the national rate" (Jamaal Bell, “Mass Incarceration: A Destroyer of People of Color and Their Communities”, Huffington Post 2010.) The US Commission on Civil Rights attributes this high rate to "differential treatment by the criminal justice system, lack of access to adequate counsel and racial profiling." These findings are in line with the widely accepted recognition that racial and ethnic minorities face unique disadvantages--disadvantages that their white counterparts do not face--in the criminal justice system. 

However, in truth, it is extremely difficult to estimate the magnitude of discrimination against American Indians within the US criminal justice system because of issues of identification and classification. According to the 2013 census, 5.3% of the Arizona population identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native alone. So, this number is not going to encompass the 2.6% of people in Arizona who identify as two or more races nor is it going to encompass the people who don't answer the race question. From what I can find, those who answer "some other race" is around 11-13%, which is significant. It is not known how many of these 11-13% are of American Indian ancestry. Also, 30.3% of Arizonans identify as Hispanic or Latino, but the census notes that "Hispanics may be of any race, so also are included in applicable race categories." This could alter numbers since some people with some American Indian heritage may identify as Hispanic, depending on their dominant identity or primary language. The race that someone chooses to identify as may not match the race with which others--jurors, prosecutors, police officers--identify them. There is also potential that within the self-identification process, inmates may choose to mark a race that they would not normally identify with because they believe they will get a certain benefit or avoid a certain disadvantage by being categorized according to a certain race, or because they do not understand or otherwise reject the classification system. 

The Arizona Department of Corrections claims that 5.1% of the Arizona prison population self-identifies as "Native Indian." However, if you look at the incarceration rate that encompasses all correctional facilities in Arizona (federal prisons, jails, halfway houses,etc.)—not all of which use the same “Native Indian” language in race classification, and use other descriptors in its place—this percentage jumps to 10% (Prison Policy Initiative 2014). 

The truth is that we can make estimates about the number of incarcerated American Indians in comparison to the overall population of American Indians and Arizonans, but these estimates are widely complicated by a number of external factors, and may be largely inaccurate. 

What can we do?

It's the final week of the open online course I've been taking for the past two months or so, and they've centered this week around how we can change the current climate that fosters wrongful conviction, and also how we can right the wrongs already caused by our criminal justice system. I think these are important considerations and I'd like to share them with you all! After all, we've thus far talked a lot about how horrific wrongful conviction can be for its victims and what factors can lead to wrongful conviction, but an important question still remains: How can we begin to solve the epidemic of wrongful conviction? 

Education

The media should take a critical role in examining and bringing attention to wrongful conviction causes and proceedings. 

Individuals should promote awareness because too commonly the public likes to believe that wrongful conviction could not and does not happen. In order for us to seriously combat wrongful conviction, awareness is crucial. Throughout the process of spreading awareness, sharing the stories of exonerees is also critical. 

The public can play an important role in helping fund Innocence Projects. 

Clemency

There are some cases where a client is innocent, but legal pathways have been exhausted. For example, some individuals have been found innocent but remain in prison on technicalities (ie., they didn't file paperwork on time). In such cases, clemency is often the final option. Clemency is when a Governor officially pardons a prisoner. Oftentimes in order for clemency to be granted, lots of media and public attention and support is needed so that Governors are pressured to act. Public support is especially crucial for gathering signatures on petitions urging clemency.  

Death Penalty and the Innocence Movement 

In the context of the large number of exonerations of inmates serving time on death row, capital punishment is being reexamined in the context of its capacity for error.  Is it worth the risk having the death penalty as a standard policy if there is a very real possibility that the individual sentenced to death is actually innocent? 

Radley Balko writes for the Huffington Post in 2013: "In a report released last month, the Death Penalty Information Center found that 2 percent of counties, as well as being responsible for a majority of executions, can also claim credit for 56 percent of the current death row population. What's more, just 15 percent of U.S. counties account for all of the executions since 1976, according to the DPIC." To date, the Death Penalty Information Center lists 150 individuals who have been freed from death row since 1973. DNA was a substantial factor in 20 of these cases. See the full list here. 

Policy and Legal Implications 

The following list summarizes some policy changes that could help combat wrongful conviction:

1. Giving judges more discretion in the context of mandatory minimum sentencing (ex: Smarter Sentencing Act) 

2. Double-blind photo or suspect line-ups

a. We also must ensure that witnesses are told that the suspect may not be in a line-up when they are asked to identify using a line-up 

3. Video recording of witness interviews and suspect interrogations   

4. Mandatory and enforceable standards for evidence preservation

5. Bringing more attention to unique issues of race, ethnicity, class and how they impact criminal justice proceedings 

6. More efficient, easier systems of being released and compensated after the case has been overturned. 

7. Scrutiny of forensic science: only scientifically accepted and sound science should be admissible in criminal cases. Some examples of scientific methods that would not meet these standards include bite mark analysis, comparative hair analysis, shoe print analysis, etc. 

8. Ensuring that inmates have access to DNA testing when they claim innocence. 

9. Ensuring that rebuttal experts are more accessible to public defenders and defendants with limited resources.  

10. Ensuring adequate resources for public defenders' offices (especially resources for investigation).

11. Implementing government programs tasked with reviewing convictions (ex: Conviction Integrity Units). 

The list above is certainly not inclusive of all the things that can and should be to fight wrongful conviction in the U.S., and I would like to post an expanded list later. 

The Innocence Movement is an integral part of maintaining the "justice" part of the criminal justice system. If you want to get involved, there is a multitude of ways you can do so. From donating money, to holding a fundraiser, to contacting government officials, to volunteering technical expertise, to signing clemency petitions, to spreading awareness about wrongful conviction, to helping exonerees, to writing letters to the editor, grassroots initiatives are what keep the movement going and what can truly create lasting change. If you want to be involved but don't know how, let me know. 

Social Science and Social Change Conference at Northern Arizona University

I attended a day-long conference on Friday, March 6 put on by the Department of Sociology and Social Work at NAU. This conference featured a number of students and professors who shared their research relating to social science, justice, and change. A few of these presentations were connected to the field in which I’m researching, others did not have a direct connection with my research goals but nonetheless provided valuable insight into community-based research. Additionally, being able to see a number of research presentations helped me to guide my ideas about how I will structure my own research presentation at the end of this trimester. I’ve added my notes under the presentations that I thought were particularly relevant or interesting.

Seminar 1: Racial and National Identities and Conflicts

            “Perceptions of undocumented-oriented organizational policies in Flagstaff” by Breton Mackenzie, graduate student in Anthropology.

                        Important takeaways: recent immigration laws like SB1070 illicit control through fear by creating an atmosphere that reinforces discrimination against undocumented (and documented) Mexican-American immigrants. Fear of deportation can lead to lack of community participation and hesitance to use resources (ex: health resources).

            “Native American experiences with discrimination in reservation border towns” by Jeremy Ashley, graduate student in Applied Sociology.

                        Important takeaways: many Native Americans living in border towns face significant disadvantages through discrimination and prejudice. Some of this discrimination is manifested in the form of “racially motivated exclusion, racial stigmatization, discrimination at work and school, racially motivated threats and aggression, everyday discrimination, and discrimination in community places and settings.” Racism and discrimination are also widely internalized. In the reservation border town examined, Native Americans reported experiences with discrimination the most or second most widely (African Americans and Native Americans often reported similar frequency and severity of discriminatory experiences).

Seminar 2: Pedagogical Explorations

            “Place-based consciousness and social transformation: Perspectives from the Flagstaff STEM City” by B. Joby Hunt, graduate student in Anthropology.

            “Consciousness and social change” by Dr. Janine Schipper, Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Work.

                        Important takeaways: it is crucial that researchers identify the assumptions that they hold. Once commonly-held assumptions are realized, they can be critically examined and, if necessary, changed.

Keynote Address

            “Service Sociology”, Dr. Javier Treviño, Wheaton College.

                        Important takeaways: service sociology is defined by Dr. Treviño as “a sociology of social problems intended to ameliorate conditions of life for those in need of assistance, and to ensure and promote the welfare of the community. Motivated by care and compassion a service-oriented sociology is aimed at helping people meet their pressing social needs. As such, service sociology involves the application of sociological knowledge combined with the expression of humanitarian sentiment in neighborly service.” Specifically, service sociology must emphasize equality, justice, and neighborliness. Service sociology must be composed of facilitating actions, which require:

1.    Care and compassion

2.    Caution (due diligence)

3.    Efficiency and efficacy

4.    Adaptability

5.    Adequacy and sustainability (focus on the future)

6.    Non-maleficence

7.    Want for the action to occur

8.    Need for the action to occur

9.    The action must be ethical and humane

10. The action cannot encourage the recipient in wrong

11. The action cannot patronize (humility)

Service sociology must promote self-determination.  

Film Screening

            Workers on the Rise, presented by Dr. MichelleTéllez, documentary about the Arizona Worker Rights Center.  An amazing documentary about amazing work! Watch here.     

  

Seminar 3: Art and Culture

            “Underground sound in the land down under”, by Dr. Frederick Gooding, Jr., Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies; Matthew Brandel, Corbin Jountti, Andrew Shadwick, and Bryantee Williams-Bailey, SBS students.

            “Everything but the funnel cake: Cultural expressions and the University of Puerto Rico student occupation of 2010” by Katherine Everhart, Instructor of Sociology.

            “Slam poetry and emerging indigenous identities” by Amanda Brand, graduate student in Applied Sociology.  

Seminar 4: Gender and Sexuality

            “Transgender outside the city: Trans Masculine identity and the non-metropolitan gender experience” by Lou Baker, graduate student in Applied Sociology.

            “From locked doors to locked screens: The implications of sexting as a gendered performance of sexuality and privacy” by Amanda Brand, graduate student in Applied Sociology.

            “Urfĭ marriage in Egypt” by Dr. Mohamed A. Mohamed, Assistant Professor of Sociology.  

Week 4: What happens after exoneration?

I've been talking a lot about the process of post-conviction litigation and subsequent exonerations, but there's an important question inherent in the nature of this discussion: after an exoneree has been freed, what happens to them? Where do they go? What do their lives look like? This week, I'd like to look at some of those questions with guidance from the course I've been taking on the Innocence Movement.

Lisa Roberts hugs defense attorney Steven Wax after being released from an Oregon prison. Lisa served 10 years on a manslaughter charge before she was exonerated. 

Lack of Assistance
After individuals are exonerated, the criminal justice system terminates its relationship with that individual. That means the individual is given no resources other than a used pair of clothes and shoes--not even a ride from the prison. Many exonerees are thus often released with no support, and are faced with finding shelter, securing a job, getting a drivers license and SSN, and other tasks in order to rebuild the life that was taken from them.

Lack of healthcare is huge issue for exonerees. Many are in desperate need of healthcare after poor prison care (dental, medical), and many more also need mental healthcare, often to address issues of post traumatic stress.

Many exonerees struggle to attain employment because although job applications ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony, they do not ask if you were subsequently exonerated or allow for any explanation. Therefore, in lots of cases, exonerees are automatically excluded from the job pool. Many exonerees also lack educational opportunities.

See the Statement on Exoneree Rights released by the Innocence Network here.

Compensation
Currently, 30 states and the District of Columbia have wrongful conviction compensation statutes, but many of these statutes are toothless, and none of these statutes provide immediate relief. Furthermore, these statutes often do not adjust compensation for the amount of time that was served and instead use cap systems. Exonerees can pursue civil suits against the state and individuals responsible for their incarceration. However, these suits are difficult because they're time-consuming, expensive, and often many police officers, judges or prosecutors are granted immunity.

Compensation statutes differ in substance based on state. Some states offer money, others education. Compensation statutes also differ procedurally, insofar as what an exoneree must do in what time frame to qualify for compensation. For example, in California, exonerees can receive up to $100 for every day they were wrongfully convicted. However, over the past five or so years, the board in charge of allotting this compensation has denied most compensation claims.

Sources of Assistance
Recognizing the extreme barriers faced by exonerees in their attempts to reenter society, some organizations have formed to try to ease this transition. Life After Innocence is one of such programs, headquartered at the Loyola University School of Law. The Life After Innocence clinic provides occupational training, educational opportunities, legal resources, housing assistance, and countless other resources to help exonerees reenter society and "reclaim their rights as citizens", emphasizing "hand-ups not hand-outs."

Week 3: So, What's an Innocence Project?

It's week three already! This week, I thought it'd be nice to give more of an explanation of what an Innocence Project looks like and what the Innocence Movement is. The MOOC also explores that subject this week, so I'll be referencing the course throughout.

Essentially, Innocence Projects are pro-bono student-staffed legal clinics that operate throughout the U.S. and the world to overturn wrongful convictions and thus right the wrongs done by the criminal justice system. The original Innocence Project is headquartered at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and was created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992. Since then, similar clinics have formed across the country and the globe; these clinics together make up the Innocence Network, which was officially established in 2005 and now has 65 members. Many of these Projects function in different ways, with different organizational structures and criteria for accepting cases. The Arizona Innocence Project is unique because it is headquartered at Northern Arizona University, which doesn't have a law school. At most other clinics, law students conduct case research, but at AIP a select group of undergraduate students perform case research. AIP investigates both DNA and non-DNA cases with claims of actual innocence. 

The Innocence Project over time has also grown to become a policy advocacy organization, advocating to reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions. 

Resources provided by Innocence Projects include: experts, investigators, legal representation, money required to conduct DNA testing, etc. 

Many independent attorneys work with Innocence Projects to litigate cases. 

In 2004, Congress passed the Justice for All Act. Title IV of this Act is an Innocence Protection Act, which provides some federal grants for innocence work through the National Institute of Justice. These grants, even in combination with state grants and community donations, are not long term sources of funding nor are they sufficient. This means that many Projects are forced to spend vast amounts of time scrambling for funding rather than performing innocence work.

Every time someone is exonerated, it saves the government $40,000-60,000 a year in housing costs. 

Innocence Projects give students hands-on experience with case investigation and allow them to gain a greater understanding of the ins-and-outs of the criminal justice system. 

The cases litigated by Projects highlight flaws within the criminal justice system and can provide powerful platforms for systematic reform. 

It should be clear that the work performed by Innocence Projects is absolutely critical and life-saving. A recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that one in twenty-five death row convicts were convicted wrongfully:
"The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences. The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution, but most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply. We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States." 

I hope that gives more information about what Innocence Projects are, what they do, and why they're so important. Look for another post soon! 

Week 2: Bad Science and More

The Nation Registry of Exonerations has released an infographic detailing the 125 exonerations that occurred during 2014.
Here are some important takeaways:
1. The longest incarceration of a 2014 exoneree was 39 years.
2. There were no exonerations in Arizona during 2014. Arizona has had 15 total exonerations
3. Pima County, AZ got a Conviction Integrity Unit. These divisions, called CIUs, are units within prosecutors' offices that investigate post-conviction claims of innocence.

The National Registry of Exonerations: 2014 Year in Review

Recent activities:
Meeting with Marianne Nielsen, Chair of the NAU Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and editor of Criminal Justice in Native America (see previous post), to discuss project.
Identifying other criminal and social justice organizations that could assist in project.
Data review: Arizona Department of Corrections.
Began to work on informational letter to send to individuals incarcerated in Arizona that could potentially benefit from AIP's services.
Massive Open Online Course: The Innocence Movement.

Literature review, recent focus:
                           

1. Jeffery Ian Ross & Larry Allen Gold, Native Americans and the Criminal Justice System (Paradigm Pub. 2006).
2. Brandon Garrett, Convicting the Innocent, (Harvard Univ. Press 2011).

This week I'd like to talk about one of the biggest reasons people are wrongfully convicted in our criminal justice system: Bad science. Really bad science. 

This issue is discussed in week three of my MOOC, and I'd like to highlight some main points here:

• Expert testimony is incredibly powerful, and juries are inclined to believe experts, often blindly. DNA evidence is especially powerful. 
• Suspect forms of science that may not be as reliable as many juries have been lead to believe: bite mark comparison, voice recording comparisons, hair microscopy, shoe print analysis, firearm tool mark analysis, among others. 



 Ray Krone, exonerated in Arizona in 2002 after serving 10 years

• These disciplines were invented by forensic analysts while the analysts were working on cases and are often not widely accepted by outside scientific communities. 
• Very little quality assurance and quality control. 
• Analysts often offer testimony that goes beyond the evidence. 
• New science often reveals that old science is incorrect; the criminal justice system takes a long time to catch up with these changing standards. 
• Many state laws do not require adequate preservation of evidence that may contain DNA
• DNA collection, investigation, and analysis are subject to human error. 
• Ray Krone: wrongfully convicted in Arizona due to bite mark evidence. After his exoneration, Krone said, "Junk science convicted me but real science saved me."

Watch this video for specific instances where bad science has been used to convict innocent individuals

DNA: the impact on wrongful convictions and subsequent exonerations

• Most cases are not resolvable by DNA
• The trend has been that fewer and fewer exonerations have actually involved DNA evidence
• Many crime scenes do not yield analyzable DNA evidence (in fact, only ~10% do)
• Contaminated DNA evidence 
• Faulty preservation or collection tactics leading to cross-contamination or degradation
•  Kirk Bloodsworth: first DNA-based death row exoneree