Reason's Radley Balko attended an Innocence Project fundraiser in Mississippi, where Cedric Willis, a wrongfully convicted but now exonerated and free man, was the keynote speaker. The city of Jackson, whose attorneys and police helped convict Willis, have resisted paying him compensation for the 12 years he was kept in prison. Balko says "Mississippi has no law in place to compensate the wrongfully convicted, but lawmakers there had probably better start thinking about one." 

"...the 12 men in Dallas represent more exonerations than have come out of any one place, except for the states of Illinois and New York," says the Innocence Project in Texas. They're working with the Dallas County DA (in the video above) to try and change the tide of wrongful convictions.

The blog for Marty Tankleff (convicted of murdering his parents) says that "two new witnesses have come forward to state that Joey "Guns" Creedon admitted his involvement in the Tankleff murders to them. The two new witnesses say they took their information to the Suffolk County District Attorney last August, two months before oral arguments in the Appellate Division, .... They said Assistant DA Leonard Lato and investigator Walter Warkenthien interviewed them, took no notes, defended Creedon, made jokes, then left, and that was the last they heard from them." The witnesses weren't disclosed to the court or Tankleff's defense.

Armed with details of the crime that only a suspect might know, scientists can use sohpisticated EEG techniques to see if that information is stored in a suspect's brain. "A specific, measurable brain response known as a P300, is emitted by the brain of a subject who has the relevant information stored in his brain, but not by a subject who does not have this record in his brain," says one blogger.

Alabama will execute Thomas Arthur on December 6, 2007. His daughter says in an email this is "(i)n spite of all the other states holding off on executions until the U.S. supreme court Rules, In spite of the American Bar Association calling for a nation wide freeze using Alabama as one of the states studied.  The governor will not stay this...." His execution was stayed for 45 days in September while the state pondered questions about its lethal injection procedures. Questions still swirl around evidence in Arthur's case which has never been tested for DNA. Alabama has vigorously opposed allowing the evidence to be tested.

State death penalty systems are seriously flawed, says the AP, citing a report by the American Bar Association.

Problems cited in a report released Sunday by the lawyers' organization include:

• Spotty collection and preservation of DNA evidence, which has been used to exonerate more than 200 inmates;
• Misidentification by eyewitnesses;
• False confessions from defendants; and
• Persistent racial disparities that make death sentences more likely when victims are white.

Stephan Cowans spent nearly seven years in prison before DNA evidence cleared him in 2004 of shooting a Boston police officer. He was found dead in his home Thursday evening, the "apparent victim" of a "targeted crime," according to the Patriot Ledger.

The Innocence Project released a report that shows New York is behind other states in implementing reforms that could help prevent wrongful convictions, even though it's one of the states with the most DNA-related exonerations. The North Country Gazette has highlights of the report (pdf).

• In the last seven years, there has been a particularly high number of DNA exonerations in New York State. Since 2000, 17 wrongfully convicted people in New York have been exonerated with DNA evidence; seven of the 17 were wrongfully convicted of murder.
• In 10 of New York’s 23 DNA exonerations, the actual perpetrator was later identified.
• In nine of those 10 cases, the actual perpetrators of crimes for which innocent people were wrongfully convicted went on to commit additional crimes while an innocent person was in prison. According to law enforcement reports, five murders, seven rapes, two serious assaults and one robbery at gunpoint were committed by the actual perpetrators of crimes for which innocent people were committed – and each of those crimes was committed after the wrongful arrest or conviction, so they could have been prevented if wrongful convictions had not happened.
• Eyewitness misidentification played a role in 13 of the 23 wrongful convictions in New York that were overturned with DNA testing.
• In 10 of the 23 cases in New York, innocent people falsely confessed or admitted to crimes that DNA later proved they did not commit.
• Limited or unreliable forensic science played a role in 10 of the 23 wrongful convictions in New York that were overturned through DNA evidence.

Max Soffar won a new trial in 2004, after serving nearly two decades for the shooting murders of four people. He was convicted and sentenced to death a second time, but his defense team says the second trial was almost as unfair as the first. "The ACLU and (the Texas Innocence Network) argued that Soffar was denied the constitutional right to defend himself because Soffar's trial judge refused to admit evidence that another man confessed to committing the murders," says one blogger.

Darrel Otto, author of a new blog called Four Lives Lost, says "stigma" surrounds the case of four Texas woman accused of sexually assaulting a child because of the Catholic priest molestation scandals in the last few years. "This, in turn, causes hesitancy on the part of media and others to investigate and publicize the case which would bring the supporting agencies onside. So we are caught in something of a Catch-22 scenario."