Odds and Ends
Catching up with some stuff...
Let's hope Judge Kline doesn't read this. Last week I did a post on the Ohio Supreme Court's decision in State v. Crager, where it upheld the admission of DNA testimony by an analyst, other than the one who'd performed the actual tests, against a Crawford challenge. Central to the Court's holding was the belief that the integrity of BCI was such that who actually performed the test didn't matter, a view embodied by Judge Kline in his concurrence that "the prosecutor asked BCI for the DNA analysis through glasses of justice, not glasses of conviction." Then there's this story from the Jacksonville Times-Union:
Only weeks before Chad Heins' murder trial in 1996, a Jacksonville prosecutor sent a memo asking a state crime lab supervisor to downplay findings that stray hairs found on the victim's body came from an unknown person."I need to structure your testimony carefully so as to convince the jury that the unknown hairs are insignificant," Assistant State Attorney Stephen Bledsoe wrote in a letter recently obtained by the Times-Union.
Heins spent 11 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. (Hat tip to CrimProf Blog.)
Truth in advertising. The legal community was abuzz last year by this ad for a three-woman divorce firm in Chicago:
Well, it turns out that the model for the picture on the left was none other than Senior Partner Corri D. Fetman, who also appeared in a photo spread in Playboy. In fact, Ms. Fetman now writes a column for the magazine, entitled "Lawyer of Love," in which she expresses a view of marriage so jaundiced it makes the average divorce lawyer sound like Mr. Rogers. Also, at the risk of being unchivalrous, a comparison of Ms. Fetman's picture for the Playboy column with the one on the firm's website confirms both the magic the magazine's photographers can work and the wisdom of the decision to focus the ad's picture on Ms. Fetman's more obvious assets.
Then again, that just might be my bitterness coming to the fore. I'm seriously considering suing the firm for using my picture as the male model in the ad without my permission.
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