New evidence casts doubt on convicted killer's guilt

Scott Glover and Matt Lait of the Los Angeles Times use scores of documents shedding doubt on the guilt of a man convicted of killing his mother over 20 years ago. Among the evidence discovered was a bloody footprint found at the scene that didn't match the convicted killer's shoes and a mysterious phone call made from the crime scene. The footprint was attributed to Bruce Lisker at trial. But a recent analysis by the Los Angeles Police Department concluded "that the footprint did not match Lisker's shoes, suggesting there was another suspect in the house at the time of the killing." When the reporters contacted eight of the 12 jurors, "five said the new information about the case would have prompted them to acquit Lisker." The former prosecutor in the case, after being shown the findings by the Times, said, "The bottom line is I now have reasonable doubt." The story includes PDFs of 14 documents ranging from a rap sheet of a jailhouse snitch to an inventory record listing the contents of the victim's purse, which includes the $120 that was alleged to have been a motive in the murder.

Scott Powers of The Orlando Sentinel used county traffic ticket data to show that "last year Florida Highway Patrol troopers, Orange County deputies and police ticketed 342 high rollers for driving at least 100 mph." Those who are caught typically are young, white men and many were traveling on the Central Florida GreeneWay. "And though the penalty for a 100-mph speeding ticket normally includes a stiff fine of $305, the vast majority of high rollers last year avoided getting traffic-violation points attached to their license records, usually by attending traffic school. Officially they are not convicted, so their insurance companies cannot raise their premiums."

Jason Riley and Kay Stewart of The (Louisville) Courier-Journal used Kentucky court records to show that "thousands of Kentuckians are erasing their arrests and convictions every year by taking advantage of expungement laws that make it cheap and easy to bury their past mistakes." Variances in the process and the lack of a tracking systems for expungements help to hide repeat offenders and create unequal justice. "In the past two years, more than 12,000 criminal cases have been wiped off the state's books as if they never existed," while neighboring Indiana makes it more difficult to have a case expunged from the record.

Ames Alexander of The Charlotte Observer, working with database editor Ted Mellnik, investigated the relationship between lawyers and judges in the North Carolina's judicial district that is most lenient on drinking and driving. "District judges there acquitted suspects in more than 87 percent of the DWI trials in which they rendered a verdict. Statewide, the acquittal rate is 39 percent, state courts data show." One lawyer, John Nobles won 203 straight DWI trials from 2000 to mid-2004. The story also links to in-depth information on the judges, the lawyers and information on how and why the data was analyzed.

Jason Kandel of the Los Angeles Daily News obtained overtime expenditures from the Los Angeles Police Department and used Excel to analyze the data. He found that the LAPD has already overspent their overtime budget by $8 million with two months still remaining in the fiscal year. "The Los Angeles Police Department spent $62.8 million through April 30, although it had budgeted $54.7 million for 1.2 million overtime hours for the fiscal year that ends June 30, documents show." The biggest chunk of the expense was found to be from court-related activities.

Sheila Burke of The Tennessean used state data to show that "children convicted of crimes escaped from state custody more than 4,400 times during the past five years, often by simply walking away from foster homes or other unsecured facilities where they had been placed by the Department of Children's Services." Tennessee's rate of escapes for all kids is about two times the national average.

Thomas Hargrove of Scripps Howard News Service analyzed data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to find that "dozens of police departments across the nation failed to report at least 4,498 runaway, lost and abducted children in apparent violation of the National Child Search Assistance Act passed by Congress in 1990. Seventeen of these unreported children are dead, 131 are still missing." Twelve percent of the more than 37,000 children reported missing to the NCMEC between 2000 and 2004 were not reported to the FBI.

Bill Moushey and Nathan Crabbe of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in conjunction with the Innocence Institute at Point Park University, investigated potential wrongful convictions in Pennsylvania, finding that "police failed to follow the steps that can help prevent false identifications." Many police agencies in the state either were not aware of federal guidelines for eyewitness identifications or disagreed with them, the project found.

Rick Brundrett of The (Columbia, S.C.) State studied records from pretrial intervention programs to find that South Carolina "prosecutors accepted more than 1,800 suspects accused of criminal domestic violence into a program that allows their charges to be dropped over the past five years." Violent offenders aren't supposed to be eligible for the program, but a loophole in state law permits those charged with domestic violence to enter. "Until last year, even the most serious criminal domestic violence charge - criminal domestic violence of a high and aggravated nature - was not classified as violent. That meant suspects charged with the crime for the first time also could be admitted into PTI."

Dave Altimari of The Hartford Courant used documents released under a federal lawsuit by the paper to show that Connecticut's "judicial branch began an organized effort in the 1990s to hide the existence of some lawsuits involving the rich and famous, years before court officials claimed those so-called super-sealed cases were merely the results of informal decisions by a handful of judges." The paper revealed the existence of such cases in March 2003.