The contempt shown for justice and humanity by some SBI agents and crime lab analysts has opened the door for every inmate whose case was touched by those agencies to request a new trial.
In at least one case, though, the disaster that is the state's forensic laboratory has opened the window and let what some presume to be a murderous owl fly through.
After learning that some of recently suspended forensic lab chief Duane Deaver's "scientific" conclusions in reality carry the same intellectual weight as reading raw chitlins spread out in the sun, you just knew that Michael Peterson's more fervent defenders were going to be clamoring to look again at his 2003 conviction for killing his wife, Kathleen. His children are now requesting a new trial for their pater familias.
Who can blame them? Vegas bookies might give you even money on a bet that a whole bunch of innocents are being punished for crimes they didn't commit - based primarily on expert testimony from people expert mainly in bad science and canting evidence in favor of cops and prosecutors.
It's hard to tell how big a role the blood spatter sputum so confidently spouted by Deaver played in sending Peterson to the pokey for life, but if you saw Deaver on the stand pontificating during the Durham writer's trial, you know it played some.
'Question authority'
Yeah, it sounds ludicrous to anyone not directly affected by Peterson's guilt or innocence that an owl inflicted the mortal wounds on Kathleen Peterson's body and escaped, leaving only a few microscopic feathers as evidence. I still think it's ludicrous to believe that an owl killed her. That doesn't mean that I disagree with anyone who thinks Michael Peterson's conviction deserves a new hearing.
Why? Because a year ago, many of us would have deemed it equally ludicrous the state's top law enforcement agency and forensic lab were peopled by folks who would send people to prison or lock them away at the Hoo Hoo Hotel for 14 years because of laziness, career advancement, or a refusal to consider evidence that proved a defendant's innocence.
A ubiquitous bumper sticker from the 1960s encouraged us to "question authority." Now that we know that everyone with a badge isn't Dudley Do-Right, and every crime scene investigator isn't like the principled, invariably sexy ones you see glamorized on TV, skepticism of our ironically named Department of Justice is demanded.
Perhaps Peterson's attorneys will get to argue anew his request for a new trial. But Jay Ferguson won't get to argue for his.
You see, his client, Joseph Timothy Keel, is already dead, killed by the state. "I represented Mr. Keel in his appeals, and I realized the Attorney General had never produced all of the open-file discovery evidence" despite being ordered by a judge to do so, Ferguson told me Friday. "They fought me on that every step of the way."
In other words, the state hooted at his request for evidence that might've kept Keel alive. You won't find any microscopic feathers, but you will find the state's fingerprints on the death-dealing needle that sent him to the Big Sleep.
