Tom Coleman was on top of the world after being honored as the Texas Department of Public Safety's 1999 Outstanding Lawman of the Year. The award was for his undercover investigation between January 1998 and July 1999 in the small Texas Panhandle town of Tulia that resulted in 46 arrests ...
The Complicity of Judges In Wrongful Convictions
by Hans Sherrer
I. Introduction
Wrongful convictions do not occur in a vacuum of judicial indifference. Every wrongful conviction results from a deliberative process involving law enforcement investigators, prosecutors, and one or more trial level and appellate judges. Although prosecutors, police investigators, defense ...
A report by University of Michigan staffers and law students _ Exonerations in the United States: 1989 through 2003 _ was released to the public on April 23, 2004. The report analyzed data from 328 cases during that 15 year period in which the defendant was officially declared, "not guilty ...
Tulia Travesty Settled For $6 Million
by Hans Sherrer
On August 22, 2003, Texas Governor Rick Perry pardoned 35 people whose convictions stemmed from a Swisher County drug investigation that began in 1998.
The prosecution of those people began with the arrest of 43 people in the Tulia, Texas area ...
Directed and Produced by Edgar A. Barens (2001), 64 minutes, VHS video, $125
Review by Hans Sherrer
Produced in the form of a home video, A Sentence of Their Own documents the negative impact of a man's 1996 seven-year prison sentence on his wife and son. The most obvious effect ...
by Jon Marc Taylor, Biddle Publishing Co., 2002, pb. 341 pages
Review by Hans Sherrer
All across the country DOC educational programs available to prisoners are being reduced or eliminated. That dire situation is compounded by the increasing denial of ready access by prisoners to information about outside educational opportunities. ...
by Jim Redden, Feral House, 2001, 235 pages
Snitch Culture is a timely examination of how personal and technological snitching is used by the state and by private organizations, in conjunction with informational databases, to obliterate the privacy of Americans. The author, Jim Redden, formerly published PDXS , a quasi-counterculture ...
By Hans Sherrer
On March 14, 2000, a classaction lawsuit by Washington State prisoners who participated in radiation experiments from 1963 to 1971 was settled for $2.4 million.
Sixty-four prisoners at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla were involved in radiation experiments conducted on their testicles. The men were ...
by Valdas Anelauskas, Clarity Press, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia, 1999, 584 pages
Review by Hans Sherrer
Discovering America is Valdas Anelauskas' challenge to the oft heard claim that America is the greatest country in the world.
As a former Soviet dissident who emigrated to the United States ten years ago with ...
Awareness of the devastatingly negative impact of the politically driven criminal justice system on American society continues to grow. On the week-end of April 10th, there were two conferences in the U. S. dedicated to exposing its normally hidden aspects to the light of publicity and public scrutiny.
One of ...
