DNA Evidence Overturns Conviction Of Florida Man Who Spent 28 Years On Death Row
While this doubtful conviction was ultimately thrown out, the events that led to Thursday’s Florida supreme court decision demonstrate just how difficult it is to attack an erroneous conviction even when that conviction is fatally undermined by DNA evidence.
The post DNA Evidence Overturns Conviction Of Florida Man Who Spent 28 Years On Death Row appeared first on ThinkProgress.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Florida Department of Law Enforcement
In 1986, Paul Christopher Hildwin was one of two suspects in the murder of a Florida woman named Vronzettie Cox. The other suspect was Cox’s boyfriend, a man named William Haverty. Yet Hildwin was convicted in large part because of DNA evidence found at the crime scene — semen found in the victim’s underwear and saliva found in a nearby rag — which was recently discovered to belong to Haverty and not Hildwin. At the time of the trial, outdated scientific evidence falsely linked this semen and saliva to Hildwin.
Hildwin has now spent nearly three decades on death row for a crime that he most likely would not have been convicted of if the DNA evidence were available during his 1986 trial. On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court acknowledged this reality, holding that “the totality of the evidence is of ‘such nature that it would probably produce an acquittal on retrial’ because the newly discovered DNA evidence ‘weakens the case against [the defendant] so as to give rise to a reasonable doubt as to his culpability.’”
At the time of Hildwin’s trial, the prosecutor’s theory was that the semen and salvia found at the scene of the crime belonged to a “nonsecretor” — a person who does not secrete blood into their other bodily fluids. Hildwin is a nonsecretor while Haverty is a secretor. After Hildwin’s conviction, however, this claim was disproven. Years later, DNA testing of the evidence left over from the trial proved that it belonged to Haverty and not Hildwin, undermining the prosecution’s case to such a degree that the state supreme court determined that a jury probably would not have convicted Hildwin.
Yet, while the doubtful conviction against Hildwin was ultimately thrown out — the state now has the option to retry Hildwin, if they choose — the events that led to Thursday’s Florida supreme court decision demonstrate just how difficult it is to attack an erroneous conviction, even when that conviction is fatally undermined by DNA evidence.
In 2006, after testing proved that the DNA evidence found near the victim did not belong to Hildwin, the state supreme court voted 4-3 not to overturn his conviction. Hildwin’s attorneys then had to return to court to earn him the right to compare the now-unidentified DNA to profiles in an FBI-maintained DNA database — and throughout this litigation Hildwin remained behind bars and on death row. Hildwin did not ultimately receive confirmation that the DNA evidence found on the scene belonged to Haverty until 2011, five years after the Florida Supreme Court denied his earlier request for a new trial. Thursday’s order came two-and-a-half years after he obtained this evidence proving that crucial DNA evidence actually belonged to the other suspect in Cox’s murder.
And, for all of this time, Hildwin has been on death row, serving time for a crime that he most likely could not have been convicted of if his jury had known in 1986 what we now know.
The post DNA Evidence Overturns Conviction Of Florida Man Who Spent 28 Years On Death Row appeared first on ThinkProgress.
The State Of Higher Education Looks Bleak In ‘Ivory Tower’
Priorities in higher education are backwards, but what can we do about them?
The post The State Of Higher Education Looks Bleak In ‘Ivory Tower’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Ivory Tower, a new documentary about higher education and the student debt crisis, grapples with a lot of the popular collegiate questions of the day: What is the point of higher education? What purpose does it serve? Is college worth it?
The film raises a lot of questions. Does it offer any answers? The purpose of the documentary is to get people thinking about rapid systemic changes in higher education, and to be outraged by those changes. But it paints a very broad — and bleak — picture of the college experience.
Ivory Tower posits that college policies across America are dishearteningly backwards. To hear the film tell it, there’s not a professor in the country who cares as much about teaching as they do about personal research; obtaining a high national rank, not the best academics, is what faculty consider the greatest measure of an institution’s success; in an effort to attract students, schools funnel money into climbing walls, pools with tanning ledges, and sports teams to up their appeal — relying on tuition hikes to do so.
The statistic at the center of this debate — student loan debt currently exceeds $1 trillion — is irrefutable. But the rest of those claims are pretty suspect. There’s no mention of the fact that college graduates still earn 84% more than individuals with only a high school diploma to their name, just the vague accusation that college isn’t “worth it.” Ivory Tower doesn’t address student life outside the classroom at all: no time is spent on the extra-curricular activities, teams, clubs and volunteer organizations that are an integral part of the 4-year university experience. By cherry-picking the most extreme examples, Ivory Tower winds up with a blind spot: the average student’s college experience. Arizona State University, as always, is called out as the “party school” and thus stands in for all state schools; why not visit, say, University of Michigan? Or the University of Virginia? At the opposite end of the spectrum is Harvard, where Ivory Tower follows a student on a full scholarship who sees Harvard as his the ladder of opportunity out of an impoverished existence in an unsafe, inner-city neighborhood. The documentary undermines its mission by failing to get a representative sampling of America’s undergraduate population.
I spoke to the director of the film, Andrew Rossi, by phone. “[Student debt] has ushered in a wave of conversation about how unsustainable college and the rise in tuition has become,” he said. “And I felt that it would be valuable to go onto campuses and see what students are learning, how teachers are interacting with students, and try to return to the question of “’What is higher education really about?’”
“Unfortunately, there is a utilitarian view of education that is exclusively focused on as a pathway to getting a job,” he said. “It’s an instrumentalist approach.”
Ivory Tower blames our student debt crisis, in part, on a failing of government. “College in this country has been viewed as a public good, basically up until the late sixties and seventies,” he said, until “conservative governors like Ronald Reagan argued that the state should not be subsidizing intellectual curiosity… Tuition start[ed] to skyrocket as state funding plummet[ed].”
“I would like to see more people embrace the idea that higher ed is a good that contributes educated citizens to our democracy.”
But overhauling higher education is easier said than done, and Ivory Tower fails to offer any meaningful alternatives to college. One option the documentary presents is for ambitious teenagers to move to Silicon Valley to create a start-up, though that’s a choice that very few can afford to make. Online courses were another suggestion, but academic performance is low when students take those free classes, because human interaction between professor and peer is removed. Online classes do work when they are taken in conjunction with lessons in person, but that option still limits access to college education among people who cannot pay for instruction.
Anne Johnson, executive director of Generation Progress, a group committed to social issues that impact young Americans, provided some answers as to how we can tackle problems presented in the film. For instance, we can focus on attention on existing borrowers, and implement policies to alleviate their financial burden. The average student owes $30,000, 50 percent of them rely on their parents for money, and 1 in 8 students have defaulted on their loans. To provide some relief, lawmakers can implement an income-based replacement plan that allows students to pay back loans in proportion to their earned income. And we’re actually closer to reaching that goal, as Obama issued an executive order earlier this month, which caps student loan payments at 10 percent of an individual’s monthly income.
Johnson also pointed to refinancing student loans as a way to remove some of the burden from borrowers. A bill introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) last March proposed a minimum tax on people whose income is $1 million or more. Revenue from the tax would, in turn, be channeled into debt refinancing and reduce the amount students have to pay back. Although the bill didn’t make it through Congress, it showed that some lawmakers are concerned with the student debt crisis, and want to create solutions to help borrowers.
Government intervention, it seems, is key — and Andrew Rossi agrees.
“We see in the film this great, proud tradition in American history of government intervening, with the Moral Act, to create the land grant universities in the 19th century, the GI Bill. The difficulty I think is that the political climate right now would not likely support that kind of legislation,” he said.
So while Ivory Tower does a good job identifying the issues in higher education, we have a long way to go before we see the change we need. The unsustainable race continues.
The post The State Of Higher Education Looks Bleak In ‘Ivory Tower’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.
