May 3 OHIO: Death Row Scot to write book on fight for freedom Death Row Scot Kenny Richey and his fiance are both to write books about their fight to have his murder conviction overturned. Kennys story is also set to be the subject of a documentary and a feature film, with an American company due to start filming in Ohio this year. The Scot, who grew up in Edinburgh before emigrating to the States as an 18-year-old, has spent more than 18 years in a maximum security Ohio prison fighting his conviction for murder and is now waiting for news of his appeal. His fiance Karen Richey, 41, said he had been planning to write the book for a long time. She has spent the last 5 years making notes on the case and is currently working on her own book about how her relationship with Kenny developed. She has dozens of letters written to her by him, giving an insight into everyday life inside the maximum security prison where he has spent the last 18 years. Kennys book will cover in detail some of his most gruelling times on death row, including the point ten years ago when he came within an hour of going to the electric chair before being granted a stay of execution. Karen said: "We are both writing books, and I have been jotting down notes for mine since about 1999. "My story is about how I became involved in the case, and with Kenny, and he will be writing a book when he is released - although hell probably just dictate it and make me write it! "Ive kept every letter hes ever written to me, so that will help to jog his memory for some things. "There will be other things which he hasnt told me about that Im sure hell want to put in the book, to show how difficult life on death row can be. "He kept a diary for 12 years, recording all his thoughts and feelings, but that was destroyed by the guards a long time ago. "They can do anything they like to the prisoners and it is so tough." Kennys story has also attracted the attention of film production company Freedomfilmz, which last year approached Hollywood legend Harvey Keitel to play the prosecutor Randall Basinger, accused of using Kennys case to gain media attention. The company is now working on a documentary about Kennys case and the injustice it uncovers in the American judicial system. Company bosses interviewed Kenny twice off camera last year and are due to start shooting in Ohio this year, before taking the film to international festivals in 2006. And film-makers Jodi Jones and Colin Gray OHara have also been working on their full-length feature drama about the case, tentatively titled Capital Mistake. Their synopsis says the film will be "based upon Kenny Richey's struggle for freedom and the love of one woman, who in trying to save Kenny's life, falls in love with him". Kenny, who has been on death row since being convicted of killing two-year-old Cynthia Collins in an arson attack in 1986, had his appeal accepted by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. He has always pleaded his innocence. The Ohio Attorney General has asked for the ruling to be looked at by the US Supreme Court, a move Kennys lawyer Ken Parsigian described as "spiteful and vindictive". The legal team do not believe there are any issues which warrant a Supreme Court review and feel the Attorney General is simply reluctant to release Kenny, now 40, in an election year. Mr Parsigian is, however, confident that his client will be released. (source: The Scotsman) ********************************* Spirko's lawyers try another avenue for appeal With time running out, lawyers for death row inmate John Spirko are asking a court to reconsider his conviction saying prosecutors provided misleading information to a jury and various courts. Spirkos lawyers filed the motion last week in U.S. District Court in Toledo asking the court to reconsider his appeal based on misleading statements and misrepresentations made by state prosecutors, according to court records. Spirko was sentenced to death in the killing of Elgin Postmistress Betty Jane Mottinger who was kidnapped from the post office Aug. 9, 1982. Her body was found a month later in a soy-bean field 50 miles away wrapped in a paint-splattered curtain. She had been stabbed more than a dozen times. The motion centers on a few key points including statements by the lead postal investigator who reportedly has maintained he always doubted the involvement of Delaney Gibson Jr., who was an untried alleged codefendant in the killing. Lawyers also challenge the states argument that Spirko made statements to investigators on details of the crime that only the killer could know. Lawyers presented newspaper articles that include some of those details including the clothes Mottinger was wearing when kidnapped, the number of times she was stabbed and a description of the tarp her body was wrapped in, according to court records. Knowledge of the postal inspectors doubts about Gibsons involvement in the murder and Spirkos statements on the crime, including Gibsons involvement, show Spirko was making false statements to investigators, his lawyers said. Spirko has exhausted his appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to consider the case. His only remaining options are this motion and a request for clemency. The state has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date. The court could do that any day. As it stands, Spirko is next in line for execution, which may be in the next several months. Spirko became a suspect in the Mottinger slaying after he contacted police in October 1982 offering to trade information about her death for help on unrelated assault charges he was facing in Lucas County. The alleged accomplice, Gibson, was never tried and the defense maintains he was in Asheville, N.C., as late as 6 p.m. the night before Mottingers murder. That town is an 8-hour drive from Elgin. (source: Lima News) NORTH CAROLINA: Former NC Death Row Inmate's Suit Claims Civil Rights Violated -- Alan Gell is suing 5 states prosecutors saying they violated his civil rights. Alan Gell, who was facing the death penalty after prosecutors withheld evidence in his murder trial, is suing 5 state prosecutors, charging them with violating his civil rights. Gell says in his lawsuit that the violations occurred when those named in the suit withheld helpful evidence from him at his 1998 trial. A Bertie County jury quickly acquitted Gell at a trial in February 2004. Gell spent 9 years behind bars, 1/2 on death row, for the 1995 murder of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins in Aulander in Bertie County. He says he has yet to hear an apology from the state for what happened to him. None of the defendants could be reached for comment on Monday. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Roy Cooper says her office hasn't seen the complaint and can't comment. (source: WFMY News) UNITED STATES MILITARY What We Don't and Do Know----The Case of Hasan Akbar The determinations of a court martial, in much the same way as a civilian trial, conform to reality selectively where these determinations match the facts at all. That is certainly the case for Hasan Akbar, who was sentenced to death last week for fragging his fellow soldiers in Kuwait. The only person who knows what happened on March 22, 2 1/2 days after the ground offensive to invade and militarily occupy sovereign Iraq, may be Hasan Akbar himself, and even that may be a risky assumption. All trials are inherently and deeply political events. That is why this trial cannot be ignored. A trial is a state ritual, bedecked in the allegorical appurtenances of robes, gavels, uniforms, and the elevated bench of the high priest. It is a carefully scripted public spectacle, even when it is not 'open to the general public,' using the mystical mumbo-jumbo of 'objectivity' as it's point of ultimate reference. Trials are codified rituals, no less primitive and dogmatic than pretending we are drinking blood and eating flesh during communion, than the boiled egg at a Pesach seder, or the daylight fast during Ramadan. A trial is the religious ritual of state power, and the purpose of a trial as a ritual of state power is to render invisible all those relations the state exists to protect. Trials are run almost exclusively by an order of modern shamans called attorneys, people who have been schooled not at determining the whole truth of anything, but instead to apply the various sub-rituals of the law on behalf of one or more of the trial participants. Please don't assume that I dislike religion or lawyers. Some of my best friends, as they say, are religious people and lawyers. The religion I want to deconstruct here is Objectivity. And I want to talk not about lawyers, but about law. A military trial, a court martial, is a ritual contrived to conceal not just the relations of power that exist prior to liberal law -- as civil trials do -- but to camouflage the realities that exist prior to the formal codes of military behavior. A trial is the exercise of the law. The so-called objectivity of the law, which pretends it has no point of view, renders the law a mirror of the status-quo. Every assumption that holds sway, with or without the formal recognition of the law, enters the courtroom, then, as a fact of nature -- a universality, something above and immune from the actual living bodies and all their turbulent histories in the courtroom. This is why every trial that purports to be objective is a lie. The separation of the human subject from all we would call objects -- be that a rain forest, a woman, or a slave -- is a lie. This reflection of the status quo that calls itself objectivity, and pretends it has no point of view, reflects power and surrounds that power in a force field of invisibility. In the trial of a woman for rape, for example, in the determination of something called 'consent,' no attorney is allowed to raise the issue of generally unequal power between men and women in society, even if plain sense tells us that social power conditions the question of consent. This is 'inadmissible.' This unequal power relation that existed prior to the law is not merely ignored by the court, it is actively excluded from any deliberation. Systems of social power, like patriarchy, like capital, like imperialism, are not discounted as irrelevant. This would leave them open to question, vulnerable to the 'objective' evidence of relevance. No, these systems that exist prior to law are not discounted; they are counted. They are counted as natural, as the very immutable laws of nature, impenetrable to mere juridical intervention. That's the first thing. It is only a matter of time after I write this, that someone will say I am defending the actions of Hasan Akbar. Those who defend and apologize for the status quo have demonstrated again and again that they are utterly unscrupulous. There are things I am writing here that will be taken out of context, and that can be combined with the existing assumptions with which we have all been indoctrinated, which will easily lend support to the impression that I am 'defending' Hasan Akbar. So be it. What is likely to be left out is what I will say right now, and what I said earlier... I do not know what happened with Hasan Akbar on May 22, 2003, so it is illogical to assume I am defending his actions. I cannot defend what I do not know. I have neither the capacity nor the inclination. What I want to do is denaturalize; I want to point out some of the terrible lies behind all the assumptions that shroud the story of Hasan Akbar, assumptions that have the impermeability of a law of nature, or an article of religious faith. What they say, 'they' being the story-product of the average socially necessary labor time expended by so-called journalists and so-called official sources... what 'they' say is that Akbar turned off the generator that provided lights in the tents at their Kuwaiti transit camp, then threw an incendiary grenade into one command tent, followed by two fragmentation grenades, one in each tent. 'They' say that he followed the grenade detonations by opening fire on the tents with his automatic rifle. Two officers, a captain and a major, were killed. Fourteen other members of the unit were wounded. I'm not inclined to dispute any of this, even though the rhetorical 'we' has a long history of fabricating evidence against both African Americans and Muslims; and Akbar was both. I'm not overwhelmed with skepticism in this case, even though I know how much latitude exists in the military to cobble together 'evidence,' and even though I know how much power the military has to conceal. Assuming... and that's what I'm doing for the sake of argument... assuming that Hasan Akbar did indeed kill Army Captain Christopher Seifer and Air Force Major Gregory Stone, on March 22, 2003, everything I have to say about trials and power still stands. I am not writing to disrespect either of the two men killed (or the wounded). There are surviving family members and friends who were probably devastated by their deaths. In fact, the only thing I will argue in this regard is that we should value these men's lives, even if we hate and oppose this war, which I do. My own son is a solider, again in Iraq. I think we need to acknowledge that their lives should be valued, and that those who grieved for them deserve empathy, regardless of the fact that this is a hideous war that should be ended immediately. I'll leave the condemnations of soldiers to the moralists. The only soldier that might have know what he was doing there that night -- really known -- may well have been Hasan Akbar. I am simply going to argue that there are others who deserve the same value and empathy, and that there is a disparity between what will happen to Hasan Akbar and others who have committed even more heinous crimes, and that disparity exposes the very systems of power that a trial is designed to conceal. In the trial ritual, two key things must be established to successfully prosecute a defendant for first degree murder, the charge for which Akbar just received a sentence of death. First, the evidence presented must establish that the defendant actually did what they say he did. Second, they must establish that he intended to do it before he actually carried out the act, that he premeditated the homicides. In the same ritual, the defense attorney must use any means at his or her disposal to create doubt about either of the foregoing propositions. Neither legal advocate has as his or her goal to explain what happened in all its complexity. There are two very narrow and competing agendas -- conviction and acquittal -- each based on very narrow rules that exclude any discussion of pre-existing systems of power. The defendant is reduced to a 'rational actor.' This is a liberal fiction that underwrites all our laws; it is based on a model of law that sees everything as a business contract. Every decision is pristine; every decision is final. There are only two ways out for the defendant. Shed serious doubt on his authorship of the act, or shed serious doubt on the actor's ability to behave rationally (the insanity plea). Akbar's lawyer attempted to do the latter. This is tougher than the former partly because the law also severely circumscribes its definition of insanity. Plenty of people who are legally sane are anything but sane by any other normative standard. Here is where I will rely on inference: inference from my own experience in the military and my observations of military activity since I retired a decade ago. Troops are generally young, and they are generally as ignorant as their young counterparts who are not in the military. That's why I don't blame soldiers for wars. Non-commissioned officers (NCO's... sergeants) are often not much older, and frequently just as ignorant, even though they have a bit more experience in the military and practical life. NCO's have that patina of authority to which young soldiers are attracted by either reverence or fear, or both. NCO's often brief their troops on every upcoming situation, and these are often unsupervised and un-vetted briefings, jammed full of the NCO's own prejudices and misconceptions. Many of the expectations that soldiers had about what their experience would be like in Iraq in March 2003 was based on the scuttlebutt they'd picked up from their own NCO's. I observed one of these briefings that was filmed by Bronwyn Adcock, a documentary film maker from Australia. In it, there was a sergeant telling his rapt audience of 20-year-olds that Muslims hated Americans. He called this a briefing on 'Iraqi history and culture.' And this was a briefing in which the sergeant was keenly aware that he was being recorded, so much of what he might have said was not included in his 'briefing.' (Before I dis NCO's, since I was one, let me point out that there many are bright, and there are plenty of commissioned officers who are as dumb as a box of raisins and likely to put out briefings that are just as worthy of ridicule.) Imagine, now, that you are a solider recently converted to Islam -- with the passion of any recent religious convert -- who either directly, through a briefing like this, or indirectly, through barracks chatter, hears these kinds of statements. Does this inspire you with confidence in the unit you are about to accompany to war? How many times had Hasan Akbar heard his religion thus maligned and misrepresented by fellow soldiers, by officers and NCO's, by the press, on the internet, watching call-in programs on C-Span? Akbar's lawyers attempted to make the case that Akbar feared his fellow soldiers. I don't know if he did or not, but it's not a stretch. Troops were pumped up for Iraq, as they testified in the superficial investigations of Abu Ghriab, by being told they were about to exact their revenge for September 11th. What is the mood of a unit full of 20-year-olds who couldn't find Iraq on a map a year earlier, and have not yet differentiated between Iraqis and the 9-11 attackers, and who have been raised on a steady diet of revenge-fantasy entertainment featuring brown people, especially Arabs, as a threatening, irrational, and undifferentiated mass? I spoke with a young solider about Abu Ghraib, who said, "I don't know why they're trippin' about that. They would have done a thousand times worse to us." This was a Black soldier, who hadn't made the connection between anti-Arab racism and the racism he encountered in his own life in the United States. When I pointed out, in the blandest argument I could make, that the majority of those who were imprisoned in Abu Ghraib had been rounded up randomly, I could see the light come on. Oh yeah. Well, that's not right. The point is, this possibility had simply never occurred to him before. We are a culture inoculated almost from birth against every critical thought. He was repeating the circulating and conventional wisdom of his unit, probably first spoken aloud by an NCO or an officer. This is the culture, and for a Muslim soldier this surely matters. I am not trying to defend Akbar. I don't know what happened, so I wouldn't know what I was defending. I don't know his motivations. But I feel fairly safe in assuming there was an atmosphere of discomfort and even hostility in which he heard these kinds of things all the time. Akbar's father reports that his son was the sole Black and sole Muslim in his company. He further alleges that Akbar was subjected to constant racial and religious harassment, including innuendo that Akbar would be 'mistakenly' shot as one of them.' because he 'looks like them and prays like them.' Reports that members of Akbar's unit sported racist tattoos and indeed did subject him to racial and religious hectoring were given a non-denial-denial by 101st Division spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Ed Loomis, who responded that the Division did not 'tolerate extremist behavior.' This is a fairly typical military disclaimer that means this wasn't the subject of the investigation, without saying that the harassment of Akbar was not investigated. Or, more seriously, that the investigation revealed facts that might embarrass the military, which is institutional anathema. The most troubling thing about Akbar's case is that, after the initial flurry of stories were quickly swallowed up by the serial dramas spun out by the Centcom liars in the initial days of the invasion, there was a virtual news blackout of the case. The military became extremely tight-lipped, and the press seemed to have forgotten it happened. Now, after all that circumspection, just as Akbar is being sentenced (and subject to be held incommunicado), there are lurid revelations from his 'diary' that purport to show that he had planned the murder of these officers, or at least other troops, all along. After the details of the trial are buried behind the military cloak for two years, then the curtains are pulled back on this spectacle of the verdict and one damning piece of evidence. It's hard for me to forget that this is the government that has illegally imprisoned thousands of people, including holding one U.S. citizen (Jose Padilla) without charges or access to a lawyer, and that persecuted Wen Ho Lee with the enthusiastic cooperation of the 'objective' press. This is the government that still holds Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal (though Mumia is held on Pennsylvania charges). And this is the military that denied exit to military-aged males in Fallujah before they turned it into a Warsaw free-fire zone. So I hope I'll be forgiven if I say, even without claiming the innocence or guilt of Hasan Akbar -- which I simply do not know about... forgive me if I say there is something here that doesn't pass a smell test. But then, very little has passed that test lately, has it? Now, we have the trial of Ilario Pantano, former Wall Streeter turned Marine looey, who apparently shot two unarmed Iraqis then decorated them with the equivalent of the old Vietnam death cards. Republican Representative Walter Jones, from my home state of North Carolina (as much a fascist nitwit as that other North Carolinian, Jesse Helms), has made Pantano his personal cause celebre, saying he'd have Pantano for his son. This is where this question arises concerning the value of life. I do not have to devalue the lives of Christopher Seifer and Gregory Stone to suggest that we might equally value the lives of Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil, who Pantano shot dozens of times then covered with a sign bearing the unit motto, 'No better friend, no worse enemy.' Moreover, an MSNBC poll in response to Pantano's trial asked the question, "Should soldiers ever be charged with murder in a war zone?" Not should Pantano be charged, but should any soldier ever be charged. Seventy percent of respondents said no. If the exact same question had been asked in association with a report on Akbar's trial, does any reader care to hazard a guess what the results might have been? The jurors in any case, including Akbar's and Pantano's, are likely to share the same set of assumptions that create the obvious disparity we would see if we held these two identical polls in conjunction with separate trials. The law says that murder is 'objectively' murder, no matter who the victim is. There's your objectivity! It's the same objectivity that translates into 13 % of U.S. drug users being Black, 38 % of drug arrestees being Black, 59 % of convictions being Black, and 74 % of all drug offenders sentenced to prison being Black. Black folk are the victims of more homicides per capita than white folk, but if you kill a white person you are almost 4 times as likely to be given the death penalty than if you kill a Black person. And we don't have to limit our examples to racial-national contradictions. We can talk about the dismally low percentage of successful rape prosecutions and concomitantly at the extremely high proof-burden bar placed before rape plaintiffs. We can look at the difference of court outcomes based on the price of one's legal representation. Class, race/nation, and gender are systems of social power that exist prior to law: systems that the law intentionally conceals behind the veil of 'objectivity.' And trials... well, trials give us all the show. Hasan Akbar is quoted as saying, "You guys are coming into our countries, and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." We may assume he meant Muslim countries. As the record now shows, these things did actually happen. Children were killed by occupation troops, and women were raped. (Troops also raped fellow female soldiers and got away with it.) It is claimed that Akbar opposed the war, and further claimed that he had written in the infamous diary that he had been 'punked' and 'humiliated' by his fellow soldiers, rather supporting his father's claims of harassment prior to deployment. He is reported to have written that he would soon be faced with a 'choice' about whom to kill. Given the circumstances, this isn't all that surprising, if true. Now that we've had the last and only act of the trial as state religious ritual, and the trial as public spectacle, we will be treated to the spectacle of Akbar's appeals process, confirming us in the ultimate justice of this objective system, and the public revenge spectacle in which public voices will decry the act while carefully avoiding any references to Akbar's color or religion, while the multitudes of private voices will reproduce the discourse of racism and xenophobia (now available in the blogosphere, and from designated trolls like Daniel Pipes) that ensures the smooth reproduction of the status quo. Then we will have our revenge, and Hasan Akbar will be executed to show our collective resolve. Meanwhile, those who ordered the bombing of Baghdad only 48 hours before Akbar pulled the pin on the first grenade will enjoy the adulation and support of many and the helpless fury of many others. (source: CounterPunch (Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army) MARYLAND: Geneticist finds key to unlock prison cell ---- DNA findings free innocent man from death row Kirk Bloodsworth had an epiphany in 1989 as he sat in his Maryland prison cell, reading a book in which some newfangled technology identified a killer through DNA left behind at the crime scene. If such a thing could be used to determine guilt, Bloodsworth thought, couldn't it also be used to prove someone's innocence? Namely, his? 4 years later, Bloodsworth made history as the 1st death-row inmate to be exonerated by DNA evidence. On May 14, Bloodsworth will attend the National Inventors Hall of Fame induction ceremony on behalf of the British scientist to whom he owes his freedom. Sir Alec Jeffreys said he regrets not being able to come to Akron. The geneticist has had a long-standing speaking engagement at the Czech Republic site where the study of genetics was born. "I guess you could say it's my spiritual home," Jeffreys said. So when the inventors hall offered to fly anyone in to accept the honor for Jeffreys, one person quickly came to mind. "I said it's got to be old Kirk," Jeffreys said. Bloodsworth's story At 44, Bloodsworth isn't old, but he's lived a lifetime's worth of experiences. And while he considers it his responsibility to share his story, he won't deny it's emotionally draining. "It's a subject that is intimate and deep and dark and evil," he said. In 1984, Bloodsworth, then a 24-year-old ex-Marine who worked as a commercial fisherman, was arrested for the sadistic rape and murder of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton in a Baltimore suburb. Police got Bloodsworth's name from an anonymous caller, and 5 eyewitnesses confirmed they had seen him with Dawn. Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death. He won a 2nd trial on appeal, was convicted again, and sentenced to 2 consecutive life terms. Everyone thought justice had been done -- everyone but the man sitting in prison. Angry and frustrated, Bloodsworth took respite from his nightmare in books, and in 1989 he chanced upon The Blooding, an account of the 1st use of genetic fingerprinting to solve a homicide. With the support of his attorney Robert Morin (now a Washington, D.C., judge), the pair started looking through old evidence to see if anything could be tested for DNA. It took two years for the FBI to find and turn over Dawn's panties, which contained a semen stain the size of a quarter. It took another year for the DNA results to come back: The stain was not from Bloodsworth. After 9 years -- 2 of them on death row -- Bloodsworth was given a full pardon and $300,000 in compensation to begin his life anew. But he soon found he'd been released into a prison without bars. People treated him like a pariah. They scribbled "child killer" in the dirt on his truck window. He had trouble finding work. "It was like they thought DNA was some kind of technicality," he said. Bloodsworth knew the only way to lift the cloud of suspicion hanging over his head was to find the real killer. He spent years trying to get someone to run the semen sample through the FBI's growing national DNA database. When Maryland officials finally agreed, they made a match. Last year, a man Bloodsworth had actually met in prison was convicted of Dawn's murder. First meeting Although Bloodsworth regained his freedom more than a decade ago, it wasn't until last year that he got to thank Jeffreys in person. Jeffreys was receiving a Pride of Britain media award. The celebrity-studded affair features a tradition in which each honoree is treated to a surprise guest. The man behind the curtain turned out to be Bloodsworth. Jeffreys said his appearance "completely blew me away." Both men and their wives left the ceremony together, found a bar and became fast friends. The award coincided with the 20th anniversary of Jeffreys' "golden moment," which he pinpointed to 9:05 a.m. on Sept. 10, 1984. Jeffreys was a 34-year-old geneticist at the University of Leicester, where he and his colleagues had spent years "playing around" looking for variation in human DNA. DNA is the blueprint of life. It holds the code that determines everything from hair color to a predisposition toward medical disorders. But 99.9 % of that genetic code is the same for all humans. So finding the relatively tiny portion of the code that makes each of us unique was no small matter. On that fateful Monday, Jeffreys was looking over film of some random DNA samples he'd exposed to a radioactive probe when he noticed something startling. In that "smudgy, blurry, horrible mess," he was able to identify a family: a technician and her parents were among the random samplings. "You could see how the child's DNA pattern was a blend of some of Mum's characteristics and some of Dad's," he said. By afternoon, Jeffreys was pricking his finger and leaving drops of his blood all over the place. He wanted to see if the test worked for dried blood left on a variety of materials. For the next month, Jeffreys worked to improve the test so the messy patterns would be clearer to read, all the while assuming it would take years for his "genetic fingerprinting" to be used in real casework. He was wrong. As soon as Jeffreys published his findings in a scientific journal, an attorney representing a family in an immigration dispute called him. The family -- British citizens originally from Ghana -- were at risk of having their youngest son deported because they couldn't prove his paternity. Jeffreys' finding proved their bond. DNA testing has since become so sensitive, people can be identified from minuscule amounts of hair, skin, saliva, bone or semen. Jeffreys predicts that in the future, police will be able to read DNA evidence to determine someone's physical characteristics, such as eye and hair color and facial features. But those advances will have to be directed by someone else. Jeffreys has moved on. While he's thrilled by how his work has revolutionized criminal investigation, that was never his goal. He has spent the last decade focusing on how gene mutation and evolution create medical disorders. "I've returned to my roots," he said, "and that's just trying to understand human biology." Bloodsworth's work But Bloodsworth is still very much in the thick of DNA as it relates to criminal investigations. If his first epiphany came while reading that book in his prison cell, the second came when he realized his experience had given him a responsibility. Bloodsworth had barely been out of prison a week when he found himself in front of a congressional subcommittee on the subject of the death penalty. And as he bought a boat, remarried and tried to get his life back together, legislators kept calling to ask about his story, or seek his advice on various bills they wanted to draft. "About 4 years ago, I figured out that this is what I was supposed to do in life," he said. Today, Bloodsworth is a program officer for The Justice Project, a nonpartisan group seeking a fairer justice system. His achievements include the 2004 Innocence Protection Act recently signed into law by President Bush, which provides money to help police solve crimes with DNA technology while providing safeguards against wrongful conviction. When he's not lobbying in Washington, Bloodsworth is on the road, telling his story to anyone who will listen. But when he comes to Akron, he wants people to reflect not on his life, but on the man who saved it. Sir Alec Jeffreys was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1994, the most appropriate honor Bloodsworth could imagine. "He truly is my white knight," Bloodsworth said. (source : Beacon Journal)
