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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

> In an effort to prevent his execution, Lee's attorney sought in the post-conviction appeals process to finally have the DNA evidence in the case tested for the first time. [...] Their request was denied. "The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said.

Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution?

Then again, if execution itself is still legal, I can answer part of that question myself, even if I don't like the answer.

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For context, here’s the other evidence the judge is referring to:

> Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later.

There’s also more context here for anyone interested in the case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee

As for the DNA findings:

> In April 2021, new DNA testing found "unknown male" DNA on the murder weapon and bloody clothes found at the scene. However, the test also "found moderate support" that blood on Lee's left shoe could have belonged to Reese.

EDIT: Apparently, a “tire thumper” looks a lot like a small wooden bat, so there’s not as much confusion as I thought about the murder weapon. I mistakenly thought the prosecution was alleging a “tire iron” was the murder weapon.

https://www.thv11.com/mobile/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-d...

A "tire thumper" is often a wooden bat.

https://www.amazon.com/RoadPro-RPTT-1-Thumper-19-Inches-Asso...

Ah, OK. I got it mixed up with “tire iron”.

> This 19 wooden tire thumper lets you know if your tires are fully pressurized by making a thump as it hits the rubber. Just swing the thumper and listen for the sound. If your tires are low in pressure it makes a different sound. Save time checking tire pressure on your rig with this wooden tire thumper.

Is this some kind of nonsense to avoid marketing it as a weapon, or do people really use these to check tyre pressures instead of… looking at or kicking the tyre? Or even a tyre pressure gauge?

it's absolutely a weapon.

Anything can be a weapon if you use it as one. That doesn't mean they are meant to be weapons.

Yes, if one views the package marketing at your local truck stop (and probably not at your family-friendly Pilot) it is quite obvious that it is a versatile tool, and you might even use it on occasion to check tires.

But, yes, it is manufactured and market to thump one thing: someone’s skull.

Wikipedia says that the murdered woman’s husband bought it for her for self-defense rather than to check tire pressure.

Tire thumpers are an actual thing that truck drivers use to check tire pressure. Unlike cars, you can't just visually inspect tire pressure on empty trucks, because dual-mounted tires with one tire completely deflated will still "look" normal. Checking with a small bat is something so routine, I would wager on you never finding a truck anywhere that doesn't have one readily accessible in the cab, and that tire thumpers are used to thump tires over thumping humans 10000000:1.

Source: I paid for college as a class A truck driver, and I used one to check every single dual-mounted tire every single day.

https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/tire-thumper-...

>Drivers of big rigs, with a gazillion tires, don’t want to take the time to apply a pressure gauge to each one...

so according to this, the intended market for a tire thumper is evidently drivers of 18 wheelers, as it would take an inordinate amount of time to check the tire pressure of every single tire with a pressure gauge. that being said, it very clearly can be used for other, more nefarious purposes, and I would be inclined to assume that a large percentage of individuals purchasing one intend to use it for said other purposes.

it's conceptually similar to how gas stations, etc, ostensibly sell "glass roses" as a gift a and a certain type of tire pressure gauge as a tool, when in reality, the majority of purchases for them are to be used as paraphernalia for consuming illicit substances (methamphetamine/any substance to be vaporized via indirect heat and freebase cocaine/"crack", respectively.)

it's telling in the latter case that you can usually find chore boy or some other similar scouring pad generally sold near the gauge (which is used as a screen for capturing the melted substance,) especially in places where no such cleaning products are sold elsewhere.

Thumping is a quick and dirty check for a grossly under pressure tire. This video shows the sound difference… https://youtu.be/6yboxSUt26s

You can use a hammer, a bat, a pry bar, anything with some mass and some reach so you can easily hit the inner tire of the dual pair. (All of which are perfectly serviceable weapons in their own right.)

And sure, in an ideal world maybe people would use gauges, or have internal monitors, or some fancy solution, but time is money and money is money, so a quick thumping suffices and don’t follow the trucks so closely that you get hit by the fragments went their retreaded tires come apart.

Any attorney or judge who justifies their conviction on eyewitness testimony has to know, at this point, its bullshit. Every criminal attorney at this point knows the infallibility of an eye witness has been proven over and over to be false.

Eye witness testimony is unreliable, but that doesn’t mean it’s always false. It just shouldn’t be the only evidence or the primary evidence in a conviction, as in this case. But if it’s used to corroborate other known facts that haven’t been revealed to the witness, then it’s still beneficial.

This wasn't an eye witnesses glance, or false memory.

It was a witness who literally chased/followed the suspect from the crime scene to a place where people knew who he was.

I don’t know anything about the specific case, but often DNA from someone else would be totally irrelevant.

If I murder someone with my kitchen knife, my wife and her fathers DNA will be on the murder weapon.

If you buy a gun from someone and then go shoot someone with it, it might have the sellers DNA on it.

So it’s sometimes the case that DNA can’t really create reasonable doubt.

Not just the seller, workers at the manufacturing plant, and any person who walked in the shop and asked to hold it.

Right. There was an incident in Europe, I believe, where law enforcement thought they'd identified an individual responsible for a massive international crime spree.

What they'd actually identified was the factory worker who packaged the DNA collection swabs.

You believe right but forgot 1 thing: these DNA collection swabs were supposed to be DNA-free (or at least sold as that) but some problem while manufacturing put DNA on them. It‘s known as „Heilbronner Phantom“ (phantom of heilbronn).

Source: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilbronner_Phantom

The presumption was that the items would have Lee's DNA on them and they did not.

Would wearing gloves prevent DNA from appearing on a wooden handle?

1) That really isn't true. Studies indicated anywhere from 40-75% of the time you can't find "touch" DNA on objects that were handled by someone. That's not even considering whether he could have been wearing gloves or wiped the object after.

2) Since the testing was conducted by defense counsel, we don't really know what an objective test would even show. His lawyers statements are a bit weasel worded--"did not show an 'absolute or conclusive' connection to Lee." Okay, but does that mean it showed a probable match? Is the DNA just too degraded to test?

The standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, not probable. So that's the correct way to describe the evidence.

Not really. Reasonable doubt refers to the totality of the evidence.

A piece of evidence that probably supports a guilty verdict does not undue other evidence just because it doesn't rise the level of reasonable doubt by itself.

It's interesting that a "fail to comprehend" post is voted more highly than an informative post that at least partially answers the question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27246831

But note that your remark falls into the same category.

Especially when the current result is based on eyewitness testimony, which is known to be crap.

Well that kind of depends on the actual testimony, doesn't it?

Here, the defendant was neighbors with the victim, and the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.

the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.

Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.

The neighbor witness followed the suspect to a place where he was known/recognized.

I didn’t see that in the article, but it’s still trivial to come up with reasonable doubts:

1. What does known/recognized mean? It’s perfectly possible for additional people to make a mistake in identification, especially if prompted by others. 2. Even if it was him, the crime wasn’t witnessed; he’d be agitated just by having seen the scene, I imagine

The big thing that adds to number 2 is that people often forget that reality is messier than neat stories. The defendant could very well have been doing something else illegal or furtive, and been agitated for that reason. They might have been involved in related criminal activity but not responsible for the actual attack. They might have had an innocent reason to be there and not expected to be believed. It may really not have been the suspect there to begin with.

That’s why the death penalty is bad, and it’s why eyewitness testimony is crap by itself, especially when it’s circumstantial.

The point is that the article is completely one sided propaganda.

It didn't mention anything about any contradictory evidence, except to say the judge felt enough existed.

Debating the death penalty is one thing, but advocates for abolishing it aren't helping themselves by relying on this type of propaganda. This was and is a solid conviction of a guilty man.

There are enough legitimate concerns to debate without taking the word of the click bait.

As for your what-if's: that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence. They convicted.

If they could (and did!) do that without needing DNA evidence, the presence of someone else's trace DNA, or absence of the suspect's on one specific piece of evidence isn't likely to change that, even if it's the murder weapon.

All evidence is imperfect, and I personally think we'll start to publicly realize that DNA evidence is just as malleable as eye-witness testimony. Just run more PCR iterations until some other DNA is amplified above the signal/noise floor! (If people knew the amount of analytical probability that goes into PCR/ matching DNA samples, they'd have a lot less faith in the technology, but that's another topic.) Same thing for manipulated/edited video and even deep-fakes.

Which, isn't too say all evidence is crap and therefore no convictions are valid.

It's why we put faith in the system and in our peers serving on petit-juries...

and why it's up to a them and the judge to evaluate the evidence, and decide whether or not to convict...

And why we don't have a computer run a PCR and automatically say: "Positive dna-sample: go directly to jail".

> that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence.

That’s a pretty shockingly huge amount of faith you’re putting in a system with well documented shortcomings and biases, especially in a capital case with a black defendant.

Also, it seems frankly absurd to claim that the absence of the subject’s DNA on the murder weapon isn’t material to the decision to convict . It’s surprisingly hard not to get DNA on things, and the prosecution’s case appears not to have painted the defendant as some sort of methodical dexter-type.

Nobody has claimed that we should rely solely on DNA tests - that’s an absurd straw man. I think it’s even more absurd to defend this sequence of events in a capital case.

While I agree with you seems like this was a sketchy case to go forward with the execution, like me, you already had a strong opinion about capital punishment before you read the article.

Being surprised at any travesty of justice means you still believe "justice the meme", and "justice the reality" have any hope of being similar to each other.

As if judge was interested in closing the case and moving onto the next one rather than serving justice. In many countries judges are unsackable, is it true in the US?

Many judges in the US have lifetime appointments. This is one reason it was so damaging (depending on your point of view) when congress refused to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees, then rammed through a record number under Trump.

It led to Trump boasting that the judges would just tilt the scales on the election for him if the count said he lost (that didn’t work out), and the current large crop of new abortion bans working their way up to the (in his words), “Trump judge” federal courts.

"However, the test also "found moderate support" that blood on Lee's left shoe could have belonged to Reese.[17]"

They did find the victims DNA on Lee's shoe. That would need to be admitted as well.

> Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution?

It wasn't "completely ignored". It was presented to the court and the test was requested, and the request was denied. Evidentiary rules are complicated and subject to abuse, yes, but they protect all of us. It's not like we'd be better off if discovery was unlimited.

Your complaint isn't about the way courts treat evidence, it's with the punishment. Death is final and not subject to appeal. And fundamentally that's an argument for why it shouldn't be available to courts at all.

But really, there's nothing especially wrong with evidentiary process in US criminal law. There are problems with it like any bureaucracy, but on the whole it does pretty well.

When the death penalty is involved I would argue that discovery should in fact be unlimited

Even for a life sentence, evidence like this shouldn't be ignored. Eyewitness evidence is one of the most fallible types of evidence.

More generally there should be more legal paths towards stays of execution even if new evidence does not yet on its own reach the standard necessary for an appeal or retrial. Not having these paths to me seems cruel and unusual.

> It's not like we'd be better off if discovery was unlimited.

Why not? Why shouldn't the defense be able to present all evidence in their possession?

Because evidence could literally be anything in the universe and no limits on what is able to be presented opens up abuse via random shit

"Defendant requests discovery for defense's exhibit "A": the entire contents of the Library of Congress.

Since the defense has not received the subpoenaed material, the case can not go to trial and the defendant should be released."

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