Video Raises Serious Questions About Death Row Conviction

I urge you to get this into the hands of as many people as possible.

In 1993, 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux drowned in her bathtub in West Monroe, Louisiana. Bite mark identification and analysis performed by forensic experts Steven Hayne and Michael West tied Jimmie Duncan to Oliveaux’s death. Duncan was convicted of murdering the baby girl and sentenced to death. He has been on death row for 10 years. But an autopsy videotape obtained by Reason magazine’s Radley Balko shows the bite marks were not on Oliveaux’s body at the time of her death. You can see the video, and still photos from it, here. Balko asked Michael Bowers, a deputy medical examiner for Ventura County, California, and a past chairman of the American Board of Forensic Odontology’s Exam and Credentialing Committee, to review the tape. When asked how abrasions on Oliveaux's cheek that were not present when the video begins could later appear, Bowers said, "Because Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He's creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he's tampering with the evidence. It's criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods." Balko's Reporting on Mississippi's Criminal Forensics System

Arts and the Enlightenment

This article offers an interesting insight into the debate between negative and positive rights.

Should scientists study race and IQ?

What always gets overlooked in such a discussion as posited by this article is that in this instance the findings really don't matter because they apply to a group and have nothing to say about any particular individual.

Before the law it is the individual who is equal. It is individuals who are accountable and responsible. It is individuals who achieve and who fail. It is with other individuals that we form relationships.

This is why it so dangerous for any public policy to be formulated around the concerns or perceived needs of a special group.

Beacon of Liberty

Everything old is new again. From the essay in question:

The wider context was the challenge to liberalism and the free market posed by
the rise of a generalised state interventionism in the form of planning,
corporatism and socialism. Capitalism seemed on the brink of systemic failure
and for many it was capitalism itself that was to blame. Its decline and its end
appeared inevitable.

Read the whole thing.

Pitt on tyranny

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

Beethoven on The Essential Individual

“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”
Ludwig van Beethoven