Word: fritz
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...contrast to the volcanic picture some Senators paint of their relations with McCain, his connections are good with Fritz Hollings, the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee. "They have had a lot of tough fights, but McCain never says Hollings is evil," says a Democratic committee staff member. "In fact, he says Hollings is an honorable debater." McCain always shows deference to the longer-serving Hollings by going to his office for meetings. On occasions when McCain leaves committee hearings, he breaks Senate protocol and hands his gavel to his Democratic counterpart rather than the Republican next in line...
...conviction separated Fritz from his 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth, whom he was raising as a single father. His co-defendant, Ron Williamson, landed on death row and came within days of being executed. Years later, Williamson's conviction was reversed on a technicality. Before retrying him, prosecutors decided to do a DNA test of semen and hair found at the crime scene and compare them with Williamson's. Fritz's lawyers asked them to test Fritz too. Result? The DNA excluded both men and implicated someone else who had never been charged with the crime. Last April, after...
Scheck and Neufeld also want more laws allowing the wrongly imprisoned to sue for damages. Only half a dozen states currently have such statutes, and some have low caps--like California's $10,000 maximum. If Dennis Fritz had slipped and fallen in a government building, he could have sued for millions. After being incarcerated for 12 years for a crime he didn't commit, he can't sue for anything...
...reason, the Innocence Project has shown, is that juries often don't require much evidence to convict people of serious crimes. In hindsight, it seems obvious that the case against Fritz--no eyewitnesses, no evidence linking him to the victim and no credible evidence linking him to the crime scene--was painfully weak. So was the case in Tulsa, Okla., against Tim Durham, who spent six years in prison (of a 3,220-year sentence) for the rape of an 11-year-old girl, until DNA cleared him. The jury ignored 11 alibi witnesses who swore Durham...
Still, Scheck says one of the most important lessons from the Innocence Project's work is that the system does get it wrong, and more often than people think. One person who doesn't need to be convinced is Dennis Fritz. Now that he's free, he's planning to go to law school--and to start a new career as a defense attorney...