The Old Balls Game
Pull quote to a Thomas Friedman column in the October 30 New York Times: “Can Bush stay the course in Iraq?”
Marquis, a founder of the NDAA’s media committee, courts reporters, and he and I have communicated occasionally over the years. On Sunday, October 26, the Tribune launched a new series, “The Legacy of Wrongful Convictions,” and before that day was up Marquis had e-mailed me tearing into it.
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“In their front page story about how the Trib researched ‘every single DNA exoneration’ (which is possible to do because there are relatively speaking so few of them),” Marquis wrote me, “[they] wailed that the ‘premier’ DNA scientist, Dr. Edward Blake, was being denied access to DNA bases. Missing from their story was the fact that Blake is the close associate of Barry Scheck, and while [Blake’s] scientific credentials are unchallenged his objectivity went out the window years ago (see Peter Boyer’s article on ‘DNA on Trial’ in the New Yorker).”
Finally Marquis brought up the case of Sonia Jacobs. “There are really innocent people who have been on death row,” he wrote, “but to be as facile as Possley is with cases like Jacobs is not good journalism.”
