Justice Issues

May 16, 2011

Kathleen Marshall

Andrew Fitzherbert was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the basis of DNA evidence alone.  His case shows that it is often not the technology or the science but the supervising biologist’s subjective interpretation of the results that is the crucial factor in assessing whether a suspect sample and a crime-scene sample “match.”

 by Mary Garden

 On Friday, February 27, 1998, between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., veterinarian Kathleen Marshall (subsequently dubbed the “Catwoman”) was murdered in the downstairs clinic of her home in Wilston, on Brisbane’s northside. Her decomposing body with 52 shallow stab wounds was not discovered until Sunday afternoon when two directors of the Cat Protection Society of Queensland (CPSQ), of which Marshall was president, visited her home. Sixteen cats and three dogs, unfed and distressed, were upstairs.

The police investigation initially focused on members of the CPSQ where power struggles and infighting had been a common occurrence, intensifying during the six months before 52-year-old Marshall’s death. In April, however, Ken Cox, a forensic biologist from the John Tonge Center, announced that he had found male blood in the crime-scene samples. Investigators decided to eliminate every male person involved in the deceased’s life, beginning with male members of the CPSQ and any male connected to a female member.

Sept. 27, 2010 Updated Dec. 2, 2011

Gurparkash Singh Khalsa

The author’s account of her role as jury foreperson at a 2010 murder trial in Stockton, California.

by Joan Bannan

Ajmer Singh Hothi, a 23-year-old trucker from Jalandhar, India was shot and killed in the cab of his parked big rig in Stockton, California on March 27, 2007. The weapon that killed him was a 9mm handgun that discharged nine bullets into the cab – six of those into Ajmer’s body. The one that entered his heart killed him instantly. He had been in the United States for 10 years, primarily residing with his parents. His mother and sister, who were in great fear for his life, had not been able to reach him for a couple of hours so they drove to the yard where he parked his truck. They found his lifeless body and called 911.

Four days after the murder, the San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department arrested Gurparkash Singh Khalsa, the father of Ajmer’s former girlfriend, Kirin Pannu. Several months later, the evidence, all circumstantial, was sent to a grand jury. After the four-day grand jury session, Khalsa was indicted on the charge of first-degree murder.

Fifty-eight year-old Khalsa, a prominent member of the local Sikh community and owner of a local trucking firm, avoided trial for three years by changing attorneys. In March 2010, a jury was selected for Khalsa’s murder trial.  I would become Juror No. 7.

November 27, 2006 updated 3/12/07

Emmett Till

The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 galvanized the fledging civil rights movement like no other killing of a black by white racists before it. After an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till's two killers, the case festered for 49 years until the U.S. Justice Department reopened it in 2004. In late February of 2007, a Lefore County, Miss. grand jury declined to issue any new indictments, effectively bringing the case to an abrupt and ignoble end. 

by Denise Noe

March 23, 2004

Who are they? These images are a sampling of unidentified victims profiled on The Doe Network.

There are thousands of unnamed corpses in the United States, so-called John and Jane Does who have turned up over the last few decades in woods, rivers, alleys and dumpsters without any identification. An Internet-based group of volunteers who call themselves The Doe Network is working to name the nameless.

by Lona Manning

Todd Matthews has always known where he belongs. His home is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, where the soft-spoken 33-year-old lives with his wife and two young sons. Home is where the ties to his past are as close as the quiet graveyard where his ancestors are buried. "I was born, live and work in a three-mile radius," Matthews explains. This may be why, he surmises, he is obsessed with helping people who are lost. Specifically, dead people who are lost.

Matthews's consuming passion is to investigate and identify "John Does," the anonymous corpses that are found in woods, rivers, by riverbanks, in alleys, and dumpsters throughout the country. There are over 5,400 John or Jane Does registered with the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), an FBI clearinghouse in West Virginia. There are thousands more cases -- nobody is sure how many -- reduced to a thin file folder, a box of bones in the evidence room, a nagging memory in the back of a retired detective's mind. Often, but not always, Does are the victims of foul play. Sometimes they took a wrong turn in life, becoming involved in drugs and crime. But, says Matthews, "No matter who they are, even no matter what they've done in life, you've got to think they're all God's children."