Chris Smith’s blog

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs my piece on a legal challenge that could bring California’s death penalty law crashing down. The decision is expected this fall, but no matter which way the judge goes we can expect appeals stretching to the horizon. Ultimately, though, it’s hard not to see this challenge as yet another step on the road to abolition.

One way or the other, members of the defense community are cautiously optimistic that the death penalty’s days are numbered. “It’s like pushing a boulder uphill,” Zimring says. “But things are changing.”

I’ve got a piece in the new issue of the American Prospect, on some innovative anti-crime efforts in Oakland that actually work. In the most messed-up parts of the city, police action alone can’t do the job; nor can well-intentioned community groups. The key, as it turns out, is to get them working together. Easier said than done–community policing schemes have come and gone (and come again) in Oakland. But this new push, which is harder-edged than community policing but has many of the same aims, looks awfully promising.

It’s been raining and the San Francisco Giants are on TV, so the streets are quiet. We’re cruising through East Oakland, one of the most violent parts of a violent city. A knot of drug dealers loiters in front of a housing project, and crackheads sit in folding chairs on the sidewalk. Two teenagers in hoodies saunter by; another weaves back and forth on a small bike. Anthony DelToro gestures toward them: “When you see youngsters like that, all in black, the majority of the damn time they got guns.” He pauses. “This is Oakland — everybody got a gun.”

…

Read the whole thing here.

Everybody knows that DNA doesn’t lie, right? That’s what CSI has taught us: Just “follow the evidence,” as Gus Grissom says, and you’ll find your perp. Well, what if the statistics we use to convict suspects (those one-in-a-million odds we hear in the courtroom) are off by orders of magnitude? What if some DNA “matches” are nowhere near as airtight as we’ve come to believe? Bicka Barlow, a San Francisco defense attorney, is asking just these questions–and the government is stonewalling her. I explore these questions in “DNA’s Identity Crisis,” a story that took me months to report and write, in the latest issue of San Francisco magazine.

Plus: “Anatomy of a DNA Match: Why finding a criminal through DNA testing is a much dicier process than you’d think.”