The murder of a homeless man in Las Vegas on July 8, 2001 was unusually vicious. Brutally beaten and stabbed, his penis was amputated after he died. Prime suspects were identified within hours of the murder, but detectives did not investigate them. Instead, weeks later they arrested an 18-year-old woman living 170 miles north of Las Vegas, based on a tipster's third-hand gossip that she might have cut a man's penis during an attempted rape in Las Vegas. That young woman is Kirstin Blaise Lobato. There is no physical, forensic, eyewitness or confession evidence tying her to the crime scene,...

Reports about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, secret CIA prisons, and other detention facilities run by the U.S. outside the country, have raised concerns about the treatment of prisoners in those facilities. Yet their treatment is different only by degree from the treatment of people jailed and imprisoned in the U.S. and other countries. And there is certainly nothing new about the physical and psychological mistreatment of imprisoned people. Brutalization of suspected wrongdoers was elevated to an art form during the middle ages in Europe, and there are credible stories of...

Kirstin Blaise Lobato was convicted in October 2006 of charges related to the murder of a homeless man in Las Vegas on July 8, 2001. It is physically impossible that Ms. Lobato committed those crimes. She was 18 in 2001, and on the entire day of July 8 she was 170 miles north of Las Vegas at her parents' house in Panaca, Nevada where she was living. Ms. Lobato's 770-page state habeas corpus petition challenging her convictions was filed on May 5, 2010. The petition's 79 grounds include 24 grounds based on new evidence. Key new evidence are reports by three forensic entomologists and a...