THE 14TH AMENDMENT AND DNA TESTING 
In a case of first impression, Eastern District Judge John Gleeson has ordered Queens District Attorney Richard Brown to provide a convicted murderer with the knife he used to stab his wife in 1992 for the purposes of conducting DNA analysis. The New York Law Journal has the story. In setting a two-part standard, Gleeson wrote in McKithen v. Brown, “I conclude that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants a convicted offender access to physical evidence for the purpose of DNA testing if it can be performed with negligible cost to the state and exculpatory results would undermine confidence in the outcome of trial.” Of the 11 federal courts nationwide that have considered the issue of defendants’ access to DNA evidence, seven have now held that such a right exists.

OF "ABIDING VALUE" 
Southern District Judge Alvin Hellerstein weighed the sanctity of the grand jury process versus the interests of public accountability … and ruled for the former, The New York Times reports. Hellerstein refused to unseal the grand jury testimony of a David Greenglass, a crucial witness in the Rosenberg atomic espionage case. The testimony of Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953. But as the years wore on Greenglass recanted much of his testimony, says a group of historians who had pushed for the release, and admitted to testifying against his sister in order to spare his wife from prosecution. In refusing to release Greenglass’s testimony while he is alive, Hellerstein said that protecting what a witness says to a grand jury “is an abiding value that I must respect.”

TANKLEFF OFFICIALLY OFF THE HOOK 
Charges have finally been dismissed in the Martin Tankleff murder case. As Newsday reports, Suffolk County Supreme Court Robert Doyle yesterday formally dismissed all charges against Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years for allegedly killing his parents before new evidence surfaced that cast blame on his father’s former business associates. “It’s 20 years overdue,” said Tankleff, 37. “I've said this all along: Had law enforcement done an investigation 20 years ago, I would not have spent 6,338 days in prison.” Said one of Tankleff’s attorneys, Barry Pollack of Washington, D.C., “I hope that at some point, the actual killers are prosecuted. But whether that happens or not, I hope the justice system learns a lesson from what went wrong in this case so there won’t be as many Marty Tankleffs in the future.”

CALCULATED AND CALLOUS 
And Gothamist reports on the divorce case of Philip and Tricia-Walsh Smith. Manhattan Acting Supreme Court Justice Harold Beeler ruled that a prenuptial agreement signed by the elderly head of the Shubert Organization and his former wife was still valid. Beeler chided Tricia-Walsh Smith for posting a YouTube video exposing her husband’s penchant for “Viagra, porn movies, and condoms” in an attempt to force a more favorable settlement. The video got over 3 million hits, but Beeler called it “a calculated and callous campaign to embarrass and humiliate her husband. She has attempted to turn the life of her husband into a soap opera by directing, writing, acting in and producing a melodrama.”