November 11: Charles McCrory: Alabama; Part One: Junk bite mark 'science.' Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith (two extraordinary journalists who report on America's criminal justice system) note that prosecutors want to keep him in prison for his wife's murder - despite a judge saying their evidence is 'junk', noting that: "McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth. Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.” In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.” Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.” “Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

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QUOTE TWO OF THE DAY: "As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released. Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said. “Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.” It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "IN 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters. In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert. In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds. Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But (Judge) Huffaker did not."

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STORY: "Prosecutors want to keep a man in prison for his wife's murder - despite judge saying their evidence is junk," by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith, published by The Intercept, on October 28, 2026. 

SUB-HEADING: "Slamming the bogus bite mark analysis that sent Charles McCrory to prison in 1985, a judge vacated his conviction"

GIST: "Alabama attorney Larry Grissettt was checking Facebook in late September when he saw a news story about a man he represented in a murder trial more than 40 years ago. According to the article, a federal judge had just vacated the conviction of that client, Charles McCrory.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

“Everybody sees this was junk science. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”

IN 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”

But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

MCCRORY IS NOT the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”

“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.

“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

The entire story can be read at: 

https://theintercept.com/2026/10/28/bite-mark-forensics-junk-science-mccrory/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

November 11, 2026; Murder or suicide? National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) entry: Tameshia Shelton: Mississippi: What happens when the board-certified forensic pathologist gets it wrong - and the defence lawyer chooses not to vigorously challenge his evidence? Spoiler alert: Tragically, years of imprisonment as a murderer served by an innocent woman! HL. As noted by NRE scribe Ken Otterbourg: "Dr. Liam Funte ruled the death a homicide, based largely on the bullet’s trajectory, which was straight back and down through Young’s chest, without any significant deviation to the left or right...During cross-examination, (defence lawyer) Ray asked Funte to provide more detail about his homicide determination. Funte said he had relied on the bullet’s pathway and the absence of any history of Young exhibiting mental-health issues. “When I do cases, it’s well-documented,” he said. “If the individuals, they had suicidal ideations, if they had suicidal thoughts, and they shoot themselves, I don’t see nice clean straight back and down gunshot wound. There’s some deviation from left and right. The pathway isn’t quite as nice.” During redirect, Funte testified that it was hard to place the barrel of a gun squarely against one’s chest. “The way you have to turn your wrist is going to deviate that bullet to the left or right, okay … When I see people who have shot themselves in the chest, the bullet goes to one side or the other. Because that’s how he can most easily pull the trigger and hold the gun. Is it possible for somebody to shoot themselves straight back? It’s possible but not probabl[e].” Prior to the trial, Funte had been unaware of the burn marks on Young’s clothes, but he testified that even with this new information, he would still rule the shooting a homicide."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The jury convicted Shelton of first-degree murder on July 17, 2015, and Kitchens sentenced her to life in prison, separating Shelton from Treasure, who was now 6 years old, and an older daughter, Trinity, who was 11 years old.  Shelton appealed, arguing the verdict was against the weight of the evidence and that Judge Kitchens should have given different jury instructions. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on March 16, 2017. 

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "On March 12, 2020, attorneys Tucker Carrington and Sandra Levick filed a motion for post-conviction relief. An amended motion was filed on April 13, 2020.  The motion, which asserted that Shelton was innocent, said that Shelton had been convicted based on inaccurate and incomplete forensic testimony about the cause of death and the gunshot residue that the state used to tie her to the shooting.   In addition, the motion said that Ramirez Williams had testified falsely about when he tested Shelton for gunshot residue. Finally, the motion said that Ray didn’t properly prepare for the trial, failing to consult with experts or present testimony that would have cast doubt on the state’s assertion that Shelton shot Young.   Two forensic pathologists said in affidavits that they had reviewed the evidence and found that there was no basis for Funte to conclude that Young’s death was a homicide. "

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Dr. Randall Frost, the medical examiner for Bexar County, Texas, said in an affidavit that Funte testified incorrectly that Young’s lack of mental illness or suicidal ideation supported a finding that ruled out suicide. “Suicide is very often an impulsive act, especially in teenagers and young adult males,” Frost said. The motion included a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said that 54 percent of people who killed themselves did not have a diagnosed mental-health condition at the time of death.  The motion said that close-contact bullet wounds were almost always associated with suicides (in 96 percent of non-accidental shooting deaths in one study), and that Funte had failed to grasp the significance of Young’s bullet wound when provided with that information at trial.   “When … confronted with the Mississippi Crime Lab’s determination that the gun was actually fired from contact or near contact range, [Funte] should have reconsidered [their] opinion in light of all the facts,” Bux said."

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PASSAGE FOUR  OF THE DAY: "About a month after Young’s death, Shelton had found a note from Treasure’s baby book. It’s not clear when the note was written, but it was either around the time of Treasure’s birth, in early May 2009, or in the days just prior to Young’s death, when he returned to Mhoon Valley for the first time since May.  In the note, Young describes his despair over the collapse of his relationship with Tutton, who he called “T.” He wrote in part: “T is a sweet girl. I love her 2 death. She’s my heart. I planned my life with her around her. I never planned 4 just me. I planned 4 both of us. I will always want to work things out between us always. I’ll never give up on her. I pretty much gotta start my life over again. I have no life without her. These are my last words.” During the trial, Ray told Shelton’s family that Judge Kitchens wouldn’t allow the letter to be introduced into evidence. But the court records didn’t reflect any discussion of the letter, and Ray didn’t do any pre-trial preparation to authenticate the letter as the first step toward its introduction. “Mr. Ray did not make a strategic choice to forgo the evidence; Instead, he utterly failed to execute the choice he had made to gain its admission,” the motion said. "

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PARAGRAPH FIVE OF THE DAY: "Ray testified at an evidentiary hearing on April 14, 2022. He said his experience with juries in Clay County drove his decision not to consult with forensic experts, either on the cause of death or the gunshot residue. “Well, that was not my strategy in this case,” Ray said. “The strategy, as I said earlier, was to go back to a hysterical person who claimed this man committed suicide and keep the jury—try to keep the jury focused on that.” 

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PARAGRAPH SIX OF THE DAY: "The appeal said that Judge Kitchens’s inference that Shelton wanted Ray to “fabricate” a defense was “untethered to any facts” before the court. “The circuit court’s ruling betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of defense counsel in gathering information, conducting discovery, investigating the case, interviewing witnesses, preparing to introduce evidence, and consulting with and retaining expert assistance on critical forensic issues in the case,” the appeal said. "

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PASSAGE SEVEN OF THE DAY: "At an evidentiary hearing before Judge Kitchens on December 9, 2021, Funte said the bullet’s trajectory was not a valid basis for distinguishing homicides from suicides and that his earlier opinion was not supported by science.  Funte also said that when he testified at the trial, he had been unaware of the size of the gun that killed Young. At the hearing, Funte used a toy gun to demonstrate how easy it was to “get the muzzle in alignment parallel to the sagittal plane,” the line that divides the body into right and left halves.  Funte also said that his trial testimony regarding mental-health issues and suicidal ideation was wrong. He said suicides can be impulsive."

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ENTRY:  Tameshia Shelton: Mississippi: By Ken Otterbourg: Posted  by The National Registry of Exonerations on October 19, 2026; Contributing Factors; (A witches brew!) False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct,  and Inadequate Legal Defense;

GIST: "At 8:59 p.m. on October 16, 2009, Tameshia Shelton called 911 to report a shooting outside her home in Mhoon Valley, a rural community in Clay County, Mississippi.

“Oh my God! Danelle!” Shelton told the operator, referring to 21-year-old Danelle Young, the boyfriend of her half-sister, Ketina Tutton. 

The operator asked Shelton, who was 31 years old, what happened. Shelton said Young was still breathing. The operator asked where Young had been shot. Shelton answered: “I haven’t rolled him over. I’m too scared.” 

The operator asked Shelton if she knew what type of gun was involved.  

Shelton said it was a small handgun. “He saw, he saw a raccoon and he was gonna shoot it. The raccoon was in a tree, and I don’t know if he, um I don’t know I didn't look. I don’t know if he tripped when he got ready to shoot it. I don’t know. I just heard a shot.” 

Shelton remained on the phone with the 911 operator for 17 minutes until two sheriff’s deputies arrived. One of the deputies, Cassandra Smith, would later testify that Shelton was hysterical and screamed, “You’re late. You’re late. He’s dead.” 

Shelton, who was holding her infant daughter, Treasure, in a blanket, searched for the gun, which she said was an heirloom from her grandfather. Smith and another officer later found the weapon, a small .22-caliber pistol with a short barrel, in the grass near Young’s feet. 

Smith then asked another deputy to call Chief Deputy Ramirez Williams and tell him that she suspected there had been a murder. 

Young and Tutton had argued an hour before his death. “I had just told him that we were not–that I was not going to move in January like we had planned,” Tutton told deputies. “This was something we had planned … until I got the job.” After the argument, they parted ways. Tutton went to her mother’s house, which was just up the road, and Young went to Shelton’s trailer. 

Shelton gave several statements to deputies in the immediate aftermath of Young’s death. All were recorded. The first, conducted by Williams, started at 9:33 p.m. and lasted about four minutes. The second statement took place three hours later, at 12:22 a.m. on October 17, and ended at 1:00 a.m. She gave a third statement to another Clay County deputy on October 19 and a fourth statement to a state investigator in preparation for a polygraph test, which was canceled after Shelton had an epileptic seizure. 

In each statement, Shelton gave the same account: Young had knocked on her window, asking if he could borrow her gun to shoot a raccoon up in a tree. Shelton said she retrieved the gun from a plastic bag, loaded it with six bullets, and gave it to Young. She said she asked him to show her the raccoon after he killed it. She said she heard a shot and went outside and found Young. Then she called 911. 

Deputies performed gunshot residue (GSR) tests on Young and Shelton. Five particles were found on Shelton’s hands, and five particles were found on the back of Young’s hands. 

Dr. Liam Funte, a board-certified forensic pathologist, performed the autopsy. He ruled the death a homicide, based largely on the bullet’s trajectory, which was straight back and down through Young’s chest, without any significant deviation to the left or right. 

A grand jury indicted Shelton for murder on April 8, 2011. Shelton was arrested and released on bond. She hired Rodney Ray, a former prosecutor, to represent her. Ray would later testify at a post-conviction hearing that he believed from the beginning that Shelton was innocent. “I thought why would somebody call 911 and stay on the phone for, I think it was 17 minutes, begging people to come to the scene to talk to the one person in the world who could say who did or who did not do it?” he said. 

Nearly six years after Young’s death, on July 14, 2015, Shelton’s jury trial began in Clay County Circuit Court, with Judge James Kitchens Jr. presiding. Prior to trial, Shelton had rejected an offer to plead guilty to manslaughter. 

Smith and Torrey Williams, an auxiliary officer, testified that they saw Shelton constantly rubbing her hands on the blanket wrapped around her daughter’s legs. Williams said this behavior continued inside Shelton’s trailer, where Shelton wiped her hands “over and over.” She continued to wipe her hands in the patrol car and at the sheriff’s office, and Torrey Williams testified that Ramirez Williams said that Shelton could not go to the bathroom or wash her hands prior to being tested for gunshot residue. 

Ramirez Williams testified that he performed a GSR test on Shelton at around 1 a.m. on October 17, 2009.  He said that Shelton had brought up the idea of testing earlier in the interview, and it was the first time that a test had been mentioned during the investigation. 

Three years after her indictment, in March 2014, Shelton had sat for an interview with Lieutenant Brett Watson of the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Department, who was administering a voice-stress analysis test. Watson testified that Shelton had claimed during the interview, which was recorded, that Williams had sprinkled a substance on her hands before conducting the gunshot residue test. Watson said there was no test performed by law enforcement that involved sprinkling a substance on a suspect’s hands. 

Felicia Robinson, a forensic scientist, testified that the bullet recovered by Funte during the autopsy had come from Shelton’s gun. She also testified that the gun had been fired from a position of contact or near-contact with Young, based on the burn marks found on his clothes. Robinson also testified that the gun was “very short,” with a barrel length of less than two inches. 

Jacob Burchfield, an analyst with the Mississippi Crime Laboratory, testified that five GSR particles had been found on Shelton’s hands, and five particles had been found on the back of Young’s hands. He said that a person could get GSR on them by firing a weapon, being near a weapon when it was fired, or handling something with GSR already on its surface. He also testified that a person who shoots a gun is more likely to have GSR on their hands than someone who is near the weapon. 

A prosecutor asked Burchfield whether a four-hour lag between the firing of a weapon and a GSR test would have an impact on the amount of residue found on a person’s hands. Burchfield said it would. 

The prosecutor continued: “If a person hypothetically in that four-hour time period goes to the bathroom, pulls their pants down, uses toilet paper, pulls their pants back up. Would those types of behaviors reduce the amount of indicative particles or gunshot residue you would expect to find in a gunshot residue kit? 

“Yes, sir,” Burchfield answered. “Any physical activities.” 

Funte testified about the autopsy and the cause of death. He said the only details he knew about the events leading up to the shooting came from the coroner’s report. (That report said, “There might have been some type of altercation or argument between Mr. Young and his girlfriend prior to the incident.”) 

Funte testified that Young’s death was a homicide, based on the gunshot wound to the chest. “The only thing that was significant during the internal examination was that bullet pathway through the tissue … There was no real significant deviation to the left side or to the right side. So, it was pretty much straight back and down.”  

During cross-examination, Ray asked Funte to provide more detail about his homicide determination. Funte said he had relied on the bullet’s pathway and the absence of any history of Young exhibiting mental-health issues.  

“When I do cases, it’s well-documented,” he said. “If the individuals, they had suicidal ideations, if they had suicidal thoughts, and they shoot themselves, I don’t see nice clean straight back and down gunshot wound. There’s some deviation from left and right. The pathway isn’t quite as nice.” 

During redirect, Funte testified that it was hard to place the barrel of a gun squarely against one’s chest. “The way you have to turn your wrist is going to deviate that bullet to the left or right, okay … When I see people who have shot themselves in the chest, the bullet goes to one side or the other. Because that’s how he can most easily pull the trigger and hold the gun. Is it possible for somebody to shoot themselves straight back? It’s possible but not probabl[e].” 

Prior to the trial, Funte had been unaware of the burn marks on Young’s clothes, but he testified that even with this new information, he would still rule the shooting a homicide. 

Tutton, the only defense witness, testified about her relationship with Young. She said that Young had once nearly overdosed on pain pills after a dental procedure. She also said that she had not been concerned about Young killing himself.  

Edith Young testified that her son did not have a history of mental illness. She also refuted Tutton’s story about Danelle and pain pills. 

Shelton did not testify.  

During the state’s closing argument, Assistant District Attorney Mark Jackson told the jury that Shelton displayed consciousness of guilt through her actions to rid her hands of gunshot residue. “Our actions speak louder than words,” he said. “She calls 911. But she was eliminating evidence the entire time. She was wiping her hands. She wanted to go to the bathroom. She wanted to do all of these things. And they told y’all every single thing she did. Every one of those is going to make gunshot residue continue to go away. Those are the actions of a guilty person. Those aren’t the actions of someone who witnessed the aftermath of a suicide.” 

Jackson also said Funte clearly testified that the shooting was a homicide. “He said in the suicides I’ve seen, there’s always deviation. To get that gun where it needs to be to shoot straight through just didn’t happen. He also said Burchfield’s testimony about the amount of gunshot residue on Young’s hands and the location of the residue indicated Young didn’t shoot himself. “He had almost no gunshot residue,” Jackson said. “He didn’t fire that gun.” 

Jackson also reminded jurors of Watson’s testimony and said that Shelton had concocted a story to explain how she got gunshot residue on her clothes and hands. He said: “The things she comes up with four and a half years later is Ramirez sprinkled something on my hands and cuts off the light. A test that doesn’t exist. It’s not a real thing. None of the investigators ever heard of it.” 

The jury convicted Shelton of first-degree murder on July 17, 2015, and Kitchens sentenced her to life in prison, separating Shelton from Treasure, who was now 6 years old, and an older daughter, Trinity, who was 11 years old. 

Shelton appealed, arguing the verdict was against the weight of the evidence and that Judge Kitchens should have given different jury instructions. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on March 16, 2017. 

In 2016, Scott Colom replaced Forrest Allgood as the district attorney for Mississippi’s 16 th Judicial District, which includes Clay County.  

Colom had not been involved in Shelton’s prosecution, and after reading the opinion affirming her conviction, he had his own questions about the case.  

“The evidence sounded thin,” Colom would later tell Mississippi Today . He said there wasn’t much of a motive, and he wondered why a guilty person would call 911. He reached out to the Mississippi Innocence Project and asked the organization to review the case. 

On March 12, 2020, attorneys Tucker Carrington and Sandra Levick filed a motion for post-conviction relief. An amended motion was filed on April 13, 2020. 

The motion, which asserted that Shelton was innocent, said that Shelton had been convicted based on inaccurate and incomplete forensic testimony about the cause of death and the gunshot residue that the state used to tie her to the shooting.  

In addition, the motion said that Ramirez Williams had testified falsely about when he tested Shelton for gunshot residue. Finally, the motion said that Ray didn’t properly prepare for the trial, failing to consult with experts or present testimony that would have cast doubt on the state’s assertion that Shelton shot Young.  

Two forensic pathologists said in affidavits that they had reviewed the evidence and found that there was no basis for Funte to conclude that Young’s death was a homicide.  

Dr. Robert Bux, the former medical examiner for Colorado Springs, Colorado, said in an affidavit that Funte’s testimony about the significance of the bullet’s pathway through Young’s chest was “irrelevant.” He wrote: “I know of no scientific support for Dr. Funte’s testimony that the lack of significant deviation of the bullet path to the left or to the right is a basis for concluding that the manner of death was homicide.” 

He said Funte testified incorrectly about the difficulty of holding a gun perpendicular to one’s chest. “[Their] testimony that one’s wrist will bend and force the gun to the left or right is worthless,” Bux said.   

Dr. Randall Frost, the medical examiner for Bexar County, Texas, said in an affidavit that Funte testified incorrectly that Young’s lack of mental illness or suicidal ideation supported a finding that ruled out suicide. “Suicide is very often an impulsive act, especially in teenagers and young adult males,” Frost said. The motion included a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said that 54 percent of people who killed themselves did not have a diagnosed mental-health condition at the time of death. 

The motion said that close-contact bullet wounds were almost always associated with suicides (in 96 percent of non-accidental shooting deaths in one study), and that Funte had failed to grasp the significance of Young’s bullet wound when provided with that information at trial.  

“When … confronted with the Mississippi Crime Lab’s determination that the gun was actually fired from contact or near contact range, [Funte] should have reconsidered [their] opinion in light of all the facts,” Bux said. 

The motion also included an affidavit from Crystina Vachon, a forensic scientist and expert on gunshot residue, that said the GSR evidence was consistent with suicide. Vachon said that the number of particles found on a person’s hand was not a reliable indicator of when or how they handled a weapon. She also said that Burchfield’s GSR report indicated that Young’s right hand was covered in dirt, which would have interfered with an accurate test. Vachon also said that the location of the residue, on the back of Young’s hands, was consistent with Young using the weapon. 

The motion also said that Williams had testified falsely about when he administered the GSR test to Shelton. According to the GSR collection form, the test took place at 9:51 p.m., not 1 a.m., as Williams testified. The three-hour difference had enhanced the state’s case by supporting its theory that Shelton used that time to destroy evidence. It also made the small amount of GSR found on Shelton seem more meaningful, the motion said. 

The motion said Ray didn’t consult with experts to learn about the flaws in the state’s forensic evidence. Doing so would have allowed him to effectively cross-examine the state’s witnesses, the motion said. 

Burchfield, the state’s GSR witness at the trial, said in an affidavit included in the motion, “Had I been asked at trial whether the five particles indicative of gunshot residue on the hands of Tameshia Shelton were consistent with her having handled and loaded a previously fired handgun within one hour of being tested, I would have answered yes.” 

The motion said that Ray failed to present other evidence undermining the state’s case. Williams had testified about finding a hair clip and a rubber band in some disturbed gravel and asserted that these items indicated a scuffle between Tutton and Young prior to the shooting. But the state had obtained a video showing Tutton and Young at the Walmart in nearby West Point at 8:06 p.m., less than an hour before the shooting. Tutton’s hair was loose. The motion said that this evidence would have “resoundingly rebutted” Williams’s testimony that there had been a physical altercation prior to the shooting.  

About a month after Young’s death, Shelton had found a note from Treasure’s baby book. It’s not clear when the note was written, but it was either around the time of Treasure’s birth, in early May 2009, or in the days just prior to Young’s death, when he returned to Mhoon Valley for the first time since May. 

In the note, Young describes his despair over the collapse of his relationship with Tutton, who he called “T.” He wrote in part: “T is a sweet girl. I love her 2 death. She’s my heart. I planned my life with her around her. I never planned 4 just me. I planned 4 both of us. I will always want to work things out between us always. I’ll never give up on her. I pretty much gotta start my life over again. I have no life without her. These are my last words.” 

During the trial, Ray told Shelton’s family that Judge Kitchens wouldn’t allow the letter to be introduced into evidence. But the court records didn’t reflect any discussion of the letter, and Ray didn’t do any pre-trial preparation to authenticate the letter as the first step toward its introduction. “Mr. Ray did not make a strategic choice to forgo the evidence; Instead, he utterly failed to execute the choice he had made to gain its admission,” the motion said.  

Watson had testified that Shelton claimed deputies had sprinkled her hands with a substance prior to testing. But the transcript of that interview, which was not prepared at the time of the trial, showed that Shelton never used the word “sprinkled.” Instead, she talked about Williams putting “stuff on her hands, most likely a reference to the GSR test he administered at her trailer. The motion said it was unclear whether Ray listened to the interview before the trial, but “he made no objection to the state’s false characterization of what was said.” 

After the motion was filed, Shelton’s attorneys and the state contacted Funte, then a medical examiner in Maine. In an affidavit filed on May 20, 2021, Funte recanted his trial testimony. He said he would now have ruled Young’s death as undetermined.  

At an evidentiary hearing before Judge Kitchens on December 9, 2021, Funte said the bullet’s trajectory was not a valid basis for distinguishing homicides from suicides and that his earlier opinion was not supported by science.  

Funte also said that when he testified at the trial, he had been unaware of the size of the gun that killed Young. At the hearing, Funte used a toy gun to demonstrate how easy it was to “get the muzzle in alignment parallel to the sagittal plane,” the line that divides the body into right and left halves. 

Funte also said that his trial testimony regarding mental-health issues and suicidal ideation was wrong. He said suicides can be impulsive. 

Ray testified at an evidentiary hearing on April 14, 2022. He said his experience with juries in Clay County drove his decision not to consult with forensic experts, either on the cause of death or the gunshot residue. “Well, that was not my strategy in this case,” Ray said. “The strategy, as I said earlier, was to go back to a hysterical person who claimed this man committed suicide and keep the jury—try to keep the jury focused on that.” 

Ray said he intentionally limited his cross-examination of Burchfield. “I couldn’t get Burchfield off the stand quick enough,” Ray said. “I did not want them to keep hearing about the gunshot residue. I knew it was damning for my defense.”   

Burchfield testified at the evidentiary hearing that Shelton’s account of when she handled the gun in days before the shooting death, including loading the gun with bullets before handing it to Young, was entirely consistent with the GSR found on her hands, and that if Ray had asked him that question, he would have answered yes. 

Ramirez Williams testified at the evidentiary hearing that his practice was to collect gunshot residue as soon as possible. He said the collection form he signed was dated October 16, 2009, at 9:51 p.m. The available records don’t indicate the prosecutor ever examined the collection form. 

Both sides filed post-hearing briefs in October 2022. In November 2023, after Judge Kitchens had not yet issued a ruling, Shelton petitioned the Mississippi Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus. Judge Kitchen said he would rule by the end of 2023 but failed to do so. The Mississippi Supreme Court issued the writ on January 22, 2024, and ordered Judge Kitchens to enter a ruling within 45 days. Nine days after the deadline, on March 18, 2024, Judge Kitchens denied Shelton’s motion.  

Judge Kitchens said that Funte’s recantation was not sufficient to merit a new trial because Mississippi law didn’t require a forensic pathologist to rule a death as homicide before a jury convicted a defendant of murder. He also said that Ray had provided effective representation, and that Ramirez Williams had not testified falsely about when he administered the GSR test. He said the deputy’s testimony was not the result of dishonesty, but rather “indicative of a witness who had not re-read the file before trial and attempted to rely upon his memory.” 

Shelton appealed, arguing that Judge Kitchens had ignored the motion records and misapplied case law in rejecting the motion for a new trial.  

The appeal said that it didn’t matter why Williams testified falsely about the time of the GSR test. “Dishonesty is not required,” the appeal said. “What is required is that the testimony itself was false or misleading, a test met here even if Williams failed to prepare for his testimony and instead relied on his faulty memory.” (The state also said Williams did not testify falsely; the collection form he signed contained “scrivener’s errors.”) 

Judge Kitchens’s order did not directly address Shelton’s claim about Ray’s failure to vigorously pursue the use of Young’s letter at trial. His ruling said: “The defendant is responsible for supplying the attorney with sufficient information so her counsel can present a ‘coherent defense.’ It is not trial counsel's job to fabricate a defense.”  

The appeal said that Judge Kitchens’s inference that Shelton wanted Ray to “fabricate” a defense was “untethered to any facts” before the court. “The circuit court’s ruling betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of defense counsel in gathering information, conducting discovery, investigating the case, interviewing witnesses, preparing to introduce evidence, and consulting with and retaining expert assistance on critical forensic issues in the case,” the appeal said. 

On December 9, 2025, the Mississippi Court of Appeals granted Shelton a new trial. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said that Funte had recanted his trial testimony that Young’s death was a homicide, “withdrawing a crucial piece of the evidentiary foundation upon which the State’s case rested.”  

The appellate court also found that Ray had been ineffective in his failure to submit Young’s letter into evidence. Ray had testified at the evidentiary hearing that Judge Kitchens would not allow him to introduce the letter, but the appellate court said there was nothing in the court record that supported that claim. “Considering the potentially exculpatory nature of this letter, we find it difficult to conclude that its absence did not prejudice Shelton’s defense,” the appellate court said. 

The court also said that Shelton had failed to prove her actual innocence. It did not rule on Shelton’s claim that Williams testified falsely.  

Shelton was released from prison on June 29, 2026.  

At a hearing on September 21, 2026, Colom asked Judge Kitchens to dismiss the case. He said in a motion that he had asked the Mississippi Medical Examiner’s Office to review Funte’s autopsy and that the office told him it could not provide any additional services. “In light of this development,” Colom wrote, “the State does not have evidence upon which a reasonable jury could rely to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Young's death was a homicide rather than a suicide.” 

Judge Kitchens dismissed the case on October 7, 2026. 

“At last, this case that should have never been brought is over,” Levick said. “Ms. Shelton was convicted of a murder that never happened at a trial that was not fair by a jury that never heard all the facts.""

https://www.exonerationregistry.org/cases/20504

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.  Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;k

November 10 : Analysis of crime-scene blood and bullets: A Canadian Perspective: Researcher Sara Gordon; It can be be pivotal in court cases. But how reliable is it? CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Producer/Reporter Georgie Smyth interviews Researcher Sara Gordon, an associate professor at Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, who notes that, "Both ballistic and blood spatter analysis, which examine evidence from a crime scene, are grounded in science. But its practitioners regularly make conclusions in court that are far beyond what their own empirical evidence supports...while lawyers and judges don’t challenge those conclusions enough. "They're admitted largely because they've always been admitted and people just sort of assume that they're reliable."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The danger of lawyers not challenging expert witness testimony in court is recognized in case law, says Rebecca McConchie, president of the Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia.  So, too, is the risk of judges and juries not appreciating the "frailties of the evidence when assessing it," she said in a statement to CBC News.  "It is so important for people to keep an open mind when they hear about criminal justice issues or evidence held out as obvious proof of a person’s guilt," McConchie said.  Ultimately, Gordon says, Canada has received far less attention in legal literature and she wants her studies to make the country's courts better at doing their job of determining guilt or innocence.  She says her work is about providing information about the evidence behind the evidence for lawyers and judges to be able to ask more questions — to "lay that out for them in a way that just makes them view the evidence a little bit more skeptically."

---------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Her research, which follows similar audits of forensic evidence in the United States, cites a case in Ontario in 2021, where a firearms examiner conceded under cross-examination that her conclusion — that shell casings from a crime scene matched a handgun found in the accused's apartment — was subjective.  The examiner later added there was “no specific number of agreements required between two items for her to conclude that there was a match" and she formed her opinion because she believed a match was "within the limits of practical certainty."

----------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Gordon's separate research on blood spatter analysis found the detail to which some experts testify is sometimes very specific, such as inferring what an accused's mental state might have been. n She points to a B.C. case from 2009 where the Crown used analysis of blood patterns in a crime scene to reconstruct the actions of the accused, arguing he had guilty intent because of the way blood was "projected" during the attack. "There are no studies testing or establishing an error rate for conclusions about an individual’s mental state based on bloodstain patterns," she writes in her research. "There's just no indication, in the science, that we can make those sorts of conclusions," she told CBC News. "

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STORY: "Analysis of crime-scene blood and bullets can be pivotal in court cases. But how reliable is it?," by CBC Reporter/Producer Georgie Smyth, published on November 8, 2026. "Georgie Smyth is a CBC Network Reporter and Producer in Vancouver. She's worked for BBC World News in London and for Nine News in Australia. She's focused on local, national and international stories that affect all Canadians." Thanks to Win Wahrer of Innocence Canada for bringing this story to our attention."

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SUB-HEADING: "Researcher questions extent of what forensic evidence reveals, says lawyers need to challenge experts in court."

GIST: "Forensic analysis has a reputation for being reliably accurate, an assumption that's been polished by many crime TV dramas where ballistics and blood-spatter teams uncover essential evidence to catch the perpetrator.

But that assumption has found its way into courtrooms, where the accuracy of forensic analysis is rarely questioned, according to new research.

Both ballistic and blood spatter analysis, which examine evidence from a crime scene, are grounded in science. But its practitioners regularly make conclusions in court that are far beyond what their own empirical evidence supports, says researcher Sara Gordon — while lawyers and judges don’t challenge those conclusions enough.

"They're admitted largely because they've always been admitted and people just sort of assume that they're reliable," says Gordon, an associate professor at Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.

How Toronto police gather clues from guns seized off city streets

Qualified and admissible expert testimony on forensic evidence can provide "significant assistance" in understanding specific information in a case, a fact sheet from the Department of Justice says. Canada’s courts have allowed it to be included in cases for decades.

Using Canadian cases, Gordon examined these forensic and investigative techniques that informed evidence regularly admitted in court.

Her analysis of firearms evidence points to "significant methodological flaws" in the research that backs up ballistics as a discipline that may "underestimate error rates." She concludes that experts often don’t give courts the full story and give "a false impression" of the accuracy of their speciality.

Bullet proof?

To connect a bullet or casing found at a crime scene to a caliber of gun, ballistics examiners will compare other bullets or casings shot from test guns and examine them under a microscope to look for similarities.

Eventually a forensic scientist may end up in a courtroom testifying that the evidence found at a crime scene is or isn’t a match, citing research from their field to back up their conclusions.

Gordon says examiners will often testify that the error rate of the ballistics field is somewhere between one and two per cent. But the studies she examined for her research reported an error rate as high as 50 per cent.

She also says there are no set standards for the minimum number of similarities needed to match bullets.

"It's largely a subjective analysis," she said. 

WATCH | 'We've just accepted this evidence is reliable for so many years,' Gordon says:

Researcher Sara Gordon says lawyers have become 'accustomed' to treating ballistics and blood spatter analysis as reliable evidence, and that experts don't give a full account of how accurate the science is when testifying in court.

Her research, which follows similar audits of forensic evidence in the United States, cites a case in Ontario in 2021, where a firearms examiner conceded under cross-examination that her conclusion — that shell casings from a crime scene matched a handgun found in the accused's apartment — was subjective.

The examiner later added there was “no specific number of agreements required between two items for her to conclude that there was a match" and she formed her opinion because she believed a match was "within the limits of practical certainty."

A$AP Rocky's trial starts with clash over ballistics report

The issue came to a head in a Chicago courtroom in 2023, where a judge, moved by a lack of "objective forensic based reasons," banned the use of ballistics matching in a criminal case.

The judge then reviewed a dozen other cases that resulted in a wrongful conviction from flawed ballistics matching, labelling it a "wake-up call to courts operating as rubber stamps in blindly finding general acceptance" of this type of evidence.

Drawing from such decisions, Gordon argues that some ballistic experts shouldn't be testifying in cases where the science doesn't give them the ability to draw conclusions.

One senior forensic scientist who regularly testifies in court says being transparent about a discipline's limitations is key.

Darryl Barr, who examines weapons and tools linked to crimes for Bulletproof Forensic Consulting, maintains there is "a scientific basis for firearms examinations" and plenty of empirical evidence that supports experts' determinations — but he concedes they could do better at making that clearer in court.

Barr says he's reassured by the fact that virtually every country in the world uses forensic analysis as part of its judicial process, and adds that any scrutiny of his discipline is welcomed.

"Science improves through scrutiny and forensic science is not any different, obviously," he said. 

Part of a prosecution or defence counsel's role is to scrutinize each other’s evidence. But digging into the accuracy of the science of forensic evidence doesn’t happen often, says Gordon.

She thinks part of the reason is that society at large has come to think ballistics and blood spatter are as definitive as DNA evidence and can reveal crucial details in an investigation — in part due to crime shows like Law and Order and the many spin-offs of CSI.

For example — despite what a slick, sunglasses-wearing fictional detective might say — the science of blood spatter cannot indicate if a person was acting deliberately or not. 

Gordon's separate research on blood spatter analysis found the detail to which some experts testify is sometimes very specific, such as inferring what an accused's mental state might have been.

She points to a B.C. case from 2009 where the Crown used analysis of blood patterns in a crime scene to reconstruct the actions of the accused, arguing he had guilty intent because of the way blood was "projected" during the attack.

Investigators found presumed blood stains in garage years after alleged murder, court hears

"There are no studies testing or establishing an error rate for conclusions about an individual’s mental state based on bloodstain patterns," she writes in her research.

"There's just no indication, in the science, that we can make those sorts of conclusions," she told CBC News. 

'Frailties of the evidence'

The danger of lawyers not challenging expert witness testimony in court is recognized in case law, says Rebecca McConchie, president of the Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia.

So, too, is the risk of judges and juries not appreciating the "frailties of the evidence when assessing it," she said in a statement to CBC News.

"It is so important for people to keep an open mind when they hear about criminal justice issues or evidence held out as obvious proof of a person’s guilt," McConchie said. 

Ultimately, Gordon says, Canada has received far less attention in legal literature and she wants her studies to make the country's courts better at doing their job of determining guilt or innocence.

She says her work is about providing information about the evidence behind the evidence for lawyers and judges to be able to ask more questions — to "lay that out for them in a way that just makes them view the evidence a little bit more skeptically."

A spokesperson for the RCMP, which provides forensic services across Canada, said it was aware of the research and that it's still committed to using established scientific methodologies, quality assurance processes and professional standards in its work." 

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/forensic-evidence-court-ballistics-blood-spatter-research-9.7401663

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

November 10: Psychiatric Seclusion: A salute to Toronto Star Courts and Justice Reporter Jacques Gallant: The Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care locked Jake Gordon up alone for five years - but transferred him closer to his family home just week after the Star published footage of his life locked in custody at Waypoint. Reporter Gallant tells Jake Gordon's story as part of the Star's '20 years in isolation' series - an ongoing investigation into the use of psychiatric seclusion at Waypoint - noting that, "the Star's reporting has been met with calls for an independent review of Ontario's mental health system."... "The move to Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Whitby came just a month after a Star profile on Gordon’s case, featuring six-and-a-half hours of video surveillance footage provided by (Diane Worden) showing her son pacing alone while in seclusion in his tiny room at Waypoint last year. Worden had requested the video from Waypoint in the hopes of finding out how her son was able to cause a serious injury to his eye, but the incident was not captured in the footage. At the time of his transfer, Gordon had been out of seclusion for just over two months, having been released amid the Star’s ongoing investigation into Waypoint’s use of the practice. “It’s shocking how fast they made this happen,” Worden said."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Seclusion is meant to be the option of last resort, to be used for as brief a time as possible, to deal with a patient who poses an imminent risk of bodily harm to themselves or others. The Star’s investigation has revealed that Waypoint has been keeping seriously mentally ill patients in seclusion for years, and in the case of Camelott Hamblett, 20 years and counting. An independent assessment concluded in August that Waypoint is holding patients in conditions the United Nations has “deemed to constitute torture” in similar settings."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Everything that has happened for her son in such a short period of time is no coincidence, Worden said. She attributed the increased focus on her son's care this year to the Star’s investigation, the multiple experts who have come forward with their concerns, and the work of Gordon’s new lawyer, Anita Szigeti, who specializes in mental health law and represents a number of other men in seclusion at Waypoint. “It’s 100 per cent because of the public scrutiny,” Worden said. “You don’t go from five-and-a-half years in seclusion to all of a sudden you’re out and making cupcakes and two months later you’re being transferred to Ontario Shores.”

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Oversight of Gordon’s time in seclusion called into question............."Unlike most of the other men in long-term seclusion at Waypoint, Gordon was not a forensic patient, meaning he hadn’t committed any crime. Rather, he was a civil patient, involuntarily detained under the Mental Health Act because he’s been found to pose a serious risk of bodily harm to himself and others. Worden is under no illusions: she does believe her son should remain in a hospital. But his case calls into question the independent oversight of the detention of civil patients, and whether there was a missed opportunity to get Gordon out of seclusion sooner. The Consent and Capacity Board (CCB) — whose three-member panels are made up of a medical professional, lawyer and layperson — is required to hold a review of a civil patient’s case after six months, and then every year afterward, to determine whether their involuntary status should be upheld; the patient can also ask for orders such as a transfer to another facility. Everything that has happened for her son in such a short period of time is no coincidence, Worden said. She attributed the increased focus on her son's care this year to the Star’s investigation, the multiple experts who have come forward with their concerns, and the work of Gordon’s new lawyer, Anita Szigeti, who specializes in mental health law and represents a number of other men in seclusion at Waypoint. It’s 100 per cent because of the public scrutiny,” Worden said. “You don’t go from five-and-a-half years in seclusion to all of a sudden you’re out and making cupcakes and two months later you’re being transferred to Ontario Shores.”

STORY:"This Ontario hospital locked Jake Gordon up alone for five years, It reansfered him just after the Star told his story," by Courts and Justice Reporter Jacques Gallant, published by The Toronto Star, on  Nov. 2, 2026.(Jacques Gallant is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering legal affairs and courts, after previously c overing federal politics. He has been part of reporting teams nominated for a National Newspaper Award and the Michener Award for public service journalism.)

SUB-HEADING: Jake Gordon has been transferred closer to his family just weeks after   the Star published footage of his life kept locked up in isolation at Waypoint Centre."

This story is part of 20 Years in Isolation, the Star’s ongoing investigation into the use of psychiatric seclusion at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. The Star’s reporting has been met with calls for an independent review of Ontario’s mental health system.

Diane Worden was happy but in shock when she got a call a few weeks ago from Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care about her son, Jake Gordon.

After more than five years detained in Ontario’s only maximum-security psychiatric hospital in Penetanguishene — almost entirely spent locked in isolation in his room — the 31-year-old man with treatment-resistant schizophrenia was being transferred immediately to a less secure hospital just a 15-minute drive from the family home.

The move to Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Whitby came just a month after a Star profile on Gordon’s case, featuring six-and-a-half hours of video surveillance footage provided by Worden showing her son pacing alone while in seclusion in his tiny room at Waypoint last year. Worden had requested the video from Waypoint in the hopes of finding out how her son was able to cause a serious injury to his eye, but the incident was not captured in the footage.

At the time of his transfer, Gordon had been out of seclusion for just over two months, having been released amid the Star’s ongoing investigation into Waypoint’s use of the practice.

“It’s shocking how fast they made this happen,” Worden said.

Seclusion is meant to be the option of last resort, to be used for as brief a time as possible, to deal with a patient who poses an imminent risk of bodily harm to themselves or others. The Star’s investigation has revealed that Waypoint has been keeping seriously mentally ill patients in seclusion for years, and in the case of Camelott Hamblett, 20 years and counting. An independent assessment concluded in August that Waypoint is holding patients in conditions the United Nations has “deemed to constitute torture” in similar settings.

Medication alone had failed to improve her son’s condition, Worden noted, as he had a poor response to many different drugs. But on the heels of the Star’s coverage this spring, Worden said her son started spending an increasing amount of time out of seclusion and out of restraints; he was being taken to the canteen and into the courtyard; he was seen by a dentist and an optometrist; he was being given access to music more often; and he was showering again.

He then improved to the point that he was released from seclusion in August, and is now well enough that he can be managed in a less secure facility.

She said Gordon — who had trouble walking and talking and would drool when Worden visited him at Waypoint — is doing significantly better. On a recent visit to Ontario Shores, Worden noted that he’s communicative and “very happy” to be there.

“He talked about the hope of getting out one day, getting a job, a nice place to live and seeing his family more often now that he is closer to home,” she said.

Everything that has happened for her son in such a short period of time is no coincidence, Worden said. She attributed the increased focus on her son's care this year to the Star’s investigation, the multiple experts who have come forward with their concerns, and the work of Gordon’s new lawyer, Anita Szigeti, who specializes in mental health law and represents a number of other men in seclusion at Waypoint.

“It’s 100 per cent because of the public scrutiny,” Worden said. “You don’t go from five-and-a-half years in seclusion to all of a sudden you’re out and making cupcakes and two months later you’re being transferred to Ontario Shores.”

For years, Worden made the drive to Waypoint — about five hours round trip — to visit her son as much as she could, when he would be permitted to briefly leave his room. While she did have her concerns about his care and would voice them to the hospital, she said she ultimately trusted that they were doing the right thing for Gordon.

Worden, who also serves as her son’s substitute decision-maker, worries about the damage that five years in isolation will have caused. She also continues to question whether seclusion for such a lengthy period of time was even necessary, pointing to Gordon’s voluminous medical records, which she said do not indicate risk or aggression from Gordon on a daily basis that would warrant him remaining locked up.

“They always told me it was because he was a harm to himself or to others,” she said. “Well, where is the harm?”

It was only when she came across the initial stories from the Star’s investigation in the spring, profiling the cases of Hamblett and other patientswho’ve been kept in locked seclusion at Waypoint, that she became alarmed.

“Obviously that trust was misguided,” she said."

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What to know about the Star's investigationSeclusion means locking a psychiatric patient up alone in a room.
Waypoint policies say it's a last resort, to be used for as brief a time as possible, with a patient who poses an imminent risk.
Waypoint has kept some patients in seclusion for years on end; for Camelott Hamblett, it's been 20 years.
Leading experts have described Waypoint's practices as “abusive” and unlike anything seen in other North American facilities.
Waypoint has refused to say how many patients are in long-term seclusion.
Waypoint says it is following a set of best practices called the Six Core Strategies to reduce seclusion.
The first of the six says the hospital CEO must be directly involved in the day-to-day use of seclusion.
Waypoint CEO Dr. Nadiya Sunderji has told the Star she will not do that, saying it would be inappropriate.
Warnings about “unethical” long-term seclusion at Waypoint and its predecessor, Oak Ridge, go back to at least 1984.
In 2019, a psychiatrist warned the Ford government the hospital's practices are "horrific" — but the Ministry of Health took no further action.
An independent report in the case of Andrew Azevedo found patients are being kept in conditions akin to the UN definition of torture.
In its decision on Azevedo's case, the Ontario Review Board found Waypoint routinely broke internal rules on seclusion. The board's decision amounted to an order: follow your own policies.
Waypoint patients describe being placed in seclusion as punishment, while not being told why they were being kept alone for months at a time.

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Oversight of Gordon’s time in seclusion called into question

Unlike most of the other men in long-term seclusion at Waypoint, Gordon was not a forensic patient, meaning he hadn’t committed any crime. Rather, he was a civil patient, involuntarily detained under the Mental Health Act because he’s been found to pose a serious risk of bodily harm to himself and others.

Worden is under no illusions: she does believe her son should remain in a hospital. But his case calls into question the independent oversight of the detention of civil patients, and whether there was a missed opportunity to get Gordon out of seclusion sooner.

The Consent and Capacity Board (CCB) — whose three-member panels are made up of a medical professional, lawyer and layperson — is required to hold a review of a civil patient’s case after six months, and then every year afterward, to determine whether their involuntary status should be upheld; the patient can also ask for orders such as a transfer to another facility.

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It’s unknown whether the board was ever presented with any evidence about Gordon’s seclusion status and whether any panel members expressed concern. That’s because while the board must provide its decision within a day of the hearing, it isn’t required under Ontario law to produce written reasons for that decision unless one of the parties — Gordon, his psychiatrist and the hospital — asks for them within 30 days of the hearing. No one ever did.

That’s in stark contrast to the Ontario Review Board, the independent body with oversight of forensic patients, which is required to produce written reasons after every hearing.

The chair of the CCB, Philip Squire, said in an email the board’s practices accord with the legislation: “The CCB is unable to comment on the practices of other administrative tribunals or their governing legislation.”


Gordon was represented by five different lawyers at six CCB hearings; it’s unclear how they came on board, though one possibility is they were arranged by legal aid after an order from the board.

When Szigeti was contacted by Gordon’s family and recently retained to be his lawyer, she found it “shocking and really disconcerting” that there were no records she could access to determine if his seclusion had been reviewed by the CCB. Notwithstanding what the law says, Szigeti has long been raising the need for the CCB to adopt a policy requiring the board to always produce written reasons for the mandatory hearings reviewing an individual’s involuntary status.


“There has to be some documentation somewhere as to what is happening with someone who is locked in a facility, and in this case locked in seclusion for more than five years,” Szigeti said.


“What is the purpose of having an oversight body tasked with mandatory hearings when there’s no record of what they did and why?”

Worden never went to her son’s hearings, which are held on Zoom, because she says his Waypoint social workers told her it was just to decide whether his involuntary status should be upheld — something she wasn’t looking to challenge anyway. She had no idea that the board would have had the power to transfer her son out of Waypoint.

She can’t help but think of other families who still don’t know.

“There are all these patients like Jake who are locked in there, and nobody can do anything about it because we don’t know the system,” Worden said. “They lock us out.”

The campus of the Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Whitby.ontarioshores.ca

‘He’s just the old Jake’

Now that Gordon is back at Ontario Shores, his mother will be able to visit him daily. When he was at Waypoint, months would pass by before she could see him because she wasn’t comfortable driving the long distance in winter weather.

And for the first time in over five years, Gordon will be able to see his father, who has multiple sclerosis and is mostly bedridden. Given the proximity of Ontario Shores, Worden plans to find a way to transport her husband there to see their son.

“The hardest part of having him at Waypoint was either his dad would pass away or something bad would happen to Jake, and he would never be able to see his dad again,” Worden said. “Jake is always worried about him. The first thing he always says is: ‘How is Dad?’”

While seclusion is used for various lengths of time in practically all hospitals, including Ontario Shores, none have been known to keep patients locked up for years like Waypoint. At Ontario Shores, Gordon’s room has a big window with a view of Lake Ontario, as well as a bed with a pillow and blankets; at Waypoint, as seen on the surveillance footage, he only had a mat on the floor.


Overall, Worden is still taken aback by just how much progress has been made since her son was released from isolation, and she hopes to see that progress continue.

“He’s lost weight, he’s talkative, he’s smiling,” she said. “He’s just the old Jake that was there before he went to Waypoint.”

Read the 20 Years in Isolation series:

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Part 1: The story of Camelott Hamblett and why he's spent two decades locked in a room alone at this Ontario psychiatric hospital
Part 2: Why Waypoint is being called an ‘abusive’ outlier for keepingpatients in isolation for years at a time
Part 3: Why the Ontario Review Board kept Camelott Hamblett in seclusion for 20 years, without asking the right questions
Part 4: Their son has been ‘caged’ at Waypoint for nearly five years. Why public ‘shock and horror’ may mean new hope
Aug. 26: Waypoint’s use of isolation has been deemed akin to ‘torture’
Aug. 31: A psychiatrist warned Doug Ford’s government about Waypoint’s ‘horrific’ isolation. The province called one hospital exec — then did nothing
Sept. 5: Why video of Jake Gordon's life in isolation left his mom ‘absolutely, completely horrified’
Sept. 14: Waypoint is ordered to address ‘harm’ of keeping man in isolation for years
Sept. 22: Warnings about ‘unethical’ use of seclusion at Waypoint go back more than 40 years
Sept. 24: Waypoint is ordered to follow its own policies, which it routinely broke
Oct. 17: Patients describe months ‘trapped’ in locked isolation at Waypoint

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The entire story can be read at:

https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/this-ontario-hospital-locked-jake-gordon-up-alone-for-five-years-it-transferred-him-just-after-the-star-told-his-story/article_5a2d2ed2-dbe3-4856-b03d-58191a52fec1.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;