Friday, September 28, 2018

Notice to Charles Smith Bloggians: I must take a brief break from blogging (my first in several years) pending completion of a writing assignment. Please keep forwarding your ideas, suggestion, tips on cases and whatever else. They come from different parts of the world, are enormously helpful and, are much appreciated. I will catch up as soon as I can. See you soon! Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.


REMINDER: WRONGFUL CONVICTION DAY  - NOW COMMEMORATED BY INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS IN MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD  - IS AROUND THE CORNER: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2d, 2018.

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Notice to Charles Smith Bloggians, whoever and wherever you maybe:  I must take a brief break from blogging  pending completion of a writing assignment. (My first break  in several years);  Please keep forwarding your ideas, suggestion,  tips on cases and whatever else. They   are enormously helpful and much appreciated.  I will catch up as soon as I can. See you soon!

Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

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PS: It's about ten years since I started publishing the Charles Smith Blog, for the reasons set out in the Blog profile.  Initially I had no idea how much attention the Blog - a rather narrow Blog  which would involve the rather narrow topic of forensic pediatric pathology  - would attract.  (As you will see below, the subject matter (a focus on Dr. Charles Smith and his victims)  has evolved significantly since that very first post). When I checked recently I discovered that to date more than  1, 853,000 internet cruisers had landed on the site. (Moving towards two million!)  I was fascinated to discover the wide range of countries around the globe from which I had drawn viewers;  Here's the top ten countries as of yesterday:

United States
778281
Germany
190559
Russia
183716
Canada
134882
Ukraine
81672
France
49874
United Kingdom     
48255
Slovenia
24433
Australia
19846
China
18223

Slovenia?  That truly was a surprise!

Why do I continue to publish this Blog - when I could use my spare time to play my guitar? (I have played classical guitar most of my life and am now studying Flamenco guitar. I love it!) There are several reasons.  First: The Charles Smith story is not yet fully told. There are several cases in Ontario heading for the Ontario Court of Appeal which hopefully will lead to exonerations that I am following. And Charles Smith is still out there, somewhere. Who knows when and where  he will pop up next? Second: As I have learned over the years there are other 'Charles Smith's' out there in different parts of the world destroying peoples lives and desecrating science, who need to be brought to public attention and exposed.  (Former Chief Pathologist Colin Manock in South Australia  who featured in the Henry Keogh case  and so many other cases, comes to mind. ) Third: I enjoy writing every post.  (There have been thousands). Fourth,  writing the posts keeps me up to date and helps keep my mind nimble. Fifth:  the Blog has put me in touch with people around the world who share my common interest. Sixth:  Most importantly, since I am long retired from the Toronto Star, the Blog gives me a way of exposing the flaws in forensic pathology and forensic pathologists that have resulted in a disturbing amount of wrongful prosecutions and convictions for decades. (The Blog also gives me a juicy opportunity to explore other crucial areas  such as   false confessions,  erroneous  identifications, questionable DNA testing methods,  crime lab  corruption (think Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak), junk science, the role of the courts in countering junk science, intrusion of criminal law on the reproductive rights of women -  and technology, the increasing risk posed by logarithms in the public surveillance, police investigation and court processes.) Seventh: My last reason relates to the Rodricus Crawford case in Louisiana, in which I was able to use my knowledge obtained in reporting on the Charles Smith cases for years to help secure the release of this innocent young man from death row in Louisiana.  Something tells me that thing tells me that there may well be another innocent man like Rodricus out there who will need my help  - and that by keeping the Blog alive I may be able to use my knowledge and experience - and this humble Blog -  to help combat ignorance and  to continue playing a  role in the eternal, borderless  battle against injustice.

Lastly, I could not publish this Blog - it is truly a one-man show - without the cooperation of sources  in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K and elsewhere who provide me with tips about cases and developments which may be of interest to our readers. I am greatly indebted to them.

Best wishes;

Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.

PS: It's is wonderful how much topnotch sites are out there on the Web relating to the subject matter of this Blog, much of which land in my posts.  (I am grateful to them and always strive to give due credit.) To name just a few, there's: Networked Knowledge: (Dr. Bob  Moles);  The Watch; (Radley Balko);   CSI DDS: Forensics and Law in Focus (Dr. Mike Bowers);  On SBS; (Sue Luttner);  Gamso for the defence; (Jeff Gamso); Grits for Breakfast: (Scott Henson);   The Wrongful Conviction Blog;  (Mark Godsey); Blind Injustice Facebook page; (Mark Godsey); In the news; (Dr. Karen Franklin);  Little rascals daycare case: (Lew Powell);  Pursue Democracy: (Andrew L. Urban); The Wrongful Convictions Report; (Andrew L. Urban);  The  Marshall Project, The Crime Report,   Forensic Science in North Carolina; The Registry of Exonerations; The Innocence Project;  The Innocence Canada web site;  Pro Publica;  The Intercept;  NPR;  The Dallas Morning News; The Houston Chronicle  The Guardian; The Telegraph;  The New York Times; Long Live Wikipedia! (And many more!)

See you soon! HL.


























Thursday, September 27, 2018

Michael Holick: New Yorker calls him "The Child-Abuse Contrarian," in a fascinating, absolutely must-read utterly important corroboration by The New Yorker and ProPublica by writer David Armstrong headed, "The Child Abuse Contrarian" and sub-headed: "Michael Holick, a renowned scientist turned expert witness, relies on his own controversial theory to help alleged abusers avoid prison and regain custody of the babies they were accused of harming."..."In the past seven years, Holick said, he has consulted or testified as an expert witness in more than three hundred child-abuse cases throughout the U.S., as well as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and Canada. In almost every case, he has made the same finding: instead of blaming any injuries on abuse, he has diagnosed the child with a rare genetic disorder, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a condition that affects the connective tissues of the skin, bones, and joints. A handful of studies on adults have linked EDS to bone fragility, and Holick argues that children with the disorder have weaker bones, which can fracture from normal handling. So far, his theory is not supported by the scientific literature, but Holick is convinced that “thousands, if not tens of thousands,” of parents worldwide have been falsely accused of fracturing their children’s bones. “It’s just terrible,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for these parents.” In all the cases he has worked on, Holick has never concluded that a child was being abused."


FIRST PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Many geneticists and bone specialists find it troubling that he diagnoses EDS in nearly a hundred per cent of the cases he examines. According to the National Institutes of Health, EDS affects, at the most, 0.02 per cent of people worldwide. The rate at which Holick diagnoses the disorder “doesn’t fall into the mathematical probability of chance,” Brad Tinkle, a clinical geneticist at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital, in Indianapolis, said. Holick retorts that his clients don’t come to him by chance; parents contact him after doing their own research and realizing that they or their children have symptoms of EDS. He adds that he hasn’t seen a single actual abuser pretending to have EDS and contacting him in search of a “get out of jail free” card. Holick regularly diagnoses children with EDS without seeing them in person. “I already know on the phone they have EDS,” he said, adding that he questions the parents about potential symptoms. “I almost don’t have to ask. I know the answer.”

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SECOND PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "State circuit-court judge Susan Carbon initially considered it an unusual injury for a short fall onto a padded surface. “The question is whether the injury was intentional and whether there was more behind the explanation of the fall,” she wrote. Holick examined the parents and the boy and concluded that they all had EDS. It “could easily explain” the fracture, Holick wrote. He then took the stand and awed the judge. She called his hundred-and-twenty-seven-page résumé “nothing short of stunning.” The analysis by the state’s medical experts “pales in comparison to Dr. Holick’s detailed explanation,” she wrote. “In Dr. Holick’s opinion, an infant with these conditions can easily sustain a fracture with ‘normal handling.’ [The child’s] skeletal structure, in Dr. Holick's view, is extremely fragile. Dr. Holick has seen numerous instances where lesser-trained persons interpreted injuries such as that sustained by [the child] as abuse when, ‘with a very high degree of medical certainty,’ they resulted from EDS, not intentional abuse.” She dismissed the charges against the father."

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STORY:  "The Child Abuse Contrarian" by David Armstrong published by The New Yorker on September 26, 2018. (David Armstrong is a senior reporter at ProPublica and an adjunct professor of journalism at Boston University...This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica);

SUB-HEADING: "Michael Holick, a renowned scientist turned expert witness, relies on his own controversial theory to help alleged abusers avoid prison and regain custody of the babies they were accused of harming."

GIST: "In September, 2016, Jenn Thompson and her boyfriend, Robbie Ray, discovered that she was pregnant. They had met just over a month earlier, through the dating app Tinder, and quickly became inseparable. Robbie would stay at Jenn’s place several nights a week, and on the weekends they tailgated at football games. The pregnancy was unplanned, but both had recently turned thirty and were ready to start a family. When they went in for an ultrasound appointment, a technician pointed out two tiny circles on the screen: twins. They bought a baby Doppler and Robbie would hold the monitor on Jenn’s stomach so they could listen to the two hearts beating in tandem. They got married five months later, at the Lutheran church Jenn attended. Robbie moved into her house, in Columbia, South Carolina, across the street from her parents in a tightly packed development of modest, newish homes tucked behind a shopping complex. They converted the second bedroom into a nursery. Jenn found the crib she slept in as an infant and gave it a fresh coat of paint. The babies arrived more than a week early, by C-section—a boy first, and then a girl. Over Memorial Day weekend, when the twins were three weeks old, half a dozen excited family members came to Jenn and Robbie’s home and took turns cradling the twins. The girl seemed particularly fussy. At times, she cried so hard that she seemed unable to catch her breath. Robbie later called it a “scary cry.” But the couple figured she was just colicky. Then, the following Tuesday, as Jenn was feeding her, she noticed swelling and bruising on the baby’s right leg. She told me that she called Robbie, who was at work, driving a truck for a uniform-supply company, to tell him that something was wrong. Jenn’s mother came over and told her to take the baby to the pediatrician. The same doctor had examined the twins just a week earlier and found them to be in good health. This time, he told Jenn to take the infant to the emergency room at nearby Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital immediately. An X-ray revealed that the baby’s leg was broken in two places, both near the ankle. The new parents said that nothing remarkable, no accidents, had occurred during the previous few days. Robbie wondered aloud if he had unintentionally hurt her while putting lotion on her legs or changing a diaper. Called in by the E.R. staff, Dr. Susan Lamb, a pediatrician specializing in child abuse, noted a pattern of bruising “consistent with an adult hand gripping the calf” and a fracture caused by “extreme” force, according to a South Carolina Department of Social Services report. The hospital staff then examined the other twin. X-rays revealed a fracture in his left leg. A doctor found bruising on his back. The next day, as Jenn and Robbie sat with the twins at the hospital, social workers and security staff converged on the room. A sheriff’s deputy handed the couple an emergency order to take the twins into state custody. Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later. To find an explanation, the Rays said, they searched the Internet and eventually discovered a group called Fractured Families. The Web site was filled with stories of parents who were accused of abuse—falsely, it said—after their children were found to have bone injuries. Jenn told me that she was struck by how similar their experiences were to her own. Jenn made contact with several of the mothers in Fractured Families. They told her that there was a doctor in Boston who might be able to help her. Michael Holick has a tenth-floor office at Boston University, where he is a professor at the medical school. His windows offer a view of the tree-canopied medical-school campus below. A makeshift system of plastic bags and buckets is rigged to collect the rain water that often leaks in. Gray tape binds the air duct, and the tiled floor is stained. Two lab coats hang in the corner and a stethoscope rests on a desk next to photographs of Holick’s wife and two adult children. Holick has worked in this space since he first arrived on campus, thirty years ago. In the past seven years, Holick said, he has consulted or testified as an expert witness in more than three hundred child-abuse cases throughout the U.S., as well as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and Canada. In almost every case, he has made the same finding: instead of blaming any injuries on abuse, he has diagnosed the child with a rare genetic disorder, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a condition that affects the connective tissues of the skin, bones, and joints. A handful of studies on adults have linked EDS to bone fragility, and Holick argues that children with the disorder have weaker bones, which can fracture from normal handling. So far, his theory is not supported by the scientific literature, but Holick is convinced that “thousands, if not tens of thousands,” of parents worldwide have been falsely accused of fracturing their children’s bones. “It’s just terrible,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for these parents.” In all the cases he has worked on, Holick has never concluded that a child was being abused. On the rare occasions when he didn’t diagnose EDS, he attributed the bone fractures to rickets or Vitamin D deficiency. Many geneticists and bone specialists find it troubling that he diagnoses EDS in nearly a hundred per cent of the cases he examines. According to the National Institutes of Health, EDS affects, at the most, 0.02 per cent of people worldwide. The rate at which Holick diagnoses the disorder “doesn’t fall into the mathematical probability of chance,” Brad Tinkle, a clinical geneticist at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital, in Indianapolis, said. Holick retorts that his clients don’t come to him by chance; parents contact him after doing their own research and realizing that they or their children have symptoms of EDS. He adds that he hasn’t seen a single actual abuser pretending to have EDS and contacting him in search of a “get out of jail free” card. Holick regularly diagnoses children with EDS without seeing them in person. “I already know on the phone they have EDS,” he said, adding that he questions the parents about potential symptoms. “I almost don’t have to ask. I know the answer.” In 2008, a father named Kenneth Grad was indicted for felony assault and endangering children after X-rays of his infant son, taken at Akron Children’s Hospital, revealed twenty-six fractures of the fingers, arms, legs, ribs, and skull, according to court documents. Holick examined the baby's mother, Laura Grad, and diagnosed classic signs of hypermobility. Without examining the baby, Holick submitted an affidavit attributing the fractures to EDS. However, a test by the family’s pediatrician found that the baby did not have hypermobility. Grad was convicted in December, 2014, and a month later was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. “The mom has EDS and so too likely the child,” Holick wrote in an e-mail, adding that, if the injuries weren’t due to bone fragility, “the amount of trauma to cause that number of fractures … would likely have resulted in the infant’s death.” In 2017, Holick co-published an article about his EDS work in the little-known journal Dermato-Endocrinology, where he is an associate editor. In the study, Holick examined the cases of seventy-two children who the authorities believed had been abused. He diagnosed sixty-seven of them with EDS. In a third of the cases, he based his diagnosis on physical exams of relatives of the children, not the children themselves.
“How can you do that without an exam?” Brendan Lee, the chair of the Molecular and Human Genetics department at Baylor College of Medicine and the director of the Skeletal Dysplasia Clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital, said. He added that hypermobile EDS “is a diagnosis that is made based on a constellation of clinical findings, which you have to do by examination and history.”
Lee and several other experts said that hypermobile EDS typically cannot be diagnosed in children younger than five. Because infants are usually very flexible, they will likely score high on elements of the test given to older patients to determine hyper-flexibility, a key aspect of EDS. Also, symptoms of the condition do not usually manifest until later in childhood, or even adulthood. “I would not be comfortable, ever, telling a parent that an infant has [hypermobile] EDS,” Lee said. There are four studies that Holick consistently cites to support his conclusions. I asked Rodney Grahame, the author of two of those studies and a former president of the British Society for Rheumatology, whether he finds Holick’s theory of a link between EDS and bone fractures in infants to be reasonable. “Not at all,” Grahame responded in an e-mail. “It may ‘stand to reason’, but it is not supported by published scientific research. In adults, other factors are at play including ageing and the menopause, alcohol, smoking which are factors associated with osteoporosis that are not present in infants.” Cristina Eller Vainicher, the lead author of another paper that Holick frequently cites, said that she can’t entirely discount his thesis, because some studies have suggested that a subset of EDS patients experience fragility fractures during childhood. Still, she wrote in an e-mail, “This does not mean that we could state all children with hypermobile EDS are at high risk of fractures.”Dr. Michael Holick explains his theory about hypermobile EDS: Holick’s credibility as an expert witness is buttressed by a formidable scientific résumé, mostly related to his work on Vitamin D. As a graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin, he discovered the active form of Vitamin D, which led to treatments for bone disease in kidney patients and for psoriasis. He later discovered that orange juice helps the body absorb Vitamin D, a finding that led to F.D.A. approval for Vitamin D-fortified orange juice. NASA tapped him to examine bone loss in space. When a mated pair of Komodo dragons at the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., failed to produce a live hatchling, Holick determined that their glass enclosure was inhibiting Vitamin D production. The dragons soon procreated. Holick, who is now seventy-two, gives talks around the world on the importance of Vitamin D. He was billed as a “legend” at the most recent annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. He has published more than five hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and more than two hundred reviews and book chapters. Since 2011, other scientists have cited him almost a hundred and ten thousand times, making him one of the most frequently cited researchers in the world. He attributes his prolific output to his ability to function with minimal sleep. He has diagnosed himself with a sleep disorder that he said he shares with several notable figures throughout history, including Michelangelo. One day, when I visited him at his office, Holick said he had been there since two-thirty in the morning. But Holick’s career has also been dogged by controversy. He came under fire for recommending the use of tanning beds based on research he’d done partly with funding from a foundation established by the Indoor Tanning Association, a relationship that I reported on in the Wall Street Journal. He also published a book called “The UV Advantage,” in which he urged people to soak up unfiltered sun two or three times a week. “Do not be afraid,” Holick wrote. “You are not going to die just because you go out in the sun.” Soon after Holick’s book came out, Barbara Gilchrest, then the head of the dermatology department at Boston University, called Holick to her office to discuss it. The pair had previously collaborated on research, but now Gilchrest gave Holick two options: he could curb his sunshine proselytization or he could resign as a professor of dermatology, one of several positions he held at the medical school. Holick resigned. Gilchrest later publicly denounced his book as “shlock science.” “He just went off the deep end and was a poster boy for the tanning industry,” she told me. Holick “ate up” the controversy, she said. “He loves being the provocative bad-boy character.”
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Holick knew from an early age that he wanted to be a scientist and a physician. His father, a machinist, and his mother, who worked part-time at a bakery, raised Holick and his four younger siblings. When Holick was five, the family moved to suburban Linden, New Jersey. He had an early fascination with dinosaurs, and “Jurassic Park” posters hang on his office wall. When he was in the third grade, his father bought him a chemistry set, putting him on a path to an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Seton Hall University. Almost seven years ago, a couple from New Hampshire called Holick. They were seeking an expert in bone disease to figure out why their son at seven months old had suffered fractured bones in both arms from no apparent traumatic cause. Doctors believed that the fractures were caused by abuse, and social services had removed the boy from the home. Holick invited the parents to his clinic. When he shook the mother’s hand, Holick recalled, he knew immediately what was going on. There are thirteen types of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The most common, and generally considered the least severe, is hypermobile EDS. The most remarkable feature of hypermobile EDS is joints that extend far beyond the normal range. Some people with the condition have made a living as side-show contortionists, using stage names like Elastic Skin Man and the Human Pretzel. That extreme flexibility can also be an advantage in sports like gymnastics and swimming, though the syndrome also makes it easy for joints to dislocate and for skin to bruise. What Holick noted when he shook the mother’s hand was that her skin was doughy and her joints were flexible—both classic signs of Ehlers-Danlos. He evaluated the baby and found that he also had flexible joints and doughy skin. Far from being abused, Holick concluded, the injured boy had EDS, and this condition predisposed him to weak bones that could fracture from normal handling. “It seems so intuitively obvious,” he told me. “No one ever connected the dots. No one in the pediatric or child-abuse community ever made an effort to find other potential mitigating circumstances to explain these fractures, other than a rush to judgment.” He testified in court on the family’s behalf, and the baby was returned to his parents. Word of Holick’s success began to spread. He now receives pleas for help from parents accused of abuse on almost a daily basis. Holick said he doesn’t charge for his services, though he does solicit donations for his Ehlers-Danlos research. About a quarter of the funding for his EDS research in the past four years—about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—has come from two families who had abuse charges dropped after Holick intervened in their cases, he said. Holick is one of the most prominent and sought-after expert witnesses for the defense in child-abuse cases. He told me that about half the parents he assists end up with a positive outcome, such as getting their children back or having abuse charges dismissed. However, he has sometimes claimed a much higher success rate. “Before I started testifying in these court cases on behalf of the family 100% of these cases had been won by the prosecution,” he wrote as part of an unsuccessful plea to the editor of a medical journal to publish his study on EDS and child abuse. “Now that I am testifying on behalf of the family 90% of the cases have been won by the parents and their children have been returned to them without further incident.” Jenn Ray talked to Holick on July 11, 2017, about six weeks after the state removed the twins from their home. In September, Jenn and Robbie, along with the twins and Jenn’s aunt, who had custody of the children, travelled to Boston to be evaluated at Holick’s clinic. (Jenn and Robbie were allowed to be with the twins as long as the aunt was present.) Holick noted that Robbie’s skin had a doughy feel and his joints were extremely flexible—he could touch the floor with the palms of his hands without bending his knees. Jenn had a history of bruising easily and feeling lightheaded when she stood up quickly. These were all symptoms of hypermobile EDS. Holick diagnosed them both with the condition.
If one parent has hypermobile EDS, the chances of a child inheriting it are fifty per cent. If both have it, the odds increase to seventy-five per cent. Holick determined, with “a high degree of medical certainty,” as he wrote in a report, that the twins had the condition, too, and that their fractures could have been caused by bone fragility associated with EDS. “It was a relief,” Robbie told me. Jenn finished his thought. “You are so lost and you’re alone,” she said. While state social-services officials believed that the injuries were the result of abuse, they could not identify a perpetrator among the people who came in contact with the twins that Memorial Day weekend. Officials did file a neglect charge against the Rays, accusing them of failing to seek prompt medical care for their daughter. The charge, if substantiated by a judge, could have prevented the Rays from regaining custody. A guardian ad litem, assigned by the court to represent the interests of the twins, recommended that the family be reunited. The guardian wrote that she had “witnessed the smile” the children gave when Jenn and Robbie entered the room. The twins’ pediatrician, the guardian reported, did “not see any red flags that would suggest Jennifer or Robbie had anything to do with this.” Finally, the guardian cited Holick’s finding that the children had symptoms of EDS. Last December, the Rays accepted a deal with the state that approved the return of the children if the couple successfully completed counselling. Even before the counselling was finished, the state allowed the twins to come home for unsupervised weekend visits, starting at Christmas, as the first step toward a permanent reunion. A 2008 article in the journal Pediatrics looked at some of the nearly forty-three thousand fractures in children under three in the years 1997, 2000, and 2003. Of those cases, the authors found that about one in eight was diagnosed as resulting from child abuse. That proportion doubled, to one in four, for babies who were less than a year old. Doctors say one reason for the difference is that children under a year aren’t walking yet, so they don’t fall on their own or run into things. Researchers first linked certain types of fractures to child abuse in the nineteen-fifties. Since then, the methods for distinguishing accidental injuries from those caused by abuse have become more sophisticated, but there is no test or evaluation that can definitively determine whether a fracture is the result of child abuse. Fracture cases are often contentious. Many of the children involved are too young to describe what happened to them, and there are usually no witnesses. There are also conditions known to mimic child-abuse injuries. Osteogenesis imperfecta, for instance, often called brittle-bone disease, is widely accepted to cause fractures in babies and infants from normal handling. Unlike with hypermobile EDS, there is a genetic test for brittle-bone disease, and many children’s hospitals routinely check for it in potential abuse cases. It is extremely rare. The easiest cases to diagnose as child abuse are the most brutal—those with devastating, widespread injuries. The truth is harder to discern when seemingly caring parents bring a child to the doctor for a different ailment and, upon being confronted with evidence of fractures, are at a loss to explain them. A sizeable chunk of Holick’s cases fall into this category. The parents who reach out to Holick have usually contacted other doctors for help, with no success. Often, they have been scorned by child-welfare officials and prosecutors who believe that abuse caused their children’s injuries. They come to Holick looking for a miracle, and when he answers their prayers they react with unabashed gratitude. “I truly believe you could be an angel put on this earth to show the justice and glory of the almighty,” a father from New Hampshire wrote to Holick, in 2016. “The good you’re doing on this earth is amazing, incredible, inspiring, loving, noble, and even incomprehensible.” The father had been charged with abuse after his four-month-old son suffered a broken arm. He said he had simply turned the boy over in the crib, and the baby wiggled and fell a short distance onto the crib mattress. The father heard a crack and the baby stopped moving his left arm. State circuit-court judge Susan Carbon initially considered it an unusual injury for a short fall onto a padded surface. “The question is whether the injury was intentional and whether there was more behind the explanation of the fall,” she wrote. Holick examined the parents and the boy and concluded that they all had EDS. It “could easily explain” the fracture, Holick wrote. He then took the stand and awed the judge. She called his hundred-and-twenty-seven-page résumé “nothing short of stunning.” The analysis by the state’s medical experts “pales in comparison to Dr. Holick’s detailed explanation,” she wrote. “In Dr. Holick’s opinion, an infant with these conditions can easily sustain a fracture with ‘normal handling.’ [The child’s] skeletal structure, in Dr. Holick's view, is extremely fragile. Dr. Holick has seen numerous instances where lesser-trained persons interpreted injuries such as that sustained by [the child] as abuse when, ‘with a very high degree of medical certainty,’ they resulted from EDS, not intentional abuse.” She dismissed the charges against the father. Holick’s legal victories have attracted widespread favorable publicity; ABC’s “20/20” and numerous local news outlets have trumpeted Holick’s expertise. One of his cases was featured on an episode of “Diagnose Me,” on the Discovery Life cable network. In a reënactment scene, an actor playing Holick tells a tearful mother that he has figured out why her child suffered broken bones. “You have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,” Holick’s character says. “It’s a very rare disease, and in kids it’s often mistaken for child abuse. I have testified about this before, and I would be happy to do it again for you.” Like the Rays, many families find Holick through Fractured Families, a nonprofit organization founded by a group of five mothers whose children once had injuries that led to suspicions of abuse. Holick had worked with four of the five, and his intervention was critical in exonerating two of them. Holick said he is careful to note in his expert reports that he doesn’t know the families he evaluates and is only offering a medical perspective. Still, his tone is hardly neutral. In three recent reports, he referred to the mothers as “delightful.” In an e-mail discussing his testimony in a case in Alabama, Holick told a defense lawyer that he was “hopeful that this lovely family will be reunited as soon as possible.”  Holick does not hide his disdain for the child-protection system, nor his belief that the parents he works with are innocent. In the four months I corresponded with Holick, he frequently forwarded me e-mails from parents accused of abuse. He wrote atop one such message, “Does this sound like a mother who is abusing and neglecting her child?” In June, a mother from the United Kingdom whose son had twenty-two rib fractures contacted Holick. The only detail of medical history she offered was that she found out after her pregnancy that she had been Vitamin D deficient. “It is certainly possible that the fractures were due to infantile rickets and vitamin D deficiency,” Holick responded. “It’s also possible that he may have had a genetic disorder that predisposes him to having fractures. It’s known as Ehlers Danlos syndrome.” The mutual enmity between Holick and abuse experts at children’s hospitals is hard to overstate. Lori Frasier, the head of the Division of Child Abuse Pediatrics at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, started encountering Holick in court several years ago. Frasier told me that she was struck by Holick’s arrogance. “Maybe he is feeling like he is really, really smart and seeing something the rest of us can’t see,” she said. He might view himself as “a Copernicus of this century, or Galileo, fighting the status quo.” Holick describes specialists like Frasier as zealots who, because of their training, see abuse behind nearly every mysterious injury that comes through the hospital door. “I naïvely assumed people want to be educated,” Holick said. “They don’t. They are child-abuse experts. They have to know.” Unlike Holick, Frasier serves as an expert witness for both prosecutors and defendants, and recently testified in Nevada for a father accused of child abuse. (The father was acquitted in the case.) She also said that she and her team diagnose abuse in only about forty per cent of the cases they consult on. “We see everything,” she said. “We see mistakes in both directions.” In May, 2016, Holick appeared on a Philadelphia television station, saying that a baby’s injuries were likely the result of EDS and a Vitamin D deficiency, not child abuse. Two days later, Frasier sent a concerned e-mail to Karen Antman, the dean of Boston University Medical School. “Dr. Holick makes statements regarding the infant’s medical condition that have no evidence base,” she wrote, noting that other experts had ruled out EDS in the case, and that even if the boy did have the condition there was no evidence it would make his bones fragile. “He is bringing the reputation of Boston University into disrepute.” Antman replied with a defense of Holick and said she didn’t need to know the particulars of his expert work. “As a private citizen and a physician, Dr. Holick is entitled to provide consultative services and testify as an expert witness,” she wrote. “As a member of the Boston University School of Medicine faculty, academic freedom allows Dr. Holick to espouse his views without censorship from the University.” Antman declined an interview request for this article but indicated through a spokesperson that she stands by the views she expressed in her e-mail.
The Philadelphia case soon took a turn, when the mother had another baby. At seven weeks, the infant was diagnosed with a fractured right leg. Holick was interviewed again and said there was “a very high degree of medical certainty” that EDS could explain the injury. “I wouldn’t hesitate to have the children returned to the parents,” Holick said. Seven months after Frasier complained to Holick’s dean, a pediatric geneticist at the Children’s Hospital at Albany Medical Center also raised concerns about him with B.U. Natasha Shur wrote in an e-mail to Holick’s department head, Alan Farwell, that Holick’s expert findings lacked scientific support. “I hope that you are interested in considering these issues, and the effect of BU and its involvement,” she wrote. Farwell replied that he was aware of Holick’s work and encouraged Shur to invite Holick to an upcoming conference to discuss the issues she had raised. Farwell declined to be interviewed. Shur, who now works at Children’s National hospital, in Washington, D.C., is frequently called on by legal authorities to determine whether a metabolic bone disorder or other condition might explain injuries that look like they were caused by abuse. “In the majority of fracture cases, I don’t make a medical diagnosis of child abuse,” she said. “Something else has happened.” Nevertheless, she finds Holick’s assertions alarming. When she takes the medical histories of patients with EDS, she told me, they don’t mention frequent fractures or brittle bones. “My patients are the first ones to state, ‘I never fractured as a baby,’ ” she said. “They have had to deal with joint dislocations, joint pain, but as a whole have not had to deal with unexplained fractures.” B.U., like most universities, guards the academic freedom of its professors by giving them wide latitude to express controversial views, particularly outside the classroom. B.U. administrators would have to show that Holick’s courtroom utterances lack scientific merit or violate accepted professional standards in order to discipline him, John Wilson, the author of the 2008 book “Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies,” said. But Holick’s critics argue that his statements fall outside the bounds of academic freedom because they have profound repercussions for families and children. “Academic freedom is not just about saying what you want,” John Leventhal, the medical director of the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital Child Abuse Program, said. In an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association last year, Leventhal and his co-authors said that academic medical centers should take some responsibility for the testimony of physicians who promote “flawed theories” in child-abuse cases. “If medical faculty at these institutions testified under oath that smoking did not cause cancer or that HIV did not cause AIDS, would such testimony be tolerated?” he wrote. While the medical school has largely supported Holick, under the banner of academic freedom, the affiliated Boston Medical Center—where he is the director of the Bone Health Clinic—has taken a dimmer view of his outside work. The hospital has the busiest trauma center in New England, and its child-protection team reviews about eight hundred cases per year. In 2014, Robert Sege, a pediatrician on the child-protection team, asked to meet with Holick. Sege wanted to know the basis of Holick’s assessment that Ehlers-Danlos or Vitamin D deficiency could explain fractures in infants. Other than agreeing that Holick provided a detailed explanation of his thinking, the men have different recollections of the meeting. At the end of their conversation, Holick said, Sege “looks me in the eye and said, ‘Holick, it is my recommendation you cease and desist immediately. We are going to make your life miserable.’ ” Sege said that this confrontation never happened, and that he left the meeting thinking that Holick was “very convincing.” Sege’s contemporaneous notes, which he shared with me, indicate that the conversation was “very cordial and collegial.” It wasn’t until later, after reviewing relevant literature in the field, that Sege determined that he could not validate the link between EDS and infant bone fractures. “I believe this is his firmly held belief,” Sege, who is now a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, said of Holick. “It is not backed by evidence.” Still, Sege said, one comment of Holick’s unnerved him: Holick told him that he doesn’t recommend that parents in potential abuse cases test for osteogenesis imperfecta, the disease known to cause injuries that look as though they might be the result of abuse. Holick acknowledges advising against testing for the disorder. “It’s incredibly rare,” he said, and the test “will come back negative,” adding to the impression that “you are a child abuser.” “That is a real red flag,” Sege said. “I am a doctor. I test for all things out there before I go to the thing that is my invention. I test for everything I can. It is alarming to tell someone not to get a test because it might impact your court case.” In May, 2017, Boston Medical Center banned Holick from using “its facilities to treat or evaluate patients under the age of thirteen for any reason,” the hospital said in a statement for this article. It said that its “medical leadership” made the decision, but didn’t explain why. Holick said that complaints about his child-abuse work prompted the edict.
The hospital did let Holick consult on one pediatric case that didn’t involve alleged abuse, he and the hospital said. However, he infuriated higher-ups when, at a mother’s request, he also examined twin two-year-olds who had allegedly been abused. According to Holick, the medical school’s chairman of medicine, David Coleman, told him, “We would be thrilled if you retired and would leave.” He was warned that he would be fired if it happened again. Boston University declined to comment regarding Coleman and said that personnel matters are confidential. Holick eventually won approval for a research project to study the genetic basis of Ehlers-Danlos, helping him to get around the ban. As part of that research, Holick now evaluates young children in suspected abuse cases in a building shared by Boston University and Boston Medical Center, just across the street from his office. As concern about Holick’s work has mounted, he has faced increasing scrutiny in court. Lawyers with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families recently spent several days attacking his credibility and trying to persuade a judge in a child-abuse case not to allow him to testify. Holick said that they brought in other experts to challenge his credentials. They subpoenaed his boss, Alan Farwell, to testify. Finally taking the stand himself, Holick endured a withering cross-examination, he said. At times, Holick appears surprised and wounded by the criticisms aimed at him. He called some of the e-mails written to his superiors “a little disappointing” and “vitriolic.” He said that those who find fault with his views should publish commentary in medical journals, or do studies of their own. Academics, he said, should want to learn from one another. Holick compares the attacks on his work to the Salem witch trials. Then, as now, Holick said, “clueless” doctors who were unable to make a proper medical diagnosis blamed scapegoats. “With no experience or knowledge about metabolic bone disease the present day witch hunters will dam [sic] any parent who innocently brings in their child for evaluation,” he wrote to the editor of a medical journal. Holick said that he has noticed cars lurking at the end of his driveway. He’s tried to approach some of the drivers, but they sped away. “You know, maybe I’m a little paranoid these days,” he said. This past January, Holick received a phone call so unsettling that he doesn’t even remember who was on the other end. The caller said that the child of a family Holick helped in an abuse case was in the hospital with a serious brain injury, and the father had been arrested. “Look what you’ve done,” the caller said, according to Holick.
The child was one of Jenn and Robbie Ray’s twins. Officials in South Carolina had agreed to a plan to gradually reunite the family. They’d had three weekends of unsupervised visits. Now the local newspaper featured a mug shot of Robbie Ray in orange prison garb. Holick said that he called Jenn Ray to find out what happened, and that he’s confident the latest injuries weren’t caused by abuse, either, but were another complication of EDS. Holick told me that the girl, whom he described as about two years old, was in a swing and hit her head. Her father was with her, he said, “and I think that he brought her into the hospital and they gave a clean bill of health. And the next day the daughter had some significant neurological deficits and was bleeding in the head. And so, as a result, he was arrested for felony child abuse. But I believe that what likely happened is just like he was stating: that he was innocently swinging his child in the swing and bumped the head. Unfortunately, the pediatrician and/or emergency doctor didn’t actually connect dots and didn’t realize that, if that infant or child has EDS, and if they’re having trauma, they should be more concerned about a brain bleed and not to have sent that child home.” The explanation is, in many ways, typical of how Holick views these cases. He is quick to declare that a trivial accident has resulted in injuries that can be explained by his diagnosis, that the child has received incompetent medical care from less knowledgeable doctors, and that the authorities have rushed to judgment. Holick’s description of the incident, however, is largely inaccurate. The girl was eight months old, not two years. Robbie wasn’t “innocently swinging his child in the swing.” By his account, he had strapped the baby into a motorized Fisher-Price swing, with the seat about a foot off the floor, while he sat on the couch and fed the other child. He didn’t drive the baby to the hospital; he called 911, and an ambulance took her. In a recording of that call, Robbie seems to be sobbing as he tries to awaken his unconscious daughter. “What’s wrong with her?” he asks the 911 operator. “What happened?” There was no delay in treatment or missed diagnosis of a brain injury. When the infant arrived at the hospital, the trauma team met her and inserted a tube into her trachea to help her breathe. A CT scan showed that a hematoma on the right side of the brain was shifting the brain to the left. Nor could Holick’s comment that she “bumped her head” explain the damage to the rest of her body. Her right leg was broken near the thigh. A photograph from the hospital shows the infant lying on her back, with one eye swollen shut and bruises on her right eye and nose. There appears to be dried blood on her left hand. Robbie’s explanation for his daughter’s injuries is that he forgot to snap in the right side of the strap, and she squirmed out, fell forward, and hit her head on the metal base of the swing. Robbie says he didn’t see what happened, but heard a thud. When he looked over, the baby was face-down on the carpeted floor. He told state social workers, according to their report, that the baby wasn’t crying or moving and, when he picked her up, her head was “just dangling back as he held her.” (Jenn told authorities that she was running an errand at Walmart when her daughter was injured, and showed them a receipt from the trip. As during the prior incident, hospital staff members found her demeanor troubling. She was noted to have a “flat” affect and to be “nonchalant and standoffish.”) One of the emergency-room doctors who treated the child was skeptical about Robbie’s story. She wrote in her notes that the “mechanism of injury”—a short fall from an indoor swing—“does not fit clinical presentation on arrival.” In a repeat of the first time the girl was brought to the hospital, six months earlier, Susan Lamb, the child-abuse specialist, was called in to evaluate. She didn’t believe Robbie, either. The fall he described couldn’t have caused the girl’s injuries, she concluded. “At this time with no plausible accident history, [the child] clearly has suffered abusive head trauma and physical abuse,” Lamb wrote. Three days later, Robbie was at home and heard a knock on the door. He peered out a window and saw several police officers in tactical gear. Robbie was shackled at his wrists and ankles and led away. He was charged with abuse to inflict great bodily injury upon a child, a felony that carries a sentence of as long as twenty years in prison. He pleaded innocent and was released on bail. Before Robbie faces a criminal trial, the child-abuse allegations will be weighed in family court. If the judge finds that there has been abuse, the D.S.S. has said that it will move to revoke the Rays’ parental rights, which would likely lead to putting the children up for adoption. Police and the D.S.S. haven’t said what they think happened. When D.S.S. investigators came to the house, they wanted to know about the family’s trip to see Holick, according to a recording Jenn made of the interview. They asked for dates, receipts, and the names of everyone who travelled to Boston. I met with Robbie and Jenn at their home on a steamy day in May. The only sign that something was amiss was the Fractured Families window decal on the back of the Ford Explorer parked in the driveway. Toys were neatly stacked in the living room. The twins’ bedroom remained just as it was in January, when their daughter was hurt. Photographs of the children adorned the refrigerator. Medical and court records were spread across the kitchen table, near where the mechanical swing was set up before police seized it. Jenn and Robbie talked to me without a lawyer present, taking occasional cigarette breaks on the back patio. The only other people in the home were Jenn’s parents, who stopped by toward the end of the interview, and who are draining their retirement funds to pay for the legal fight to return the twins to Jenn and Robbie. The twins, Jenn told me, are in foster care about ninety miles away.
Joking that she has earned a “Google medical degree,” Jenn offers detailed alternative explanations for her daughter’s injuries and for the twins’ prior fractures. She insists that mistakes by doctors aggravated her daughter’s condition. The only time she became emotional was when talking about the stress that the abuse charges have put on her marriage. Robbie and Jenn believe that Lamb, the abuse specialist, took an immediate dislike to them after the Memorial Day incident and saw the swing injury as an opportunity to separate them from their children permanently. Jenn called the doctor a “liar” who is “evil,” “wicked,” and a “narcissist.” A spokesperson for South Carolina’s Department of Social Services declined to comment. Lamb said that medical-privacy laws prohibited her from discussing the case. A spokesperson for Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital said that child-abuse experts there, including Lamb, are consulted roughly fifty times a year on suspicious injuries. Since 2007, they have found that abuse is medically indicated in about half of the cases they’ve seen. The couple contends that their daughter suffers from a metabolic bone disorder—though not necessarily EDS—that worsened the damage from the fall. Jenn thinks the baby may have brittle-bone disease. An orthopedist who evaluated the child concluded otherwise, but Jenn wants a genetic test performed. Both the orthopedist and a new guardian ad litem representing the interests of the infant attribute the injuries to abuse, according to the guardian’s report. Robbie said that he will fight the charges. “If anything, I saved her life” by calling 911, he said. “I would not hurt my daughter. And that’s why I keep trying to tell people, I know I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do anything wrong.” Those weren’t the only criminal charges that Robbie emphatically denied. I asked him about a 2015 misdemeanor conviction for public intoxication that had turned up when the police did a background check. A truck carrying Robbie and a friend, both drunk, had been found on its side in a ditch at 2 A.M., according to police. Robbie was adamant that he knew nothing about it and insisted that it must be a case of stolen identity. But an intoxicated Robbie is clearly identifiable in a video taken by a police-cruiser camera. “I got really drunk,” Robbie told one officer. “I can’t handle my alcohol.” The video shows him being handcuffed. When I confronted Robbie about the video, he first reiterated that the incident was “news to me.” He eventually acknowledged that he was at the scene and offered a series of new explanations—for example, that a third person had brought him there after the accident—that are contradicted by the recordings. Nothing has surfaced to indicate alcohol was a factor in either of the alleged abuse incidents. Holick will be watching the Ray case from Boston. Mistakes happen in medicine, but he realizes that one high-profile misstep on his part could greatly damage his credibility. “I’m very, very concerned this could upend this whole activity, if even one of the cases of the hundreds turns out to be a child-abuse case,” he said. But he acknowledged the possibility that the case might not turn out as he would like. “You know, these types of things are going to happen,” he said. In another conversation, he reflected on the impact of his crusade to reunite families divided by child-abuse allegations. “To date,” he said, “almost all of the kids I helped return to parents are happy and well.”"

The entire story can be read at:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-child-abuse-contrarian?mbid=nl_Daily%20092618&CNDID=23031411&utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20092618&utm_content=&spMailingID=14320711&spUserID=MTMzMTc5ODYwNjU0S0&spJobID=1482126801&spReportId=MTQ4MjEyNjgwMQS2

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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; 

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Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Dangers of DNA Testing: Outstanding New York Times 'opinion' piece by Dr. Greg Hampikian. (If I used 'must reads' on this Blog this would certainly be one of them! Kudos to the New York Times for publishing it. (HL)..."In a new study, 74 out of 108 crime laboratories implicated an innocent person in a hypothetical bank robbery."..."The good news is that there are methods to reanalyze old DNA mixture data using computer programs that can help analysts correct errors, without any new lab testing. In fact, one lesson from the study is that while only seven of the 108 labs in the study properly excluded the innocent profile, one of them used such a program (TrueAllele by Cybergenetics). Many crime labs now have access to these programs and use them on current cases. But they could and should easily go back and re-examine old DNA mixtures to correct tragic mistakes. In fact, we have shown that this is possible."


PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The test results are troubling, especially since errors also occur in actual casework. Just ask Dwayne Jackson of Las Vegas. When he was 18, he was told that his DNA matched DNA from a home invasion and kidnapping of a woman and her two daughters. He was advised that a jury would most likely believe the DNA, not him. Facing a life sentence at trial, he pleaded guilty to reduced charges in 2003. Mr. Jackson spent nearly four years in a Nevada prison, until the crime lab realized it had accidentally switched his sample with another suspect’s tube. The lab apologized, and he was released from prison.  Tube swaps are easy to understand. But some laboratory errors are far more difficult to detect. For example, it’s hard to interpret DNA mixtures from three or more people. As DNA testing has become more sensitive, most laboratories are now able to produce profiles from anyone who may have lightly touched an object. The result is that DNA mixtures have become more common, making up about 15 percent of all evidence samples. To assess how labs are doing with these mixtures, the institute’s researchers have conducted several national studies over the past two decades. Basically, they gave crime labs DNA from several people, as well as DNA from fake crime scenes. They asked the labs if any suspects matched the evidence. If the labs found a match, they were required to report a match statistic. This statistic indicates the odds that the match is a coincidental or innocent match. One shocking result from the new N.I.S.T. study is that labs analyzing the same evidence calculated vastly different statistics."

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COMMENTARY: "The Dangers of DNA Testing," by Dr. Greg Hampikian, published by The New York Times on September 21, 2018. (Dr. Hampikian is a professor of biology at Boise State University.)

SUB-HEADING: "In a new study, 74 out of 108 crime laboratories implicated an innocent person in a hypothetical bank robbery."

PHOTO CAPTION: "Linda Krueger, executive director of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Criminalistics Bureau, at a news conference in 2011 where police officials apologized for a DNA error that wrongly sent Dwayne Jackson to prison for four years."

GIST: Before you give the police a DNA sample, read an alarming new study of crime laboratories published this summer, the largest study of its kind. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology gave the same DNA mixture to about 105 American crime laboratories and three Canadian labs and asked them to compare it with DNA from three suspects from a mock bank robbery. The first two suspects’ DNA was part of the mixture, and most labs correctly matched their DNA to the evidence. However, 74 labs wrongly said the sample included DNA evidence from the third suspect, an “innocent person” who should have been cleared of the hypothetical felony. The test results are troubling, especially since errors also occur in actual casework. Just ask Dwayne Jackson of Las Vegas. When he was 18, he was told that his DNA matched DNA from a home invasion and kidnapping of a woman and her two daughters. He was advised that a jury would most likely believe the DNA, not him. Facing a life sentence at trial, he pleaded guilty to reduced charges in 2003. Mr. Jackson spent nearly four years in a Nevada prison, until the crime lab realized it had accidentally switched his sample with another suspect’s tube. The lab apologized, and he was released from prison.  Tube swaps are easy to understand. But some laboratory errors are far more difficult to detect. For example, it’s hard to interpret DNA mixtures from three or more people. As DNA testing has become more sensitive, most laboratories are now able to produce profiles from anyone who may have lightly touched an object. The result is that DNA mixtures have become more common, making up about 15 percent of all evidence samples. To assess how labs are doing with these mixtures, the institute’s researchers have conducted several national studies over the past two decades. Basically, they gave crime labs DNA from several people, as well as DNA from fake crime scenes. They asked the labs if any suspects matched the evidence. If the labs found a match, they were required to report a match statistic. This statistic indicates the odds that the match is a coincidental or innocent match. One shocking result from the new N.I.S.T. study is that labs analyzing the same evidence calculated vastly different statistics. Among the 108 crime labs in the study, the match statistics varied over 100 trillion-fold. That’s like the difference between soda change and the United States’ gross domestic product. These statistics are important because they are used by juries to consider whether a DNA match is just coincidence. I first learned about the results of this study in 2014, at a talk by one of its authors. It was clear that crime labs were making mistakes, and I expected the results to be published quickly. Peer-reviewed publication is important, because most judges won’t let you cite someone’s PowerPoint slide in your testimony. But years went by before the study was published, preventing lawyers from using the findings in court, and academics from citing the results in journal articles. If some of us had not complained publicly, it may not ever have been published. While this lapse in publication is troubling, more disturbing is that the authors try to mute the impact of their own excellent work. Neither the paper’s title nor the abstract mention the shocking findings. And the paper contains an amazing number of disclaimers. In fact, the conclusion begins with a stark disclaimer apparently intended to block courtroom use:
The results described in this article provide only a brief snapshot of DNA mixture interpretation as practiced by participating laboratories in 2005 and 2013. Any overall performance assessment is limited to participating laboratories addressing specific questions with provided data based on their knowledge at the time. Given the adversarial nature of the legal system, and the possibility that some might attempt to misuse this article in legal arguments, we wish to emphasize that variation observed in DNA mixture interpretation cannot support any broad claims about “poor performance” across all laboratories involving all DNA mixtures examined in the past.
People serving time behind bars based on shoddy DNA methods may disagree. It is uncomfortable to read the study’s authors praising labs for their careful work when they get things right, but offering sophomoric excuses for them when they get things wrong. Scientists in crime labs need clear feedback to change entrenched, error-prone methods, and they should be strongly encouraged to re-examine old cases where such methods were used. The good news is that there are methods to reanalyze old DNA mixture data using computer programs that can help analysts correct errors, without any new lab testing. In fact, one lesson from the study is that while only seven of the 108 labs in the study properly excluded the innocent profile, one of them used such a program (TrueAllele by Cybergenetics). Many crime labs now have access to these programs and use them on current cases. But they could and should easily go back and re-examine old DNA mixtures to correct tragic mistakes. In fact, we have shown that this is possible. Working with Cybergenetics analysts and Innocence Network organizations in four states, our Boise State University laboratory has re-examined a few select cases and already persuaded courts to overturn a conviction in New Mexico, two in Indiana and two in Montana. We have also helped identify a new suspect in a 23-year-old murder. While we have to go to court to get access to case data (a very time-consuming process), the crime labs don’t. They could easily review their own cases. With tens of thousands of DNA mixtures analyzed each year, there are many innocent people who hope the crime labs and courts take the national institute’s study seriously, and act quickly."

The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/the-dangers-of-dna-testing.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;
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Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Deep-fake video's: Fascinating story from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (by Senior Correspondent Ron Synovitz) explores how Amnesty International is toiling to tell real videos from fakes. (This really makes me wonder how long it will be before deep-fake videos unknowingly pass judicial scrutiny in our courtrooms. Or is it already happening? HL)..."Dubberley concludes that the best way the DVC can protect itself from being duped by increasingly realistic fake videos is to continue combining "traditional research" with new digital verification tools. He says Amnesty researchers must be careful not to "get lured into the trap of leading on the video work." "We're very solid in that now," he says. "But it's always a temptation to use a video that you find showing something horrific. The last thing we want to happen is to use a video as evidence and then find out that it's not real."


A deepfake video can put a person's face on somebody else's body, make them say words they never uttered, show them in a place they've never been, or even put them at an event that never occurred. That's why Amnesty created its Digital Verification Corps (DVC), a network of about 100 students at six universities around the world who are the vanguard for identifying authentic and fraudulent social-media posts. The diverse team of volunteers is being trained as the next generation of human rights researchers, fluent in new tools and methods to spot fake videos and confirm whether online images are really from the time and place that is claimed. Krivosheyev says the flood of videos and photos now being shared online has been "absolutely a game changer" for human rights investigations. "Just looking at how our work has changed over the last decade, there is a major difference in the level of confidence with which we can speak about things as 'fact,' as opposed to 'allegations,' because we are able to see photographic and video evidence of human rights violations," Krivosheyev tells RFE/RL. "We're talking about a range of things -- from violations of the right to peaceful assembly, to torture, to people being unlawfully deprived of their liberty," Krivosheyev says."

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GIST: "When Amnesty International launched a probe this year into police crackdowns against Russian protesters, one of its research methods was to collect and verify videos posted on social media from across Russia since 2012. Denis Krivosheyev, deputy director of Amnesty's Eastern Europe and Central Asia department, says images posted on social media can greatly strengthen human rights investigations if the authenticity of photos and videos can be reliably verified. But images distributed over the Internet are easily misrepresented for propaganda purposes or manipulated by pranksters. Increasingly sophisticated artificial-intelligence video tools, like FakeApp, are also raising concerns by helping the technically astute create realistic computer-generated videos known as "deepfakes." A deepfake video can put a person's face on somebody else's body, make them say words they never uttered, show them in a place they've never been, or even put them at an event that never occurred. That's why Amnesty created its Digital Verification Corps (DVC), a network of about 100 students at six universities around the world who are the vanguard for identifying authentic and fraudulent social-media posts. The diverse team of volunteers is being trained as the next generation of human rights researchers, fluent in new tools and methods to spot fake videos and confirm whether online images are really from the time and place that is claimed. Krivosheyev says the flood of videos and photos now being shared online has been "absolutely a game changer" for human rights investigations. "Just looking at how our work has changed over the last decade, there is a major difference in the level of confidence with which we can speak about things as 'fact,' as opposed to 'allegations,' because we are able to see photographic and video evidence of human rights violations," Krivosheyev tells RFE/RL. "We're talking about a range of things -- from violations of the right to peaceful assembly, to torture, to people being unlawfully deprived of their liberty," Krivosheyev says. In fact, Amnesty has monitored crackdowns on protesters by Russian authorities for years using what Krivosheyev calls "traditional research methods." That has meant gathering media reports about alleged rights abuses and then visiting the locations to interview witnesses and alleged victims. "Previously, Amnesty was relying a lot on words like 'reportedly' and 'allegedly'," Krivosheyev says. "We're doing a lot less of this now, and one reason is video and photographs on the Internet that verify what a source claims." Krivosheyev says the work of the DVC has become essential. "In the Russian context, verifying the information we have is important because, increasingly with time, we see how facts are treated as myth and how fake news is presented as fact," he says. "We need to triangulate any information that comes to us," Krivosheyev explains. "We must be able to speak confidently about things that happened as facts rather than merely quoting reports, some of which are not entirely accurate." Since the DVC was launched in September 2016, it has played a key support role in Amnesty International's research on conflicts and crises. DVC researchers have contributed to Amnesty's reports on ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Burma, the mass forced displacement of populations under Syrian government policies, and the use of chemical weapons in Syria and Sudan. Sam Dubberley, the head of the DVC, notes that human rights researchers a decade ago had to rely on satellite images to collect scraps of information from such inaccessible conflict zones. He says the DVC has changed that because it can verify the authenticity of open-source videos and photographs from anywhere in the world. By comparing images of a mosque in a video from Syria against satellite images, DVC volunteers at the University of California-Berkeley are able to confirm the town where a video was recorded. Shadows and weather conditions, for example, can help ascertain when a video was made. The state of buildings pictured in a conflict zone also offer clues. The DVC uses reverse imagery searches to determine whether a photo was posted online before the date that an Internet post claims it was taken.
"One of the most important things to do when you've found a piece of content is to check if it has appeared online before and when it has appeared online," Dubberley says. "If you're investigating an air strike somewhere in Syria that you've been told took place in 2017, and you find the same picture or video online in 2016, you can very quickly make the deduction that it's not linked to the air strike in 2017," he says. "So that's the first thing we do. We always conduct a reverse image search on a photograph." In the absence of such reverse-imagery-search tools for videos, Amnesty International in 2014 developed its own DataViewer tool to check on YouTube videos. It works by extracting four stills from a video and performing a reverse imagery search on those thumbnail images.
DVC volunteers also collate multiple videos from an event to better understand what has happened. In this way, Amnesty researchers were able to disprove claims by Egyptian authorities that a viral video from Cairo in August 2013 showed protesters pushing a police car off of a bridge: By verifying the authenticity of a second video of the incident shot from a different angle, Amnesty researchers showed that the police car collided with another vehicle and then rolled backward off the bridge. Amnesty has also teamed up with Truly.Media -- a collaborative web-based platform developed by Germany's Deutsche Welle broadcaster and a Greek software company. Truly.Media aims to counter disinformation campaigns by using digital verification techniques -- such as the InVid plugin -- that help determine the authenticity of social-media posts. It has been tailor-made for journalists and human rights investigators to spot out fake videos before they get used in research or in reporting.
"We feel that these are becoming key additional parts of the research methodology that Amnesty needs to use on a day-to-day basis to monitor potential human rights violations around the world," Dubberley tells RFE/RL. "We are very keen to see these skills extended into the human rights community -- starting with students at the grassroots level who want to work in the future for human rights organizations," Dubberley says. "We see this as being really critical for the future of the human rights movement. In addition to the University of California-Berkeley, other partners in Amnesty's DVC program are the University of Essex and Cambridge University in Britain, the University of Toronto in Canada, the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and the University of Hong Kong.
"In the first year, we hoped the network would contribute to five different research projects," Dubberley says. "But we actually contributed to 25 or 30 different projects. So the DVC has proven very rapidly to be a valuable addition to the traditional research here at Amnesty." Krivosheyev says making video just one pillar of evidence has been Amnesty’s approach with its ongoing investigation into police crackdowns against Russian protesters since 2012. "There is a general pattern, and what we see in the video evidence confirms it," he says, adding that a full report on the issue will be published by early 2019. "There is a lot of evidence where we can talk of the authorities violating the right to peaceful assembly in a wide range of contexts" across Russia, he adds. "The Russian authorities are generally not tolerant of open protests," Krivosheyev says. "When it takes the form of street rallies then quite often the response is dispersal." Dubberley concludes that the best way the DVC can protect itself from being duped by increasingly realistic fake videos is to continue combining "traditional research" with new digital verification tools. He says Amnesty researchers must be careful not to "get lured into the trap of leading on the video work." "We're very solid in that now," he says. "But it's always a temptation to use a video that you find showing something horrific. The last thing we want to happen is to use a video as evidence and then find out that it's not real.""
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.rferl.org/a/human-rights-team-toils-to-tell-real-videos-from-fakes/29498517.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;
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Monday, September 24, 2018

Flawed DNA evidence: Washington DC lawyer/commentator Marina Medvin presents an unlikely false accuser in Forbes Magazine under the heading "Framed By Your Own Cells: How DNA Evidence Imprisons the Innocent..."Modern technologies can now detect and analyze DNA from samples comprised of only 16 cells. But due to the touch-transfer properties of DNA, determining how those cells reached the surface on which they were found is impossible. Tiny amounts of touch-transferred DNA have placed people at locations they had never visited and implicated people for crimes they did not commit."

Framed By Your Own Cells: How DNA Evidence Imprisons The Innocent
Framed By Your Own Cells: How DNA Evidence Imprisons The InnocentFIRST PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Imagine a man waiting at a restaurant for a business associate. His business associate opens the restaurant door, then walks over to the man and shakes the man's hand with the same hand the associate used to open the restaurant door. The man has now received a DNA transfer of his associate's DNA, and any DNA that the associate's hand picked up on the restaurant door handle. If we were to swab the man's hand for DNA, we might find the man's DNA, his associate's DNA, and the DNA of a few other unknown people who touched the door handle of the restaurant and whose DNA stuck around, people who the man never touched. The DNA of these other people transferred to the man's hand through the touch-transfer properties of DNA.  Similarly, a person identified by a match of DNA discovered at a crime scene may have never come into contact with the object or the person on which his DNA was found. Yet, modern day high-tech CSI investigations do not account for the possibility that the evidence discovered at a crime scene was deposited via touch-transfer."

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SECOND PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In 2014, Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was charged with various sexual assault crimes stemming from accusations of women he encountered while on patrol. While the case initially appeared brittle, from ever-changing victim accounts to evidence contradicting the stories altogether, a speck of DNA from one of the accusers was found on the officer's uniform pants. Unlike a visible sample of identifiable DNA (think Monica Lewinski's blue dress stain), the DNA found on Holtzclaw's pants was instead invisible, touch-transfer DNA. In fact, his patrol car's door handle produced four times as much DNA as the speck on his pants. The evidence also confirms that Officer Holtzclaw searched the accuser's purse for evidence on behalf of the police department, before he was swabbed for DNA, rummaging through her personal belongings, his hands plausibly coming into contact with a plethora of her DNA. He also used the restroom, touching his pants in the process. Consistent with touch-transfer DNA properties, an unaccounted-for and unknown male's DNA had also been found on Holtzclaw's pants together with the female's DNA. Nevertheless, the prosecutor told the jury that the speck of female DNA evidence was conclusive proof of sexual contact between Holtzclaw and the victim, and then, unsupported by his own evidence, claimed that the particular DNA came from the victim's vagina—a scientifically impossible conclusion. The jury found Holtzclaw guilty and sentenced him to 263 years in prison. His appeal is presently pending. Daniel Holtzclaw currently sits behind bars and maintains his innocence.  These are just three examples of a yet unknown total amount of criminal prosecutions based on the government's reliance on touch-transfer DNA evidence at trial. At least one of the affected defendants, Daniel Holtzclaw, is still imprisoned. Many others may be charged in the future. On at least one known occasion, the lack of touch-transfer DNA has been used by a government to "clear" suspects."

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THIRD PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The presentation of touch-transfer DNA as bulletproof to a jury is thus even more worrisome. During a criminal trial, lawyers for the government and for the accused are expected to present competing possibilities of how a crime could have occurred, and who may have been responsible for the crime. A jury is not confined to mathematical computation of criminal culpability. Instead, a jury is free to choose among reasonable constructions of the evidence. Overcome with anxiety and fear of making the wrong choice, jurors tend to rely on the existence of, or the lack of, forensic or DNA evidence presented to them at trial. Thus, when prosecutors present to a jury touch-transfer DNA evidence with the same oomph as large-sample DNA evidence, the jurors, under the influence of pre-set expectations for scientific evidence to prove culpability and the common notion that DNA evidence is inherently trustworthy, feel compelled to convict. The result is touch-transfer DNA can readily lead to conviction of the innocent. In 2007, Amanda Knox was charged with the murder of her roommate based a minuscule amount of touch-transfer DNA."

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GIST: Modern technologies can now detect and analyze DNA from samples comprised of only 16 cells. But due to the touch-transfer properties of DNA, determining how those cells reached the surface on which they were found is impossible. Tiny amounts of touch-transferred DNA have placed people at locations they had never visited and implicated people for crimes they did not commit. 
Forensic technologies detecting and analyzing DNA evidence have been at the forefront of criminal investigations. Scientists have told us that the perpetrator of a crime will leave traces of his DNA at the crime scene, and if found in even in small amounts, the evidence can be used to identify the perpetrator. Finding a suspect's DNA at a crime scene, on a victim, or on a piece of evidence, is consistently used by law enforcement to place a suspect at the scene of the crime, with the victim, or in contact with the relevant piece of evidence. Prosecutors have been representing DNA evidence as superior to all other types of identification evidence. However, research conducted at the University of Indianapolis shows that the detection of DNA does not actually indicate presence or contact. In fact, it may not narrow the scope of the investigation at all. This is because humans shed DNA continuously, and shed DNA transfers freely between people and objects. DNA can be transferred through a handshake or touching an inanimate object, like a doorknob. Every time you shake someone's hand you might receive some of your acquaintance's DNA, and that of other people whose DNA had come into contact with your acquaintance's hand. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as "secondary transfer DNA," while journalists have been using the term "touch DNA." I will use a more global term, "touch-transfer DNA," to describe DNA transferring easily through contact or touch.  Imagine a man waiting at a restaurant for a business associate. His business associate opens the restaurant door, then walks over to the man and shakes the man's hand with the same hand the associate used to open the restaurant door. The man has now received a DNA transfer of his associate's DNA, and any DNA that the associate's hand picked up on the restaurant door handle. If we were to swab the man's hand for DNA, we might find the man's DNA, his associate's DNA, and the DNA of a few other unknown people who touched the door handle of the restaurant and whose DNA stuck around, people who the man never touched. The DNA of these other people transferred to the man's hand through the touch-transfer properties of DNA.  Similarly, a person identified by a match of DNA discovered at a crime scene may have never come into contact with the object or the person on which his DNA was found. Yet, modern day high-tech CSI investigations do not account for the possibility that the evidence discovered at a crime scene was deposited via touch-transfer. When DNA detection capabilities emerged in the 1980s, forensic technologies had much lower sensitivity and required large, visible samples for DNA analysis. Over the past decade, forensic technologies used by law enforcement have become so highly sensitive that the quantum of DNA required for analysis has become very low. Samples of DNA may now be invisible and so low in size and quality that older forensic equipment would not be able to detect any DNA; samples entirely invisible to the human eye. Only a sample of about 16 cells is required for modern equipment to analyze the DNA within. Compare this to the tens of thousands of skin cells that we shed each day. 
The concept of obtaining identifying information from tiny bits of touch-transfer DNA was first discovered by an Australian scientist and published in 1997 under the title "DNA fingerprints from fingerprints." The scientist discovered that tiny bits of DNA would transfer through touch, together with fingerprint markings, allowing for the collection and analysis of DNA from fingerprints left behind by culprits. Practical utility in the criminal justice world required the emergence of more sensitive technologies to detect the infinitesimal bits of evidence. Such equipment began appearing in forensic laboratories over the last 15 years. But law enforcement did not limit their search for touch-transfer DNA to just fingerprints; instead, they expanded the search for touch-transfer DNA to all objects and surfaces, irrespective of the ability to find other identifying evidence connected to that DNA, such as a fingerprint. This led to the prosecution of individuals based on DNA from low-template and low-quality samples not connected to other identifying data. Moreover, prosecutors failed to distinguish the unique nature of touch-transfer DNA and the likelihood of random and innocent touch-transfer origins, presenting it to juries as the equivalent of a smoking gun. Albeit, the Australian scientist who presented the concept of touch-transfer DNA, also noted that some people's DNA curiously appeared on things that they had never touched. Four Indianapolis scientists recently questioned the reliability of the modern day high-sensitivity forensic lab technologies used by law enforcement to identify suspects via DNA. They explained that even though current technologies utilized by forensic laboratories are now reading DNA profiles from low-template and low-quality samples, they have "not been systematically investigated." The scientists published their findings in 2016, in the Journal of Forensic Science, under the heading: Could Secondary DNA Transfer Falsely Place Someone at the Scene of a Crime? Their answer was an unequivocal yes. Touch-transfer DNA "could falsely link someone to a crime" and forensic scientists relying on modern high-sensitivity equipment could "falsely conclude that DNA left on an object is a result of direct contact." Their findings revealed that it is impossible for scientists to determine whether the tiny bits of DNA came into contact with evidence from a direct source or via secondary source. And, that no matter how much they tried to sanitize their experiment, unknown third-party DNA was nonetheless able to make its way into the results, highlighting the plausibility of cross-contamination with touch-transfer DNA. The FBI standards for DNA laboratories were last updated in 2011, and, to this day, no changes have been made to reflect the 2016 Indianapolis findings. There are currently no widespread standards in place that are specifically aimed at preventing cross-contamination with touch-transfer DNA in the laboratories where various evidentiary objects are examined. This means that when objects that are placed on shared surfaces in the laboratory, to be examined or photographed, for example, they are subjected to cross-contamination by touch-transfer DNA. The same goes for the initial discovery and investigation of the evidence when the evidence is first handled by police officers. The presentation of touch-transfer DNA as bulletproof to a jury is thus even more worrisome. During a criminal trial, lawyers for the government and for the accused are expected to present competing possibilities of how a crime could have occurred, and who may have been responsible for the crime. A jury is not confined to mathematical computation of criminal culpability. Instead, a jury is free to choose among reasonable constructions of the evidence. Overcome with anxiety and fear of making the wrong choice, jurors tend to rely on the existence of, or the lack of, forensic or DNA evidence presented to them at trial. Thus, when prosecutors present to a jury touch-transfer DNA evidence with the same oomph as large-sample DNA evidence, the jurors, under the influence of pre-set expectations for scientific evidence to prove culpability and the common notion that DNA evidence is inherently trustworthy, feel compelled to convict. The result is touch-transfer DNA can readily lead to conviction of the innocent. In 2007, Amanda Knox was charged with the murder of her roommate based a minuscule amount of touch-transfer DNA. Knox's DNA, and the DNA of the victim, were found on a kitchen knife that was located in the home of Knox's friend, who was charged as a co-conspirator in the murder. Since the victim was never in the co-conspirator's residence, the prosecution insisted that the only way for the victim's DNA could have found its way into that home and onto that knife, would have to be through direct contact—the murder. In 2009, an Italian jury convicted Knox, even though the knife in question did not match the entry wounds on the victim's body. It was not until 2015 that Ms. Knox was exonerated based on a more precise understanding of how DNA transferred through contact and on concerns with touch-transfer DNA cross-contamination. In 2012, Lukis Anderson was arrested and charged with the murder of a millionaire in California. Traces of his DNA were found on the victim's fingernails. Law enforcement crafted a theory of the case based on this evidence and Anderson's lengthy criminal record, dangling the death penalty over Anderson's head. Anderson was unable to effectively assist in his own defense. "Maybe I did do it," he told his public defender, not remembering what happened on the night in question due to significant intoxication. After spending five months in jail, Anderson was released when it was uncovered that he was at the hospital when the crime occurred, recovering from intoxication. But how did his DNA get onto the victim's fingernails? Anderson was the victim of touch-transfer DNA misinformation. The two paramedics who had treated Anderson for intoxication, hours before the millionaire was murdered, later responded to the scene of the murder with Anderson's DNA already on them. Contact between the paramedics and the millionaire resulted in the exchange of DNA on their hands, which just happened to include Anderson's DNA from contact that took place hours prior. In 2014, Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was charged with various sexual assault crimes stemming from accusations of women he encountered while on patrol. While the case initially appeared brittle, from ever-changing victim accounts to evidence contradicting the stories altogether, a speck of DNA from one of the accusers was found on the officer's uniform pants. Unlike a visible sample of identifiable DNA (think Monica Lewinski's blue dress stain), the DNA found on Holtzclaw's pants was instead invisible, touch-transfer DNA. In fact, his patrol car's door handle produced four times as much DNA as the speck on his pants. The evidence also confirms that Officer Holtzclaw searched the accuser's purse for evidence on behalf of the police department, before he was swabbed for DNA, rummaging through her personal belongings, his hands plausibly coming into contact with a plethora of her DNA. He also used the restroom, touching his pants in the process. Consistent with touch-transfer DNA properties, an unaccounted-for and unknown male's DNA had also been found on Holtzclaw's pants together with the female's DNA. Nevertheless, the prosecutor told the jury that the speck of female DNA evidence was conclusive proof of sexual contact between Holtzclaw and the victim, and then, unsupported by his own evidence, claimed that the particular DNA came from the victim's vagina—a scientifically impossible conclusion. The jury found Holtzclaw guilty and sentenced him to 263 years in prison. His appeal is presently pending. Daniel Holtzclaw currently sits behind bars and maintains his innocence.  These are just three examples of a yet unknown total amount of criminal prosecutions based on the government's reliance on touch-transfer DNA evidence at trial. At least one of the affected defendants, Daniel Holtzclaw, is still imprisoned. Many others may be charged in the future. On at least one known occasion, the lack of touch-transfer DNA has been used by a government to "clear" suspects. In 2008, the Boulder County District Attorney cleared members of the JonBenet Ramsey family as suspects in the high-profile murder case when investigators did not find any touch-transfer DNA from members of the slain girl's family on her clothes. The Ramsey case remains the exception rather than the rule.  As of now, anytime we touch a public surface, we remain fair game for criminal suspicion based on touch-transfer DNA. 
Moving forward, law enforcement must reduce reliance on DNA evidence while investigating a criminal case. It is not a dependable means of understanding the connection between the DNA and the crime. For criminal trials, it should become standard practice for judges to sustain defense motions for the exclusion of DNA evidence on the grounds that DNA evidence is confusing and misleading, highly prejudicial, speculative and inherently unreliable. Otherwise, our courts risk DNA convicting the innocent."

The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marinamedvin/2018/09/20/framed-by-your-own-cells-how-dna-evidence-imprisons-the-innocent/#6d8f04c64b86

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;
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