April 29: The very messy Missy Woods 'scandal.'…(Discredited former Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI)Forensic Scientist Yvonne Missy Woods): Colorado Public Radio (CPR) reports that although legislation was hoped to clear up the scandal, "Defence attorneys are now overwhelmed by cases," noting that: "Years after former CBI forensic scientist Missy Woods’ misconduct came to light, defense attorneys worry there's not enough being done to restore justice to the people in potentially thousands of cases."…"The fallout has bled beyond the courtroom and overturned trials as a result of Woods’ faulty testing. Already, Colorado has spent millions of dollars to retest hundreds of DNA samples and passed legislation to notify people in the system whose evidence may not have been properly handled. While the state, defense attorneys and people whose cases may have been affected watch closely, the scandal has laid bare problems in the system and prompted a legislative solution that sent a lot of people scrambling. Defense attorneys are now sifting through these cases to figure out just how many people were impacted by Woods’ actions. A law passed last year required crime labs to report all the cases worked on by people who’ve been accused of misconduct, regardless of whether it impacted the case directly. That law, called the Forensic Science Integrity Act, makes it possible for people to take legal action if an employee who worked on their case is accused of misconduct. It also lets defendants add post-conviction evidence that might help in a retrial. Efforts to follow the law have been slow-going."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Concerns over Woods’ work were first brought up in 2014, then again in 2018. At that point, she was suspended from working on criminal cases but was then reinstated, according to an internal affairs report. In 2023, when an intern reported an anomaly in Woods’ test data at the lab, CBI took a deeper look into Woods’ work and found additional concerns with her work.  “They knew about this in 2014 and allowed it to continue, and heard about it again in 2018 and allowed it to continue,” Mulligan (a defence attorney) said. “And yet we didn't find out about it for years … they had two strikes already and then finally got that third strike, and yet we continue to allow them to police themselves.”

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SECOND QUOTE OF THE DAY: Mulligan  said she wants transparency and real change. “The damage is already done, so why not do it right and get some fairness for the people of Colorado and try to limit future damage,” she said. “Right now, the train is continuing to plow down the tracks. It's kind of like that ridiculous poster of the train that blasts through the train station and falls off the other side. Only imagine that the train is falling down like four more stories. And then onto another track and keeps on going, and then blasts through another train station and keeps on going. The train wreck is continuing to go on and on and on."

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STORY: "Legislation hoped to clear up the Missy Woods scandal. Defense attorneys are now overwhelmed with cases," by Justice Reporter Ava Kian, published by 000 000, on April 27, 2026.

GIST: "Years after former CBI forensic scientist Missy Woods’ misconduct came to light, defense attorneys worry there's not enough being done to restore justice to the people in potentially thousands of cases. 

According to the law, crime labs were supposed to send all of the notices by September 2025, and the district attorneys were required to forward that to defendants within 91 days of receiving it. That means some cases missed one or both deadlines. Public defenders said they started seeing more notices roll in this winter.

Still, a notice is a beacon of hope for those whose cases have been mishandled 

“I have several clients who now have hope that their claims of innocence will finally be heard and that they will finally get justice … I think they finally get some hope,” said Mary Claire Mulligan, a defense attorney. “They're like, ‘I'm finally going to get some justice out of this. I have a chance of finally someone listening to me. I've been saying I'm innocent for years.’” 

The law has also created some unforeseen challenges. Its implementation is proving difficult and resource-intensive for Colorado’s defense attorneys, who say the burden has fallen on them. The majority of these cases are in the post-conviction phase — an area of law that requires specific skills that draws few attorneys to the field.

There’s also the matter of the limits of the law and what defendants are entitled to. 

“CBI is making it difficult for us to get the information that we need in order to fully give effect to what FSIA entitles us to do to defend our clients,” Mulligan said. “The people in charge should let them just give us the information, show us what's going on right at the CBI. Because right now we're assuming the worst.”

CBI said in a statement that the law mandates comprehensive transparency, which it committed to comply with.

The agency said it is meeting the discovery requirements and ultimately, in districts where discovery is an issue at court, the judge makes the final call. 

“The CBI works closely with each prosecutor and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to ensure we are meeting our legal requirements,” said Rob Low, CBI’s strategic communications director, in a statement.

The whole system

For many defense attorneys, misconduct at the crime lab has cast doubt on the whole system, especially considering that discrepancies in Woods’ work were first mentioned in 2014 and then again in 2018. In 2023, the agency investigated after an intern brought up anomalies in Woods’ work. 

The 65-year-old is facing 102 felony charges, including cybercrime, first-degree perjury and forgery. She has pleaded not guilty and her trial is expected to start in September.

Since Woods’ misconduct became news, other instances of evidence mishandling have been revealed. 

A DNA analyst who worked for the Weld County Sheriff’s Office at the Northern Colorado Regional Forensic Lab was fired in 2024 after anomalies were found in her work. No criminal charges were filed in that case. According to CBI, one other person was also found to have misconduct, for which they’re sending notices. 

One of key component of lab work is that work is reviewed by other employees through a process called “technical review.”

Mulligan, who first encountered Woods in the 90s and has cross-examined her a handful of times, said she recalls that in one case, when doubt was cast on the forensic report, Woods said that it can’t be wrong because it’s been reviewed. 

“The technical reviewer had to have made mistakes or overlooked something or the technical review process is faulty in order for them to miss this or the technical reviewer was also committing fraud,” Mulligan said. “Technical reviewers are just as much a part of the problem as the original lab analyst. They're supposed to be the backstop. They're supposed to be what makes this a scientific result.”

How many cases?

CBI has sent out over 10,000 notices through the act, according to Low, the department’s communications director. He said that, through Colorado’s new law, three other cases were reported to district attorneys as being impacted by misconduct. 

If that number seems high, it’s because notices are now being sent for every case that those employees worked on.

Zachary Brown, the deputy chief public defender at the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, said they have received around 3,000 notices so far. Of those, roughly 600 people have requested counsel. They’ll be represented by state-funded counsel, either the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender or the Alternate Defense Counsel. 

Impossible workload

As it stands, those organizations don’t have the capacity to handle these cases. 

“We're figuring out how to handle this. It feels like it shouldn't all be our burden, right? The FSIA, the act about this, puts the burden on CBI and the prosecution, and it's us who are working to really provide these folks with zealous representation,” said Joanna Landau, the executive director for the Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel.

She said the act was a necessary first step, but they need support to follow through. 

“The Forensic Science Integrity Act was an important acknowledgement of this problem and a huge step in addressing this massive scandal,” Landau said. “The problem is it doesn't solve the problem. It provides a process to help shed light on the problem. And so then there are all the other moving parts of how that actually happens, and that's the part that we're dealing with.”

It’s time-sensitive work. Legal action for most felony cases needs to be filed within three years of receiving the notice. For other crimes, it’s a narrower window. 

“I just would hate to see someone miss out on a full, thorough investigation because it took a year to get him a lawyer. Or the worst-case scenario is you have an innocent person sitting in prison for an extra day, even because we couldn't get him a lawyer quick enough,” Mulligan said. 

Mulligan is one of the attorneys representing Michael Clark, who spent 12 years in prison for allegedly murdering someone in 1994. His conviction was overturned, and he was released on bond after Woods’ misconduct was uncovered. His case will be retried. 

Long process

Getting through these cases could take years. It requires lawyers who are versed in post-conviction law, a small field with few attorneys that includes reviewing mountains of evidence.

“Part of the slowdown that we're having is that we just don't have enough lawyers who are trained to do post-conviction work who can get on this huge influx of cases. I mean, if we're going to see a thousand cases come in, we've got a lot of work to do,” Mulligan said.

The organizations also need to bring in forensic experts who can understand the data.

Alternate Defense Counsel is looking to find contractors who will take these cases. They don’t have enough. So far, Landau said, they have taken on around 80 cases.

Unknown costs

As of March, Alternate Defense Counsel has spent just less than $500,000 on these cases, Landau said. 

“The bulk of that money has been in this past calendar year, which to me says we're getting up and running with these cases, but we're just at the beginning and with the expected huge number of cases coming in, that number is going to get much higher,” she said.

The two organizations have requested $2 million from the legislature this session, which they hope will cover attorney and expert costs. They estimated that working on all these cases would take roughly $11 million, though they say the final price tag is unclear.

“It is impossible to fully understand how much Woods-related workload will increase for the agencies in FY 26-27, largely due to CBI’s continued delays over the past year in releasing information about her misconduct,” the Alternate Defense Counsel wrote in its budget request.

According to the First Judicial District Attorney, when criminal charges against Woods were announced in January 2025, the CBI estimated that the total cost of Woods’ alleged misconduct, through 2024, was $11,071,486.

The Joint Budget Committee that same month approved $7.5 million for CBI to retest DNA samples tampered with by Woods.

Procedural challenges

Mulligan and other defense attorneys said they’ve been dealing with pushback in court from CBI when requesting discovery, like information on technical reviewers. So they’ve been litigating it in court. Mulligan said there’s more than a handful of cases she worked on where Woods’ expert testimony was a key factor, which is why she thinks discovery about the technical reviewers is important. 

“The district attorney's offices and AGs and CBI are in some situations saying, no, the FSIA doesn't apply to technical reviewers,” she said. “That's stonewalling us.” 

She argues that the law allows that information to be shared with defendants. Under the statute, defendants have a right to discovery. Mulligan and other attorneys, like Brown, said they’re spending resources trying to get information. 

“There's information in the government's possession that it doesn't want to reveal … the government can be a lot of folks, it can be district attorney's offices, it can be CBI, which is a government agency. Certainly, it can be the Attorney General's office where we have good faith disputes over these issues,” Brown said. “And that's been a long fight.” 

The CBI pushed back against that characterization. 

“The CBI is not stonewalling but meeting discovery requirements. The goal is not to delay or obstruct; we are committed to being transparent,” said CBI’s Rob Low.

Questions about oversight

While Mulligan and other defense attorneys praise the law for doing something about the issue, they say there’s still problems. There’s no oversight of the process, meaning CBI – or other crime labs, determine when there has been misconduct by an employee – and that would trigger the forensic law process. 

Concerns over Woods’ work were first brought up in 2014, then again in 2018. At that point, she was suspended from working on criminal cases but was then reinstated, according to an internal affairs report.

In 2023, when an intern reported an anomaly in Woods’ test data at the lab, CBI took a deeper look into Woods’ work and found additional concerns with her work. 

“They knew about this in 2014 and allowed it to continue, and heard about it again in 2018 and allowed it to continue,” Mulligan said. “And yet we didn't find out about it for years … they had two strikes already and then finally got that third strike, and yet we continue to allow them to police themselves.”

CBI said it’s committed to “building trust through comprehensive action, transparency, and accountability,” in a statement to CPR. The agency pointed to Woods’ immediate suspension and bringing in investigators from other states’ agencies for her criminal investigation as steps it’s taken to do so.

At CBI’s request, the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation opened a criminal investigation into the data anomalies in November 2023.

Worries about transparency remain

Mulligan said she would like to see a separate entity overseeing this. 

Landau said she worries about transparency, especially with a discrepancy in the total number of cases that require a review. As of November, Alternate Defense Counsel had identified 1,536 cases it says are impacted by Woods’ misconduct. 

CBI reports that her alleged misconduct impacted 1,045 cases. 

Low said the CBI doesn't know how the Alternate Defense Counsel identifies cases and can't offer an explanation about the discrepancy. But he said that the bureau is confident that its numbers are correct. That presents a problem for some defense attorneys. 

“We've identified cases that are not on CBI’s list,” Landau said. “I think it's going to be inherently subjective, but I hope the CBI continues to identify the cases so that we can get justice for the people who need it. But right now, I think we can't solely rely on them to identify everything that their own people did wrong.”

Having a separate entity do that work was discussed when crafting the law, said Rep. Matt Soper, one of the act’s sponsors. Ultimately, the cost proved too much. 

“We wanted to bring on more contractors from outside the state to really look at what the full impact was within CBI,” he said. “We can still get through this as a state to be able to figure out where the wrong took place. And so we have to balance, unfortunately, at the end of the day, that resources are not unlimited.”

Audit points to culture

An external audit in 2025 found problems within the organization’s culture, citing things like the prior leadership prioritizing productivity and output, with minimum oversight.

Since then, CBI said it has changed policies, implemented new quality programs and added additional reviews to deter future misconduct, according to a statement. 

Soper thinks the turnover and influx of new employees has shifted the culture. The CBI director retired in 2025 and was replaced with Armando Saldate. 

Soper thinks people will have to trust that the culture has changed. For attorneys representing people who have been potentially wrongly incarcerated, there’s not much trust left. 

“This all happened while CBI was policing itself. If it continues to do so, I don't see how things are going to change,” Mulligan said. “It doesn't feel just.” 

Mulligan said she wants transparency and real change. 

“The damage is already done, so why not do it right and get some fairness for the people of Colorado and try to limit future damage,” she said. “Right now, the train is continuing to plow down the tracks. It's kind of like that ridiculous poster of the train that blasts through the train station and falls off the other side. Only imagine that the train is falling down like four more stories. And then onto another track and keeps on going, and then blasts through another train station and keeps on going. The train wreck is continuing to go on and on and on.""

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify that the additional misconduct reported at the CBI is not related to the Missy Woods case. It was also updated to include CBI's stance that they are confident in the number of cases they identified."

The entire story can be read at:

 https://www.cpr.org/2026/04/27/legislation-missy-woods-scandal-defense-attorney/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.   Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

 FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;

FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

April 28: James Broadnax: Texas: Major (Unwelcome) Development; The Dallas Morning News (Reporter Jamie Landers) reports that the Texas parole board has unanimously denied clemency to James Broadnax two days before his scheduled execution…"The cousins were convicted of capital murder in separate trials. Broadnax, who was tried as the shooter, was sentenced to death, while Cummings, who was tried as his accomplice, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But on March 11, Cummings signed a written declaration stating it was he who shot Swan and Butler, not Broadnax. Cummings wrote that he persuaded his cousin to take the blame based on the circumstances of their criminal records. Cummings said he had already been convicted of other offenses, including burglaries, while Broadnax had a single charge for marijuana possession. "I want to clear my conscience and do not want James to be executed for shooting two people when I was the one who committed those acts," Cummings wrote. "It was my decision to come clean.""

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has repeatedly declined to intervene in Broadnax’s case.  The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on an appeal centered around Cummings' confession, but denied two other appeals  Monday, including one about using his rap lyrics as evidence against him and another based on allegations the state struck Black jurors from participating in his trial."

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STORY: “Texas parole board denies clemency to James Broadnax two days before scheduled execution,” by  Senior Breaking News Reporter Jamie Landers, published by The Dallas Morning News, on April 28, 2026. (Jamie Landers is a senior breaking news reporter at The Dallas Morning News. She is a graduate of The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, where she studied journalism and political science. Jamie previously reported for The Arizona Republic and Arizona PBS.)

SUB-HEADING: “The vote against recommending clemency or reprieve was unanimous."

SUB-HEADING: “James Broadnax, 37, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday in Huntsville. “

GIST: “The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied clemency to James Broadnax, closing one of the final paths available to halt his Thursday execution. 

The vote against recommending clemency or reprieve was unanimous, according to a memo obtained Tuesday by The Dallas Morning News. 

The decision comes two days before Broadnax, 37, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Huntsville. 

Clemency in Texas is historically rare for death row inmates, with only three cases since the penalty was reinstated in 1976, according to data tracked by the Death Penalty Information Center. 

Texas governors can't issue a pardon, commutation, or reprieve without a written recommendation from the board, but they do have the authority to grant a one-time reprieve of execution.

In 2018, Gov. Greg Abbott commuted Thomas “Bart” Whitaker’s death sentence to life without parole. 

He listed several reasons, including the surviving victim’s opposition to execution and the fact that the man who killed the victims did not receive the death penalty.

Broadnax raised the latter in his own appeals. 

In June 2008, court documents say Broadnax and his cousin, Demarius Cummings, set out to rob Matthew Butler and Stephen Swan outside their music studio in Garland.

 By the time they left, Butler, 28, and Swan, 26, were dead, and the cousins had taken only $2 and a 1995 Ford.

BROADNAX AND CUMMINGS WERE BOTH 19 AT THE TIME.   

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has repeatedly declined to intervene in Broadnax’s case. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on an appeal centered around Cummings' confession, but denied two other appeals  Monday, including one about using his rap lyrics as evidence against him and another based on allegations the state struck Black jurors from participating in his trial."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/article/james-broadnax-clemency-denied-22228908.php?utm_content=cta&sid=62680b8e4f757f64bad68826&ss=P&st_rid=null&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=alert&utm_campaign=dlsn%20%7C%20breaking%20news

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.   Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. 

FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;

FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

April 28: Former Detroit Homicide Investigator Barbara Simon: (HL) I have been following this policing nightmare closely for years - now even CNN is on the watch, with Senior Reporter Ray Sanchez's razor-sharp story headed, "She was once considered one of Detroit’s toughest homicide interrogators. Now she’s accused of coercing false confessions" - a story which bears the photo caption, "Former Detroit homicide investigator Barbara Simon is at the center of at least six wrongful convictions overturned or vacated because of coerced or falsified statements."…"Simon, 78, solved – or closed – hundreds of murder cases during the 20 years she spent as a homicide investigator with the Detroit Police Department. Now, she is at the center of at least six murder convictions that have been overturned or vacated — two as recently as last month — after state courts found evidence that the confessions and eyewitness statements she helped obtain were tainted by misconduct ranging from coercion to falsification, resulting in innocent Black men being imprisoned for years before they were absolved. These teams work to overturn wrongful convictions, freeing innocent people from prison. They can do much more, experts say Simon’s actions inflicted deep and lasting emotional wounds, the former prisoners and their attorneys say. Her alleged tactics, which were first reported by the Detroit Metro Times in 2024, have also led to millions of dollars in settlements at Detroit taxpayers’ expense, with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the city or police department."

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of  scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used interrogation methods  such as  the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As  all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:

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QUOTE  OF THE DAY: "Craighead didn’t see a way out, so he admitted to the shooting and signed a confession written by Simon. He was convicted of manslaughter for his friend’s death, a sentence which he fought even after his parole in 2009. His break came when Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker vacated the conviction in February 2021 and ordered a new trial, citing Simon’s “history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath. “This new evidence establishes a common scheme of misconduct,” Walker wrote in the order. “This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character for truthfulness.”

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Detroit’s homicide section had a “practice of regularly arresting and detaining persons they believed to have information concerning a homicide-related offense, including suspects’ family members and individuals who lived in the vicinity of the crime,” the DOJ report said. “When there was a high-profile murder in the neighborhood, they were happy to violate the rights of every single person in that community,” Syed, who was lead counsel on the Johnson and Scott cases, said about the homicide unit. “They were just going to arrest any random young Black man who was in the vicinity.” With time and awareness, the culture at the Detroit Police Department has slowly changed. “Once that kind of conduct starts to be revealed, I think, thankfully, the community kind of wakes up and understands there should be a limit to what police can do,” Syed said."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Police often concluded murder investigations after getting signed confessions. “I had a detective tell me, ‘A case is closed if we get an arrest warrant signed, or if there’s a confession, and whatever happens at trial happens, but we closed our case,’” Mueller said. George Calicut Jr. is one such example. He had admitted stealing a cell phone in 1999, but prosecutors and his attorneys say he later signed a false confession written by Simon claiming he killed a woman and left with “$5 and a cell phone.” Calicut had no prior interactions with police and at his trial, “there were no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking” him “to the crime. DNA testing was ordered but not performed.” An agreement dismissing the case says Simon told Calicut she could help him by drafting a statement that would reduce the charge to manslaughter — and warned that if he contacted a lawyer, he’d be charged with first-degree murder."

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STORY: "She was once considered one of Detroit’s toughest homicide interrogators. Now she’s accused of coercing false confessions," by Reporter Ray Sanchez, published by CNN,  on April 26, 2026. (Ray Sanchez is a Senior Reporter for CNN’s National Hub in New York, where for more than a decade he has covered breaking news and generated in-depth human stories chronicling tales of injustice and the struggles of life in America – including the migrant crisis, police brutality, mass shootings and the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.)

PHOTO CAPTION: Former Detroit homicide investigator Barbara Simon is at the center of at least six wrongful convictions overturned or vacated because of coerced or falsified statements. 

GIST: "Tall, with a mound of curls spilling onto her face, Barbara Simon looks like the preschool and elementary school substitute teacher she is now.

But behind the silver wire-rimmed glasses and sparkling accessories is a hard-nosed ex-cop with a reputation as “The Closer” – a tough interrogator known for her uncanny ability to elicit confessions in murder cases.

Although Simon has never been charged with a crime, many of her former cases are under review and more exonerations are expected, attorneys with the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic told CNN.

Simon has repeatedly denied the allegations in past testimony and declined CNN’s requests for comment for this story; the Detroit Police Department never disciplined her over the claims. Attorneys who represented Simon in previous lawsuits did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. The Detroit Police Department and the city of Detroit also did not respond.

‘They called her “The Closer”’

Mark Craighead sat before Simon in an interrogation room in 2000, when Detroit police officers brought the husband and father to the old police headquarters, telling him it was about “a three-year-old case that we need to close.”

Craighead had been questioned twice before for the murder of his close friend Chole Pruett, but he insisted he didn’t do it and was at work in a locked warehouse 20 miles away at the time of the shooting.

He was held overnight in a jail cell crawling with roaches and mice and his repeated requests to call his wife and an attorney were ignored.

When Craighead met with Simon, “She tells me that my wife is going to find herself a new husband and my kids are going to be calling somebody else daddy if I didn’t tell her what I had done because I am going to jail for the rest of my life,” Craighead said, according to court documents from a 2001 evidentiary hearing to determine if his confession was made voluntarily.

Craighead was forced to take a polygraph test, which he was told he failed.

“She told me that if I don’t start cooperating with her and tell her what really happened, that she would use the polygraph and the witness statement to place me at the scene of the crime,” Craighead said. “And that would convict me, convict me and then send me to jail for the rest of my life.”

But, Craighead said Simon told him, there “must have been a reason for the shooting.”

“She told me I didn’t seem like the kind of person that would kill and rob my best friend so I must have had a reason.”

Craighead said Simon gave him an example, “like an argument that turned into a fight … and it was an accident that the gun went off and did something like that happen, if it happened like that, that I should tell her.”

Only then, she told him, could she help him get his charges reduced, get an attorney and get bond and “fight this thing on the outside,” he testified.

“They called her ‘The Closer,’” Craighead said in an interview with CNN. The police “knew what tactics she was using.”

If he didn’t cooperate, then Simon said she would “use what she got and send me to jail for the rest of my life.”

Craighead didn’t see a way out, so he admitted to the shooting and signed a confession written by Simon.

He was convicted of manslaughter for his friend’s death, a sentence which he fought even after his parole in 2009.

His break came when Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker vacated the conviction in February 2021 and ordered a new trial, citing Simon’s “history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath.”

“This new evidence establishes a common scheme of misconduct,” Walker wrote in the order. “This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character for truthfulness.”

The Michigan Court of Appeals later affirmed the decision, writing that the “newly discovered evidence also indicates that Investigator Simon’s interrogation tactics demonstrated a scheme, plan, or system to obtain false confessions.”

Later, the prosecution dismissed Craighead’s charges and he was exonerated.

The way the decisions unfolded in cases involving Simon was “groundbreaking,” said Imran Syed, a law professor and co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.

“In Michigan, that sort of pattern-and-practice-based exoneration wasn’t really a thing until Craighead,” he said.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment about Craighead’s case or any of the others handled by Simon. But Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement last month that her office’s “systematic review of Investigator Simon’s cases” is “exhaustive and ongoing.” Worthy added that the conviction integrity unit has “been consistently working on these cases and more involving other DPD Homicide detectives.”

New eyewitness account leads to exonerations

Justly Johnson and Kendrick Scott  each spent nearly two decades in prison for a killing they didn’t commit in a case Simon investigated.

The men were arrested for the brutal murder of Lisa Kindred in front of her children on Mother’s Day 1999, based on witness testimony that was recanted.

“It was a very high-profile case. And the Detroit police felt the pressure. Somebody in that neighborhood was going to prison. They didn’t care who it was,” Johnson, now 52, told CNN. “The whole agenda was they were going to put that murder on somebody, and we were the suspects, and we were going to take that case.”

“Basically, our lives were destroyed,” he said.

The pair filed numerous unsuccessful appeals until new evidence emerged 12 years later: the eyewitness account from Charmous Skinner Jr., Kindred’s son, who was 8 at the time of the murder, and testified that Johnson and Scott were not the killers.

The Michigan Supreme Court remanded the cases for new trials and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office later dismissed the charges. Johnson and Scott were exonerated in 2018.

At a deposition in 2019, Skinner said the Detroit Police Department never interviewed him – even though he was sitting right next to his mother in the minivan when she was shot.

Simon told Johnson she was under pressure to close the case when she interrogated him, according to an affidavit from Johnson.

He served 19 years for a fatal shooting he didn’t commit. A letter from the gunman changed everything

“Investigator Simon then told me that investigators did talk to my alibi witnesses but it didn’t matter because the mayor was on her boss, and her boss was on them (homicide investigators) and they were going to charge me with the murder whether I was innocent or not,” Johnson said in the affidavit.

She said, “they were going to charge me with murder, and that there wasn’t a jury in America that wouldn’t convict me for killing a white woman,” Johnson said, before she “stormed out of the room.”

In a 2020 deposition about the Kindred case, Simon said she didn’t remember the case and said she wasn’t involved with interrogating the witnesses, who recanted their statements.

She also denied being “under any pressure” to close homicide cases.   

“I did my job. I did the best that I could,” she said at the deposition.  

A ‘poster child’ for police misconduct in Detroit

Simon graduated from the police academy in 1977 and worked her way up from a patrol officer and member of the sex crimes unit to become a homicide investigator with the Detroit Police Department around 1990. 

She has “become the poster child” of “Detroit police misconduct in the 1990s, 2000s,” Syed said, but she was “not the only bad actor.”

“She comes from a culture where what she did was at least tolerated. And some of our clients would say it was more that it was encouraged. It was a whole cultural problem.”

That culture was the subject of a Department of Justice investigation finding that the Detroit Police Department’s homicide section in the 1990s was notorious for casting a wide net over entire neighborhoods and unlawfully arresting people they believed knew about a murder.

In 1998, Detroit police arrested more than three people for every homicide but solved fewer than half of them, according to FBI statistics cited by the DOJ. The city averaged more than 500 homicides a year that decade.

Detroit’s homicide section had a “practice of regularly arresting and detaining persons they believed to have information concerning a homicide-related offense, including suspects’ family members and individuals who lived in the vicinity of the crime,” the DOJ report said.

“When there was a high-profile murder in the neighborhood, they were happy to violate the rights of every single person in that community,” Syed, who was lead counsel on the Johnson and Scott cases, said about the homicide unit. “They were just going to arrest any random young Black man who was in the vicinity.”

With time and awareness, the culture at the Detroit Police Department has slowly changed.

“Once that kind of conduct starts to be revealed, I think, thankfully, the community kind of wakes up and understands there should be a limit to what police can do,” Syed said.

In 2003, the DOJ and Detroit agreed to a monitor to oversee reforms at the police department, including use of force, unlawful detention practices and other misconduct. The oversight ended in 2014, when the DOJ said the department had effectively resolved many of the unconstitutional practices that prompted federal intervention.

Meanwhile, the state passed a law in 2013 requiring police to make video and audio recordings of statements from people arrested for major crimes.

There were other consequences for the city too – like the hefty settlement payments Detroit doled out to the exonerated men in Simon’s cases. Johnson and Scott each received $8 million settlements.

“I will say it would appear with the new police department leadership in the last several years, they want to make themselves more accountable,” said attorney Wolfgang Mueller, who represented Johnson, Scott and Craighead in legal action. “And for selfish reasons, the city’s paying out too much money, and it gives the good cops a black eye.”

‘A very good interrogator’

During Simon’s time with the police department, interrogations took place at the gritty old police headquarters building at 1300 Beaubien Street, a hulking nine-story monolith that occupied an entire city block in downtown Detroit. Witnesses and suspects were often held for hours or even days without probable cause, moving between small interrogation rooms and filthy, vermin-infested holding cells, according to the DOJ report and accounts from the exonerated men and their attorneys.

“Barbara Simon was involved in scores, probably hundreds, of interrogations over a long career, and we just don’t know how many of those cases are bogus, are tainted, but surely there’s more,” said David Moran, who co-founded the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and was lead counsel on two major cases involving the homicide investigator.

The Michigan Court of Appeals described “striking” similarities in how Simon interrogated three of her cases.

She “was seen as one of the police department’s best interrogators, with a reputation for getting suspects to confess and witnesses to name names,” according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks exonerations through publicly available information.

 Simon acknowledged her reputation during a deposition in 2023.

“You were considered a very good interrogator, right?”

“That’s what they say,” she answered.

“And you were very good at getting confessions, right?” asked Mueller.

“I did my job. So, I am not going to say I was a pro.”

DNA and preserved evidence lead to reversals in decades-old cases

Police often concluded murder investigations after getting signed confessions.

“I had a detective tell me, ‘A case is closed if we get an arrest warrant signed, or if there’s a confession, and whatever happens at trial happens, but we closed our case,’” Mueller said.

George Calicut Jr. is one such example. He had admitted stealing a cell phone in 1999, but prosecutors and his attorneys say he later signed a false confession written by Simon claiming he killed a woman and left with “$5 and a cell phone.”

Calicut had no prior interactions with police and at his trial, “there were no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking” him “to the crime. DNA testing was ordered but not performed.”

An agreement dismissing the case says Simon told Calicut she could help him by drafting a statement that would reduce the charge to manslaughter — and warned that if he contacted a lawyer, he’d be charged with first-degree murder.

After the Michigan Innocence Clinic asked the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to review the case, it was discovered that DNA evidence excluded Calicut from the scene and he was freed last month after nearly 30 years behind bars.

“I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be free,” he told CNN.

Preserved evidence from the crime scene also led to Lamarr Monson’s murder conviction being vacated after he served 20 years in prison.

Monson was convicted in 1997 based on what he says was a false confession after Simon interrogated him.

“You could say she was aggressive. I would say she was mean,” Monson said of Simon. “I was in a state of shock, and she tried to take advantage of that.”

He said she wrote a statement omitting his alibi and falsely said he stabbed a girl – despite a medical examiner’s testimony that the child was likely beaten with a toilet tank lid found at the scene, according to court records.

“She just began to twist my words and twist things in a way you could say she was answering her own questions. And in doing so, she falsified (the) statement,” Monson told CNN.

“As I complained about me wanting a lawyer, or me wanting to use the phone, she would just kind of shut down, leave the room, maybe leave me in there about an hour or so, then come back in and begin to continue the questions,” he said. “She was actively piecing together what she wanted things to look like.”

Moran, Monson’s attorney, examined the toilet tank lid in 2016 – and discovered fingerprints embedded in the blood stains.

“The toilet tank lid was sitting in a Detroit police warehouse,” Moran recalled. “They brought it out for us and unwrapped it, and it was still covered in dried blood. And in the dried blood were fingerprints they had never bothered to run because they had obtained a false confession from Lamarr Monson within hours.”

The prints matched another man who had confessed to his ex-girlfriend, and Monson was released.

Monson’s case was settled with the city for $8.5 million, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

“I do want (Simon) to be held accountable for her actions,” Monson told CNN. 

“She’s made a career of doing this to young Black men in particular. I just have a real disdain about that.”

No accountability, no justice

A few weeks after Calicut’s release, another man convicted of second-degree murder based on a statement obtained by Simon was also freed.

In the case against Roy Blackmon, two witnesses later testified their statements were coerced. They said Simon threatened to charge them as accessories to murder unless they implicated Blackmon in a fatal shooting.

Blackmon is now pursuing a bachelor’s degree and hopes to become a social worker and mentor young people, according to the Innocence Clinic.

He joins Johnson, Scott, Craighead, Monson and Calicut in trying to rebuild their lives after years behind bars – and they share a belief that justice won’t be complete until Simon answers for what she did.

“I pray for her,” Johnson said. “I can’t say I forgive her. She needs to be punished. She hasn’t apologized to nobody. You know what, it’s probably better. She’s probably tormented every day.”

As the men await accountability, Simon remains in the Detroit area. Last year, she testified in a deposition that she has been working as a substitute teacher for students from preschool through fourth grade, but it’s not clear which school district. A company that contracts substitute teachers for schools in the Detroit area did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Before that, after retiring from the police department, she worked as a special agent for the Michigan Attorney General’s Child Support Division.

Simon “worked exclusively on matters related to nonpayment in child support cases,” Michigan Attorney General spokesperson Danny Wimmer said in a statement.

“In her position at this department it would not have been possible for Ms. Simon to engage in the type of misconduct she is now alleged to have committed at other agencies, and we are aware of no issues concerning her investigations into parents who refused to pay child support,” the statement said."

The entire story can be read at:

detroit-barbara-simon-exonerations

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.   Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;

FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;