November 15: Chicago: Former Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara's policing crime wave: Question of the day: Chicago is paying $260.8 m to 17 wrongly convicted in cases involving this former detective in settlements that decades of allegations that Guevara manipulated witnesses, coerced confessions and fabricated evidence to secure murder convictions, often involving young men suspected of gang affiliations, Criminal Justice Journalists reports. The questions abound. (Here's just a few of them: Who protected Guevara while he was conducting his wrongful conviction policing crime wave over so many years? Where was the media watchdog? Who was this man who destroyed so many lives, families? Can this happen again?

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Here are the 17 men Chicago has settled with: (WTTS: Reporter  Heather Cherone;)

https://news.wttw.com/2026/11/10/here-are-17-men-chicago-will-pay-260m-after-being-convicted-following-investigations-ex

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Attorney Anand Swaminathan, who represents the plaintiffs, said the financial compensation cannot undo the damage caused by nearly 400 years of wrongful imprisonment."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Among the men receiving compensation are brothers Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, who will receive a combined $34.7 million after each spent approximately 25 years in prison for a 1997 murder.  Rosendo was convicted despite presenting evidence that he was at a bowling alley watching a boxing match during the shooting, while Juan was convicted after a judge prevented a witness from testifying that he had falsely identified the brothers under police pressure. Their convictions were overturned in 2022, and both received certificates of innocence in 2023.  Another case involves Louis Robinson, who will receive $18.8 million after spending 26 years in prison for the 1996 murder of 17-year-old Kelly Velez.  Robinson maintained that Guevara pressured the victim’s boyfriend to identify him as the shooter, even though Robinson did not match witness descriptions. His conviction was overturned in 2023, and he received a certificate of innocence the following year. "

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STORY: "Chicago Paying $260M To 17 Wrongly Convicted In Police Cases," published by Criminal Justice Journalists, on November 12, 2026.

GIST: "Chicago taxpayers will pay $260.8 million to 17 men who collectively spent 383 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in cases investigated by former Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, reports WTTW News.

 The settlements follow decades of allegations that Guevara manipulated witnesses, coerced confessions and fabricated evidence to secure murder convictions, often involving young men suspected of gang affiliations.

 Many cases followed a pattern: Guevara received a tip identifying a suspect, obtained incriminating witness statements or confessions, and helped build prosecutions that resulted in lengthy prison sentences. 

The settlements will be distributed in four equal installments between April 2027 and October 2028, with the men’s attorneys receiving 40%.

 Attorney Anand Swaminathan, who represents the plaintiffs, said the financial compensation cannot undo the damage caused by nearly 400 years of wrongful imprisonment.

 The massive payout adds to the financial consequences Chicago faces over police misconduct and raises questions about accountability for investigations that sent innocent people to prison for decades.

Among the men receiving compensation are brothers Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, who will receive a combined $34.7 million after each spent approximately 25 years in prison for a 1997 murder. 

Rosendo was convicted despite presenting evidence that he was at a bowling alley watching a boxing match during the shooting, while Juan was convicted after a judge prevented a witness from testifying that he had falsely identified the brothers under police pressure.

 Their convictions were overturned in 2022, and both received certificates of innocence in 2023. 

Another case involves Louis Robinson, who will receive $18.8 million after spending 26 years in prison for the 1996 murder of 17-year-old Kelly Velez. 

Robinson maintained that Guevara pressured the victim’s boyfriend to identify him as the shooter, even though Robinson did not match witness descriptions.

 His conviction was overturned in 2023, and he received a certificate of innocence the following year. 

The settlements illustrate how questionable witness identifications and alleged investigative misconduct contributed to wrongful convictions that remained intact for decades before being overturned.

The entire story can be read at: 

https://share.google/4QvWdWehq04JpGbyf

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

flock watch...

 Flock ---transcribe..............

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2_d03JyeKg

November 14: Brigadier Alfred Dreyfus: Question of the day:"What can a political scandal that seized late-nineteenth century France tell us about the long afterlives of miscarriages of justice?" as discussed by Samantha Dulieu, News Editor of the Justice Gap, who notes that: "Dreyfus was convicted in the paranoid decades after the Franco-Prussian war when tensions remained heightened between France and Germany. He was accused of being a spy and selling military secrets to Germany. A note that was apparently written in Dreyfus’ hand was uncovered in the residence of the German Ambassador in France by a French intelligence agent and the blame immediately landed with Dreyfus. It was a time of antisemitic fervour in France. As a Jew, Dreyfus’ loyalties were assumed not to lie with France, and his conviction catalysed latent, outlandish antisemitic conspiracy theories. The significance of this recent anniversary is found in how long some of myths around the case have endured, and how relevant it still appears."

BACKGROUND: (From a previous post of this Blog): May 31, 2025:  "Brigadier General Alfred Dreyfus: (Tainted  handwriting comparison):  Major (Welcome) Development: The Government of France has moved to honour this victim of anti—semitism within the French army  with a posthumous promotion over a century after his wrongful conviction,  The Algemeiner reports, noting that:  "In 1894, Dreyfus, a 36-year-old army captain from the Alsace region in northeastern France, was accused of leaking secret information to a German military official and was put on trial amid a fierce antisemitic media campaign.  Despite a lack of evidence, Dreyfus was convicted of treason based on a handwriting comparison with a document found in a German official’s wastepaper basket in Paris, sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, and stripped of his military rank.  Years later, French Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, then head of military intelligence, secretly reopened the case and uncovered that the handwriting on the incriminating document belonged to another officer. But when he brought this evidence to the army’s general staff, Picquart was dismissed from his post and imprisoned for a year."

 https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/7803064816570184084

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "All of the modern hallmarks of a miscarriage of justice are present in this fascinating case: A conviction based on dodgy hearsay evidence, a convenient scapegoat, overt prejudice and outlandish accusations with no basis in evidence. A polemical debate raged in the press, and favourable coverage in the media was a key part of securing a retrial. More important still was perhaps the redoubtable campaigning of Dreyfus’s wife, brother, and other allies, against an intransigent military and judicial system. But it would seem it doesn’t matter how high-profile a wrongful conviction, or how effectively exposed the cover-up may be, decades on many people will believe the establishment version of events, that there’s no smoke without fire, or indeed fall for the conspiracy theories that emerged at the outset of the case. Despite plenty of evidence that grave miscarriages of justice do happen, accompanied so often by the kind of cover-up as in the Dreyfus Affair, many people simply cannot entertain that the next one may come along sooner than they think."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Despite plenty of evidence that grave miscarriages of justice do happen, accompanied so often by the kind of cover-up as in the Dreyfus Affair, many people simply cannot entertain that the next one may come along sooner than they think. While people like Jeremy Bamber, Lucy Letby and others maintain their innocence while languishing in prison (whatever the outcome of any future appeals they may eventually be granted), it is worth remembering that the justice system can right a wrong after years or decades of dogged campaigning, but the cover-up and the conspiracy can last a century more."

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COMMENTARY:  "Conspiracies, campaigns and cover-ups: What the Dreyfus Affair can tell us 120 year on," by Samantha Dulieu, published by The Justice Gap, on November 12, 2026. "(Samantha Dulieu is a freelance writer and News Editor of The Justice Gap. She has covered some of the most high profile miscarriages of justice in the UK, as well as law, policy, human rights issues, prisons, protest and migration. She also offers her expertise to All party Parliamentary Group on miscarriages of justice through its secretariat, the Future Justice Project.)..."The Justice Gap is an online magazine about the law and justice run by journalists, The Justice Gap;)

SUB-HEADING: "What can a political scandal that seized late-nineteenth century France tell us about the long afterlives of miscarriages of justice?"

GIST: "Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish Captain in the French army, was arrested then wrongfully convicted of treason in 1894. A new exhibition in London marks 120 years since Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906. This was only after he was found guilty a second time at a second trial – held after the real culprit had confessed and some within the French military establishment had even admitted the cover-up.

Dreyfus was convicted in the paranoid decades after the Franco-Prussian war when tensions remained heightened between France and Germany. He was accused of being a spy and selling military secrets to Germany. A note that was apparently written in Dreyfus’ hand was uncovered in the residence of the German Ambassador in France by a French intelligence agent and the blame immediately landed with Dreyfus. It was a time of antisemitic fervour in France. As a Jew, Dreyfus’ loyalties were assumed not to lie with France, and his conviction catalysed latent, outlandish antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The significance of this recent anniversary is found in how long some of myths around the case have endured, and how relevant it still appears.

A poster published in late nineteenth-century France featuring an antisemitic carton, Alfred Dreyfus is presented as the head of a Hydra. Wiener Holocaust Library, Courtesy of Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1945 a French far-right figure who had relished in denouncing Dreyfus in the 1890s was on trial for his role as a collaborator with Nazi Germany in the Vichy Regime. As the guilty verdict was read out, he exclaimed that he was a victim of ‘Dreyfus’s revenge’.

Speaking at the launch of the exhibition at The Wiener Holocaust Library, eminent historian Professor Sir Richard Evans described a scene from his youth in Oxford in the late 1960s. Watching an art-house film at the cinema, one of the characters described an event as ‘just like the Dreyfus Affair’, which prompted a French member of the audience to jump out of their seat and begin shouting that Dreyfus was guilty and always had been. It seemed he felt personally wronged that anyone should believe it was a true miscarriage of justice.

In 1995, over a century after the wrongful conviction, the French army formally announced that they believed Dreyfus was innocent of all charges and had been persecuted by the military because he was Jewish. The military official who said this at a meeting convened by a French-Jewish community group said remarks were nothing new and that the army had recognised Dreyfus’ innocence since the charges were dropped. However, the year before, the same official’s predecessor was ousted after he had suggested that Dreyfus was, in fact, guilty.

Several institutions over the intervening decades have refused to have a statue of Dreyfus installed outside their buildings, with the sculpture bouncing around Paris until it was finally given a permanent spot earlier this year.

All of the modern hallmarks of a miscarriage of justice are present in this fascinating case: A conviction based on dodgy hearsay evidence, a convenient scapegoat, overt prejudice and outlandish accusations with no basis in evidence. A polemical debate raged in the press, and favourable coverage in the media was a key part of securing a retrial. More important still was perhaps the redoubtable campaigning of Dreyfus’s wife, brother, and other allies, against an intransigent military and judicial system.

But it would seem it doesn’t matter how high-profile a wrongful conviction, or how effectively exposed the cover-up may be, decades on many people will believe the establishment version of events, that there’s no smoke without fire, or indeed fall for the conspiracy theories that emerged at the outset of the case. Despite plenty of evidence that grave miscarriages of justice do happen, accompanied so often by the kind of cover-up as in the Dreyfus Affair, many people simply cannot entertain that the next one may come along sooner than they think.

While people like Jeremy Bamber, Lucy Letby and others maintain their innocence while languishing in prison (whatever the outcome of any future appeals they may eventually be granted), it is worth remembering that the justice system can right a wrong after years or decades of dogged campaigning, but the cover-up and the conspiracy can last a century more."

The entire commentary can be read at: 

https://www.thejusticegap.com/conspiracies-campaigns-and-cover-ups-what-the-dreyfus-affair-can-tell-us-120-years-on/

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

November 13: Richard Glossip: Oklahoma: Major (Welcome) Development: Oklahoma has dropped the murder charge he faced - after nearly executing him 9 times - The Intercept (Reporters Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith) reports, noting that: "But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction in 2025, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond, who by then was running for governor, did an abrupt about-face, announcing he would once again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder. In the year and a half since then, it has become glaringly apparent that prosecutors from Drummond’s office are grossly ill-equipped to take Glossip’s case to trial. Since his original trial in 1998, the state has lost or destroyed evidence, numerous witnesses have died, and prosecutors have conceded that their own star witness — who has sought to recant his testimony multiple times — can’t actually be expected to remember what happened the night of the killing. “For 30 years, Richard Glossip has maintained his innocence,” Knight said in a statement after the hearing. “After nearly executing him 9 times, the State of Oklahoma has now dismissed the murder charge against him. This morning, to finally put this matter to rest, Rich pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”

STORY: "Oklahoma Drops Murder Charge Against Richard Glossip, Avoiding Third Trial," by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith, published by The Intercept, on November 12, 2026. 
Liliana Segura,  Jordan Smith

SUB-HEADING: "Glossip agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge to end his 30-year legal saga. He will be sentenced in December." 

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The contours of Glossip’s plea are remarkably similar to a behind-the-scenes agreement made in 2023 between Drummond and Glossip’s lead attorney Don Knight. At the time, Drummond told Knight that if a court were to overturn Glossip’s conviction, he would resolve the case by accepting a plea to accessory after the fact in exchange for time served — and a promise that Glossip would not sue Oklahoma for anything related to his arrest and incarceration. But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction in 2025, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond, who by then was running for governor, did an abrupt about-face, announcing he would once again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Glossip’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 17. Since his release, Glossip has “been living a peaceful and law-abiding life,” Knight said in his statement. “We look forward to an opportunity to show why returning him to custody would not serve the interests of justice, and to ending this nightmare for Rich and all concerned.”


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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "GLOSSIP HAD ORIGINALLY been charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the killing. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed woke him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” According to Glossip, it wasn’t until the next morning, when Van Treese was missing, that he realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on. But Sneed told police Glossip was the mastermind behind the plot to kill Van Treese, and, with no other evidence tying Glossip to the crime, Sneed’s statement became the basis of the state’s case."


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GIST: "Less than a month before he was scheduled to stand trial a third time, accused of a murder he has always sworn he did not commit, Richard Glossip on Thursday agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, a final step toward bringing his three-decade legal saga to an end.

Glossip, 63, was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of his boss Barry Van Treese inside Room 102 of the rundown motel the Van Treese family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to killing Van Treese, but he insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

During a brief hearing that was originally scheduled to address pretrial matters, Oklahoma County Court Judge Natalie Mai instead accepted a plea from Glossip to accessory after the fact and dismissed the murder charge against him. With members of Van Treese’s family looking on from their seats in the jury box, Glossip stood to answer a series of routine questions to confirm that his plea was voluntary. Mai did not ask any specific questions about the crime itself.

Under Oklahoma law in place at the time of the killing, the maximum punishment for accessory after the fact was 45 years. Taking into consideration the decades Glossip spent on death row and credits earned for good behavior, Glossip’s attorneys say he would have been eligible for full release in 2016 and should serve no more time behind bars. But defense lawyers did not reach an agreement with the state as to a proposed sentence. In a statement released after the hearing, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who once expressed deep concerns about the state’s case against Glossip, made clear that his office will be seeking additional prison time.

Ultimately it will be up to Mai to decide if Glossip should be sentenced to time served or if any additional punishment is warranted.

The contours of Glossip’s plea are remarkably similar to a behind-the-scenes agreement made in 2023 between Drummond and Glossip’s lead attorney Don Knight. At the time, Drummond told Knight that if a court were to overturn Glossip’s conviction, he would resolve the case by accepting a plea to accessory after the fact in exchange for time served — and a promise that Glossip would not sue Oklahoma for anything related to his arrest and incarceration.

“We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”

But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction in 2025, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond, who by then was running for governor, did an abrupt about-face, announcing he would once again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder.

In the year and a half since then, it has become glaringly apparent that prosecutors from Drummond’s office are grossly ill-equipped to take Glossip’s case to trial. Since his original trial in 1998, the state has lost or destroyed evidence, numerous witnesses have died, and prosecutors have conceded that their own star witness — who has sought to recant his testimony multiple times — can’t actually be expected to remember what happened the night of the killing.

“For 30 years, Richard Glossip has maintained his innocence,” Knight said in a statement after the hearing. “After nearly executing him 9 times, the State of Oklahoma has now dismissed the murder charge against him. This morning, to finally put this matter to rest, Rich pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”

GLOSSIP HAD ORIGINALLY been charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the killing. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed woke him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.”

According to Glossip, it wasn’t until the next morning, when Van Treese was missing, that he realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.

But Sneed told police Glossip was the mastermind behind the plot to kill Van Treese, and, with no other evidence tying Glossip to the crime, Sneed’s statement became the basis of the state’s case. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, prosecutors said that he had taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” then-prosecutor Fern Smith told the jury.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip.

Glossip’s defense failed to present the tape to the jury, which led an Oklahoma court to overturn Glossip’s first conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Although a second jury convicted him and sent him to die in 2004, doubts over Glossip’s guilt continued to grow.

Glossip subsequently came close to execution many times and may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened upon taking office in 2023. He ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case. When that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed – whom the state has described as its “indispensable witness” – had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy on Glossip’s behalf made his announcement in June 2025 that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed the long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.

After that, Drummond essentially washed his hands of the case to focus on his ultimately failed attempt to become Oklahoma’s next governor, handing off prosecutorial duties to other lawyers in his office. Prosecutors declared that they intended to use the same discredited evidence to try Glossip a third time and spent months fighting to keep him in jail. Despite those efforts, Mai ordered Glossip’s release.

With a December 2026 trial date looming, tensions between the two sides have ratcheted up. Glossip’s lawyers have complained about prosecutors failing to turn over evidence as required under the law. Prosecutors have tried to limit what the defense can present to jurors at trial regarding the history of the case – including asking Mai to bar any mention of Drummond’s previous advocacy on Glossip’s behalf.

Glossip’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 17.

Since his release, Glossip has “been living a peaceful and law-abiding life,” Knight said in his statement. “We look forward to an opportunity to show why returning him to custody would not serve the interests of justice, and to ending this nightmare for Rich and all concerned.”

After the hearing, Glossip and his wife, Lea, stood with Knight to address reporters. Glossip thanked Knight and Lea for their support. “It was a hard day,” Lea told The Intercept, “but Richard and I are both people of faith.” She expressed that “today marks a meaningful step toward finally bringing this case to an end. We are both deeply grateful for the tireless efforts of his legal team.”

The entire story can be read at: 

https://share.google/vUYGbwYtXCLX9mwQK

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

November 13: Recent National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) entry: Sheila Denton: Georgia: Evolving bitemark science - and mark those fatal, but often deceptive words, 'to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.' Recent National Registry of Exoneration (NRE) entry: As Judge Brooks put it, on dismissing all of the charge, without the bitemark evidence: “the only evidence linking [Denton] to the murder was the testimony of a single witness [Jones] who testified that [Denton] admitted to the murder. However, a review of the trial transcript shows that this witness was effectively impeached at trial and had highly dubious credibility.” The evolving science? ... "In November 2017, Mark Loudon-Brown and Katherine Moss, attorneys from the Southern Center for Human Rights, filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial. The motion asserted that David’s testimony at the trial was no longer valid. The motion was based in part on advancements in the scientific understanding of bitemark evidence, changes in the American Board of Forensic Odontology (ABFO) guidelines, and new opinions from two other forensic odontologists that demonstrated that the bitemark evidence in the case could not affirmatively link Denton the murder."

PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: In March 2006, Denton went to trial in Ware County Superior Court. The prosecution’s primary evidence was testimony from Dr. Thomas David, a forensic odontologist.  David testified “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that a bitemark had been found on Denton’s left arm and a bitemark had been found on Garner’s right forearm. David said “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that it was probable that Denton left the bitemark on Garner and that it was probable that Garner left the bitemark on Denton. 

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "In addition, the motion said that David’s opinions on bitemark evidence had evolved as well. The motion said that in April of 2016, following the change in the ABFO Guidelines, David had authored an affidavit in a bitemark case in Pennsylvania. In that case, he had testified at the 1991 trial of John Kunco and linked Kunco to an injury that David said was a bitemark.  In his affidavit in that case, David had said that the “scientific knowledge and understanding on which these conclusions were based, however, has changed significantly,” and that he “would not proffer such testimony, since it is inconsistent with the current ABFO Guidelines and with current scientific understanding of the limitations of bitemark comparison.”

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "The motion said that during an evidentiary hearing in the Kunco case, David had modified his opinion in light of the changes in scientific understanding of bitemark evidence as was reflected in the new ABFO Guidelines. He had changed his opinion from the highest level of certainty that the injury was a bitemark to “cannot exclude.”  The motion said that David further admitted that he could not give an opinion as to how many people could have made the mark at issue because “[y]ou don’t know how many people might be included in an open population.”  “In other words, in Mr. Kunco’s case, Dr. David admitted that the new evidence—namely, the change in scientific understanding of bitemark analysis as reflected in the new ABFO Guidelines—would change the testimony he would offer at trial,” the motion said. (In 2019, after Kunco had been granted a new trial, he pled guilty to lesser charges for his release.) Waycross County Chief Superior Court Judge Dwayne H. Gillis held a hearing in May 2018."

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PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "David testified, as did Dr. Cynthia Brzozowski and Dr. Adam Freeman—all board-certified by the ABFO. The defense also presented two affidavits co-authored by five board-certified ABFO odontologists. Each of the experts agreed that any testimony regarding the bitemarks, based on the current science, would no longer be incriminating.  David admitted that if he testified at Denton’s trial based on the recent advancements in science, his testimony would have been different."

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 National Registry of Exonerations: Sheila Denton: Georgia: Major (Welcome) Development: Contributing factors: False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct." By Maurice Possley: Entered on September 15.  2026.

On May 21, 2004, the body of 73-year-old Eugene Garner was found in his home in Waycross, Georgia. Neighbors called the police after entering his house, seeing signs of a struggle, and smelling natural gas. Garner was lying face down in the bedroom.

Police noticed that all of the gas stove burners were on, but the pilot lights were extinguished. Once the house cleared of gas, Garner’s body was removed. His pockets had been turned out of his pants.

An autopsy revealed that Garner died from manual strangulation and extensive blunt force trauma. An injury on his right forearm was characterized as a bitemark. His body had been doused with a liquid chemical.

Thirty-seven-year-old Sheila Denton became a suspect after she was arrested at midnight on the day Garner’s body was found and gave police a false name. Police determined that Denton knew Garner because she had delivered food to his house. Garner was commonly believed at the time to keep large amounts of cash in his house, although there was no evidence, beyond his turned out pants pockets, that any money was missing.

Police subsequently picked up Sharon Jones, an admitted crack cocaine addict and crack cocaine dealer. During an interrogation, Jones initially denied any knowledge of the crime. However, when she was threatened with being charged with Garner’s murder, she implicated Denton, claiming that Denton had confessed to the crime.

On August 13, 2004, Denton was indicted on charges of malice murder, felony murder, and giving a false name to the police.

In March 2006, Denton went to trial in Ware County Superior Court. The prosecution’s primary evidence was testimony from Dr. Thomas David, a forensic odontologist.

David testified “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that a bitemark had been found on Denton’s left arm and a bitemark had been found on Garner’s right forearm. David said “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that it was probable that Denton left the bitemark on Garner and that it was probable that Garner left the bitemark on Denton.

An analyst from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Division of Forensic Sciences testified that she had examined hairs that were found in Garner’s hand. The analyst said that the hair belonged to Garner. She said no hair associated with Denton was found at the scene.

Jones testified that at 4:30 a.m. some day in May 2004, Denton came to a known crack house where Jones was guarding about $500 worth of crack cocaine. When Denton first came to the door, according to Jones, Denton said, “I did something.” Jones said that Denton had cuts and scratches on her arms and legs. Jones testified that she asked Denton, "What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

Jones said that Denton replied, “I just killed the man that stay in front of Wally’s,” referring to a convenience store across the highway from Garner’s residence. Jones said that Denton, who typically had little money, bought $300 worth of crack cocaine and left.

Jones testified that she didn’t believe Denton. She said that she thought Denton had fallen in some bushes.

She admitted that she implicated Denton only after the officers “kept saying I did it.” She said the police told her they had found her fingerprints in Garner’s home and that they had a videotape of her in the home. Jones said she knew that wasn’t true, but the officers threatened to put her in jail.

The prosecution conceded during closing arguments that if not for the bitemark testimony, “I have to admit that’s reasonable doubt” in the case.

On March 15, 2006, the jury acquitted Denton of malice murder, and convicted her of felony murder and giving a false name to the police. She was sentenced to life in prison plus one year.

Denton appealed, arguing that Jones was not a credible witness because of the amount of crack cocaine she was smoking at that time, the tricks and lies the police officers told to get her to talk to them, and contradictions between her trial testimony and her statements to police officers.

In February 2010, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected these arguments and affirmed the convictions and sentence. “The transcript reveals that all of these matters going to Jones’s credibility were thoroughly addressed by defense counsel on cross-examination,” the Court said. “Assessing the credibility of Sharon Jones was a matter lying within the province of the jury, not this Court.”

In November 2017, Mark Loudon-Brown and Katherine Moss, attorneys from the Southern Center for Human Rights, filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial. The motion asserted that David’s testimony at the trial was no longer valid.

The motion was based in part on advancements in the scientific understanding of bitemark evidence, changes in the American Board of Forensic Odontology (ABFO) guidelines, and new opinions from two other forensic odontologists that demonstrated that the bitemark evidence in the case could not affirmatively link Denton the murder.

In addition, the motion said that David’s opinions on bitemark evidence had evolved as well. The motion said that in April of 2016, following the change in the ABFO Guidelines, David had authored an affidavit in a bitemark case in Pennsylvania. In that case, he had testified at the 1991 trial of John Kunco and linked Kunco to an injury that David said was a bitemark.

In his affidavit in that case, David had said that the “scientific knowledge and understanding on which these conclusions were based, however, has changed significantly,” and that he “would not proffer such testimony, since it is inconsistent with the current ABFO Guidelines and with current scientific understanding of the limitations of bitemark comparison.”

The motion said that during an evidentiary hearing in the Kunco case, David had modified his opinion in light of the changes in scientific understanding of bitemark evidence as was reflected in the new ABFO Guidelines. He had changed his opinion from the highest level of certainty that the injury was a bitemark to “cannot exclude.”

The motion said that David further admitted that he could not give an opinion as to how many people could have made the mark at issue because “[y]ou don’t know how many people might be included in an open population.”

“In other words, in Mr. Kunco’s case, Dr. David admitted that the new evidence—namely, the change in scientific understanding of bitemark analysis as reflected in the new ABFO Guidelines—would change the testimony he would offer at trial,” the motion said. (In 2019, after Kunco had been granted a new trial, he pled guilty to lesser charges for his release.) Waycross County Chief Superior Court Judge Dwayne H. Gillis held a hearing in May 2018.

David testified, as did Dr. Cynthia Brzozowski and Dr. Adam Freeman—all board-certified by the ABFO. The defense also presented two affidavits co-authored by five board-certified ABFO odontologists. Each of the experts agreed that any testimony regarding the bitemarks, based on the current science, would no longer be incriminating.

David admitted that if he testified at Denton’s trial based on the recent advancements in science, his testimony would have been different.

Brzozowski testified that at the time of Denton’s trial, the testimony given by David was permissible. However, by 2019, saying that an injury was probably a bitemark was no longer a permitted conclusion by ABFO guidelines.

“He [David] testified that Ms. Denton was the probable biter of Mr. Garner and that Mr. Garner was the probable biter of Ms. Denton. And today we would not testify as to a probabilistic association,” Brzozowski said.

She said she had reviewed photographs of the injuries and concluded there was “insufficient evidence to determine that either of these injuries are human bite marks.”

Freeman testified that under the current AFBO guidelines, David’s trial testimony concerning probability would be “a misrepresentation of what the underlying science supports.” He said that in his opinion, neither injury was a bitemark at all.

On Feb. 7, 2020, Denton's conviction was vacated with assistance from the Innocence Project. Judge Gillis granted the defense motion, vacated Denton’s convictions, and ordered a new trial.

“The defense testimony and evidence in this case is profound and leads one to conclude that bitemark evidence is no longer a valid subject of scientific inquiry unless it can exonerate one or exclude a particular person,” Judge Gillis wrote.

The judge noted that “David admitted that, today, he would not even compare the marks on [Garner] with the teeth of Denton, because it is uncertain as to what caused the injury at all.”

Moreover, Judge Gillis said, “This record is clear that the expert opinion evidence has changed. Additionally, it is clear that the ABFO guidelines changed due to the realization that bitemark evidence is inherently unreliable.”

He said that the ABFO’s recognition of the inadequacies of bitemark evidence "is profound and undisputed." He added that the bitemark evidence presented in Denton' s trial "was not competent evidence.”

On April 8, 2020, more than 15 years after her arrest, Denton was released pending a retrial.

On September 9, 2026, Ware County Superior Court Judge J. Kelly Brooks dismissed all of the charges against Denton.

In a one-page ruling, Judge Brooks declared that “the State does not believe there is sufficient evidence likely to obtain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Judge Brooks noted that without the bitemark evidence, “the only evidence linking [Denton] to the murder was the testimony of a single witness [Jones] who testified that [Denton] admitted to the murder. However, a review of the trial transcript shows that this witness was effectively impeached at trial and had highly dubious credibility.”"

The entire entry can be read at: 

https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/20330

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

November 12: Sam Hallam: UK: "Someone to Blame." New podcast on this troubling UK case of Identification - and so much more - gone terribly wrong; No evidence, no CCTV footage, and he'd heard that witnesses who claimed to have seen him at the scene had changed their story. Oh, yes. No compensation, Even to this day. As Simon Hattingstone reports in the Guardian: "In court, the prosecution called two witnesses who had placed Hallam at the scene in statements given to the police. One of the girls who had confronted him in the street said she had seen him walking away from the fight, but under cross-examination she admitted that she couldn’t be sure it was Hallam. A friend of the victim, she said that somebody had mentioned Hallam’s name and she “just wanted someone to blame”. In 2012, a play was made about Hallam’s case called Someone to Blame."

Podcast Episode: October 17, 2026: Wrongly Convicted: The case of Sam Hallam and the fight for justice. UK true crime podcast: 

https://ow.ly/OBvn5103iww

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (Guardian): "Did Hallam think the campaign to free him would be successful? “By now I was not fully confident I was going to go home. I couldn’t be after everything that happened to me. I’d already been arrested, charged, convicted and lost an appeal.” His first appeal, a year after conviction, was on the grounds of lack of evidence and witnesses changing their story at trial. The appeal court judges believed that the witnesses had been telling the truth initially despite what they said in court."

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: (Guardian): "A month after his father’s death, astonishing information was uncovered. Although the police had taken Hallam’s phone for evidence, they had not bothered to search through it. The new investigation by Thames Valley police did the basic work that the Metropolitan police failed to do in the first place. The phone contained photos that Hallam had taken at his grandmother’s house on the afternoon of the murder and photos of him with his father at the local pub in the evening. Neither Hallam’s father nor his grandmother had remembered this, making Winstone’s point about alibis all the more pertinent. His phone also revealed that he and Harrington had been playing football that week – but one night later. Finally, the phone showed that while his co-defendants had been in touch with each other multiple times just before the incident, Hallam had spoken to only one of them over a three-month period. The campaign to free him uncovered nine witnesses who said he was not at the scene."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: (Guardian):  "Hallam says he will only feel free once the government accepts that he deserves compensation. He has now been to the court of appeal twice, and to the supreme court. In July he went to the European court of human rights, supported by Foot and the eminent civil rights lawyer Marcia Willis Stewart; they expect the judgment next year. “This happened to me in 2004. I’m still going to court for the same case 19 years later." (Publisher's note: He lost in the European Court and remains uncompensated to this day. HL); 

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STORY: "At 17, I was jailed for a murder I didn’t commit – and spent seven life-changing years in prison," by Simon Hattenstone, published by The Guardian, on November 7, 2023. (Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian.)

The first Sam Hallam heard of the crime that would cost him seven years of his life was when two girls approached him in the street. They told him that they knew what had happened – there had been a street brawl two days earlier in east London involving about 40 people and he had attacked a young man who was now dead. Hallam, then 17 and with no criminal convictions, was bewildered. He hadn’t even been there, let alone attacked the victim, a popular 21-year-old trainee chef called Essayas Kassahun. It worried him enough to ask his brother whether he should talk to the police. His brother told him it was just a groundless rumour, and advised him that there was no need to go to the police but he should steer clear of the area.

It was a week after the incident in October 2004 when four or five police officers turned up at his mother’s flat. He told them that he knew why they were there and that it must be a mix up. He was arrested and taken to Belgravia police station. “That was devastating for me,” Hallam says. But he wasn’t worried about the outcome. He simply wasn’t there. He would explain everything, tell them what he was doing and be released in a couple of hours.

But that didn’t happen. It turned out he was mistaken about his alibi – he had said he thought he’d been playing football with his friend Timothy Harrington, but Harrington told the police he’d not seen him that week. The police said he had deliberately provided a fake alibi. He was held at the station for two days, then charged and remanded to Feltham young offender institution, where he spent a year. “I got charged and that was more devastating. Then I got remanded and that was even more devastating. It was just devastating event after devastating event.” What kept him going was the knowledge that his case would come to trial and he would be cleared. There was no evidence, no CCTV footage, and he’d heard that witnesses who claimed to have seen him at the scene had changed their story. 

Eight people stood trial for the murder of Kassahun. The jury at the Old Bailey heard that the attack was an act of revenge by a group of youths, known as the Hoxton Biker Boys because they rode BMX bikes, against another group who lived a mile away in Whitecross. The murder was a tragedy in multiple ways. Kassahun, whose fatal head injuries were caused by a knife or a baseball bat with a screw protruding at one end, was not the target of the attack. He had simply tried to save a friend who had apparently “stared down” one of the group in an earlier incident.

In court, the prosecution called two witnesses who had placed Hallam at the scene in statements given to the police. One of the girls who had confronted him in the street said she had seen him walking away from the fight, but under cross-examination she admitted that she couldn’t be sure it was Hallam. A friend of the victim, she said that somebody had mentioned Hallam’s name and she “just wanted someone to blame”. In 2012, a play was made about Hallam’s case called Someone to Blame.

The second witness was also a friend of the victim. In his first police statement he described a white boy on a silver BMX who pulled out a baseball bat with a protruding screw. Hallam did not even own a bike at the time. This witness later gave a second statement also naming Hallam. But in court he repeatedly said he had not seen the attacker’s face because he was wearing a hoodie or top wrapped tight around his face, and all he knew was that he had blondish hair. (Hallam’s hair is brown.) When asked why he had named Hallam, he said he was upset because his friend had just died and he’d been given Hallam’s name by the first witness.

Harrington, called as a witness for the prosecution, told the court he had made a mistake and now thought he actually had been with Hallam on the night of the murder. The prosecution then treated him as a hostile witness, cross-examining him and exposing his inconsistencies. Hallam still believed he couldn’t be found guilty – the case against him was nonsense. But after seven weeks he was convicted of murder, conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm and violent disorder and sentenced to a minimum of 12 years in prison. Twenty-year-old Bullabek Ringbiong was also convicted of murder. “My legs collapsed after the first verdict,” Hallam says. “I can’t remember anything else that was said. That night I started to process it in Feltham. I was thinking: I’m going to be here for a long time.”

Eighteen years later, we meet at the offices of Appeal, a charity and law practice that fights miscarriages of justice. He is accompanied by his lawyer Matt Foot, a co-director of Appeal. Hallam is wearing a smart jacket, has a sharp haircut and at 36 could pass for a man in his mid-20s. He admits he is young for his age – he never got the opportunity to grow up as he should have done.

As a 17-year-old in jail, he was small and naive, the perfect target for bullying. “I was a kid, just out of school. No life experience at all. People saw my vulnerability when I got there. That made it worse for me because they preyed on the vulnerable. People take advantage of that, try to get stuff out of you – for example in the canteen. I got beaten up a lot.”

How did he cope? He didn’t initially, he says. For the first time in his life, he experienced depression, though he didn’t know what it was back then. “I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t get of my bed, wouldn’t wash.” Then he started to fight back – literally. That was the only way. “I got jumped in the first two months I was there, and that’s when people said: ‘You need to say sorry,’ and I was like: ‘I’m not going to say sorry for being jumped!’ Once I stood my ground nothing happened to me after that. If you give in to them, they’ve got you where they want you.”

Hallam had another advantage – his fellow prisoners believed he was innocent. Some of those who had been at the fight that ended in Kassahun’s murder were now in jail alongside him. They knew Hallam hadn’t been present and spread the word. Over time, he made friends. Initially he had assumed his fellow inmates were “the worst of the worst” but his opinion changed. “Many of them committed bad crimes but were good people. You can’t judge them for the crime they committed otherwise you wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. If I hadn’t had other people around me when I was in there, I wouldn’t have been able to survive. I got through because of the friends I made in there.”

It’s not surprising that people looked out for him. Hallam is likable, ebullient, polite and funny. Whenever he gets the chance to laugh (telling me how his nine-year-old son Thierry, named after the Arsenal legend Thierry Henry, has just become a Manchester City fan; or explaining that his cat Jéff’s name is pronounced with a soft J and has an acute accent because he looks French) he explodes into a joyous cackle.

Away from prison, family and friends fought for him, led by the miscarriage of justice campaigner Paul May, whose investigations helped get the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Bridgewater Four overturned. They did all they could to keep the case in the news. When Hallam was moved to Aylesbury prison in Buckinghamshire, they turned up outside the prison in an open-top bus to celebrate his birthday. “That didn’t go down well at the prison. It rained that day, too!”

The actor Ray Winstone, an uncle of his best friend, fronted an episode of ITV’s Tonight programme in 2007, insisting Hallam was innocent. He interviewed witness after witness who confirmed Hallam wasn’t at the scene and explained how easy it is to get your alibi wrong.

The thing is, Foot says, Hallam didn’t even say he was definitely playing football with his friend. “Sam said in the statement: ‘I believe I was playing football with my friend Timmy.’ I don’t think it was a bad statement, but then he’s portrayed as a liar by the prosecution.”

Did Hallam think the campaign to free him would be successful? “By now I was not fully confident I was going to go home. I couldn’t be after everything that happened to me. I’d already been arrested, charged, convicted and lost an appeal.” His first appeal, a year after conviction, was on the grounds of lack of evidence and witnesses changing their story at trial. The appeal court judges believed that the witnesses had been telling the truth initially despite what they said in court.

At the age of 21, Hallam was moved to Bullingdon prison in Oxfordshire. He says the environment was less violent than at previous jails. “People took me under their wing. Older men in their 40s and 50s such as my friend Bez, who’s 55 now. Me and him did everything together – we got a job together and went to the gym together.” He got an NVQ Level 3 in printing and worked as a lithographic printer for three years in prison. The routine – food, work, gym – helped him get through the days.

But it was a struggle. While he was in prison both his grandmothers died. In October 2010, Hallam hit rock bottom when his father, Terry, took his own life aged 56. For Hallam, the timing made the tragedy even worse. The previous day, the Independent had reported that Hallam was likely to be cleared at a second appeal; his father was found with the newspaper cutting in his pocket. Sam’s mother, Wendy Cohen, has said that the suicide was a result of the pressures of dealing with their son’s wrongful imprisonment. Hallam was told of his father’s death by the prison chaplain and he attended the funeral. “He was breaking his heart and couldn’t even wipe his eyes or nose, because he was handcuffed both sides,” Wendy told me in 2013.

Hallam can’t find the words when I ask him about his father’s suicide today. “Just confusing … confusing … Yeah.” He comes to an anguished stop. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to talk about this. Sorry.”

A month after his father’s death, astonishing information was uncovered. Although the police had taken Hallam’s phone for evidence, they had not bothered to search through it. The new investigation by Thames Valley police did the basic work that the Metropolitan police failed to do in the first place.

The phone contained photos that Hallam had taken at his grandmother’s house on the afternoon of the murder and photos of him with his father at the local pub in the evening. Neither Hallam’s father nor his grandmother had remembered this, making Winstone’s point about alibis all the more pertinent. His phone also revealed that he and Harrington had been playing football that week – but one night later. Finally, the phone showed that while his co-defendants had been in touch with each other multiple times just before the incident, Hallam had spoken to only one of them over a three-month period. The campaign to free him uncovered nine witnesses who said he was not at the scene.

On 16 May 2012, the case finally returned to the court of appeal for a second time. In the morning Hallam’s team, led by Foot and barrister Henry Blaxland QC, argued that the convictions were unsafe. Immediately after lunch, at 2pm, the prosecution announced it would not contest the appeal.

“It was a very dramatic moment,” Foot says. “The whole of the public gallery just went ‘Yeeeeaaaaaaaah!’, like some football roar. I’ve never heard anything like it in court – a mix of anger and relief – and it went on for ages.” He smiles at the memory and looks at Hallam. “Do you remember?”

“Yeah. Just by his body language, I knew what the prosecution barrister was going to say,” Hallam says. “The judge asked if I knew what was going on. I was aware, but I was just in bewilderment really.”

His convictions were overturned. Within a week he had found himself a job and seemed to be coping well. But gradually the enormity of what had happened began to sink in. He had spent seven years imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit; his father had killed himself while he was in prison; he no longer knew how to function in the free world. Often, he wished he was back in prison where life was less complicated and everybody appeared to be on his side. “This is the weird thing. When I talk to friends who I was inside with, often we’re laughing: ‘Do you remember this, do you remember that?’” There was a camaraderie? “Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He asks if there is something wrong with a person who misses prison.

Then he was hit with another injustice. By 2014 he still hadn’t been paid compensation for his wrongful conviction. Although the CPS had thrown in the towel at the appeal, justice secretary Chris Grayling had refused any payment under a new test that required proof of innocence “beyond all reasonable doubt” – an impossibly high bar for almost anyone in Hallam’s situation to clear. His legal team is challenging the test on the basis that it breaches the presumption of innocence.

Despite having his conviction quashed, he has come to feel that the establishment does not really believe he was innocent. The money would be useful, he says – he lost seven years of income in prison, he’s not in a fit state to work now, he needs money for therapy and he has to support Thierry. But, he says, the compensation is about so much more than money. “For me it’s more an acceptance of the wrongdoing and what they need to put right.”

After his release, Hallam’s mental health deteriorated. His post-traumatic stress disorder intensified, he suffered from depression again, became withdrawn, struggled with relationships and was unable to work. “I’ve got really low,” he says. “I have never tried to take my life but I’ve had suicidal thoughts.” Sometimes he only feels understood by people who have also suffered a miscarriage of justice. He mentions Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six and Patrick Maguire, who was jailed at 14 as part of the Maguire Seven – both had their convictions overturned in 1991. “I can speak to them because I know they’ve been through it.” Last year he went to Scotland to meet members of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (Mojo), a support group. “We had a group therapy session and you just feel a connection with everyone there.”

But back home, he says, he has become dysfunctional in ways that he didn’t even realise until it was pointed out to him. “You’ve painted your room grey, like a cell, haven’t you?” Foot says.

“Yes, and I sleep in my living room. I never go to bed. My friend said to me: ‘You’ve recreated that environment to put yourself at peace because that’s become a part of you.’”

But it’s more complicated than that. He has created a cell that he’s desperate to escape from. “I didn’t lock my front door for six months. I took my doors off, too. I did it without noticing.”

Hallam says he will only feel free once the government accepts that he deserves compensation. He has now been to the court of appeal twice, and to the supreme court. In July he went to the European court of human rights, supported by Foot and the eminent civil rights lawyer Marcia Willis Stewart; they expect the judgment next year. “This happened to me in 2004. I’m still going to court for the same case 19 years later.”

To go through what Hallam has been through and to retain your humanity takes some doing. I could imagine him going around the country educating people about miscarriages of justice, I tell him. He smiles. “In the long run that’s what I want to do. If I can possibly make something positive out of what I’ve been through, talking and stuff.” But first of all, he says, he’s got a fight to win. “Until this whole court thing is over I can’t move on.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org"

The entire story can be read at: 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/07/jailed-for-murder-i-didnt-commit-spent-seven-life-changing-years-in-prison

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

November 12: Charles McCrory: McCrory; Junk bite-mark 'science.' Part 2: A classic report on this still unresolved junk bite-mark 'science case, in which journalists Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith note that "there's a junk science crisis in US criminal convictions - and point out that US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer "calls it out' in this Alabama case... "Sotomayor joined her colleagues in declining to review the case, writing separately to explain. “I vote to deny this petition because due process claims like McCrory’s have yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts,” she wrote. “Legislatures concerned with wrongful convictions based on faulty science, however, need not wait for this Court to address a constitutional remedy.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY:  (2024):“We appreciate Justice Sotomayor recognizing that Charles McCrory was convicted based on bitemark evidence that science has condemned and that the expert who testified against him has recanted,” McCrory’s lawyers wrote in an email to The Intercept. “But today an innocent man remains in prison, where he has been for almost 40 years. We will continue to fight for Mr. McCrory in the federal courts and call upon the State of Alabama to rectify this injustice.""

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "She notes that the “wholesale reevaluation” of forensics began with a congressionally mandated review by the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2009 issued a landmark report calling out nearly all forensic practices as scientifically unsound. The report included harsh criticism of bite-mark evidence. In 2016, those concerns were reiterated in a bombshell report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body that provides nonbinding recommendations to the U.S. president. The advisory council noted that bite-mark analysis would never likely pass scientific muster. Since then, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued its own exhaustive report finding the same."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "But just because some people were questioning bite-mark evidence in the early 2000s doesn’t mean that the scientific consensus had changed by then. It had not. And as The Intercept has reported, the battle over bite-mark evidence and other forms of junk science, continues to this day. This makes it difficult for people like McCrory who seek to challenge their convictions based on new evidence. “Because science evolves slowly rather than in conclusive bursts,” Sotomayor wrote, it is hard to pinpoint when the science has truly changed and thus, when the issue should be raised on appeal. “Unlike a murder weapon left in an abandoned warehouse, forensic science does not lie around waiting for sudden discovery.” And when scientific evidence is debunked, it’s a unique and ground-shaking event that needs addressing. “Evidence that an entire mode of forensic analysis has no scientific basis, however, is of a different category from evidence that might call into question a witness’s credibility or motive to testify.”

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PASSSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: “Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases.” Sotomayor’s statement is a big deal, said Fabricant, who also wrote a book on junk forensic science. “Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases, and the failure of lower courts to take remedial action to address these all too common miscarriages of justice.”

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STORY: "There's a junk science crisis in criminal convictions. Sonia Sotomayor calls it out in Alabama bite-mark case," by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith (Two extraordinary journalists  who report on America's criminal justice system)  published by The Intercept, on July 10, 2024;

GIST: Is there a  constitutional right not to be convicted based on junk science? For years, the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to directly grapple with that question — so much so that Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently said that Congress and state legislatures should tackle the problem now instead of waiting on the courts to fix it.

On July 2, the court unanimously declined to review the case of Charles McCrory, who was convicted in Alabama in 1985 for the murder of his wife, based almost exclusively on bogus bite-mark testimony. Bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited by scientists and, to date, is behind at least 39 wrongful convictions or indictments.

Bite-mark evidence is among a host of problematic, scientifically questionable forensic practices widely used in the criminal legal system. While a number of forensic practitioners have acknowledged the problem and sought to get their disciplines on firmer scientific footing, the law has not caught up. Ostensibly, courts are supposed to vet forensic evidence before trial, though because judges are not scientists — and most lack any science training — this is rarely effective, and they often allow even the most questionable science into evidence.

For people like McCrory subsequently convicted based on junk science, there is often no straightforward way for the courts to revisit or correct old cases based on outdated and debunked forensic practices. The law favors finality, so once someone is sent to prison, it becomes difficult to challenge a conviction based on junk science, and judges often deny appeals based on procedural matters without ever engaging with those flaws.
While the Supreme Court has occasionally acknowledged this problem, among her colleagues, Sotomayor was alone in calling out the crisis it has created. In a statement alongside the denial of McCrory’s appeal, Sotomayor described his case as a symptom of a broader problem.

“Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”

“This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” Sotomayor wrote. “Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”

To date, a handful of states have created a direct avenue of appeal for defendants convicted based on junk or debunked science. Texas was first, and Sotomayor notes that the statute has been used to exonerate a man named Steven Mark Chaney, who was convicted on bogus bite-mark evidence. California has a similar statute, which was used to exonerate Bill Richards, also convicted on discredited bite-mark analysis.

“These statutes,” Sotomayor wrote, “create an efficient avenue for innocent people convicted based on forensic science that the scientific community has now largely repudiated.”

A Flimsy Piece of Evidence

Throughout the nearly four decades since his wife’s murder, McCrory has maintained his innocence. In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s case against him. The case has since attracted additional attention and media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. 

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

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives searched McCrory’s home and car and found nothing to connect him to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two bedroom windows that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.

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

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

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

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown also presented testimony from two leading forensic dentists who were once bite-mark true believers but now admitted that the discipline lacked any scientific underpinning and was not valid evidence. They agreed to testify for free, they told the court, because they felt they had a duty to correct the record. Dr. Cynthia Brzozowski, a veteran forensic dentist from New York, told the court that she felt an “ethical and civic responsibility” to testify in cases like McCrory’s.

In response, prosecutors presented no evidence and instead insisted that McCrory was guilty based on the same case presented at trial, including the bite mark — which they now termed “teeth marks” — implying that this was a separate and valid discipline. It is not. Regardless, prosecutor Grace Jeter argued that, even if Souviron had not testified for the state, jurors could have looked at the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that the wounds were caused by McCrory’s teeth. In other words, the jury would have been free to engage in its own expert-free junk science.

In the end, Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short agreed with the state, denying McCrory’s request for a new trial. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his decision. When McCrory’s lawyers asked the court to reconsider — in part because one of the justices had previously defended McCrory’s conviction while working as a prosecutor — the court simply reissued its opinion, complete with a typo that appeared in the original, along with a note saying that the judge had now recused herself.

McCrory’s team then appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week denied review.

In their petition to the high court, McCrory’s lawyers asked the justices to consider two questions: whether the right to due process precludes a judge from deliberating on the appeal of a case they’d previously worked on, and whether there is a “due process right not to be convicted based on forensic evidence later shown to be fundamentally unreliable.”

Sotomayor joined her colleagues in declining to review the case, writing separately to explain. “I vote to deny this petition because due process claims like McCrory’s have yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts,” she wrote. “Legislatures concerned with wrongful convictions based on faulty science, however, need not wait for this Court to address a constitutional remedy.”

She notes that the “wholesale reevaluation” of forensics began with a congressionally mandated review by the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2009 issued a landmark report calling out nearly all forensic practices as scientifically unsound. The report included harsh criticism of bite-mark evidence. In 2016, those concerns were reiterated in a bombshell report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body that provides nonbinding recommendations to the U.S. president. The advisory council noted that bite-mark analysis would never likely pass scientific muster. Since then, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued its own exhaustive report finding the same.

For all intents and purposes, bite-mark evidence is dead — except in many courts, including in Alabama, which refuse to consider its status when evaluating appeals such as McCrory’s. In part, the problem is that statutes outlining post-conviction procedures were written prior to scientific advancements and do not contemplate the evisceration of an entire field of practice, leaving countless defendants convicted on junk science without any meaningful avenue to challenge their convictions.

Alabama’s prosecutors argue, first, that courts approved the use of bite-mark evidence in the 1980s, and so, in theory, it remains legitimate. Second, they argue that McCrory should have raised this issue years ago — back in 2002, in fact, when his lawyers first found a Newsweek article that questioned bite-mark evidence. In other words, their argument isn’t necessarily that bite-mark evidence is good or even valid, but rather, that Alabama law still recognizes the discipline, and there’s nothing new in McCrory’s appeals that changes that. Souviron’s affidavit recanting his testimony is too little, too late.

But just because some people were questioning bite-mark evidence in the early 2000s doesn’t mean that the scientific consensus had changed by then. It had not. And as The Intercept has reported, the battle over bite-mark evidence and other forms of junk science, continues to this day.

This makes it difficult for people like McCrory who seek to challenge their convictions based on new evidence. “Because science evolves slowly rather than in conclusive bursts,” Sotomayor wrote, it is hard to pinpoint when the science has truly changed and thus, when the issue should be raised on appeal. “Unlike a murder weapon left in an abandoned warehouse, forensic science does not lie around waiting for sudden discovery.”

And when scientific evidence is debunked, it’s a unique and ground-shaking event that needs addressing. “Evidence that an entire mode of forensic analysis has no scientific basis, however, is of a different category from evidence that might call into question a witness’s credibility or motive to testify.”

“Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases.”

Sotomayor’s statement is a big deal, said Fabricant, who also wrote a book on junk forensic science. “Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases, and the failure of lower courts to take remedial action to address these all too common miscarriages of justice.”

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, McCrory’s other lawyer, have filed an appeal in federal district court raising the same concerns they brought to the Supreme Court. While Alabama is arguing that the appeal should be tossed out, Sotomayor seems to be nodding to the district court to give McCrory’s case a thorough vetting.

“We appreciate Justice Sotomayor recognizing that Charles McCrory was convicted based on bitemark evidence that science has condemned and that the expert who testified against him has recanted,” McCrory’s lawyers wrote in an email to The Intercept. “But today an innocent man remains in prison, where he has been for almost 40 years. We will continue to fight for Mr. McCrory in the federal courts and call upon the State of Alabama to rectify this injustice.""

The entire commentary can be read at: 

bite-mark-supreme-court-sotomayor

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;