July 27: Devin Bennett: Mississippi: (A doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West (need I say more?) case): Question of the day: Asked on Reason by writer.historian James McWilliams: "Will This Mississippi Man on Death Row Get a Chance To Prove His Innocence?"..."Will This Mississippi Man on Death Row Get a Chance To Prove His Innocence?".. It was early in the morning on August 25, 2000. As Devin Bennett tells it, he put his 10-week-old son Brandon in a car seat and put the car seat on his bed—and then, as the father dozed in and out of sleep, Brandon fell. The baby didn't appear to be hurt in the immediate aftermath of the fall, Bennett says, but hours later he noticed the boy was having trouble breathing. He rushed him to a hospital in Rankin County, Mississippi, where Brandon's heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing. After being transferred to another hospital, Brandon died."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Two and a half years later, a jury found Bennett guilty of capital murder and felonious child abuse and sentenced him to death. The medical examiners responsible for Brandon's autopsy—doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West, a pathologist and an odontologist who often worked together—presented evidence that the fatal injuries resulted from a kind of nonaccidental trauma that, at the time, was considered a sound medical diagnosis. Their autopsy report, written by Hayne, cited "changes consistent with concurrent shaken baby syndrome." Hayne and West reached this conclusion because the classic "shaken baby syndrome triad"—bleeding around the brain, bleeding behind the eyes, and brain swelling—were evident in Brandon. At the time, the triad was considered solid evidence of shaken baby syndrome. Bennett has been fighting to prove his innocence since 2002."

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STORY: "Will This Mississippi Man on Death Row Get a Chance To Prove His Innocence?, by James McWilliams, published by Reason, on July 24, 2026. (James McWilliams is a writer and historian who teaches at Texas State University. His 2025 book The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography.)

SUB-HEADING: "Recent court rulings in Louisiana and Texas give hope to Devin Bennett." 

GIST: "It was early in the morning on August 25, 2000. As Devin Bennett tells it, he put his 10-week-old son Brandon in a car seat and put the car seat on his bed—and then, as the father dozed in and out of sleep, Brandon fell.

The baby didn't appear to be hurt in the immediate aftermath of the fall, Bennett says, but hours later he noticed the boy was having trouble breathing. He rushed him to a hospital in Rankin County, Mississippi, where Brandon's heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing. After being transferred to another hospital, Brandon died.

Two and a half years later, a jury found Bennett guilty of capital murder and felonious child abuse and sentenced him to death. The medical examiners responsible for Brandon's autopsy—doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West, a pathologist and an odontologist who often worked together—presented evidence that the fatal injuries resulted from a kind of nonaccidental trauma that, at the time, was considered a sound medical diagnosis.


Their autopsy report, written by Hayne, cited "changes consistent with concurrent shaken baby syndrome."

Hayne and West reached this conclusion because the classic "shaken baby syndrome triad"—bleeding around the brain, bleeding behind the eyes, and brain swelling—were evident in Brandon. At the time, the triad was considered solid evidence of shaken baby syndrome.

Bennett has been fighting to prove his innocence since 2002. He and I speak frequently and frankly about his case, noting how it hinges on a flawed autopsy and the changing science around shaken baby syndrome. Fighting the state of Mississippi for decades to get an evidentiary hearing has generally left Bennett exhausted and frustrated.

But on June 30, he felt some hope.

The Case of Jimmie Duncan

On June 29, the Louisiana Supreme Court declared an inmate named Jimmie Duncan to be "factually innocent" after he spent 27 years on death row.

Duncan was convicted in 1998 of first-degree capital murder for sexually assaulting and drowning his girlfriend's 23-month-old toddler, Haley Oliveaux. Today he is free on bail—in part because, according to the Louisiana Supreme Court, "Duncan's conviction turned substantially on forensic evidence offered by experts whose reliability 'appears questionable at best.'"

When he read this decision, Devin Bennett took note. Those questionable experts were the same pathologist and odontologist who performed his son's autopsy: Hayne and West.

In the Duncan decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court cited "serious problems" with Haley's autopsy. Central to its concern was West's handling of alleged bite mark evidence on her body.

According to trial documents, West took a dental mold from Duncan and applied it to Haley's flesh—specifically over areas that he thought might have been bite marks—as part of his standard "comparative technique." A forensic expert later surmised that the bites West identified were not bites, but maybe bruises. The bite marks that West imprinted on Haley's body not only destroyed potential DNA evidence but were then identified by prosecutors as Duncan's actual bite marks.

The Louisiana court wrote that West's "'direct comparison technique' has been seriously questioned,' and that the [autopsy] video showed him 'forcibly thrusting' Duncan's dental molds into areas of Haley's face and body 'in a rather disturbing manner and to a rather disturbing degree.'"

A former head of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, Lowell Levine, testified that what West did was "a fraud, simply put." Even West himself later said of his own bite mark analysis in another case, "if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don't believe it's a system that's reliable enough to be used in court."

The takeaway: Whatever passed for acceptable forensic science when Duncan was convicted in 1998 has since been "seriously undermined" by "new, reliable, and noncumulative evidence" that, had it been presented during the original trial, could have resulted in Duncan being found not guilty. Duncan is now out of prison.

As for Haley Oliveaux? Duncan's attorneys, relying on testimony from Haley's doctor, now suspect she drowned in a bathtub after suffering a seizure.

The Case of Hayne and West

Hayne and West didn't just reach questionable conclusions through questionable practices. There was also the matter of their basic competence.

Catherine Legge is a journalist who has researched Hayne and West for years for a documentary on Jimmie Duncan. Hayne and West, she says, worked within a context that "unfortunately allowed them to be shitty at their job."

Hayne (now dead) and West (retired) used dubious forensic practices in a legal system that permitted and maybe even encouraged it. Their autopsies—as documented in The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, a 2018 book by Tucker Carrington and former Reason writer Radley Balko—raised suspicions among their peers that they were working in collusion with state prosecutors.

"Hayne and West were seen as tools for giving District Attorneys what they wanted," says Legge.


In its Duncan decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court wrote that Hayne and West's forensic work was "below the acceptable standard of care," "untruthful," "unreliable," "sloppy," and poorly documented. Forensic evidence they have produced in other cases has contributed to 9 convictions (8 in Mississippi) that were later overturned.

The sheer volume of their work encouraged sloppiness. Hayne worked on contract doing 8–9 autopsies a day, and anywhere from 1,000–1,600 a year. Medical forensic accreditation boards recommend a yearly total of around 250.

Under Hayne's contract, counties paid him by the body. Adding up the payments comes to a career total of around $10 million. At its height, his practice was doing 80 percent of Mississippi's autopsies. His practice was a factory.

Gradually—too slowly—the system took note of his sloppy work. In 2008, Mississippi prevented Hayne from doing autopsies. West was forced to leave the Board of Forensic Odontology in 2006. He often misidentified bite marks and, in one instance, claimed to have linked a suspect's teeth to a half-eaten sandwich. In another, he mistook crawfish bites on a body as human.

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Balko and Carrington write that Hayne and West "dominated the Mississippi death investigation system for twenty years. West testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands."

They also quote a former police chief in Mississippi: "There's no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne. There may even be some on death row." 
The Case of Devin Bennett

Devin Bennett is on death row at Parchman penitentiary primarily because of Hayne's testimony. He wants a jury to reconsider Brandon's autopsy in light of the fuller story we now have on Hayne and West.

In Bennett's case, several forensic experts have concluded that Hayne and West made critical interpretive errors in Brandon's autopsy. Most notably, they attributed over a dozen abrasions on Brandon's body to Devin's alleged abuse. Yet when Brandon arrived at the first hospital, a nurse found no unusual marks on Brandon's body and noticed no abnormalities on the head or rest of the body.

Had anyone explored Brandon's previous medical records (which were at the hospital) or checked with child protective services, they would have learned that Brandon never showed medical evidence of bruising. Bennett and his girlfriend never missed a pediatrician appointment. According to Bennett, the only potentially negative thing they had ever been accused of doing to Brandon was overfeeding him.

Between the initial emergency room visit and Brandon's transfer to another hospital, Brandon underwent more than one unsuccessful intubation, several resuscitation efforts, and organ harvesting. All cause bruising and abrasions.

Bennett's attorneys argue that what Hayne presented as evidence of shaken baby syndrome could have been bruising caused by medical professionals trying to save Brandon from the effects of a fall.

At one point at Bennett's trial, Hayne told the jury that Brandon had "two skull fractures," one on each side of his skull. The implication was that Bennett had inflicted them. But these fractures are nowhere to be found in Hayne's autopsy report. The only reference in that report to evidence of a fracture—"bilateral focal fractures"—were later determined by expert medical examiners to be "wormian bones," which are natural bone chips located in the sutures of the skull.

Hayne "just made shit up," one of Bennett's attorneys complained.
The Case of Robert Roberso

What Bennett needs for a new hearing is post-conviction scientific evidence so convincing that it would reasonably lead a jury to this different outcome. On this front, there is good news for Bennett.

In October 2025, the conservative Texas Court of Appeals halted the execution of Robert Roberson. They did so in part on the grounds that the scientific status of "shaken baby syndrome" has changed enough to stay his execution under Texas' "junk science law."

Roberson, who is autistic, was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, by shaken baby syndrome. But in the face of weakening evidence of shaken baby syndrome as a valid medical diagnosis, Texas not only halted Roberson's execution but is moving to provide him an evidentiary hearing.

New research reveals that the so-called triad of shaken baby symptoms—brain bleeding, bleeding behind the eyes, brain swelling—could have resulted from accidents, including birth-related subdural bleeds, adverse reactions to medications, medical preconditions, and, yes, a short fall from a bed.

Reflecting this shift, the American Academy of Pediatrics now officially recommends the term "abusive head trauma" over "shaken baby syndrome."

If Bennett's case was heard today, the most convincing explanation for Brandon's death might be a preexisting condition (a head injury from forceps at birth) combined with a short fall. (For Roberson's daughter, newer evidence suggests that Nikki died from a combination of pneumonia and a chronic precondition.)

In the wake of the Roberson and Duncan decisions, Bennett is seeking a new hearing for his case. It remains to be seen if Mississippi will give him that chance."

The entire story can be read at: 

james-mcwilliams

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;

July 26: Retired neonatal nurse Lucy Letby. UK: Question of the day: Why must we talk about Lucy Letby? The answer is made patently clear by teacher/writer/poet (and much else) Kate Clanchy, in her extraordinary Prospect Magazine commentary which deserves to be read by all - especially those who remain silent about Lucy Letby's plight. As Kate Clanchy reports: It took voices from abroad to interrupt the complacency: first an article by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker shone a light into the darkness of the COCH neonatal ward; then, after Mark McDonald started acting for Letby, came an astonishing intervention from Dr Shoo Lee of Canada, the expert whose paper on air embolism had initially been relied upon by Evans and the consultants. Dr Lee thought Evans had misused his discoveries. Now he went on to reassess the full set of indictments with an international panel of neonatal experts, all, like McDonald, working pro bono. “We did not find any murders,” Dr Lee said, presenting that review. Just a hospital that “would be shut down” were it in Canada. Since that report, the Thirlwall Inquiry, despite its early interdictions, has published more and more documentation to support Dr Lee’s thesis—and it has become ever clearer, even to the Sun newspaper, that the convictions are not safe."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "Only new evidence can count.  Letby’s team now believe they have that: new science over the insulin cases at the heart of the indictment, apparently overturning the tests at the time. Still, the CCRC will not say how many months or years Letby must wait. Meanwhile, the once-confident Thirlwall Inquiry is delaying its report.  Meanwhile, cases of babies who died a decade ago wait to be heard by the coroner, and all the parents of the children involved suffer torments.  Meanwhile, in Bronzefield Prison, Letby waits out the best years of her life, a very well-behaved prisoner, by all accounts, very tidy and constructive. Morris interviews several of her friends and colleagues and paints a picture of an ordinary, pleasant young woman, fond of cats and salsa dancing, dedicated to her job.  She was marked out as a scapegoat only by her tendency to report all accidents and mistakes, even by doctors, and by being, like Amanda Knox, conspicuously pretty."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY:  "We are lucky Letby is alive.   Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse indicted on very similar statistical mistakes to Letby, suffered a stroke while imprisoned and lived only 15 years after exoneration.  Sally Clark, the solicitor falsely convicted of killing her babies, drank herself to death four years after being freed.  Scapegoating, and I say this also for myself, is a deadly social force that has been much speeded up by digital information. We have to talk about it, and we have to talk about Lucy Letby, however hard it is to look at what we have done, however much noise it makes in the kitchen."

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COMMENTARY: "We need to talk about Lucy Letby," by writer  Kate Clanchy, published by Prospect Magazine, on June 25, 2026,

SUB-HEADING: "A new book highlights the inconsistencies behind the nurse’s conviction. When will the establishment give us doubters a hearing?"

GIST: "Let’s not talk about Lucy Letby, says my doctor friend.

 Not her trial and her 15 whole-life tariffs for murderous assaults on babies.

 Not in my kitchen. 

My psychiatrist friend bans the topic on her dog walk. 

Lady Justice Thirlwall, opening her 2024 inquiry into how Letby’s workplace failed to notice her crimes, dismissed questions about her guilt as “noise”.

My neonatologist friend Tariq, on the other hand, from the other side of the park, wants to talk of little else.

But he’s from South Africa, and it does tend to be outsiders like us who make a noise about Letby. 

This includes social upstarts such as the healthcare worker-turned-barrister Mark McDonald.

 Also people with deplorable politics: Nadine Dorries, David Davis, Peter Hitchens. 

Also scapegoats and jailbirds: Amanda Knox, who has recently produced an excellent podcast about Letby, vindicated Libor trader Tom Hayes… and me.

We’d just disagree, says my doctor friend. 

We’d get upset. 

It’s true the fight has been long and desperate. 

On social media, the camps defending and attacking Letby have acquired battle tags—Letby Truther, Guilter, Pitchforker—and are worn, ragged and defensive as any army at the end of a siege. 

Some individuals have been lost for months to hand-to-hand combat, their utterances so specialised they have become encoded.

Others, though, have been spurred to extraordinary efforts of clarification. 

Dr Phil Hammond of Private Eye, who began his reportage complacent about Letby’s guilt, has now written 38 lucid, thoughtful articles about her innocence.

The Brazilian journalist Cleuci de Oliveira has investigated, informed, persuaded and never once lost her temper in three years of taking abuse as @LucyLetbyTrials on X. 

Christopher Morris began as a garrulous but indefatigable author of YouTube explainer videos about Letby and has now produced this compendious, inelegant, shamelessly partisan, yet useful and admirable book.

Morris shows us the Letby case as a road trip through the largest, scariest mountains of unhappiness in Broken Britain, a tour of our national embarrassments. 

His relentless interviewing—70 individuals are included—produces mounds of detail, but also convinces us that the devil is in such details, and that the only way out, like going on a bear hunt, is through.

We start the tour with Our Holy NHS.  (National Health Service. HL)

The year is 2016, and we are in one of its most run-down hospitals, the Countess of Chester (COCH). 

The neonatal unit, as Morris meticulously details, has suffered a decade of austerity during which the typically cost-cutting, non-medical management had stripped the ward of many of its expensive, well-qualified nurses, leaving the 26-year-old Letby one of the most senior, often with responsibility for looking after the sickest babies. 

She was the nurse the others phoned to ask scarily basic questions about procedures.

That’s not all. 

The infrastructure of the unit has been allowed to deteriorate until sewage drips from the ceiling and comes up the pipes of the bathroom.

 Cots are crowded together, machines don’t work and nor do door-swipe mechanisms. 

Next door, the maternity unit is performing as badly as any of Britain’s scandalous maternity units, sending through babies already suffering injuries and infections. 

The whole is presided over by consultants apparently so nonchalant that they only take two ward rounds a week (two a day is best practice), so cackhanded that an inquest found that a baby died at the hospital after doctors misplaced his breathing tube, and seemingly so arrogant that they insist, despite everything, on the unit being registered at a high grade and accepting very unwell babies.

It was perhaps unsurprising that the number of baby deaths spiked. In 2016, the hospital management commissioned an inquiry from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health which pointed out many of the factors above. 

In the meantime, the management had downgraded the unit so it took in less unwell babies—and the death rates moderated at once.

Around that time, though, some consultants had started to scapegoat Letby. 

When the unit was downgraded, one of them remembered that more than a year previously he had caught Letby standing idly by a cot containing a desaturating baby—though a contemporaneous note he wrote gives a different account. 

When this story was merged with other consultants’ concerns, Letby was put on desk duty and another inquiry into the deaths was commissioned. It found no evidence of deliberate harm.

Letby took out a grievance against the consultants. She won comprehensively

By now, we were deep in another plague of modern Britain: the toxic, absorbing, quasi-judicial, witch-hunt-friendly HR procedure. 

Spurred on by her furious parents,  Letby took out a grievance against the consultants. 

She won comprehensively. 

The consultants were found to have bullied her with their allegations and ordered to apologise.

 HR actions against the consultants were due to begin on the day they took their concerns to Cheshire Police.

One reason my doctor friend won’t let me talk about Letby is that she believes that nurses, as a class, habitually make complaints against doctors and are favoured by management, which is also riddled with nurses. 

Could the two COCH consultants who went to the police have felt injured in a similar way?

At the station, they seem to have been treated as impressive, convincing gentlemen.

The police were unconvinced by the two investigations and the grievance.

 In time, in fact, they would arrest some of the management on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter.

Letby was arrested at dawn and put in handcuffs. 

Her garden was dug up. 

Her garage was done over and her computer searched and every hospital case followed up. 

The police found a Post-it note on which, apparently on the instruction of her counsellor, Letby had written down her darkest fears—“I am evil I did this”—some handover notes which she said she had taken home by accident, some Facebook searches of the babies’ parents.

 At the hospital, there was the testimony of the consultants and Letby’s attendance on the sickest babies, but no direct evidence. No one in that very crowded unit had ever seen her do anything untoward.

Experts were contacted. 

Professor Jane Hutton, a statistician, was dropped from the investigation after explaining that the figures about Letby were complex.

 Dr Dewi Evans, a retired paediatrician who said he suspected deliberate harm within 10 minutes of reviewing the clinical notes, was retained. 

That is one of the things the Letby case reveals to us: our expert-witness system favours professionals paid to be adversarial over disinterested specialists.

Another is the power of the presiding judge in a trial, especially, in a high-profile case, over the press. 

In 2022, Letby began a 10-month trial in a glare of media interest. 

Judge James Goss granted anonymity to an unprecedented number of witnesses: not just to the babies and their families, but to nine clinical witnesses, including the consultant involved in the misplaced-intubation death examined at inquest. 

The workplace reports were never shown to the jury either, so the entire HR story and the possible motives it gave to Letby’s accusers were not paid sufficient attention.

 Letby herself, heavily medicated by now, was left to swing in the media’s wind.

And swing she did, with not only the tabloids sweating ghoulishly over her condemnation but also the BBC and the broadsheets. 

Only a month after the trial, after Peter Hitchens had raised the first doubt, a retrial on a single count was announced and UK public comment was shut down again in the interest of justice. All was as silent as my doctor friend’s kitchen. Not a peep of rudeness to be heard.

It took voices from abroad to interrupt the complacency: first an article by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker shone a light into the darkness of the COCH neonatal ward; then, after Mark McDonald started acting for Letby, came an astonishing intervention from Dr Shoo Lee of Canada, the expert whose paper on air embolism had initially been relied upon by Evans and the consultants. 

Dr Lee thought Evans had misused his discoveries. 

Now he went on to reassess the full set of indictments with an international panel of neonatal experts, all, like McDonald, working pro bono. 

“We did not find any murders,” Dr Lee said, presenting that review. Just a hospital that “would be shut down” were it in Canada.

Since that report, the Thirlwall Inquiry, despite its early interdictions, has published more and more documentation to support Dr Lee’s thesis—and it has become ever clearer, even to the Sun newspaper, that the convictions are not safe.

Only new evidence can count. Letby’s team now believe they have that

But that does not bring us any nearer to an appeal. 

If our hospitals are Oliver Twist’s workhouse and our courts foggy as Bleak House, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, set up in the wake of the Birmingham Six to assess miscarriages of justice, is the Circumlocution Office. 

The Court of Appeal was not interested in Dr Lee’s report because that evidence could, in theory, have been presented at the original trial.

 Only new evidence can count. 

Letby’s team now believe they have that: new science over the insulin cases at the heart of the indictment, apparently overturning the tests at the time. Still, the CCRC will not say how many months or years Letby must wait.

Meanwhile, the once-confident Thirlwall Inquiry is delaying its report. 

Meanwhile, cases of babies who died a decade ago wait to be heard by the coroner, and all the parents of the children involved suffer torments. 

Meanwhile, in Bronzefield Prison, Letby waits out the best years of her life, a very well-behaved prisoner, by all accounts, very tidy and constructive.

 Morris interviews several of her friends and colleagues and paints a picture of an ordinary, pleasant young woman, fond of cats and salsa dancing, dedicated to her job. 

She was marked out as a scapegoat only by her tendency to report all accidents and mistakes, even by doctors, and by being, like Amanda Knox, conspicuously pretty.

We are lucky Letby is alive. 

Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse indicted on very similar statistical mistakes to Letby, suffered a stroke while imprisoned and lived only 15 years after exoneration. 

Sally Clark, the solicitor falsely convicted of killing her babies, drank herself to death four years after being freed. 

Scapegoating, and I say this also for myself, is a deadly social force that has been much speeded up by digital information.

 We have to talk about it, and we have to talk about Lucy Letby, however hard it is to look at what we have done, however much noise it makes in the kitchen."

The entire story can be read at: 

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/74218/kate-clanchy-review-of-christopher-morris-reasonable-doubt-examining-the-case-of-lucy-letby

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;

July 26: Samuel Grasty, Morton Johnson and Derrick Chappell, known as the “Chester 3.”...The dissenting judge ruled that the new DNA evidence does not merely illustrate that the unknown person was in Nickens’ apartment that night, but also that it was “physically impossible” that any of the petitioners were present....But as. you will see below, the majority judges took a very technical approach to the circumstances in which a new trial may be granted, and in prison the three must linger... As Alex Rose reports in The Delaware County Daily Times, "Chappell and Grasty each received life sentences, while Johnson received a de facto life sentence of 99 years. They were 15, 20 and 18 years old, respectively, when the crime occurred. Chappell was later resentenced to 28 years to life after the U.S. Supreme Court retroactively changed the rules for sentencing minors. All three have spent decades in prison, but have maintained their innocence."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "Brennan heard from defense experts at two hearings in 2022 that showed none of the petitioners’ DNA was on anything tested in the victim’s home. That testing also revealed for the first time that Nickens assault likely came at the same time that she experienced some sexual activity, indicating she may have been raped and killed at the same time."

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STORY: "Chester 3’ denied new trials by state appeals court," by Reporter Alex Rose, published by The Delaware County Daily Times, on July 23, 2026.

GIST: "The Pennsylvania Superior Court has overturned a March 2024 order from Delaware County Common Pleas Court Judge Mary Alice Brennan granting new trials to a trio of men convicted in the 1997 murder of a 70-year-old Chester woman.

“The court finds that the new DNA results, if adopted by a jury, would likely compel a different verdict,” Brennan said in three subsequent identical opinions for Samuel Grasty, Morton Johnson and Derrick Chappell, known as the “Chester 3.”

But two of three Superior Court judges who reviewed the case found that Brennan’s analysis contravened clearly delineated rules for when a new trial may be granted. The standard, set by the state Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Murchison, requires taking the totality of the evidence into consideration, including that already entered at trial.

Grasty, 49; Johnson, 46; and Chappell, 44; were separately convicted in trials from 1998 to 2001 in the death of Henrietta Nickens inside her home on the 3200 block of West 10th Street in Chester on Oct. 10, 1997.\

Chappell and Grasty each received life sentences, while Johnson received a de facto life sentence of 99 years.

They were 15, 20 and 18 years old, respectively, when the crime occurred. Chappell was later resentenced to 28 years to life after the U.S. Supreme Court retroactively changed the rules for sentencing minors.

All three have spent decades in prison, but have maintained their innocence.

Brennan heard from defense experts at two hearings in 2022 that showed none of the petitioners’ DNA was on anything tested in the victim’s home.

That testing also revealed for the first time that Nickens assault likely came at the same time that she experienced some sexual activity, indicating she may have been raped and killed at the same time.

The Commonwealth had never charged the case as a sex crime, but rather as a burglary gone wrong. The appeals court decided the new evidence merely underscored what was already known: That another unknown individual had deposited DNA at the scene.

“This same information was previously considered by all three separate factfinders and rejected,” the majority opinion stated. “The post-conviction DNA tests results are thus cumulative of previously available and previously used evidence at trial.”

President Judge Anne E. Lazarus wrote in her dissent that the new DNA evidence does not merely illustrate that the unknown person was in Nickens’ apartment that night, but also that it was “physically impossible” that any of the petitioners were present.

Defense attorneys have vowed to continue pursuing all possible avenues to free their clients."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.delcotimes.com/2026/07/23/chester-3-denied-new-trials-by-state-appeals-court/

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;

July 25: Brandon Grimes: Baltimore, Maryland: Release: (State's Attorney Office): From our 'How's that for Chutzpah' (definition below) department: "In February 2018, the Defendant devised a scheme to fraudulently secure his release from prison, secure an exoneration, and defraud the State of Maryland of approximately $1,462,896 through the Office of Administrative Hearings. This scheme involved creating and submitting fake ballistics documents to the Circuit Court of Baltimore City. In March 2024, Defendant Brandon Grimes filed a petition for Writ of Actual Innocence (WAI) with the Baltimore City Circuit Court Clerk’s Office."

Chutzpah: Collins English Dictionary:   'Shameless audacity; impudence; brass,"

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BACKGROUND: According to charging documents obtained by WJZ Investigates, Grimes faked a ballistics report to show he did not kill Detective Troy Chesley in January 2007 and hoped to get hundreds of thousands of dollars as payment for being wrongly convicted.  Court records show that Grimes, in March 2024, filed a petition for writ of actual innocence with the Baltimore City Circuit Court. He alleged in 2018 that an assistant state's attorney "turned over to Grimes various pieces of newly discovered evidence she found, and amongst those documents was a ballistic report she claimed she found in a box somewhere." Grimes claimed Baltimore police suppressed that report, and a document labeled "confidential" showed he was shot by the same weapon that killed Detective Chesley, and therefore proved he was not the killer. The Conviction Integrity Unit found the Bullet Report was a fraud and forwarded the findings to the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Unit."

https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/convicted-grimes-chesley-baltimore-police-officer-found-guilty-fraud-prison/

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Deputy Chief Michael Leedy and Assistant State’s Attorney Keri Borzilleri of the State’s Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit prosecuted this case. “The attempts made by the Defendant to falsely exonerate himself and receive financial benefits not only put the accreditation of our world-class crime lab at risk, but also undermine every real petition of actual innocence that comes forward from wrongfully convicted individuals,” said State’s Attorney Ivan J. Bates. “Thanks to the diligent work of our Conviction Integrity Unit, this attempted deception was caught before a dangerous offender with a lengthy criminal record could be potentially released from incarceration and steal taxpayer dollars.”

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RELEASE: "Convicted Murderer Found Guilty of Forging BPD Crime Lab Reports in Attempt to Overturn Previous Conviction," released by State Attorney Ivan Bates,  on July 20, 2026.

SUB-HEADING: "Defendant Brandon Grimes was convicted of the 2008 murder of a Baltimore Police Detective."

GIST: Today, State’s Attorney Ivan J. Bates announced the conviction of Defendant Brandon Grimes who, following a three-day jury trial, was found guilty of evidence tampering, identity fraud and related charges for his attempt to secure an exoneration in order to be released from prison and receive financial benefits from the State of Maryland.

 The Defendant received a 10-year sentence as a result. 

At the time of his sentencing, the Defendant was already serving Life without parole plus 18 years for the 2008 fatal shooting of Baltimore City Police Detective Troy Lamont Chesley Sr. in the 4500 block of Fairfax Road on January 9, 2007. 

Deputy Chief Michael Leedy and Assistant State’s Attorney Keri Borzilleri of the State’s Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit prosecuted this case.

“The attempts made by the Defendant to falsely exonerate himself and receive financial benefits not only put the accreditation of our world-class crime lab at risk, but also undermine every real petition of actual innocence that comes forward from wrongfully convicted individuals,” said State’s Attorney Ivan J. Bates. “Thanks to the diligent work of our Conviction Integrity Unit, this attempted deception was caught before a dangerous offender with a lengthy criminal record could be potentially released from incarceration and steal taxpayer dollars.”

In February 2018, the Defendant devised a scheme to fraudulently secure his release from prison, secure an exoneration, and defraud the State of Maryland of approximately $1,462,896 through the Office of Administrative Hearings. 

This scheme involved creating and submitting fake ballistics documents to the Circuit Court of Baltimore City.

In March 2024, Defendant Brandon Grimes filed a petition for Writ of Actual Innocence (WAI) with the Baltimore City Circuit Court Clerk’s Office. 

In the petition, the Defendant falsely claimed that, in February of 2018, an Assistant State’s Attorney ‘turned over various pieces of newly discovered evidence she found, and amongst those documents was a ballistic report she claimed she found in some box somewhere...’ 

That petition goes on to falsely claim that the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) suppressed a ballistics report showing the Defendant was also a victim shot by the same weapon that killed Detective Chesley. 

To support these false claims, the Defendant referred to and attached ‘Exhibit 1A,’ which was a purported Bullet Report to show that both he and Detective Chesley were victims of the shooting that occurred in January 2007.

 The Defendant's WAI and exhibits were submitted to the Conviction Integrity Unit of the State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO).

The Conviction Integrity Unit determined the Bullet Report was a fraud and forwarded the findings to BPD’s Homicide Unit.

 The SAO and BPD investigation revealed several inconsistencies in the Defendant's Bullet Report, including the names and signatures of two firearms examiners who did not prepare or sign it.

 Additionally, the property numbers did not match and its style was inconsistent with that of an authentic ballistics report.

Further investigation would reveal that the Defendant discussed his scheme with several individuals in recorded phone calls made from prison, which included references to getting out of prison, securing money from the State, and fabricating documentation.

Since his 2008 conviction, the Defendant has filed numerous post-trial motions seeking release through different mechanisms. All have been denied by the Court."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.stattorney.org/media-center/press-releases/3302-convicted-murderer-found-guilty-of-forging-bpd-crime-lab-reports-in-attempt-to-overturn-previous-conviction

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;

July 24: Former Police Officer James Duckett: Florida: The Orlando Sun (Reporter Martin E. Comas) reports that attornies for the death row who is scheduled to die at noon Tuesday for the 1987 rape and drowning of an 11-year-old Lake County girl — are asking a federal court in Ocala to halt his execution and order additional DNA testing on the victim’s underwear, jeans and scrapings from her fingernails, The Orlando Sentinel reports, noting that: "New DNA testing, along with an evidentiary hearing on the results, would be an opportunity to know whether Duckett really killed the Mascotte girl on a spring night 39 years ago. “Mr. Duckett’s conviction is based entirely on circumstantial evidence,” said Brittney Lacy, one of Duckett’s three attorneys, in a brief filed with the U.S. District Court. No physical evidence links Duckett to Teresa McAbee’s murder, she added. Duckett, 68, has always maintained his innocence. His attorneys are requesting that the federal court order the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and state prosecutors to release the evidence so that it can be tested and compared to Duckett’s DNA." Duckett’s legal team filed a similar appeal to the Florida Supreme Court this week, including requesting a halt to his execution. But the Florida Supreme Court on Friday morning denied Duckett’s motion for a stay of execution, and called his appeal for more DNA testing “meritless.”

WORDS TO HEED: FROM OUR POST ON KEVIN COOPER'S  APPLICATION FOR POST-CONVICTION DNA TESTING; CALIFORNIA: (Applicable wherever a state resists DNA testing): "Blogger/extraordinaire Jeff Gamso's blunt, unequivocal, unforgettable message to the powers that be in California: "JUST TEST THE FUCKING DNA." (Oh yes, Gamso raises, as he does in many of his posts, an important philosophical question: This post is headed: "What is truth, said jesting Pilate."...Says Gamso: "So what's the harm? What, exactly, are they scared of? Don't we want the truth?" 

 https://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2018/06/kevin-cooper-2-california-application.html

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Those tests on semen and hair samples taken from Teresa’s underwear did not show with “a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that James Duckett either is or is not a contributor to the evidentiary DNA mixture,” according to a report by Dr. David Mittleman of Othram Inc, a private lab that conducted the testing. An evidentiary hearing requested by Duckett’s attorneys to probe the testing and results was denied by a Circuit Court judge in Lake County, who is overseeing the case. Duckett’s attorneys now say that additional testing of Teresa’s underwear, jeans, vaginal smears and scrapings from under her fingernails could be tested for DNA and then compared to Duckett. Those items are being held by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office. The federal court said it will consider Duckett’s request for additional testing, even as the Florida’s top court said that it would not. “Duckett was aware of the items he now wants tested when he filed his prior motion for DNA testing on March 5,2026 — more than four months ago,” according the state Supreme Court ruling. “He has failed to identify any valid reason he could not have requested this testing sooner.”

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STORY: "Former Florida police officer appeals to federal court for DNA testing, days before rescheduled execution," by Martin E. Comas, published by The Orlando Sentinel, on July 24, 2026. (Martin E. Comas covers Seminole County and its seven cities for the Orlando Sentinel. Martin is a University of Central Florida graduate with degrees in journalism and business administration. He is fluent in Spanish). 

SUB-HEADING: "James Aren Duckett, a former police officer convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in 1987, is scheduled to be put to death at Florida State Prison on March 31.)"

GIST: Attorneys for Florida death row inmate James Duckett — who is scheduled to die at noon Tuesday for the 1987 rape and drowning of an 11-year-old Lake County girl — are asking a federal court in Ocala to halt his execution and order additional DNA testing on the victim’s underwear, jeans and scrapings from her fingernails.

They say the new DNA testing, along with an evidentiary hearing on the results, would be an opportunity to know whether Duckett really killed the Mascotte girl on a spring night 39 years ago.

“Mr. Duckett’s conviction is based entirely on circumstantial evidence,” said Brittney Lacy, one of Duckett’s three attorneys, in a brief filed with the U.S. District Court. No physical evidence links Duckett to Teresa McAbee’s murder, she added.

Duckett, 68, has always maintained his innocence.


His attorneys are requesting that the federal court order the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and state prosecutors to release the evidence so that it can be tested and compared to Duckett’s DNA.

Duckett’s legal team filed a similar appeal to the Florida Supreme Court this week, including requesting a halt to his execution.

But the Florida Supreme Court on Friday morning denied Duckett’s motion for a stay of execution, and called his appeal for more DNA testing “meritless.”

Florida Attorney General’s Office said Teresa’s family had waited long enough for Duckett’s execution. He has had numerous appeals since his conviction.

“The people of Florida, as well as the surviving victims, deserve better than the excessive delays that now typically occur in capital cases,” according to the filing signed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. “Last minute stays of execution should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis first signed Duckett’s death warrant on Feb. 27. But the state supreme court stayed the execution on March 26, just days before he was first scheduled to be put to death, to allow an initial round of DNA testing and analysis requested by his attorneys. Such testing was not available at the time of his trial.

Those tests on semen and hair samples taken from Teresa’s underwear did not show with “a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that James Duckett either is or is not a contributor to the evidentiary DNA mixture,” according to a report by Dr. David Mittleman of Othram Inc, a private lab that conducted the testing.

An evidentiary hearing requested by Duckett’s attorneys to probe the testing and results was denied by a Circuit Court judge in Lake County, who is overseeing the case.

Duckett’s attorneys now say that additional testing of Teresa’s underwear, jeans, vaginal smears and scrapings from under her fingernails could be tested for DNA and then compared to Duckett. Those items are being held by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

The federal court said it will consider Duckett’s request for additional testing, even as the Florida’s top court said that it would not.

“Duckett was aware of the items he now wants tested when he filed his prior motion for DNA testing on March 5,2026 — more than four months ago,” according the state Supreme Court ruling. “He has failed to identify any valid reason he could not have requested this testing sooner.”

Just after 9 p.m. on May 11, 1987, Teresa asked her single mom if she could walk to a nearby convenience store on State Road 50 — about a block away from her home, inside a converted garage — to get a pencil to finish her homework, according to trial testimony.

Duckett — who was sitting in his patrol car across the street running radar — saw Teresa walk out of the store with three boys, including one who was 13 years old. The two then walked behind a dumpster at the side of the store.

Duckett pulled into the parking lot and called the two over to his patrol car to warn them about a city curfew. The boy’s uncle walked over from a nearby laundromat to take the boy home.

Duckett, who was living in the Sumter County community of Croom-A-Coochee, was indicted by a grand jury more than five months later. He turned himself in to the Lake County Jail soon after.

“I think we’ve got a good case,” then Lake Sheriff Noel Griffin Jr. said at the time. “We wanted to be careful and do it right. We didn’t want to make mistakes, and you just don’t solve these things overnight.”

Investigators discovered Teresa’s finger and palm prints, along with Duckett’s, on the hood of his patrol car.

Duckett — who was the only officer on duty that night in the small town — interviewed Teresa’s mother at the police station and later at her home that night after she reported her daughter missing around 11 p.m. Duckett printed up posters, and said he looked for her at the lake where her body was found. Investigators presented as evidence the unique tire imprints from Duckett’s patrol car on the dirt road leading to the lake.

At the trial, a woman testified that she witnessed Teresa get into the patrol car with Duckett and they drove away. But the woman later recanted her story and said she lied to investigators at the Lake County Jail after she was arrested for a probation violation and wanted to avoid more jail time.

Other witnesses testified they saw Teresa walk around the store alone and back home on Sunset Avenue.

Her body was found the next morning floating near the shore of a small lake less than a mile away. She had been raped and drowned. Marks on her neck showed she had been strangled.

Following the DNA testing done this spring, DeSantis re-issued a death warrant on July 15, days after the state supreme court lifted its stay.

Duckett’s attorneys say that the public is not harmed in waiting for a new round of DNA tests to determine with near finality if he is the killer.

“Mr. Duckett has explained that he wants nothing more than to have the evidence properly examined,” according to the federal court filing by his attorneys.

If Duckett’s execution by lethal injection is carried out Tuesday, it would be the first time in 62 years that two Florida inmates were put to death on the same day.

The other execution is scheduled that day is for Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, who was sentenced to death in 1987 for the murders of his former girlfriend’s parents in Pasco County.

In a separate court filing, Duckett and Occhicone on Thursday asked a federal court in Tallahassee to halt Tuesday’s execution, arguing the state’s unprecedented plans to execute both inmates on the same day violates several of their Constitutional rights, including a ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The lawsuit also argues that two executions in one day puts a tremendous amount of stress on prison officials because of the large amount of planning and procedures to avoid a botched execution.

“The inherent difficulties and concerns arising from the practice [of multiple executions in one day] has prompted several states to adopt rules expressly prohibiting it,” the lawsuit states. The state of Missouri, for example, allows only one execution per month.

In addition, executions in Florida are typically conducted at 6 p.m., allowing the inmate to meet with his family that morning. However, because Duckett’s execution is scheduled for noon, his final visit with his family would be between 9 a.m. and noon on Monday, more than 24 hours before his execution."

The entire story can be read at: 

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/07/24/duckett-appeals-to-federal-court-for-dna-testing-days-before-execution/

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;

July 24: James Duckett: Fort Lauderdale; Florida:Speed over science: His lawyers say Florida chose speed over science in rescheduling his executions, The David Vanguard (Author Shrema Verma) reports, noting that: "Attorneys for death row prisoner James Duckett argued this week that Florida is moving toward his July 28 execution after state officials chose DNA testing methods that prevented a complete forensic analysis of key biological evidence, a decision the defense contends undermines confidence in Duckett’s conviction. Duckett’s legal team, whose client was previously scheduled for execution on May 31, issued a new statement after Gov. Ron DeSantis rescheduled the execution for July 28."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Following the signing of Duckett’s first death warrant, Duckett was granted DNA testing of biological evidence that had never been examined using modern forensic technology. Rather than ensuring the use of a testing method that would allow the most complete analysis possible, the state urged the use of a laboratory that, according to the legal team, was not capable of performing the advanced Whole Genome Sequencing, or WGS, needed to fully analyze the degraded DNA evidence."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The state argued that its decision was based primarily on the need for speed and stated in court that it had “a strong interest in not having the execution delayed” and wanted testing to be completed “as soon as possible.” However, the legal team argued that the state’s position ignored expert testimony that another laboratory could perform the necessary WGS testing more quickly than the laboratory selected by the state to conduct what the attorneys described as an inferior test. By refusing to allow any laboratory other than the Florida agency to perform the testing, the legal team contended, the state destroyed the evidence most important to Duckett’s case by choosing a testing method and agency that it knew could not provide an accurate result."

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STORY: "Defence says Florida chose speed over science in rescheduled Duckett executions," by Shreya Verma, published by the Davis Vanguard, on July 21, 2026. "Shreya Verma is a second-year Political Science Major at the University of California, Irvine. She has previously served as an intern at the Fremont City Council, where she conducted research and co-authored a paper analyzing the impact of social issues, such as homelessness and access to education, on the community, particularly on the marginalized population. Currently, she serves as the Vice President of the Women in Law Association at UCI, Vice President of Finance for The Women's Network, and a committee director for UCI Model United Nations. Her interests include international law, human rights, and supporting underserved communities. She hopes to attend law school and work in Criminal Law in the future."

GIST: Attorneys for death row prisoner James Duckett argued this week that Florida is moving toward his July 28 execution after state officials chose DNA testing methods that prevented a complete forensic analysis of key biological evidence, a decision the defense contends undermines confidence in Duckett’s conviction.

Duckett’s legal team, whose client was previously scheduled for execution on May 31, issued a new statement after Gov. Ron DeSantis rescheduled the execution for July 28.

The legal team expressed disappointment with the governor’s decision to set a new execution date, arguing that the state’s own actions prevented a full and reliable evaluation of evidence that, they contend, could demonstrate Duckett’s innocence.

The attorneys also said it was shameful that the governor selected a date only two weeks away and scheduled Duckett’s execution on the same day as Dominick Occhicone’s execution.

Following the signing of Duckett’s first death warrant, Duckett was granted DNA testing of biological evidence that had never been examined using modern forensic technology.

Rather than ensuring the use of a testing method that would allow the most complete analysis possible, the state urged the use of a laboratory that, according to the legal team, was not capable of performing the advanced Whole Genome Sequencing, or WGS, needed to fully analyze the degraded DNA evidence.

The state argued that its decision was based primarily on the need for speed and stated in court that it had “a strong interest in not having the execution delayed” and wanted testing to be completed “as soon as possible.”

However, the legal team argued that the state’s position ignored expert testimony that another laboratory could perform the necessary WGS testing more quickly than the laboratory selected by the state to conduct what the attorneys described as an inferior test. By refusing to allow any laboratory other than the Florida agency to perform the testing, the legal team contended, the state destroyed the evidence most important to Duckett’s case by choosing a testing method and agency that it knew could not provide an accurate result.

Duckett was allowed to receive the underlying data so that an independent expert could perform the analysis that, according to the legal team, should have been conducted initially only after the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay of execution. However, by then, the legal team said, it was too late, and valuable time had already passed.

Because the laboratory selected by the state used a testing method that was not designed for the type of forensic testing required and consumed the entire limited DNA sample, the independent expert was left with data that could not produce either an inclusion or an exclusion.

The legal team stated that the state’s own decisions directly led to the inconclusive test results. According to Duckett’s attorneys, the state chose both the laboratory and the testing method and prioritized expediency over determining what happened to Teresa McAbee.

The legal team emphasized its claim that the state is attempting to execute its client without reliable, conclusive evidence. The attorneys argued that, as a result, the truth may never be fully known.

Finally, the legal team stated that Duckett has always maintained his innocence. The attorneys argued that the state’s duty is to ensure justice is served, not to rush to conclude a case in which they believe serious doubts about guilt remain.

They argued that resorting to execution without a thorough and complete analysis of the evidence is premature.

The legal team urged the governor to consider testing by its preferred laboratory and to review the additional evidence before the scheduled execution. The attorneys said, “We are committed to seeking every avenue of relief for Mr. Duckett ahead of his scheduled July 28 execution so that the State of Florida does not execute an innocent man. We urge Governor DeSantis to reopen the clemency process and fully evaluate the serious issues in the integrity of Mr. Duckett’s conviction.""

The entire story can be read at: 

duckett-florida-execution-rescheduled

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;

July 23: Junk Science Series: (Part 4): Pink Crime: The Appeal (Journalist/author/playwrite and much more) interviews new book which examines women and queer people convicted for crimes that never occurred, under the heading, "Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity."...The Appeal: "You write about how the majority of known wrongful convictions of women involve cases where no crime occurred. Is there any understanding of why that is? VB: According to the National Registry of Exonerations, up to 75 percent of women who were wrongly convicted in the United States were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. So what does that mean? That means there was no criminal act. [For example] there was a space heater that started a fire and yet police thought that the woman was at the home and intentionally set the fire. Police and prosecutors rely on faulty forensic evidence, fire science evidence, and they combine that with gender stereotypes. This is a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad woman who intentionally set the fire. The woman is wrongly convicted based on that confluence of falsehood forensic evidence and gender bias.'

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "The Appeal: You write about how junk science intersects with pink crime. Can you define junk science? Can you talk about how it intersects with the topic of your book—the criminalization of queer identity, motherhood, and pregnancy? VB: Junk science is a label that is often applied to forensic evidence. Forensic evidence is evidence from forensic disciplines that came up in police investigations. These were types of evidence that were created by the police for the purpose of being able to identify a suspect as the perpetrator and convict them so they’re biased from the very beginning.  When we’re thinking about this, we’re thinking about shoeprints, we’re thinking about fingerprints, we’re thinking about bite marks, we’re thinking about fire science investigations. These all grew up in police investigations. That’s where they came from. They did not come from a scientific lab where you have a hypothesis and the hypothesis is tested for whether it is accurate, for whether it is reliable."

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{ASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "You take a piece of lung from the fetus and you put it in water to see if it floats. The idea is that if the piece of lung floats, then the baby was born and took its first breath. This test is not only notoriously unreliable, it also gives false positives.  The last example I’ll give is drug tests and drug testing people who are giving birth in a hospital. These drug tests are not necessarily reliable, and they also don’t indicate [that] there’s any harm to a child. A lot of these fetal harm charges are brought when there’s a positive drug test even when there is a healthy baby. Giving birth to a healthy child is not necessarily going to be enough to protect someone who is pregnant from allegations that they’ve caused some fetal harm. But having a child who does have health conditions at birth, immediately healthcare providers, with social workers, with police, turn on the pregnant person and say, “What did you do to cause this? What behaviors did you do or not do?” And this is so expansive. This can be: “Were you walking enough? Did you get enough bed rest? What were you eating? Did you eat soft cheeses? Did you eat certain kinds of fish?”

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

STORY: "New Book Examines Women and Queer People Convicted for Crimes That Never Occurred," by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, published by The Appeal.on July 22, 2026. (Based in New Jersey, she writes on prison and jail conditions, wrongful convictions, and the criminalization of disabilities. Elizabeth has also written for The Nation, New York Focus, and TruthOut. Partnering with CoLAB Arts, she has written two interview-based plays, which have been performed in the Northeast—“Life, Death, Life Again: Children Sentenced to Die in Prison” and “Banished: A Family on the Sex Offender Registry.” She worked for eight years at the Innocence Project as a case analyst where her work was instrumental in several exonerations. She is the recipient, with journalist Juan Moreno Haines, of the 2020 California Journalism Awards Print Contest. They were awarded first place for At San Quentin, Overcrowding Laid The Groundwork For An Explosive COVID-19 Outbreak, in the category: Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic – Fallout, weeklies, circulation 25,0001 and over.)

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SUB-HEADING: "In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, Valena Beety examines how women and queer people face punishment for their bodily autonomy and gender."

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, roughly three-quarters of women exonerated after wrongful convictions involve cases where no crime actually occurred—the wrongfully convicted women faced charges for acts of self-defense, stillbirths and miscarriages, or accidental deaths.

Valena Beety’s new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, examines the connections between junk science and gender bias that fuels these wrongful convictions—a category of cases she calls “Pink Crime.” 

“These are criminal cases that are about punishing women and queer people for their bodily autonomy, for their gender, for their gender performance,” Beety told The Appeal. “The criminal legal system is being used to silence people, surveil, punish, and truly erase people who don’t conform.”

Proving innocence in these cases is a particularly Herculean task, says Beety, who has litigated many innocence cases herself and is co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. 

“DNA evidence is very helpful in reversing a conviction because it’s showing it’s not one person who did it, it’s another person,” Beety says. 

But if there was no crime, “there was no perpetrator.”

“It requires a completely different framework,” Beety says of no-crime wrongful convictions. “If you have prosecutors and courts in post-conviction that are dead set on, ‘Well, the only way a conviction is reversed is if you have DNA evidence,’ then that misses the majority of women who are in prison and have been wrongly convicted.”

Below is our interview with Beety about Pink Crime. The interview has been edited for clarity. 

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The Appeal: You write, “Protecting the innocent and exemplary person does not shrink the carceral state; it only fortifies it.” Could you elaborate on what that means?

Valena Beety: This goes back to the idea of the perfect victim, which has worked against women and queer people for decades. You have survivors of domestic violence who fought back against their attacker, and they instead are the ones who are criminalized. Or you survive domestic violence or sexual violence, and you’re a sex worker, and you’re criminalized because of that. Or you call the police from your home, and your children are there, and the police come, and you’re charged with child neglect for failing to protect your children from your abusive partner. This is all tied to a perfect victim, a perfect survivor. To be that perfect victim as a woman, as a queer person, it’s about performing gender and performing gender well enough to be sympathetic—that you are worthy of help instead of punishment. 

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The Appeal: You write about how junk science intersects with pink crime. Can you define junk science? Can you talk about how it intersects with the topic of your book—the criminalization of queer identity, motherhood, and pregnancy?

VB: Junk science is a label that is often applied to forensic evidence. Forensic evidence is evidence from forensic disciplines that came up in police investigations. These were types of evidence that were created by the police for the purpose of being able to identify a suspect as the perpetrator and convict them so they’re biased from the very beginning. 

When we’re thinking about this, we’re thinking about shoeprints, we’re thinking about fingerprints, we’re thinking about bite marks, we’re thinking about fire science investigations. These all grew up in police investigations. That’s where they came from. They did not come from a scientific lab where you have a hypothesis and the hypothesis is tested for whether it is accurate, for whether it is reliable. 

The only forensic evidence that is truly scientific evidence is DNA, and that did grow up in a lab, with hypothesis testing for its reliability and accuracy. DNA evidence has been able to prove these forensic disciplines are faulty.

Forensic evidence wasn’t about finding out if the evidence was reliable on its own. It was instead about creating evidence to convict defendants. We’re seeing this being used today in real time in these charges based on pregnancy, based on parenting, and based on queer identity. 

We see prosecutors who are trying to bring charges of murder against people who have a stillbirth, and what they use is the floating lung test. This is a test literally from when we would accuse women of being witches and throw them in the river, and if they drowned, they were innocent, but if they floated, they were guilty, and then they would be murdered by the state. This is how old this test is and it is incredibly unreliable.

You take a piece of lung from the fetus and you put it in water to see if it floats. The idea is that if the piece of lung floats, then the baby was born and took its first breath. This test is not only notoriously unreliable, it also gives false positives. 

The last example I’ll give is drug tests and drug testing people who are giving birth in a hospital. These drug tests are not necessarily reliable, and they also don’t indicate [that] there’s any harm to a child. A lot of these fetal harm charges are brought when there’s a positive drug test even when there is a healthy baby.

Giving birth to a healthy child is not necessarily going to be enough to protect someone who is pregnant from allegations that they’ve caused some fetal harm. But having a child who does have health conditions at birth, immediately healthcare providers, with social workers, with police, turn on the pregnant person and say, “What did you do to cause this? What behaviors did you do or not do?” And this is so expansive. This can be: “Were you walking enough? Did you get enough bed rest? What were you eating? Did you eat soft cheeses? Did you eat certain kinds of fish?”

The Appeal: You write about how the majority of known wrongful convictions of women involve cases where no crime occurred. Is there any understanding of why that is? 

VB: According to the National Registry of Exonerations, up to 75 percent of women who were wrongly convicted in the United States were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. 

So what does that mean? That means there was no criminal act. [For example] there was a space heater that started a fire and yet police thought that the woman was at the home and intentionally set the fire. Police and prosecutors rely on faulty forensic evidence, fire science evidence, and they combine that with gender stereotypes. This is a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad woman who intentionally set the fire. The woman is wrongly convicted based on that confluence of falsehood forensic evidence and gender bias.

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The Appeal: What inspired you to write this book? 

VB: I am a queer woman. I’m married to another woman, and we have a child. We’re a queer family. We were moving back to my home state of Indiana when we were pregnant. Indiana had made abortion illegal in all but the most extreme circumstances, and we knew that there might be pregnancy difficulties, and if there were, we would not have access to abortion. If there were pregnancy difficulties, we could be blamed for that. 

Being queer parents, we are, just by our identities, looked at as more likely to be dangerous towards children. We have never taken bathtub photos of our child because we know that there’s a different lens that can be applied to us as queer people, and it’s a criminalizing lens. That’s what really motivated me to connect the dots to create this term, pink crime, to say, “Hey, this is all going back to gender bias and people in power using the criminal legal system as a lever to punish women and queer people who don’t conform to gender norms.”

 

In my home state of Indiana, our governor proclaimed June to be officially “Nuclear Family Month,” which is a man and a woman married with biological children. Our lieutenant governor even posted, “Take back the rainbow.” 

[In their minds] there’s only one model for how people can be a family, and otherwise, you are deviant. This all plays a role in not only why I wrote the book, but why I continue to talk about it and continue to care about it.

The entire story can be read at: 

new-book-examines-women-and-queer-people-convicted-for-crimes-that-never-occurred

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;