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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "The Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office argues that the CT scan existed from the beginning, but that Morris’s trial counsel made flawed attempts at getting it. The office also said that the medical examiner’s findings on the cause and manner of death had been confirmed by other experts. “I believe that the medical evidence was clear and this conviction was just,” State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess said in a statement. After two years worth of testimony, Morris’s case now rests with Circuit Court Associate Judge Pamela K. Alban. She previously led the special victims unit in the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office, which included prosecuting child abuse cases."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Since 1989, only one person has been exonerated in Anne Arundel County, according to the National Exoneration Registry. “Postconviction relief is structurally built to be difficult,” said Mary Kelly Tate, a law professor and founding director of the Institute of Actual Innocence at the University of Richmond School of Law. “The criminal justice system puts a premium on finality.” As the Aug. 26 hearing concluded, Alban, the judge, said she would work to get Morris an answer on the innocence petition — as well as the postconviction proceeding focused on the ineffective assistance of counsel claims — in the coming weeks. "
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "In 2019, with a new attorney, Morris won an appeal to reopen a postconviction proceeding on claims that both his trial and former postconviction counsel had not found a credible expert to discredit the state’s theory, according to court filings. Prosecutors have said those attorneys were effective."
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STORY: "A baby died in his care. He has spent years trying to clear his name," by Reporter Jasmine Golden, published by 000 on September 17, 2026. (Jasmine Golden is a reporter covering social issues and other news on the Metro desk at The Washington Post. She joined the Post in 2021 and has covered crime and courts in Prince George's County, Maryland. She is a multimedia journalist and has interned at NBC News Washington and Politico Magazine.)
GIST: "A judge is weighing Curtis Ryan Morris’s case years after his conviction in the killing of a 3-month-old infant in his care."
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PHOTO CAPTION: "Curtis Ryan Morris, shown here with his dog, Artemis, in 2014, was convicted that same year and sentenced to 40 years in prison."
The Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office argues that the CT scan existed from the beginning, but that Morris’s trial counsel made flawed attempts at getting it. Ask The Post AIDive deeper
The office also saiTd that the medical examiner’s findings on the cause and manner of death had been confirmed by other experts.
“I believe that the medical evidence was clear and this conviction was just,” State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess said in a statement.
After two years worth of testimony, Morris’s case now rests with Circuit Court Associate Judge Pamela K. Alban. She previously led the special victims unit in the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office, which included prosecuting child abuse cases.
The case
Morris was excited to be a father, his attorneys said.
He started dating his girlfriend while she was expecting and was in the delivery room when the baby girl was born, court filings detail. The couple got an apartment and were raising the girl together.
Morris’s family, who declined to comment for this story, said in an article posted to the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project website that he is “very loving, caring, sincere.”
The family of the girl declined to comment for the story.
On June 10, 2012, according to charging documents, county police arrived at University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center in response to the 3-month-old’s death.
Morris was there alongside his girlfriend, who had been at work. Police and investigators from the medical examiner’s office took their statements and ordered an autopsy, court filings detail.
Months later, Morris was arrested. Police charged him with second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse among other counts. He denied harming the girl.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had ruled the infant’s death a homicide. Medical professionals found she had suffered a head injury within six hours of her death, a time in which she was with Morris, police said in the charging documents.
A jury convicted Morris in 2014 and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
He’d spend the next decade trying to clear his name.
Morris argued his trial attorney had erred in using a medically censured expert, hurting his case. He lost that appeal of his conviction, and subsequent attempts for a new trial.
According to court filings, the trial attorney testified during a postconviction proceeding that Morris and his family were aware of the censure and had agreed to go ahead with the expert, who countered the state’s theory of the cause of death.
In 2019, with a new attorney, Morris won an appeal to reopen a postconviction proceeding on claims that both his trial and former postconviction counsel had not found a credible expert to discredit the state’s theory, according to court filings. Prosecutors have said those attorneys were effective.
The arguments
Attorneys for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which has helped free dozens of people in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, took up Morris’s case in 2022 after his new attorney found multiple medical experts who questioned the medical examiner’s testimony.
Another major firm — Latham & Watkins LLP — also joined the case.
In Maryland, a defense team must meet two prongs for a writ of actual innocence petition. First, they must show there is newly discovered evidence that could not have been discovered through due diligence in time to move for a new trial, said Rachel Marblestone Kamins, director of the Decarceration and Re-entry Clinic at the American University Washington College of Law.
They also must show that the evidence creates a substantial or significant possibility that the outcome may have been different.
Morris’s attorneys maintain they’ve met the legal standard — pointing to testimony given in 2024 by the medical examiner who had ruled the girl’s death a homicide.
During a cross-examination that year, court filings show, the examiner said a CT scan had been taken of the girl.
“That was news to everyone in the courtroom,” Richard Frohlichstein, an associate with Latham & Watkins, told the court during Morris’s hearing in August.
Morris’s defense team had experts review the CT scan. They determined that clotting in the girl’s brain — which could have caused oxygen deprivation and stop it from functioning — would have taken days to weeks to develop, not hours, Frohlichstein said.
One of the defense’s experts, according to court filings, found that blunt force trauma could be the cause of the girl’s death, but that the trauma was not recent. It may have dated back to her birth and led to “a series of delayed complications,” including the clotting and a healing skull fracture.
“Had the jury heard this, there is a real possibility at least one juror would have reasonable doubt,” Frohlichstein said at the August hearing.
Assistant State’s Attorney David Russell picked apart the defense’s claims.
He said in court that the CT scan is not new evidence and also questioned efforts made by Morris’s previous counsel to obtain it.
According to court filings, Morris’s trial counsel requested a CT scan from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner before trial, but withdrew the request “despite the fact that the CT scan had not been provided.”
Russell wrote in a court filing that “a subpoena of the OCME file does not generally result in the disclosure of all evidence held by the office.”
At court last month, Russell said all that needed to be done was to ask the assistant medical examiner for the scan. As soon as the examiner was questioned about it during the 2024 cross-examination, Morris’s current counsel had the scan within days, Russell said.
“It certainly could have been discovered due to due diligence,” Russell said in court.
Morris’s trial counsel is now a judge. A spokesperson for the Maryland Judiciary declined a request for an interview, saying it “generally cannot comment on pending or impending legal matters.”
In a 2025 declaration, however, Morris’s trial counsel wrote to the court that he had withdrawn his records request because he believed all records had been provided. No one told him, he said, that a CT scan existed.
Russell said in court that no one told the trial counsel there wasn’t a scan, either.
Russell also disagreed with defense counsel over what the scan showed. He said the state’s expert, a forensic radiologist, found the alleged blood clot identified on the girl’s scan is common after death.
He also argued that the state experts were stronger than the defense’s and included the only expert who performed the autopsy.
Beyond that, Russell said, the jury heard testimony from a neighborwho recalled Morris slamming the door in their face and being agitated and hearing excessive crying during a video game. Morris’s attorneys rebutted that sounds like a household with a newborn.
Russell said justice “requires finality.”
“This has been going on for more than a decade,” Russell said.
The wait
Since 1989, only one person has been exonerated in Anne Arundel County, according to the National Exoneration Registry.
“Postconviction relief is structurally built to be difficult,” said Mary Kelly Tate, a law professor and founding director of the Institute of Actual Innocence at the University of Richmond School of Law. “The criminal justice system puts a premium on finality.”
As the Aug. 26 hearing concluded, Alban, the judge, said she would work to get Morris an answer on the innocence petition — as well as the postconviction proceeding focused on the ineffective assistance of counsel claims — in the coming weeks.
Morris offered a smile when his friends waved at him from the gallery.
His father, Curt Morris, said in the article on the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project website that the family’s “daily lives revolve around his schedule.”
They visit Morris twice a week and call him at least once a day.
“We’re his sanity,” Curt Morris said in the article. “And it’s been that way since day one.""
GIST: "A judge is weighing Curtis Ryan Morris’s case years after his conviction in the killing of a 3-month-old infant in his care."
GIST: On a Sunday in June 2012, Curtis Ryan Morris explained to investigators how his evening caring for the 3-month-old girl he was raising as his own ended in tragedy.
He had just fed her a bottle inside his Maryland apartment when she began to choke and stopped breathing.
Morris called 911 and performed CPR. The baby girl was rushed to the hospital, where she died.
As Anne Arundel County police investigated, an assistant medical examiner determined the girl died of blunt force head trauma, court filings show. Morris, then 20, was arrested and a jury later convicted him of murder.
Morris has proclaimed his innocence for more than a decade. And a legal team now representing him says the proof lies in a critical piece of evidence that never made it in front of a jury.
At a court proceeding in late August, Morris’s attorneys pointed to a postmortem CT scan of the child’s head they said shows she suffered from preexisting medical complications, including blood clotting in her brain.
The scan, the attorneys said, contradicts the state’s claim that the infant suffered fresh injuries while in Morris’s care. They’re asking a judge to set aside the verdict, or grant him a new trial.
The challenge for Morris and his attorneys isn’t just convincing the judge that specific medical evidence casts doubt on his conviction. It’s convincing the judge his original attorney never knew about it.
“There are two tragedies here: the loss of a child and the wrongful conviction of the person who loved her,” Jimmy Moody, legal director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which is representing Morris, said in a statement.
He had just fed her a bottle inside his Maryland apartment when she began to choke and stopped breathing.
Morris called 911 and performed CPR. The baby girl was rushed to the hospital, where she died.
As Anne Arundel County police investigated, an assistant medical examiner determined the girl died of blunt force head trauma, court filings show. Morris, then 20, was arrested and a jury later convicted him of murder.
Morris has proclaimed his innocence for more than a decade. And a legal team now representing him says the proof lies in a critical piece of evidence that never made it in front of a jury.
At a court proceeding in late August, Morris’s attorneys pointed to a postmortem CT scan of the child’s head they said shows she suffered from preexisting medical complications, including blood clotting in her brain.
The scan, the attorneys said, contradicts the state’s claim that the infant suffered fresh injuries while in Morris’s care. They’re asking a judge to set aside the verdict, or grant him a new trial.
The challenge for Morris and his attorneys isn’t just convincing the judge that specific medical evidence casts doubt on his conviction. It’s convincing the judge his original attorney never knew about it.
“There are two tragedies here: the loss of a child and the wrongful conviction of the person who loved her,” Jimmy Moody, legal director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which is representing Morris, said in a statement.
The Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office argues that the CT scan existed from the beginning, but that Morris’s trial counsel made flawed attempts at getting it. Ask The Post AIDive deeper
The office also saiTd that the medical examiner’s findings on the cause and manner of death had been confirmed by other experts.
“I believe that the medical evidence was clear and this conviction was just,” State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess said in a statement.
After two years worth of testimony, Morris’s case now rests with Circuit Court Associate Judge Pamela K. Alban. She previously led the special victims unit in the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office, which included prosecuting child abuse cases.
The case
Morris was excited to be a father, his attorneys said.
He started dating his girlfriend while she was expecting and was in the delivery room when the baby girl was born, court filings detail. The couple got an apartment and were raising the girl together.
Morris’s family, who declined to comment for this story, said in an article posted to the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project website that he is “very loving, caring, sincere.”
The family of the girl declined to comment for the story.
On June 10, 2012, according to charging documents, county police arrived at University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center in response to the 3-month-old’s death.
Morris was there alongside his girlfriend, who had been at work. Police and investigators from the medical examiner’s office took their statements and ordered an autopsy, court filings detail.
Months later, Morris was arrested. Police charged him with second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse among other counts. He denied harming the girl.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had ruled the infant’s death a homicide. Medical professionals found she had suffered a head injury within six hours of her death, a time in which she was with Morris, police said in the charging documents.
A jury convicted Morris in 2014 and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
He’d spend the next decade trying to clear his name.
Morris argued his trial attorney had erred in using a medically censured expert, hurting his case. He lost that appeal of his conviction, and subsequent attempts for a new trial.
According to court filings, the trial attorney testified during a postconviction proceeding that Morris and his family were aware of the censure and had agreed to go ahead with the expert, who countered the state’s theory of the cause of death.
In 2019, with a new attorney, Morris won an appeal to reopen a postconviction proceeding on claims that both his trial and former postconviction counsel had not found a credible expert to discredit the state’s theory, according to court filings. Prosecutors have said those attorneys were effective.
The arguments
Attorneys for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which has helped free dozens of people in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, took up Morris’s case in 2022 after his new attorney found multiple medical experts who questioned the medical examiner’s testimony.
Another major firm — Latham & Watkins LLP — also joined the case.
In Maryland, a defense team must meet two prongs for a writ of actual innocence petition. First, they must show there is newly discovered evidence that could not have been discovered through due diligence in time to move for a new trial, said Rachel Marblestone Kamins, director of the Decarceration and Re-entry Clinic at the American University Washington College of Law.
They also must show that the evidence creates a substantial or significant possibility that the outcome may have been different.
Morris’s attorneys maintain they’ve met the legal standard — pointing to testimony given in 2024 by the medical examiner who had ruled the girl’s death a homicide.
During a cross-examination that year, court filings show, the examiner said a CT scan had been taken of the girl.
“That was news to everyone in the courtroom,” Richard Frohlichstein, an associate with Latham & Watkins, told the court during Morris’s hearing in August.
Morris’s defense team had experts review the CT scan. They determined that clotting in the girl’s brain — which could have caused oxygen deprivation and stop it from functioning — would have taken days to weeks to develop, not hours, Frohlichstein said.
One of the defense’s experts, according to court filings, found that blunt force trauma could be the cause of the girl’s death, but that the trauma was not recent. It may have dated back to her birth and led to “a series of delayed complications,” including the clotting and a healing skull fracture.
“Had the jury heard this, there is a real possibility at least one juror would have reasonable doubt,” Frohlichstein said at the August hearing.
Assistant State’s Attorney David Russell picked apart the defense’s claims.
He said in court that the CT scan is not new evidence and also questioned efforts made by Morris’s previous counsel to obtain it.
According to court filings, Morris’s trial counsel requested a CT scan from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner before trial, but withdrew the request “despite the fact that the CT scan had not been provided.”
Russell wrote in a court filing that “a subpoena of the OCME file does not generally result in the disclosure of all evidence held by the office.”
At court last month, Russell said all that needed to be done was to ask the assistant medical examiner for the scan. As soon as the examiner was questioned about it during the 2024 cross-examination, Morris’s current counsel had the scan within days, Russell said.
“It certainly could have been discovered due to due diligence,” Russell said in court.
Morris’s trial counsel is now a judge. A spokesperson for the Maryland Judiciary declined a request for an interview, saying it “generally cannot comment on pending or impending legal matters.”
In a 2025 declaration, however, Morris’s trial counsel wrote to the court that he had withdrawn his records request because he believed all records had been provided. No one told him, he said, that a CT scan existed.
Russell said in court that no one told the trial counsel there wasn’t a scan, either.
Russell also disagreed with defense counsel over what the scan showed. He said the state’s expert, a forensic radiologist, found the alleged blood clot identified on the girl’s scan is common after death.
He also argued that the state experts were stronger than the defense’s and included the only expert who performed the autopsy.
Beyond that, Russell said, the jury heard testimony from a neighborwho recalled Morris slamming the door in their face and being agitated and hearing excessive crying during a video game. Morris’s attorneys rebutted that sounds like a household with a newborn.
Russell said justice “requires finality.”
“This has been going on for more than a decade,” Russell said.
The wait
Since 1989, only one person has been exonerated in Anne Arundel County, according to the National Exoneration Registry.
“Postconviction relief is structurally built to be difficult,” said Mary Kelly Tate, a law professor and founding director of the Institute of Actual Innocence at the University of Richmond School of Law. “The criminal justice system puts a premium on finality.”
As the Aug. 26 hearing concluded, Alban, the judge, said she would work to get Morris an answer on the innocence petition — as well as the postconviction proceeding focused on the ineffective assistance of counsel claims — in the coming weeks.
Morris offered a smile when his friends waved at him from the gallery.
His father, Curt Morris, said in the article on the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project website that the family’s “daily lives revolve around his schedule.”
They visit Morris twice a week and call him at least once a day.
“We’re his sanity,” Curt Morris said in the article. “And it’s been that way since day one.""
The entire story can be read at:
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;
