September 2: Nancy Smith: Ohio: Question of the day: She Was Absolved of a Heinous Crime. Why Won’t They Leave Her Alone?, asked by New York Times Criminal Justice Reporter Shaila Dewan, in a story sub-headed, "A judge exonerated Nancy Smith, an Ohio bus driver, after she was convicted of abusing children in her care. Now, prosecutors want to reverse an order saying she was innocent."..."While Ms. Smith was in prison, the frenzy surrounding the case began to dissipate. Two years after her trial, a local newspaper, The Chronicle-Telegram, published a series of articles that took a critical look at the case. The jury, it reported, had been unaware that the children’s testimony had been “hopelessly compromised”; had not seen a lineup video in which most of the children were unable to identify Joseph Allen; and had not been told that the first mother to accuse Ms. Smith had been convicted of her role in a cocaine ring. The assistant prosecutor who had taken the case to trial, Jonathan Rosenbaum, acknowledged that he had not listened to initial interviews in which children denied having been molested. “I listened to the tapes of the detectives who solved this case,” he told the newspaper."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "I had followed the Head Start case for years when I first met Ms. Smith in 2018. She was working as a dog groomer in a large veterinary office, where she was grateful for floor-to-ceiling windows that meant she could always be seen. Almost a decade out of prison by then, she was still afraid of being falsely accused. When Ms. Smith first learned of the accusation against her, she told me, “I remember going home to my parents and just, literally, just bawling.” As panic spread and pressure on the police mounted, the children were subjected to repeated interviews, using a host of coercive techniques that are now known to produce not only false answers, but also false memories. Parents were permitted to coax, cajole and contradict their children. One boy insisted for nine months that nothing had happened to him before finally changing his story. Years later, child sex abuse experts would call the case a textbook example of contamination and confirmation bias."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Tears are always close to the surface with Ms. Smith. She cries when she thinks about the graduations, the weddings and the births she missed during the 15 years she was incarcerated. And she cries because she is trapped in a legal purgatory driven, she believes, by ego, money, political score cards and even evil itself. Her supposed crime, sexually abusing preschoolers at a Head Start nursery, was part of a wave of outlandish day care abuse allegations in the 1980s and ’90s. Widely known today as the sex-abuse hysteria cases, they followed roughly the same arc as the Salem witch trials, beginning with hasty convictions and ending in recrimination over how so many prosecutions could have been based on so little evidence. The cases have resulted in more than 60 exonerations across 13 states."

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "The court trying the exoneration case slapped down their efforts, as did an appeals court. But this month, some of the defendants in Ms. Smith’s suit filed a notice that they would appeal her exoneration to the Ohio Supreme Court. Ms. Smith’s lawyer, calling to give her the news, assured her that this was just another Hail Mary that would not succeed. She remained composed as she asked questions, but soon her emotions won out. “What is really the story behind all this from Day 1?” she asked tearfully. “Whose scapegoat am I?""

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STORY: "She Was Absolved of a Heinous Crime. Why Won’t They Leave Her Alone?, by Shaila Dewan, published by The New York Times, on August 25, 2026. (Shaila Dewan:  I am a national correspondent for The New York Times, covering criminal justice — policing, courts and prisons — across the country..."Our criminal justice system defines the boundaries of our most basic rights. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, yet it is still one of the most violence-plagued Western democracies. Because of the great power given to the police, the courts and prisons, they deserve special scrutiny. I seek to explain to readers how the system works with political and historical context. I am particularly interested in stories that explore how the criminal justice system sometimes fails to meet the ideals set forth in our Constitution."

SUB-HEADED: "A judge exonerated Nancy Smith, an Ohio bus driver, after she was convicted of abusing children in her care. Now, prosecutors want to reverse an order saying she was innocent."

PHOTO CAPTION: "A judge overturned Nancy Smith’s conviction in a child sex abuse case in 2022."

GIST: "In 1990, Nancy Smith, a divorced mother of four, took a job as a bus driver in Lorain, Ohio, a working-class city on the underbelly of Lake Erie. Each time a child got on her bus, she marked half of an X on the roster. When the child got off, she marked the other half. The children gave her hugs and holiday gifts.

One day in 1993, Ms. Smith was pulled off the route. A mother had come forward with a startling story she had heard from her 4-year-old daughter: Ms. Smith and a bus aide named Joseph had taken the child not to preschool, but to a basement where Joseph and the children got undressed, played “doctor,” and worse.

The lead detective on the case had a difficult time corroborating the story. A medical examination found no signs of abuse. The bus had not been late, mileage records showed no discrepancies and there had been no suspicious absences. The children who rode the bus told the detective that nothing unusual had happened. There was no aide named Joseph.

But word spread. “They started putting the stuff on TV and the newspapers,” Ms. Smith recalled. “I was just like: Oh my God. What the heck?”

Soon, more 4- and 5-year-olds were brought to the police to repeat jumbled stories of sexual abuse involving sticks, needles and cups of urine. Asked to point out where they had been taken, they identified at least six houses. They mentioned a man named Joseph, but described him variously as white, Black, Latino or even Black with white spots.

Ms. Smith cooperated with investigators, expecting that the truth would win out. Instead, one morning she woke to find a front-page headline trumpeting the arrest of a man named Joseph Allen, who was not a bus aide but had a prior conviction for child molesting. “That was the very first time I ever seen that man,” she told me.

A few hours later, she looked out the front window and saw an unmarked police car drive by. Ms. Smith, who was living with her mother at the time, recalled saying, “Oh my God, Mom, they’re going to come and arrest me.” Next, she saw a patrol car. Ms. Smith, who had never been in trouble with the law, was handcuffed in front of her mother and children. At the jail, her hands shook so badly that the police had trouble getting her fingerprints.

Not long ago, I visited Ms. Smith, 69, in Lorain, where she lives on $494 a month in Social Security. Her rental home is crammed with Ohio State Buckeyes swag, reclining furniture, encomiums to faith and family, a rescued terrier named Bailey. Her own artwork hangs there, too, landscapes inspired by reruns of “The Joy of Painting” she watched in prison.

As we spoke, she sank into an armchair and snuggled her newest great-grandchild, just 13 days old, against her shoulder. A tattoo etched in cursive on her right arm read “February 25, 2022,” when a judge overturned her conviction in a child sex abuse case that shocked Lorain three decades ago.

“See how God blessed me,” she said, turning to nuzzle the baby’s cheek.

Then, suddenly, she began to cry.

Tears are always close to the surface with Ms. Smith. She cries when she thinks about the graduations, the weddings and the births she missed during the 15 years she was incarcerated. And she cries because she is trapped in a legal purgatory driven, she believes, by ego, money, political score cards and even evil itself.

Her supposed crime, sexually abusing preschoolers at a Head Start nursery, was part of a wave of outlandish day care abuse allegations in the 1980s and ’90s. Widely known today as the sex-abuse hysteria cases, they followed roughly the same arc as the Salem witch trials, beginning with hasty convictions and ending in recrimination over how so many prosecutions could have been based on so little evidence. The cases have resulted in more than 60 exonerations across 13 states.

Ms. Smith was among the exonerees, which enabled her to seek compensation from the state for wrongful imprisonment. Other exonerees in Ohio have won seven-figure settlements. But in Ms. Smith’s case, the state, the county, the city and others whom she has sued for damages have tried every means to block her.

Now, after the prosecutor who cleared her lost his bid for re-election, they are even trying to take her exoneration away.

“Just leave me alone,” she said. “Thirty-two years has been long enough. I want to know what it’s like to wake up every morning and know that it’s over.”

I had followed the Head Start case for years when I first met Ms. Smith in 2018. She was working as a dog groomer in a large veterinary office, where she was grateful for floor-to-ceiling windows that meant she could always be seen. Almost a decade out of prison by then, she was still afraid of being falsely accused.

When Ms. Smith first learned of the accusation against her, she told me, “I remember going home to my parents and just, literally, just bawling.”

As panic spread and pressure on the police mounted, the children were subjected to repeated interviews, using a host of coercive techniques that are now known to produce not only false answers, but also false memories. Parents were permitted to coax, cajole and contradict their children. One boy insisted for nine months that nothing had happened to him before finally changing his story. Years later, child sex abuse experts would call the case a textbook example of contamination and confirmation bias.

When the trial started, Ms. Smith said, “I was concerned, but I wasn’t that concerned.” But as the testimony proceeded, her unease deepened. One by one, small children dressed in their Sunday best climbed into the witness stand and perched in an adult-size chair. Their answers were often nonsensical. One boy testified that Joseph had put a gun in his mouth and shot him. Another, gently questioned about inconsistencies in his story, burst into tears. The judge handed him a tissue.

Ms. Smith’s lawyer, Jack Bradley, did not present mileage or attendance records. Nor did he call to the stand Ms. Smith’s real bus aides, who said she had done nothing wrong, or the original detective, who had been replaced by a rookie after he recommended dropping the case.

He assured Ms. Smith that the burden of proof was on the state, which did not have a coherent theory of the crime and could not specify the date, time or place of the abuse. Mr. Bradley has since acknowledged that he underestimated the emotional power of the accusations and would use a very different strategy if he could do it over.

On Aug. 4, 1994, the jury came back with its verdict: guilty on all counts. Ms. Smith broke down. “I did not commit this crime,” she told the judge. “I don’t even know that man.”

When she first arrived at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, she thought it looked like a college campus. She still remembers the first Christmas she spent without her family. A prison employee was singing carols for the inmates, and Ms. Smith did not want to hear them.

“You just put me in prison in August, and you think I’m going to go and celebrate Christmas?” she told me. “Oh my God, I was devastated. They made me sit there and listen to that crap.”

In 2003, Ms. Smith was crocheting a pair of matching baby blankets and bunting when she got the news that her daughter Amber, who had been pregnant with twins, had miscarried. On the phone, Amber said, “I need you.” But Ms. Smith could not be there — she was nine years into a sentence of 30 to 90 years.

That same year, four children who testified at the trial were awarded $1.5 million each in a settlement with Head Start. All four are now adults. Two did not respond to interview requests sent to their lawyers. The others did not to respond to calls and emails.

Ms. Smith still grows incensed that the authorities never asked what was going to happen to her own children, aged 12 to 18, when she was sent away. Her eldest child got a place of his own, and the others went to live with relatives.

“My kids were without a mother,” she said of the authorities, “and they didn’t care.”

While Ms. Smith was in prison, the frenzy surrounding the case began to dissipate. Two years after her trial, a local newspaper, The Chronicle-Telegram, published a series of articles that took a critical look at the case. The jury, it reported, had been unaware that the children’s testimony had been “hopelessly compromised”; had not seen a lineup video in which most of the children were unable to identify Joseph Allen; and had not been told that the first mother to accuse Ms. Smith had been convicted of her role in a cocaine ring.

The assistant prosecutor who had taken the case to trial, Jonathan Rosenbaum, acknowledged that he had not listened to initial interviews in which children denied having been molested. “I listened to the tapes of the detectives who solved this case,” he told the newspaper.

In 2003, the newly formed Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati took Ms. Smith on as one of its first clients. Five years later, a ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court in an unrelated case opened the door for many convicted people to request resentencing, offering Ms. Smith a slender opportunity.

Ms. Smith’s plea landed in the courtroom of Judge James Burge, an iconoclast who frequently got crosswise with Lorain’s legal establishment. Judge Burge had Ms. Smith transferred to the Lorain County jail, and then set a $100,000 bond.

In February 2009, Ms. Smith was released in the midst of the largest snowstorm in a decade. She had no winter coat. She had lost all her upper teeth while in prison. She was back in a town that had sent her away as the worst kind of monster. And she had no idea whether or when she would be returned to prison.

To help pay for her dental work, her family organized a spaghetti supper, printing up about 100 tickets for $12 each. Nearly 600 people showed up, causing a traffic jam outside the veterans’ hall in Lorain.

“You don’t know what it means to have so many people come out and support you,” Ms. Smith said of that time. “People I didn’t even know were there.”

In court four months later, Judge Burge began by noting his respect for everyone who had worked on the Head Start case. But having reviewed the file, he continued, “I have absolutely no confidence that these verdicts are correct.” He entered a judgment of acquittal, provoking an audible gasp of surprise. Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen were free to go.

To this day, Ms. Smith is firm in her view that Mr. Burge was an instrument of a higher power: “I’ve always told him that — I said, ‘Judge Burge, I believe that God put you in that judge seat because he knew what you were going to do for me.’”

That might have been the end of the Head Start case. Instead, the county prosecutor at the time, Dennis Will, objected that the judge had exceeded his authority. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed, and ordered Judge Burge to return Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen to prison.

He did not do so, and no one pressed the point. Prosecutors remained unwilling to clear Ms. Smith’s name, but were hesitant to insist that she be locked up again. New revelations continued to undermine the case. There were leaked recordings of the Lorain police chief, who had overseen the investigation, expressing grave misgivings. During an exposé on NBC’s “Dateline,” a child recanted allegations he had made against Mr. Allen.

Four years went by before a deal was struck: Mr. Allen, who had been sentenced to five consecutive life terms, would have to return to prison, but for a much shorter period of 10 years. Some of Mr. Allen’s supporters have contended that he was treated more severely all along because he is Black and Ms. Smith is white.

Ms. Smith would remain convicted, but her sentence would be reduced to time served. She would forgo any attempt to challenge the outcome or win compensation, but she would remain free.

Ms. Smith was tormented by the choice between signing the deal and going back to prison. “To this day, I still don’t think I did the right thing,” she says. “I really don’t, because I want my name cleared.”

In 2019, a new opera that told the story of six wrongfully convicted people premiered in Cincinnati. Five had, in real life, been exonerated and received millions of dollars each in compensation. The sixth was Ms. Smith.

She had much in common with the others, including post-traumatic stress disorder and bouts of road rage. She still cleaned her house obsessively. She had tried forgiveness workshops, counseling, public speaking and even a songwriting retreat for the wrongfully incarcerated.

But she was acutely aware that unlike the exonerees, she was still a convicted sex criminal. Lorain, a small town in many respects, offered constant reminders. One of the dogs she groomed belonged to a detective who had testified against her. Even today, her children ran into the Head Start families at the grocery store and Denny’s. Her defense lawyer is now the mayor.

Because she was barred from taking legal action, for many years a pardon was her only hope for absolution. Two governors declined to grant it.

In 2020, a new county prosecutor, J.D. Tomlinson, was elected in Lorain. After a review, he said that he would support an exoneration, a process that would begin with a series of hearings before a judge. Ms. Smith, though, was apprehensive. “Something’s going to happen, it always does — it never works out for me,” she recalls thinking. “I was afraid to even breathe.”

Sure enough, at the first hearing she looked up to see Mr. Rosenbaum, the original prosecutor, appearing via Zoom on behalf of two of the victims to argue against the exoneration. He said Mr. Tomlinson should be disqualified, in part because his chief of staff was Mr. Burge, who as a judge had freed Ms. Smith in 2009.

Mr. Burge’s previous attempt to void the convictions had been “illegal, misguided, improper, personal, unethical and perhaps corrupt,” Mr. Rosenbaum argued, adding that Mr. Tomlinson had become “a spokesman for two child rapists.”

J.D. Tomlinson, the Lorain County prosecutor, apologized to Joseph Allen and Ms. Smith for their prosecution on Feb. 25, 2022, in Elyria, Ohio.Credit...Bruce Bishop/Chronicle-Telegram, via Associated Press

The judge disagreed. On Feb. 25, 2022, he vacated the convictions. “I apologize to you,” Mr. Tomlinson told Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen, “especially for what was done to you and to your families, as a result of this ill-conceived prosecution.”

When it was Ms. Smith’s turn to speak, she thanked God and her lawyers. But she did not limit her response to expressions of relief and gratitude. “One day,” she told her adversaries, “you will all answer for this.”

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

The court trying the exoneration case slapped down their efforts, as did an appeals court. But this month, some of the defendants in Ms. Smith’s suit filed a notice that they would appeal her exoneration to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Ms. Smith’s lawyer, calling to give her the news, assured her that this was just another Hail Mary that would not succeed. She remained composed as she asked questions, but soon her emotions won out.

“What is really the story behind all this from Day 1?” she asked tearfully. “Whose scapegoat am I?""

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: "In my years covering criminal justice, the Lorain Head Start case is one of the most astounding I have come across, in terms of the many twists and turns in its 30-year history. I have looked at the case from top to bottom, even listening to the surviving tapes of interviews with the children and their parents. There’s so much more than I could possibly fit in this story, so I can’t wait to hear your thoughts and answer some of your questions."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/nancy-smith-child-sex-abuse-exoneration.html

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;

September 1: Danyel Smith: Georgia: Major (Welcome) Development: Yet another over-turning of a so-called "shaken baby" conviction, resulting from new medical evidence of medical complications, WSB reports, in. a story headed, "Metro Atlanta father granted $100K bond after murder conviction overturned," noting that, "Smith has maintained his innocence since his initial conviction. He previously rejected a plea deal that could have allowed him to leave prison if he admitted to the crime, saying he would not admit to something he did not do. The new medical evidence found that Smith’s son died from medical complications."

QUOTE  OF THE DAY: "State Rep. Marvin Lim has also called for the charges against Smith to be dropped, questioning whether continuing to prosecute the case serves the interests of justice. “This person has had no other criminal history other than this conviction that has been overturned, subjected to a new trial,” Lim said. “Are we meeting the demands of the justice system? Are we adding anything new by continuing to prosecute this person?” Lim also pointed to the medical evidence that led to Smith’s conviction being overturned. “You cannot get back the time spent incarcerated,” he said."

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PASSAGE OF THE  DAY: "For Smith’s family, Tuesday’s $100,000 bond represents another significant development after more than two decades behind bars. Prosecutors’ appeal of the decision granting Smith a new trial remains ongoing.""

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STORY: "Metro Atlanta father granted $100K bond after murder conviction overturned, published by WSB on September 1, 2026/

GIST:  "A Gwinnett County father who has spent more than 23 years behind bars after being convicted of killing his infant son has been granted $100,000 bond.

Danyel Smith’s murder conviction was overturned after new medical evidence challenged the findings used in the case, which had previously been considered a “shaken baby” case.

Smith was granted a new trial earlier this year. Prosecutors are appealing that decision.

Smith has maintained his innocence since his initial conviction. He previously rejected a plea deal that could have allowed him to leave prison if he admitted to the crime, saying he would not admit to something he did not do.

The new medical evidence found that Smith’s son died from medical complications.

Ahead of Tuesday’s bond hearing, Smith’s fiancée, Tasha Pyatt said the family was hopeful he could finally return home after more than two decades in prison.

“I would say it’s about 99% excitement, but that 1% jitter, and it’s because we’ve been down this road so many times,” Pyatt said.

Pyatt said the family had already prepared for Smith’s possible return, including putting up a “Welcome Home” sign and a balloon arch at their home.

“I just want to lay in his arms and that’s all he wants to do with me,” Pyatt said.

State Rep. Marvin Lim has also called for the charges against Smith to be dropped, questioning whether continuing to prosecute the case serves the interests of justice.

“This person has had no other criminal history other than this conviction that has been overturned, subjected to a new trial,” Lim said. “Are we meeting the demands of the justice system? Are we adding anything new by continuing to prosecute this person?”

Lim also pointed to the medical evidence that led to Smith’s conviction being overturned.

“You cannot get back the time spent incarcerated,” he said.

For Smith’s family, Tuesday’s $100,000 bond represents another significant development after more than two decades behind bars.

Prosecutors’ appeal of the decision granting Smith a new trial remains ongoing.""

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.wsbradio.com/news/local/after-23-years-behind-bars-father-former-shaken-baby-case-could-return-home/KPNBP6ZUAVFF7LHV4VJP26QNSU/

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;

September 1: Narrative vehicles?: Question of the day: Asked by award-winning writer and author Susan Berardi in The Washington Monthly: 'The law enforcement bullets that killed Renee Good, Kohen Wiley, and John Albers entered from the side. Why did the official accounts say the cars were driving straight at officers?'... "For the last five years, I’ve analyzed police interviews, autopsies, forensic reports, press statements, and video evidence from shootings into moving vehicles. I’ve also interviewed dozens of mothers who lost children in police shootings. In city after city, I began to recognize the same language—not necessarily in the shootings themselves, but in the official accounts that followed them. Cars can, of course, be deadly weapons, and officers sometimes face drivers who are genuinely trying to hit them. The issue is not that police describe those threats. It is that, in the chaotic hours after a shooting, a department can present an officer’s account of the most disputed moment as an established fact. Every police shooting is chaotic, and officials often must speak before they know everything. The problem is that a preliminary account does not always remain preliminary. Since the official version usually arrives first—and carries the authority of the state—later evidence often has to dislodge a story already lodged in the public mind."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The first account matters beyond any single case. A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that television news outlets more often used language that obscured responsibility after police killings than after civilian killings, especially in cases involving unarmed victims who did not flee. Researchers traced that language most often to police departments’ initial accounts. Participants exposed to such language were less likely to hold officers morally responsible or to demand accountability."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "“The driver weaponized his vehicle” is a finding. “The officer believed the vehicle was driving toward him” is an account awaiting verification. Initial statements should mark the opening of an investigation, not its close.   I can no longer read an initial press release the way I once did. I still read the first story. I just don’t mistake it for the last. "

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STORY: "Narrative Vehicles: "The law enforcement bullets that killed Renee Good, Kohen Wiley, and John Albers entered from the side. Why did the official accounts say the cars were driving straight at officers?," by Susan Berardi, published by Washington Monthly, on August 24, 2026. (Susan Berardi is an award-winning writer and author of Stolen Sons, forthcoming in March 2027 from Plainspoken Books, an imprint of the University Press of Kansas.)

GIST: "The yellow trajectory rod marks a bullet that entered the passenger-side window of the minivan in which John Albers, 17, was killed by an Overland Park, Kansas, officer who said the vehicle was coming at him. Credit: Johnson County Crime Lab, obtained by Sheila Albers through a Kansas Open Records Act request and used with her permission.

“The driver weaponized his vehicle and drove toward the officer.”

I’ve heard that language before.

In less than one week this summer, ICE agents fatally shot two men in moving vehicles—25-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. In both cases, Homeland Security said the drivers had “weaponized” their vehicles against officers.

Less than a month earlier, on June 14, 2026, police responded to a reported shoplifting outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi. Vellesiya Wiley waited in the passenger seat of her friend’s car with her one-year-old son, Kohen, on her lap.

Wiley’s friend returned with a bag of diapers and began backing out of the parking spot. An officer fired into the car multiple times, according to news reports. One bullet fatally struck Kohen.

Police said “officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. [They] attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.”

Different agencies, different states, the same assertion: the vehicle was coming at the officer.

For the last five years, I’ve analyzed police interviews, autopsies, forensic reports, press statements, and video evidence from shootings into moving vehicles. I’ve also interviewed dozens of mothers who lost children in police shootings. In city after city, I began to recognize the same language—not necessarily in the shootings themselves, but in the official accounts that followed them.

Cars can, of course, be deadly weapons, and officers sometimes face drivers who are genuinely trying to hit them. The issue is not that police describe those threats. It is that, in the chaotic hours after a shooting, a department can present an officer’s account of the most disputed moment as an established fact.

Every police shooting is chaotic, and officials often must speak before they know everything. The problem is that a preliminary account does not always remain preliminary. Since the official version usually arrives first—and carries the authority of the state—later evidence often has to dislodge a story already lodged in the public mind.

In Mississippi, Wiley remembers her son’s shooting differently. “I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said.

Wiley recalled the officers stood on the right side of the car as her friend steered left. An independent review concluded a bullet entered the right side of Kohen’s chest and exited the left.

On January 20, 2018, in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, the call went out to police: “J-21 attempt,” code for attempted suicide.

“I’m familiar with that kid,” one police officer radioed back.

John Albers, 17, struggled with ADHD and depression. He had begun to make some impulsive decisions.

That night, two officers arrived at the Albers home for a welfare check. Across the street, a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured what happened next.

A thin line of light appeared beneath the garage door. Officer Clayton Jenison raised his weapon and moved toward the driveway. The garage door continued to rise.

A silver minivan’s reverse lights came on, and the van rolled backward onto the driveway. On a police dashcam positioned to the left of the van, Jenison appeared to stand directly behind the vehicle. The Ring camera showed a different angle: Jenison remained to the right of the minivan at all times.

“Stop!” Jenison shouted.

The tires rolled. No sudden acceleration. No lurch. Just movement.

Jenison fired. Two shots flashed in the darkness. Glass shattered.

The minivan paused, then continued backward into a reverse J-turn around the officer. Its back end swung into the street until the van rolled back onto the Albers front lawn, headlights facing the street.

Jenison pivoted, tracking the vehicle, and fired eleven more shots as it circled him.

In his videotaped interview with police detectives, Jenison said, “I thought he was going to run me over.” Forensic analysis showed him standing six feet to the right of the van when he fired his first shot and nineteen feet away when he fired his thirteenth.

An hour after the shooting, before John’s father, Steve Albers, knew what had happened, an officer asked him, “Why did John park the van backward in the garage?”

Steve didn’t understand.

The officer rephrased: “Any reason he might want to park it so he could drive forward into the street? Why he might need to get out fast?”

Steve shifted his gaze from the officer to the open garage, not knowing his son had, in fact, reversed rather than driven forward.

“Any idea why he’d try to run over an officer?”

“Wait,” Steve replied, puzzled at the implication. “What’s going on here?”

That evening, Overland Park police released a statement:

“As the responding officers approached the residence to make contact, the garage door opened, and a vehicle exited the garage, moving rapidly toward one of the responding officers.”

The disputed perception in Jenison’s interview—“I thought he was going to run me over”—had become, in the department’s public account, a statement of fact: the vehicle was “moving rapidly toward” him.

Psychologists call part of what happens next the primacy effect: information encountered first can shape how later information is interpreted. Once the public hears that a driver accelerated toward an officer, contradictory evidence may have to fight uphill simply because it arrived second.

At a press conference one month after the shooting, District Attorney Steve Howe played only the left-side police dashcam video. “Suddenly, the garage door opened,” he said. “The minivan backed up toward the officer who was standing directly behind it. John Albers rapidly drove the car toward the officer.”

Howe made no mention of the Ring doorcam video.

The minivan “performed a wild J-turn,” he continued, “and in a split second, the officer went from a position of safety to once again being directly in the path of a van that was accelerating toward him.”

The official explanation again turned on the same disputed fact: where the officer stood in relation to the vehicle.

John’s autopsy, completed one week after Howe’s press conference, showed that the bullets traveled from right to left through his head and neck. Forensic analysis determined the bullets shattered the passenger-side windows of the minivan; the rear window and front windshield remained intact.

The first account matters beyond any single case. A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that television news outlets more often used language that obscured responsibility after police killings than after civilian killings, especially in cases involving unarmed victims who did not flee. Researchers traced that language most often to police departments’ initial accounts. Participants exposed to such language were less likely to hold officers morally responsible or to demand accountability.

The pattern predates Albers. In 2010, after Officer Aaron Hess fatally shot 20-year-old Daniel “D.J.” Henry Jr. outside a college bar in Pleasantville, New York, police said Henry had sped toward Hess and struck him with his car.

Witnesses, passengers, and video later challenged that account, saying Henry had followed an officer’s order to move the car forward slowly and had not accelerated toward Hess.

A 2021 New York Times investigation found that over five years, police killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or knife and were not being pursued for a violent crime—more than one death every week.

When an official narrative takes hold, a victim’s family can spend months or years trying to catch up to it. By the time contradictory evidence emerges, the first account may already have framed the questions journalists, prosecutors, and the public are asking.

On January 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Federal officials said she had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” An independent autopsy later concluded that one bullet entered Good’s left temple and exited the right side of her head.

Unlike many local police departments, Homeland Security did not frame Good’s shooting as the beginning of an ongoing investigation. Officials instead used sweeping language about her intent. But in this case, the government’s account did not go uncontested for long: citizens uploaded cellphone videos in real time, allowing the public to compare official claims with other evidence almost immediately.

But Good’s shooting remains the anomaly. The surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis, the violence, and the round-ups of law-abiding immigrants had already brought out dozens of protesters and cell phone coverage to that residential street. At least three videos emerged within minutes of the shooting. So ordinary citizens, in real time, were able to break the government’s monopoly on the first narrative. Officials no longer controlled the story or the evidence.

What happens in cases where no Ring camera, dashcam, or cellphone video exists to compete with the first account? One could argue that when independent videos aren’t immediately available, the official account deserves even more caution—not less.

The first story still matters. Officers deserve the opportunity to explain what happened, and the public deserves timely, accurate information. But departments can distinguish what they know from what an involved officer says.

“The driver weaponized his vehicle” is a finding. “The officer believed the vehicle was driving toward him” is an account awaiting verification. Initial statements should mark the opening of an investigation, not its close.

I can no longer read an initial press release the way I once did. I still read the first story. I just don’t mistake it for the last. "

The entire story can be read at:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/08/24/weaponized-vehicle-ice-shootings/?utm_source=TMP-Newsletter&utm_campaign=e1cfb9ad8a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_08_26_10_32&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5e02cdad9d-e1cfb9ad8a-174331221

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;

August 31: DNA testing or lack thereof: Griselda "Chris"Moore takes to the explains Village Vanguard to ask "How much is one man's time worth? (and many other questions) as she offers a wife's plea for accountability and DNA testing. Some of her other questions: What matters to me now is what we do with a case nearly 50 years later. Shouldn’t we be willing to look again? Shouldn’t we be willing to test evidence? Shouldn’t we be willing to correct a mistake if one was made?" Read on.

BACKGROUND: From a previous post of this Blog:  (Link below): "All 50 states and the federal government have legal mechanisms allowing prisoners to seek postconviction DNA testing, but many statutes require inmates to satisfy burdensome procedural requirements before courts will authorize testing. Legal scholars and innocence attorneys say those barriers have prevented postconviction DNA testing laws from delivering on their promise of making modern forensic testing available to prisoners with credible innocence claims. Brandon L. Garrett, a leading criminal justice scholar at Duke University School of Law, told Law360 in an email that DNA testing "has certainly taught us that our ideas about finality and strength of evidence are quite fallible and limited." "Given the lessons from those wrongful convictions, and all of the scientific research on how evidence can go wrong, we would expect that we would have clear pathways to investigate new evidence of innocence," Garrett said. "We've made some progress. And we still don't have adequate safeguards in place. Further, we have been backsliding."

2050234247046168664

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "My husband is currently serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime he has maintained since he was 19 years old that he did not commit. He is now 68. Nineteen years old. Sixty-eight years old. Nearly 50 years of his life have passed while he has continued to maintain his innocence. And there is DNA evidence. This is not something I dreamed up yesterday. I have documentation of my communications with the District Attorney’s Office concerning this evidence. Several years ago, the newly-elected district attorney told us that, if elected, she would make sure the DNA evidence issue was addressed and that we would be able to pursue testing. She was elected. The matter was subsequently referred to what was described to us as her “special department,” which would follow up on the DNA issue. Those representatives then instructed us to file the appropriate DNA petition. We did exactly what we were told to do. Immediately. And then? Nothing."

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

COMMENTARY: "How much is one man's time worth? A wife's plea for accountability and DNA testing," by Griselda "Cris" Moore, published on August 26, 2026.

GIST: "How much is one man’s time worth?

That is the question I keep asking myself as I sit through hearing after hearing, listening to attorneys ask for more time, prosecutors ask for more time, and deadlines come and go.

My husband is currently serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime he has maintained since he was 19 years old that he did not commit.

He is now 68.

Nineteen years old. Sixty-eight years old.

Nearly 50 years of his life have passed while he has continued to maintain his innocence.

And there is DNA evidence.

This is not something I dreamed up yesterday. I have documentation of my communications with the District Attorney’s Office concerning this evidence.

Several years ago, the newly-elected district attorney told us that, if elected, she would make sure the DNA evidence issue was addressed and that we would be able to pursue testing.

She was elected.

The matter was subsequently referred to what was described to us as her “special department,” which would follow up on the DNA issue.

Those representatives then instructed us to file the appropriate DNA petition.

We did exactly what we were told to do. Immediately.

And then?

Nothing.

The petition was set aside, and the DNA issue was never meaningfully addressed again.

That is difficult for me to understand.

If the District Attorney’s Office is confident that they have the right man, then test the evidence.

If the evidence supports the conviction, then let it say so.

If the evidence raises questions about the conviction, then the justice system has an obligation to confront those questions.

But allowing potentially important evidence to sit untouched while a man grows old behind bars is not justice.

More than eight years ago, California enacted legislation providing a process through which people convicted of crimes can petition for DNA testing when potentially relevant biological evidence exists.

So I must ask a very simple question:

If the District Attorney’s Office is confident they have the right man, what is the holdup?

What are we waiting for?

But for the moment, I want to set that question aside and talk about something else that has become impossible for me to ignore:

TIME.

Time is something none of us gets back.

My husband was a young Black man when he was convicted in the late 1970s. I am not interested in claiming that race explains every injustice or every delay in his case.

But history matters. We cannot pretend that the criminal justice system of that era was immune from racial injustice or that wrongful convictions were impossible.

What matters to me now is what we do with a case nearly 50 years later.

Shouldn’t we be willing to look again?

Shouldn’t we be willing to test evidence?

Shouldn’t we be willing to correct a mistake if one was made?

Instead, I continue to watch time disappear.

In recent years, attorneys have been appointed to represent my husband in proceedings involving his case. These are attorneys who are supposed to advocate for people who are incarcerated and who depend upon them to fight for their rights.

What I have witnessed has left me frustrated, angry and deeply disillusioned with our justice system.

I have watched attorneys request extensions.

I have watched hearings pushed further down the road.

I have watched deadlines established by judges and then watched those deadlines become flexible when another excuse or request for additional time is presented.

And all the while, someone is getting older in a prison cell.

Someone is missing birthdays.

Someone is missing holidays.

Someone is missing family members growing older.

Someone is missing an entire lifetime.

That person doesn’t get an extension on his life.

I am a retired government employee. I worked for the government for 20 years.

If I had repeatedly failed to complete my work, missed deadlines and continually asked for more time without producing results, I have a hard time believing I would have remained employed.

Yet when government-funded attorneys and government offices handle these cases, where is the accountability for getting the work done?

Who pays for all these hours?

The taxpayers do.

I am one of those taxpayers.

I am retired, and I am still paying taxes. I have no problem paying for a justice system that works.

What I have a problem with is paying for unnecessary delay and what appears to be a lack of urgency when someone’s freedom and remaining years of life are at stake.

Recently, I sat in court and listened to the District Attorney explain that more time was needed because all the transcripts had not yet been obtained.

This office has been involved with this same case for more than four years. I have personally communicated with the office throughout this process, and I have documentation of those communications.

So I must ask:

How much time does it take?

And more importantly:

How much time should a human being be expected to surrender while the people handling his case continue asking for more?

We have already spent approximately two and a half years with one court-appointed attorney. From the beginning, a six-month extension was requested.

During that time, there was, from our perspective, very little meaningful contact with her client. When we asked for a change of attorney, the judge defended her qualifications.

Perhaps she was a good attorney.

Perhaps she was not.

But the result was the same:

More time was lost.

And when you are 68 years old and have already spent nearly five decades incarcerated, two and a half years is not a small amount of time.

It is not simply paperwork.

It is not simply another continuance on a court calendar.

It is someone’s life.

I am not asking anyone to perform miracles.

I am not asking attorneys to work beyond what is reasonable.

I am not asking prosecutors to abandon their responsibilities.

I am asking for something much simpler:

DO YOUR JOB.

Do it thoroughly.

Do it competently.

Do it within a reasonable amount of time.

And when a judge establishes a deadline, perhaps that deadline should actually mean something.

Because justice delayed is not an abstract phrase when the person waiting for justice is sitting in a prison cell.

Our justice system is supposed to seek truth — not simply process paperwork until the years run out.

There is a cruel irony in telling an incarcerated person that his case matters while repeatedly telling him that the people handling it simply need more time.

More time for whom?

The attorneys have time.

The prosecutors have time.

The courts have time.

The government has time.

But the person sitting in the prison cell?

He has only the time left in his life.

My husband was 19 when this began.

He is 68 now.

I don’t know how many more years we have together. I don’t know how many more years he has.

What I do know is that none of us gets to add those lost years back onto the end of our lives.

So I am not asking for special treatment.

I am asking for accountability.

I am asking for urgency where urgency is warranted.

I am asking judges to stop routinely accepting delay after delay without meaningful consequences.

I am asking the District Attorney’s Office to remember the commitment that was made regarding the DNA evidence.

And I am asking that the evidence be tested.

Not next year.

Not after another extension.

Test it.

If it confirms their case, then let the evidence speak.

If it raises questions about the conviction, then let the justice system have the courage to face those questions.

Because there is a human being at the center of this case.

His name is my husband.

He was 19 years old when his life was taken from him.

He is 68 now.

Please stop wasting what little time he has left.

DO YOUR JOB."

The entire story can be read at:

https://davisvanguard.org/2026/08/dna-testing-wrongful-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;

August 31: Rodney Reed: Texas: DNA: A saving grace? Not always, as Senior Reporter Marco Peggio reports on Law360 in his insightful commentary headed, "DNA can prove your innocence, if they let you test it," in which he notes that, as the Reed case illustrates, some prisoners face "obstacles" in obtaining potentially exculpatory DNA testing: "The case illustrates the central paradox of DNA testing: While advances in forensic science have made it easier than ever to answer questions of guilt and innocence, prisoners often face formidable legal hurdles before they can obtain testing in the first place. Reed's case isn't unique and the problem extends far beyond Texas."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Battles around access to DNA testing replicate a long-standing tension at the heart of the criminal justice system: the one between a defendant's claims of innocence and the resolution of criminal cases, known as finality. Prosecutors tend to oppose processes that risk delaying judgment becoming final. One example is the habeas corpus process, through which people seek to vacate their convictions based on claims of constitutional violations in their criminal cases. The process of obtaining DNA testing triggers a similar dynamic. Findley (Keith A. Findley, who co-founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project) said that some prosecutors embrace the use of postconviction DNA testing, and even initiate the testing process. Others vehemently resist it, even in cases where the same technology was used to secure a defendant's conviction. "It's a form of hypocrisy," Findley said. "To some prosecutors and some courts, finality to them becomes more important than ultimate justice, than getting it right, and that's deeply problematic."

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

QUOTE TWO OF THE DAY: "All 50 states and the federal government have legal mechanisms allowing prisoners to seek postconviction DNA testing, but many statutes require inmates to satisfy burdensome procedural requirements before courts will authorize testing. Legal scholars and innocence attorneys say those barriers have prevented postconviction DNA testing laws from delivering on their promise of making modern forensic testing available to prisoners with credible innocence claims. Brandon L. Garrett, a leading criminal justice scholar at Duke University School of Law, told Law360 in an email that DNA testing "has certainly taught us that our ideas about finality and strength of evidence are quite fallible and limited." "Given the lessons from those wrongful convictions, and all of the scientific research on how evidence can go wrong, we would expect that we would have clear pathways to investigate new evidence of innocence," Garrett said. "We've made some progress. And we still don't have adequate safeguards in place. Further, we have been backsliding."

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

QUOTE THREE OF THE DAY: "Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project who represents Reed, called it "baffling" that DNA evidence could be used to secure convictions but resisted when it could potentially help the defense. "It's incredibly powerful evidence that is just sitting in the clerk's office available to be tested," Pucher said in an interview with Law360. "It makes no sense to have a statute that allows for access to postconviction testing, to have a murder weapon that is going to have on it the DNA from the person who committed this crime, and having that be sitting there and not tested."

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-
COMMENTARY: " by Senior Reporter Marco Peggio, published by Law360, on August 21, 2026.

Rodney Reed was convicted of murder but argues his innocence would be proved if Texas prosecutors would test the DNA on the likely murder weapon from the case.

Reed's case highlights the obstacles prisoners face in obtaining potentially exculpatory DNA testing. 

On April 23, 1996, the partially clothed body of 19-year-old Stacey Lee Stites was found along a rural road in Bastrop County, Texas. 

She was wearing only a black bra, underwear, torn blue jeans, socks and one tennis shoe. Investigators recovered semen from her vagina and rectum, and a medical examiner later concluded Stites had been sexually assaulted.

Near the body, police recovered part of a brown woven belt missing its buckle.

Another piece of the belt, with the buckle attached, was found inside the pickup truck Stites shared with her fiancée, Jimmy Fennell, a Giddings, Texas, police officer.

Investigators concluded the belt had been used to strangle Stites. The two pieces fit together and the belt's pattern matched marks on her neck.

DNA testing later identified Rodney Reed, a Black man from the Bastrop area, as the source of the semen recovered from Stites' body. Reed was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1998.

Reed has always maintained his innocence, arguing that he and Stites, who was white, were having an affair and had consensual sex shortly before she was killed.

 His lawyers later uncovered evidence they say points to Fennell, who's white, as the killer, including racist statements. 

In one, made while serving a prison sentence for an unrelated sexual assault, Fennell allegedly said he "'had to kill [his] n***rloving fiancé[e],'" as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a later opinion.

But for nearly three decades, the centerpiece of Reed's innocence claim has been the belt investigators said was the murder weapon.

 Since 1999, Reed has sought to get the belt tested for DNA, but Texas courts have repeatedly denied his requests.

The case illustrates the central paradox of DNA testing: While advances in forensic science have made it easier than ever to answer questions of guilt and innocence, prisoners often face formidable legal hurdles before they can obtain testing in the first place.

Reed's case isn't unique and the problem extends far beyond Texas. 

All 50 states and the federal government have legal mechanisms allowing prisoners to seek postconviction DNA testing, but many statutes require inmates to satisfy burdensome procedural requirements before courts will authorize testing.

Legal scholars and innocence attorneys say those barriers have prevented postconviction DNA testing laws from delivering on their promise of making modern forensic testing available to prisoners with credible innocence claims.

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading criminal justice scholar at Duke University School of Law, told Law360 in an email that DNA testing "has certainly taught us that our ideas about finality and strength of evidence are quite fallible and limited."

"Given the lessons from those wrongful convictions, and all of the scientific research on how evidence can go wrong, we would expect that we would have clear pathways to investigate new evidence of innocence," Garrett said. "We've made some progress. And we still don't have adequate safeguards in place. Further, we have been backsliding."

The Promise of DNA

The DNA Breakthrough

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, DNA testing has played a direct or circumstantial role in 648 exonerations since 1989. 

That figure includes cases in which DNA excluded the defendant and identified another perpetrator, or in which it helped undermine a prosecutor's theory.

Forensic scientist Edward T. Blake pioneered the technology in the United States. 

In 1986, he conducted the first DNA test ever admitted in an American court. 

Three years later, he helped exonerate Gary Dotson, one of the first people in the world to be cleared through DNA testing after he was rongfully convicted of kidnapping and raping a 16-year-old girl who later recanted her allegations.

Blake also helped secure the 1993 exoneration of Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person on death row to be cleared through DNA testing after his wrongful conviction for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl.

According to the Innocence Project, the nonprofit founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld as a law clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Blake's exculpatory DNA reports helped free dozens of wrongfully convicted people during the technology's early years. 

Before DNA technology entered the picture, the dominant view — reflected in literature, Supreme Court opinions and media accounts — was that, although fallible, the criminal justice system only rarely produced a wrongful conviction.

So when DNA technology began being used to test crime scene samples and link them to suspects in the mid-1980s, it was a game changer. 

As testing began producing exonerations, starting with the clearing of David Vasquez for a rape and murder in 1989, assumptions about the accuracy of the criminal justice system began to shatter.

Keith A. Findley, who co-founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project in 1998 and recently retired from teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told Law360 that the pre-DNA presumption that wrongful convictions were rare was so ingrained that even postconviction attorneys were wary about finding defendants who were truly innocent. 

But soon enough they discovered, case after case, that errors were rampant, Findley said.

"When the first DNA exonerations came along, they were shocking," Findley said. "They were stunning because not only did they prove with near certainty — as near as you can get — that an innocent person had been wrongly convicted, but they told us who it was: they gave us a name, a face, a story, a life."

Although DNA testing applied only in a small subset of cases — where a suspect left biological evidence at the crime scene — those exonerations provided unprecedented proof that many practices previously relied on in the justice system were actually faulty, and often led to wrongful convictions.

"DNA testing proved it was the gold standard. It proved definitively that wrongful convictions occur," said Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former journalist at the Chicago Tribune who is now a senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations.

That reckoning helped focus the national attention on practices such as mistaken eyewitness identification procedures, coercive police interrogations, poor defense lawyering, withholding of exculpatory evidence and a wide range of error-prone forensic methods.

"DNA testing has led to a lot of criminal justice reforms that are designed to increase accuracy," Daniel Medwed, a leading legal scholar on wrongful convictions and postconviction remedies, told Law360.

With DNA testing providing scientific near-certainty of innocence, even nonscientific evidence pointing toward exoneration such as a witness recanting their testimony, or a defendant recanting self-incriminating statements, began to be regarded as more valuable overall.

In the decades since its onset, DNA technology itself has also continued to evolve, becoming more accurate and requiring less biological evidence than in the past.

Forensic investigators are able to extrapolate DNA profiles from skin cells left through casual contact on open surfaces, a method known as touch DNA.

 Mitochondrial DNA, which is stored inside parts of cells responsible for creating energy and can be recovered in skeletal remains, shed hairs or hair fragments, can be used to identify people in cases where samples are degraded or old.

"As DNA has become more precise, it's not only more accurate but it also requires less biological evidence, which means it's available in more cases," Medwed said. "Nowadays, DNA testing is often available at the beginning of cases, so you can weed out innocent suspects."

The Reality of Procedural Obstacles

In the initial years DNA testing was available, convicted people often faced uphill battles to access that testing.

 Prosecutors were often successful in persuading judges, typically the ones who presided over the original trials, to deny motions for DNA testing.

Over time, however, as exonerations occurred more often, political pressure increased on state legislators to enact laws creating a legal path for prisoners to obtain DNA testing. 

New York was first in 1994, followed by Illinois in 1997.

 A later wave of statutes created mechanisms to ensure that evidence was preserved so that it could be tested later.

In the mid-2000s, prosecutorial offices began creating conviction integrity review units. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins formed the first substantial one in 2007.

But just as they created access, legislatures also imposed conditions on when courts may order testing. Depending on the state, defendants may have to either be incarcerated, file within prescribed deadlines, overcome restrictions tied to guilty pleas or confessions or to show that favorable DNA results likely would have changed the outcome of their trial.

Postconviction DNA testing isn't without downsides. It can be costly and time-consuming.

Still, the cumulative effect of these barriers is troubling because they eliminate a tool that could either confirm the integrity of a conviction or expose a wrongful one, Medwed said.

"Anything that reinforces accuracy — even if the test validates the conviction — that's a positive thing. It reinforces our sense of the integrity of the system," he said.

There have been cases in which DNA testing confirmed guilt.

 For example, Roger Keith Coleman, who maintained his innocence until his execution in Virginia in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, was posthumously linked to the crime by DNA testing in 2006, confirming the jury's verdict.

The Virginia PostConviction DNA Testing Program, a state-funded initiative that reviewed archived case files from 1973 to 1988, shows how postconviction DNA testing can be used to reinforce confidence in the original verdicts, in addition to exonerating innocent people. 

While the project led to 13 exonerations and identified previously unknown perpetrators in at least 16 cases, DNA testing also showed that, among 227 sexual assault convictions that produced determinate results, 187 yielded inculpatory results, meaning the convicted person was not excluded as the source of the biological evidence.

Not every procedural requirement carries equal weight, experts say. 

Attorneys who litigate postconviction DNA cases say the most consequential obstacle is often the "materiality" standard, which generally requires defendants to show that favorable DNA results would likely have changed the outcome of their trial.

"The biggest hurdle to overcome is the materiality standard," Chase Baumgartner, a staff attorney at the Innocence Project of Texas and former DNA analyst, told Law360. "The courts say, 'even if you got all the DNA testing you wanted, it wouldn't make a difference in your case. So we're not going to waste the time and effort and money to do this because it just wouldn't make a difference.'"

Mike Ware, executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, said that requirement can force courts to speculate about the value of evidence before it has ever been tested.

"It's kind of almost putting the cart before the horse because you really cannot definitively say how material the results are going to be until you know what the results are," Ware said.

He pointed to the case of Steven Phillips as an example of why courts should be cautious about denying DNA testing based on predictions of what the evidence will show.

In Phillips' case, the state successfully argued that DNA testing was unnecessary because multiple eyewitnesses had identified Phillips as the perpetrator of a series of sexual assaults in the Dallas area, making identity irrelevant. Testing was ultimately conducted anyway, Ware said, and it excluded Phillips as the source of the biological evidence and identified the actual perpetrator through a direct DNA comparison.

Reed's Long Fight for DNA Testing

In 2001, Texas enacted Chapter 64, one of the nation's earliest postconviction DNA testing statutes. 

The law created a procedure allowing convicted defendants to seek DNA testing of biological evidence under specified conditions.

Reed turned to Chapter 64 in 2014 after years of unsuccessfully seeking DNA testing of the belt, asking a Bastrop County court to order modern testing of what prosecutors identified as the murder weapon. 

His attorneys argued that advances in forensic science since his 1998 trial could recover biological material from the woven belt and help determine who handled it.

Texas argued that Reed failed to satisfy several of Chapter 64's requirements, including demonstrating that the belt had been preserved with an adequate chain of custody. 

Prosecutors also contended that any DNA recovered could reflect genetic material that was casually transferred prior to the crime and, in any event, would not likely have changed the outcome of Reed's trial.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately denied the motion, finding that the belt was "contaminated" because it had been "handled by ungloved attorneys, court personnel, and possibly the jurors." 

The court also concluded that Reed had not shown that exculpatory testing results would have resulted in his acquittal.

Reed then sued in federal court, arguing that the state courts' interpretation of Chapter 64's chain-of-custody requirements violated his due process rights. 

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Reed's lawsuit was timely and could proceed but did not decide whether he was entitled to DNA testing.

Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project who represents Reed, called it "baffling" that DNA evidence could be used to secure convictions but resisted when it could potentially help the defense.

"It's incredibly powerful evidence that is just sitting in the clerk's office available to be tested," Pucher said in an interview with Law360. "It makes no sense to have a statute that allows for access to postconviction testing, to have a murder weapon that is going to have on it the DNA from the person who committed this crime, and having that be sitting there and not tested."

Pucher said testing could be completed in a matter of weeks, with the Innocence Project covering the cost, yet the litigation over access to the evidence has stretched on for more than a decade.

 During that time, Texas even sought an execution date for Reed in 2019 before it was ultimately stayed.

Pucher said testing the belt's inner grooves, areas less likely to contain DNA from ordinary handling, could help identify who strangled Stites.

"We know that the person who committed this crime, who strangled her, necessarily used a lot of force, held the belt for a long time, probably sweat on the belt," Pucher said. "If there is DNA in there, it's from the perpetrator."

In an amicus brief supporting Reed's latest appeal, Baumgartner, the former DNA analyst, argued that even accounting for possible contamination, testing the belt could still include or exclude Reed or Fennell "with above 95% accuracy."

In March, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Writing in dissent,Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it "inexplicable" that prosecutors continued to oppose DNA testing of the belt "despite the very substantial possibility that such testing could exculpate Reed and identify the real killer."

"The State will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed's or Fennell's DNA is on the murder weapon, even though a simple DNA test could reveal that information," Justice Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Finality Versus Innocence Claims

When Guilty Pleas and Confessions Bar DNA Testing

Findley said access to DNA testing exposes the coercive pressures embedded in the criminal justice system and an emphasis on finality that can come at the expense of defendants' constitutional rights. 

That tension is particularly evident in states that bar or restrict postconviction DNA testing for defendants who confessed to crimes or pled guilty.

About 94% of state criminal convictions and 97% of federal criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through guilty pleas rather than trials. 

Yet, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 925 of the 3,846 people exonerated since 1989 — about 24% — had pled guilty. About 13% of exonerees falsely confessed to the crimes for which they were convicted.

"Two of the flaws of the current system — police coercion that leads to false confession and bargaining power that can lead innocent people to plead guilty — are sometimes used as barriers to access to the DNA that can prove they're innocent," Findley said.

Four states have laws that prohibit or restrict postconviction DNA testing for defendants who pled guilty or no contest, a plea in which a defendant accepts a conviction without expressly admitting guilt.

Medwed said those restrictions on DNA testing fail to account for the reality of plea bargaining and the coercive effect of what is known as the "trial penalty."

"Most people plead guilty, and they might plead guilty even though they're innocent because they're risk averse and they're worried about a much worse sentence after trial," Medwed said. "The idea is if you plead guilty, you forfeit your right to seek postconviction DNA testing."

The first iterations of Texas' Chapter 64 foreclosed testing for people who had confessed to crimes under the rationale that a confession makes any evidence subject to DNA testing immaterial. 

As statistics began showing that false confessions are a leading cause of wrongful convictions, the state legislature later removed that provision from the statute.

Battles around access to DNA testing replicate a long-standing tension at the heart of the criminal justice system: the one between a defendant's claims of innocence and the resolution of criminal cases, known as finality.

Prosecutors tend to oppose processes that risk delaying judgment becoming final. One example is the habeas corpus process, through which people seek to vacate their convictions based on claims of constitutional violations in their criminal cases. The process of obtaining DNA testing triggers a similar dynamic.

Findley said that some prosecutors embrace the use of postconviction DNA testing, and even initiate the testing process. Others vehemently resist it, even in cases where the same technology was used to secure a defendant's conviction.

"It's a form of hypocrisy," Findley said. "To some prosecutors and some courts, finality to them becomes more important than ultimate justice, than getting it right, and that's deeply problematic."

Findley said resistance is often fueled by confirmation bias: Prosecutors and courts are so convinced in the guilt of a defendant and so invested in the outcome of a case that they cannot conceive the possibility that DNA testing could produce a different result.

"The system is so attached to this notion of finality that often prosecutors and courts resist, even when the DNA could be fairly significant, principally because they remain convinced the person is guilty," Findley said. "Remember that in every one of the DNA exonerations, the system was convinced the person was guilty."

Baumgartner said Reed's case has taken on significance beyond his own conviction because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' interpretation of Chapter 64 is now being cited in other cases to oppose postconviction DNA testing.

One example, he said, is Paul Shoemaker, a client of the Innocence Project of Texas who was convicted of felony murder in the death of Richard Reyes, who was shot outside the Valle Vista Apartments in Harlingen, Texas. 

Shoemaker is seeking DNA testing of a lighter that prosecutors say the shooter used just minutes before the killing and that police recovered the following morning.

The lighter has remained stored in a sealed evidence envelope at the police station. 

Prosecutors successfully argued that the evidence should not be tested because, under the TCCA's ruling in Reed's case, the markings on the evidence envelope — such as officers' initials and dates — raise chain-of-custody concerns similar to those the court found dispositive in Reed. 

The state said there were many possible contributors to the DNA on the lighter, arguing it was unlikely that any identified DNA would identify the shooter.

"Reed's case has kind of exploded beyond his and has become a new way to deny testing when the DNA does matter in the case," Baumgartner said.

Ware said denying DNA testing based on technical interpretations of Chapter 64 undermines what the statute was designed to accomplish.

"You have to ask yourself: why would the state ever oppose a Chapter 64 motion?" he said. "They don't want to be embarrassed by an exoneration. Never mind that it might allow them to go out and catch the actual perpetrator and, you know, enhance public safety.""

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.law360.com/articles/2507387/dna-can-prove-your-innocence-if-they-let-you-test-it

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;

August 30: AI-powered surveillance networks: Startling Flock exposé: Mother Jones investigation (Assistant editor Schuyler) reveals that police are spending opioid settlement funds on Flock cameras - and although historic opioid settlements were supposed to be a lifeline for underserved communities, much of that money is flowing to law enforcement, noting that: "Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras that has received more than 1,500 signatures to date.

“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Menear told me. “The new crisis is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

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

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intense bipartisan pushback in the communities where they’ve been deployed. A review of meeting minutes, local reporting, state opioid expenditure disclosures, and invoices obtained via public records requests reveals that at least twelve sheriffs’ offices and police departments have since 2024 spent their opioid funds on Flock cameras. Another seven law enforcement agencies used the money to purchase similar ALPR technology from competitors Motorola, Axon, and Verkada. In sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000 in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The surveillance industry has taken notice, explicitly encouraging cops to spend opioid money on the technology. A December blog post from the multinational security firm Leonardo called opioid settlement funds “a major new opportunity” for law enforcement to invest in license plate readers.

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

STORY: "Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras," by Assistant Editor Schuyler Mitchell, published by 'Mother Jones' on August 27, 2026. (Schuyler Mitchell is an assistant editor at Mother Jones. She previously worked as an associate editor at The Intercept and a political columnist at Truthout. Her freelance writing and reporting have appeared in The Baffler, Dirt, New York magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and elsewhere. Currently based in New York, she was born in Texas and raised in North Carolina.)

SUB-HEADING: "Historic opioid settlements were supposed to be a lifeline for underserved communities. But much of that money is flowing to law enforcement."

GIST: "More than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs), an investigation by Mother Jones has found.

Settlement funds began flowing to states and localities in 2022, after major pharmaceutical companies agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the industry’s role in the opioid crisis. Altogether, state and local governments secured more than $50 billion in funds, to be paid out over 18 years, from the various manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the deadly epidemic.

Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills.


“Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intense bipartisan pushback in the communities where they’ve been deployed. A review of meeting minutes, local reporting, state opioid expenditure disclosures, and invoices obtained via public records requests reveals that at least twelve sheriffs’ offices and police departments have since 2024 spent their opioid funds on Flock cameras. Another seven law enforcement agencies used the money to purchase similar ALPR technology from competitors Motorola, Axon, and Verkada.

In sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000 in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions.

In city council and county commission meetings, police sought to convince local officials that the cameras were a good use of the opioid money because they would help catch drug traffickers and reduce drug-related crimes. But Robyn Oster, director of policy at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said that this type of spending doesn’t honor the spirit of the settlements.


“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” said Oster. “While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis…Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

At a June 2025 meeting in Sunnyside, Washington—an agricultural hub where roughly one in five people live in poverty—council members were thrilled by the prospect of spending their opioid settlement money on a Flock camera. Around $200,000 had been sitting, untouched, in the city’s coffers since 2022, even as the area faced a dire need for expanded treatment services: Yakima County lacks a medical detox center and has one of the highest overdose death rates in Washington state.

“We’ve had several people … in that strip mall next to the hotel … that have complained about drug use and things like that behind their business, and they’ve asked us to place a trailer there,” the Sunnyside police chief told city councilmembers. He requested the approval of $24,000 in opioid settlement funds to go to a one-year lease for a mobile Flock security trailer, which would integrate with the city’s existing Flock surveillance system.

“I was trying to find creative ways to pay for one because $24,000 wasn’t in our budget this year,” he added, “but we’ve got this opioid settlement money, and if we’re tying it to the drug use problem we’re having at these hotels, I think we can justify the expenditure there.”

The city council unanimously voted to approve the police chief’s request. “Can we afford two of them?” one councilmember asked with enthusiasm.

Thousands of miles away, in Ohio County, West Virginia, county commissioners also voted unanimously in favor of spending opioid money on Flock cameras. In September 2025, the commission approved the sheriff’s office’s request for six Flock ALPRs, totaling $57,900 for the first three years. According to meeting minutes, Chief Deputy Kent Lewis “said a representative from the company is able to come and give a presentation,” and “added that Walmart and Lowe’s use FLOCK, so we may be able to tie into their system as well.” When one commissioner asked whether the cameras were an appropriate use of the funds, the deputy sheriff responded that they would “[help] track drugs coming into our area.”

Three months later, Sheriff H. Nelson Croft Jr. gave an update on Flock to the commissioners. According to meeting minutes, the system logged 28,000 license plate readings on Black Friday alone. Ohio County has a population of around 40,000.

The surveillance industry has taken notice, explicitly encouraging cops to spend opioid money on the technology. A December blog post from the multinational security firm Leonardo called opioid settlement funds “a major new opportunity” for law enforcement to invest in license plate readers.

“Eligible spending categories vary by state,” the blog post noted, but approved uses often include “LPR technology due to its role in detecting vehicles tied to drug trafficking, overdose events, and fugitive recovery.” In June, 404 Media reported that Leonardo planned to add sensors to its ALPRs that “would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices” in passing cars, enabling the cameras to track not just cars but “the location of particular people.”

“The funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

Mother Jones identified four additional locations where local officials explored using opioid money to pay for Flock cameras but ultimately funded them through other parts of city or county budgets. In Green, Ohio, for instance, the city council approved the purchase of 14 Flock cameras in 2024, and the mayor stated at the time that the city could use $20,000 of opioid money to offset the cost. But Shelley Goodrich, Green’s director of finance, told me the city ultimately paid for the first two years of the contract using a different funding source. “We were planning to use Drug Task Force funds beginning in 2026; however, we have not made any payments in 2026,” she wrote. This month, the Green City Council voted against renewing its contract with Flock, citing concerns about privacy and oversight.

In Etowah County, Alabama, commissioners authorized two disbursements from the opioid settlement fund to pay for ten Flock cameras in August 2024 and March 2025, totaling $42,267. But minutes from October 2025 show that the sheriff department’s budget was increased by $42,267, “to reimburse the Opioid Settlement fund for the FY 2024 and FY 2025 annual contract for the Flock safety cameras.” The Etowah County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about why it reimbursed the funds or whether it plans to use opioid money for future renewals of the Flock contract.

Opioid spending on police surveillance technology isn’t limited to ALPRs. Mother Jones also identified six locations that have used opioid settlement money to fund contracts with Peregrine Technologies, an AI-powered software platform that integrates law enforcement surveillance data from a variety of sources.

In October, the city of Campbell, California, approved a three-year, $71,500 annual contract with Peregrine using opioid settlement funds. A publicly accessible copy of the contract states that “the initial Customer Data sources and systems” integrated into Peregrine would include both Flock and Axon ALPRs, as well as Axon body cameras, police records, and the Axon Fusus intelligence platform. Two months later, the city council in Chicopee, Massachusetts, approved a five-year, $837,500 contract with Peregrine, to be paid using opioid funds.

Chicopee was among the western Massachusetts cities hit hardest by the opioid crisis, and in 2024, it still had the second-highest overdose rate in Hampden County. In meeting minutes, the Chicopee mayor noted there was “quite a bit of money in the opioid agreement account” and said that the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office supported increasing the Peregrine contract from three years to five years.

Peregrine itself has been proud to announce “new partnerships” with police departments in Cranston and South Kingstown, Rhode Island. “Both agencies leveraged opioid settlement funds to invest in their communities by strengthening interagency collaboration, operational awareness, and investigative workflows through Peregrine,” stated a July LinkedIn post from the company.

Revelations that local governments spent residents’ opioid money on Flock cameras has stoked furor in both Pensacola, Florida, and Monongalia County, West Virginia. In Pensacola, the mayor approved a two-year, $108,000 contract for 18 Flock cameras using opioid funds. After seven months of public backlash, the Pensacola City Council announced in June that it would no longer allow opioid money to be spent on Flock cameras when the contract next came up for renewal.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, constituents have shown up at the Monongalia County Courthouse every Wednesday morning to speak out against local officials’ support for Flock. In November, the Monongalia County Commission approved the sheriff’s request to use up to $180,000 of settlement funds to install 20 Flock cameras across the county. To some people in the area, this use of the opioid money felt like salt in an all-too-fresh wound.

“As somebody who has had family members directly affected by the opioid crisis, I find the use of these funds absolutely disgusting,” said Harrison York, a 25-year-old electrical engineering student at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “The thing that got my family members clean were methadone services, and that’s what this opioid settlement money should be used for.” He pointed to research showing that criminalization does little to help people struggling with drug addiction, and contended that further policing “would punish the poor and the working class, who are victims” of the opioid epidemic.

Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras that has received more than 1,500 signatures to date.

“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Menear told me. “The new crisis is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/police-opioid-funding-flock-alpr-camera-surveillance-tech/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-08-28-2026

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;