November 9: Technology: (Misuse of confidential databases available to police) : Constable Elias Mouawad: Ontario's explosive police corruption probe 'Operation South' puts the spotlight on the prevalence of police abuse of confidential databases as Toronto Star Crime Reporter Wendy Gillis reports on this Toronto police officer who was caught snooping, which, says the Star, explains why his case is a warning to every officer with database access, noting that: "Mouawad was a bycatch of the bigger Project South investigation. He was caught on a wiretap running a licence plate search for Daljit Singh, his former boss at a security company, who assured it was for “nothing bad.” Unbeknownst to Mouawad, Singh was with Brian Da Costa, an accused drug trafficker and alleged co-conspirator of Const. Timothy Barnhardt, the veteran cop at the heart of the policing scandal. The subject of Mouawad’s search was linked to two past drug trafficking investigations, according to an agreed statement of facts read out at the officer’s trial. A lawyer for Singh, who is charged in relation to Mouawad’s computer search, declined to comment."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "In spite of log-in screens warning officers against misuse each time they sign into a workstation, police officers across Ontario have for years illicitly mined the private information at their fingertips, abusing databases intended solely to help them solve crime. At disciplinary hearings, officers who snoop on romantic interests or query the status of a relative’s criminal record often face docked pay or a temporary demotion, even for scores of prohibited searches; a police tribunal is expected to soon hear the case of a Toronto officer who allegedly ran more than 100 prohibited queries in a 15-month span."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: " Critics say a “slap on the wrist” approach has let the problem fester, as seen by alarming Project South allegations that database information leaked by a Toronto cop facilitated shootings, extortions and a conspiracy to commit murder. “I didn’t think, in my opinion, that it was ever taken seriously,” said Gerry McNeilly, former director of Ontario’s police complaints watchdog. “I think we’ve seen the result of that now through Project South, because it obviously continued to mushroom.”

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Criminal convictions for police database breaches happen, but cases are often egregious or involve additional offenses. In 2022, Toronto police Const. Trevor Gregory pleaded guilty to breach of trust for querying the address of an alleged African warlord then sending it to his son — who fatally shot the man at his London home the next day. The officer received a 12-month conditional sentence. Database abuse akin to Mouawad’s more often merits three to six days docked pay at the tribunal, Brauti said, or more if the information was disseminated."

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PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "At Mouawad’s trial, the prosecutor, Walker, asked the judge to issue a sentence that included two months of house arrest, saying the court mustsend an “unambiguous” message to police officers that leaking confidential database information will not be tolerated. Rhinelander ultimately sided with the defence, concluding his search was an “isolated lapse in judgment” and that his unique circumstances called for restraint. But she warned officers who abuse databases not to assume Mouawad’s fate would be theirs. In an era where access to digital information is “widespread and powerful,” the public must trust that sensitive information in police databases is secure, she said. “The message going forward should be clear,” she wrote. “Police officers who misuse their privileged access to confidential databases for purposes unrelated to their duties risk not only employment and disciplinary consequences but also criminal convictions.”

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STORY: "A Toronto rookie cop was caught snooping. Why his case is a warning to every officer with database access, by Crime and Police   Reporter Wendy Gillis, published by The Toronto Star, on November 9, 2026. (Reporter Wendy Gillis joined the Toronto Star staff in 2010 and has since been nominated multiple times for National Newspaper Awards. She previously worked for the StarPhoenix in Saskatoon, her hometown.)

SUB-HEADING: "Critics say the ‘slap on the wrist’ approach of handling most of these cases has let the problem fester."

PHOTO CAPTION: "Toronto police Const. Elias Mouawad pleaded guilty to conducting a single unlawful computer search on behalf of a friend. Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star

GIST: "As Elias Mouawad sat before the judge deciding his fate, his lawyer argued the rookie Toronto officer’s case would normally never even see the inside of a courtroom.

Were it not for the fact that he had been folded into the explosive police corruption probe Project South, the 25-year-old constable would be where most officers who leak confidential police database information end up, Peter Brauti argued earlier this fall. He’d be at the police disciplinary tribunal.

There, Mouawad’s misdeed usually results in docked pay.

That was part of the problem, as the prosecutor saw it. Considering the “lenient” penalties doled out by police tribunals, citizens might reasonably want the justice system to step in, Samuel Walker argued.

“The public would be justified in saying it might be necessary for the courts to send a message to the police service: That they need to deal with this more seriously,” Walker said.

“What they have been doing to date is not good enough.”

In spite of log-in screens warning officers against misuse each time they sign into a workstation, police officers across Ontario have for years illicitly mined the private information at their fingertips, abusing databases intended solely to help them solve crime.

At disciplinary hearings, officers who snoop on romantic interests or query the status of a relative’s criminal record often face docked pay or a temporary demotion, even for scores of prohibited searches; a police tribunal is expected to soon hear the case of a Toronto officer who allegedly ran more than 100 prohibited queries in a 15-month span.

Critics say a “slap on the wrist” approach has let the problem fester, as seen by alarming Project South allegations that database information leaked by a Toronto cop facilitated shootings, extortions and a conspiracy to commit murder.

“I didn’t think, in my opinion, that it was ever taken seriously,” said Gerry McNeilly, former director of Ontario’s police complaints watchdog. “I think we’ve seen the result of that now through Project South, because it obviously continued to mushroom.”

Toronto police have launched an anti-corruption project reviewing database access and abuse, and a province-wide review of database practices is ongoing. A police spokesperson said suspected misuse is taken seriously and investigated, with consequences determined by the extent of searches and whether confidential information was divulged.

But critics say harsher penalties for even lower level cases are needed to denounce more routine abuse, including police laying more criminal charges against their own.

Last month, the Ontario judge hearing Mouawad’s case weighed in.

“There was a time when conduct of this nature may have been addressed primarily through internal disciplinary proceedings or employment-related consequences,” Ontario Superior Court of Justice Catherine Rhinelander said. “That is no longer sufficient in every case.”

A bycatch in a bigger police scandal

Mouawad was a bycatch of the bigger Project South investigation. He was caught on a wiretap running a licence plate search for Daljit Singh, his former boss at a security company, who assured it was for “nothing bad.” Unbeknownst to Mouawad, Singh was with Brian Da Costa, an accused drug trafficker and alleged co-conspirator of Const. Timothy Barnhardt, the veteran cop at the heart of the policing scandal.

The subject of Mouawad’s search was linked to two past drug trafficking investigations, according to an agreed statement of facts read out at the officer’s trial. A lawyer for Singh, who is charged in relation to Mouawad’s computer search, declined to comment.

Mouawad wasn’t connected to the more serious Project South allegations and he said he didn’t know the other officers implicated. He did one lone search and wasn’t paid for the favour. After pleading guilty to one count of improperly searching a police database, Mouawad told court he “deeply” regretted his actions.

“Being criminally prosecuted for a single unauthorized check is already at the extreme end of the punishment spectrum,” Brauti said, asking the judge for a conditional discharge.

Criminal convictions for police database breaches happen, but cases are often egregious or involve additional offenses. In 2022, Toronto police Const. Trevor Gregory pleaded guilty to breach of trust for querying the address of an alleged African warlord then sending it to his son — who fatally shot the man at his London home the next day. The officer received a 12-month conditional sentence.

Database abuse akin to Mouawad’s more often merits three to six days docked pay at the tribunal, Brauti said, or more if the information was disseminated.

In spite of log-in screens warning officers against misuse each time they sign into a workstation, police officers across Ontario have for years illicitly mined the private information at their fingertips.R.J. Johnston/Toronto Star

Toronto officer accused doing 100+ unauthorized searches

A 2014 Toronto Star investigation found at least 25 officers misused internal databases in the previous five years, including an OPP officer who was docked 30 hours’ pay after conducting more than 550 unauthorized searches.


This summer, prosecutors withdrew a criminal charge against Const. Abbas Popal, a 25-year-old Toronto officer charged in March with one count of unauthorized use of a computer. According to Brauti, whose firm represented Popal, he is accused of conducting over 100 unauthorized searches.

Though the prosecutor said there were grounds to believe a criminal offence was committed, the police tribunal was “better suited to addressing this misconduct,” noting Popal hadn’t disseminated the information and there was no public interest in proceeding.

Popal is currently suspended with pay. His lawyer, Peter Ketcheson, told the Star allegations his client unlawfully accessed police databases have not been proven, and said the evidence “definitively” shows he did not disseminate any information from the alleged searches, or use it for improper purposes.

At Mouawad’s trial, the prosecutor, Walker, asked the judge to issue a sentence that included two months of house arrest, saying the court must send an “unambiguous” message to police officers that leaking confidential database information will not be tolerated.

Rhinelander ultimately sided with the defence, concluding his search was an “isolated lapse in judgment” and that his unique circumstances called for restraint.

But she warned officers who abuse databases not to assume Mouawad’s fate would be theirs. In an era where access to digital information is “widespread and powerful,” the public must trust that sensitive information in police databases is secure, she said.

“The message going forward should be clear,” she wrote. “Police officers who misuse their privileged access to confidential databases for purposes unrelated to their duties risk not only employment and disciplinary consequences but also criminal convictions.”

THE PROJECT SOUTH FILES

Toronto cops were dealing drugs to each other, corruption probe docs allege. ‘You got ... cocaine eyes’

‘A little slap on the wrist’

McNeilly, former director of Ontario’s recently renamed Law Enforcement Complaints Agency, said he took it seriously when his office received complaints from those who believed their personal information was leaked. But when he brought complaints to police, the searches were usually characterized as a “slip up,” not a privacy breach or security risk, he said.

“So we’re gonna give you a little slap on the wrist and say, ‘Don’t do it again,’” McNeilly told the Star.

Crimes of curiosity may not merit more than internal discipline, McNeilly said, but penalties should be harsher than a reprimand or a few days’ docked pay.

Danielle McNabb, a Brock University assistant professor who researches police accountability, said searches that involve harassment and stalking may also warrant criminal charges. In general, the justice system is better suited to exact consequences that “reflect the public’s view of how serious these abuses are” and act as deterrents, she said.

“Really showing police officers this is strictly forbidden — it will result in significant consequences,” she said.

Rooting out abuse a challenge

Toronto police spokesperson Stephanie Sayer said criminal charges are one way to address misuse but said misconduct hearings can result in significant penalties, including demotion or dismissal.

Clayton Campbell, president of the Toronto Police Association, defended the current accountability system and said “we cannot assume the egregious actions of a few members accurately reflect what happens across an entire organization.”

“We have thousands of members who access these databases professionally and treat the information therein with the utmost integrity,” Campbell said.

Extensive database use is part of what makes rooting out abuse challenging. Officers routinely search internal databases while responding to calls, conducting investigations and completing other duties, generating millions of system records, police say.

“Identifying instances of inappropriate access among this volume of activity is complex, which is why effective safeguards, monitoring and oversight are so important,” Sayer said.

In addition to stricter penalties, McNabb said police forces should focus on frequent and systematic auditing to get ahead of the problem to begin with.

“Police services need to do a better job at proactively dealing with this,” she said."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/how-one-project-south-officer-s-case-became-a-referendum-on-how-harshly-we-should-treat-unlawful-database-searches/article_2fbafec2-bb84-4b82-9cc4-9920bacdb6bf.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;

November 9: Southern Justice? Jeremy Hutchinson, Mark Bowling and Mary Kate Mull, Take us into a very dark place, in their commentary 'When junk science decides guilt in the South," published by The Magnolia Tribune, (based in Flora, Mississippi) noting that: "Under modern evidentiary standards, scientific analysis should not reach a jury unless it rests on reliable methods and validations. Yet for decades, courts admitted forensic disciplines before their reliability had been established. For example, bite-mark analysis, microscopic hair comparison, and bloodstain interpretation was presented to juries as objective science, even though unbiased researchers had failed to validate their reliability. The consequences were devastating—innocent people were convicted, guilty people remained free, and public trust in the criminal justice system eroded. Those harms have been especially severe in the South because junk science did not operate in a vacuum. It operated alongside underfunded public-defense systems, elected coroners with limited medical training, and communities where Black defendants often faced judges, juries, prosecutors, police departments, and forensic witnesses shaped by the region’s racial past. A forensic claim that might have been challenged by a well-funded defense team could become nearly unanswerable for a poor defendant in a rural county. The clearest example is Mississippi."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The federal government has also acknowledged the consequences of placing too much faith in junk science. In 2015, after an extensive review of microscopic hair comparison testimony, the FBI admitted that its examiners had overstated forensic conclusions in the overwhelming majority of cases reviewed, including cases involving death sentences. These were not harmless technical errors. They helped convict real people. According to the Innocence Project, misapplied forensic science has contributed to more than half of its wrongful-conviction cases. In many of those cases, juries heard testimony that exceeded what science could actually prove. Experts offered conclusions with unwarranted certainty. But such opinions were based on techniques that had never been validated. In the South, those errors often reinforced patterns that were already familiar: poor defendants against the state, Black defendants before institutions built during or after segregation, and rural communities dependent on local officials whose authority was rarely questioned. Phony forensics gave the system a language of certainty. It allowed prosecutors to present weak cases as scientific fact, and it made racial and class bias harder to see because the prejudice arrived wearing the mask of expertise."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is more than the story of two discredited experts. It is a warning about what happens when a legal system shaped by racial history grants scientific authority before science has earned it. In the South, the fight against junk science is also a fight against the legacy of racial discrimination in the courtroom. Every wrongful conviction based on unreliable forensics is a reminder that justice depends not only on finding the guilty, but on ensuring that the evidence used to convict is worthy of the trust placed in it."

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STORY: "When junk science decides guilt in the South," by Jeremy Hutchinson, Mark Bowling an  Mary Kate Mull," published  by the beautifully named Magnolia Tribune, on July 27, 2026. (Jeremy Hutchinson  is the former chair of the Arkansas Senate Judiciary Committee and is now the Director of Special Projects at Unify. US. Mark Bowling is a former Special Agent with the FBI. "Mary Kate Mull is a legal fellow at Unify. US."

GIST: States should adopt the federal standard for expert testimony and make reliability a threshold requirement, not a question left for jurors to sort out after unreliable science has been heard.

In an American courtroom, few words carry more weight than “the science shows.”

Jurors may question an eyewitness or a defendant’s explanation, but forensic evidence is different. When someone dubbed “an expert” testifies about forensic evidence, such testimony carries substantial weight. However, bite marks, hair comparisons, bloodstain patterns, and other analyses have turned out to be junk science – unvetted, inaccurate, and unreliable. When the State fails to act as gatekeepers, so-called ‘expert testimony’ is mistaken for scientific proof.

Under modern evidentiary standards, scientific analysis should not reach a jury unless it rests on reliable methods and validations. Yet for decades, courts admitted forensic disciplines before their reliability had been established. For example, bite-mark analysis, microscopic hair comparison, and bloodstain interpretation was presented to juries as objective science, even though unbiased researchers had failed to validate their reliability. The consequences were devastating—innocent people were convicted, guilty people remained free, and public trust in the criminal justice system eroded.

Those harms have been especially severe in the South because junk science did not operate in a vacuum. It operated alongside underfunded public-defense systems, elected coroners with limited medical training, and communities where Black defendants often faced judges, juries, prosecutors, police departments, and forensic witnesses shaped by the region’s racial past. A forensic claim that might have been challenged by a well-funded defense team could become nearly unanswerable for a poor defendant in a rural county.

The clearest example is Mississippi. In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write about how the state’s criminal justice system allowed forensic pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne and bite-mark analyst Dr. Michael West to become two of its most influential expert witnesses. For years, Hayne performed the bulk of Mississippi’s criminal autopsies, while West repeatedly testified, untruthfully as it turns out, that bite marks could identify suspects with remarkable precision.

Their influence mattered because Mississippi’s death-investigation system was not merely inefficient; it was historically tied to local politics. Like many Southern states, Mississippi relies heavily on county-level officials and informal arrangements rather than a consistently independent, professionally staffed medical examiner system. In such an environment, Hayne and West often testified as neutral experts, but in reality, they were peddling junk science as part of the prosecution’s team.

The human cost was enormous. Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two Black men from rural Mississippi, were convicted in separate child-murder cases after testimony from Hayne and West link them to bite marks that later proved unreliable. Together, they spent decades in prison before DNA evidence exposed the truth: another man was responsible. Their cases show how junk science can do more than convict the innocent. It can protect the guilty by giving the legal system a false sense of certainty.

The tragedy is not only that two so-called experts got it wrong. It is that judges repeatedly allowed juries to hear testimony that lacked the scientific foundation Courts accepted their testimony with little scrutiny because it sounded scientific and because the defendants most harmed by it often lacked the money, status, and institutional trust needed to challenge it. In the South, where criminal punishment has long been entangled with racial politics, that failure carries particular weight.

The problem with junk science isn’t limited to Mississippi courtrooms. Just last month, the Louisiana Supreme court freed a man on death row who was convicted using bite mark analysis, finding that the evidence was “scientifically indefensible.” Across the country, courts admitted forensic evidence that had never undergone the rigorous testing expected of legitimate scientific disciplines. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences warned that many commonly used forensic methods lacked the necessary scientific support and called for major reforms. In 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reached a similar conclusion, finding that feature-comparison disciplines like bite mark and hair comparison analyses, lacked “foundational validity.” Those findings raise an obvious question: if these methods weren’t trustworthy, why were juries allowed to consider them as scientific evidence at all?

The federal government has also acknowledged the consequences of placing too much faith in junk science. In 2015, after an extensive review of microscopic hair comparison testimony, the FBI admitted that its examiners had overstated forensic conclusions in the overwhelming majority of cases reviewed, including cases involving death sentences.

These were not harmless technical errors. They helped convict real people. According to the Innocence Project, misapplied forensic science has contributed to more than half of its wrongful-conviction cases. In many of those cases, juries heard testimony that exceeded what science could actually prove. Experts offered conclusions with unwarranted certainty. But such opinions were based on techniques that had never been validated.

In the South, those errors often reinforced patterns that were already familiar: poor defendants against the state, Black defendants before institutions built during or after segregation, and rural communities dependent on local officials whose authority was rarely questioned. Phony forensics gave the system a language of certainty. It allowed prosecutors to present weak cases as scientific fact, and it made racial and class bias harder to see because the prejudice arrived wearing the mask of expertise.

There has been some progress. Courts are increasingly skeptical of opinion disguised as science. The 2023 amendments to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 reaffirmed that judges, not juries, must determine whether expert testimony satisfies reliability requirements before it is admitted. Yet too many states reject the federal approach. Mississippi is already considering changing court rules to embrace the federal approach. The state Supreme court is studying the matter. For there to be justice, the court should adopt the change as soon as possible and allow for appeals in cases where junk science and phony forensics were used.

Science deserves its privileged place in the courtroom, but only when it is truly scientific. The most important safeguard against junk science is not a better jury instruction or a stronger cross-examination. It is a judge willing to keep unreliable opinions out of the courtroom altogether. Expert testimony must be grounded in methods that have been rigorously tested, independently validated, and honestly presented to juries with their limitations fully acknowledged.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is more than the story of two discredited experts. It is a warning about what happens when a legal system shaped by racial history grants scientific authority before science has earned it. In the South, the fight against junk science is also a fight against the legacy of racial discrimination in the courtroom. Every wrongful conviction based on unreliable forensics is a reminder that justice depends not only on finding the guilty, but on ensuring that the evidence used to convict is worthy of the trust placed in it.

The solution is simple. States should adopt the federal standard for expert testimony and make reliability a threshold requirement, not a question left for jurors to sort out after unreliable science has been heard. Federal Rule of Evidence 702 permits expert testimony only when it is the product of reliable principles and scientific methods rather than conjecture and opinion. States should adopt the federal approach so that evidence is not admitted because it sounds scientific; it is admitted because it is reliable."

The entire Commentary can be read at: 

https://magnoliatribune.com/2026/07/27/when-junk-science-decides-guilt-in-the-south/?fbclid=IwZnRzaAVWwfJkdm100DBoOGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHBkb2YBZmRpZBZRGPuLiJHYMZ8xLhTMtmbBA2l6U3QIc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQKNjYyODU2ODM3OQABH8YcrsOlbIi400f67ohiDeyDuU944G8rlvtjpy7Vgsmr2CjsIkNEo-k_K2BZ_aem_ZAaV5V3Y1m89iWXR4ssuvA

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

November 8: Forensic psychiatrist Martin Blinder: Obituary Writer Clay Risen's obituary on the forensic scientists recent death is aptly headed, "Martin Blinder Has Died. He Was Blamed for the ‘Twinkie Defense,' and sub-headed, "A forensic psychiatrist, he testified that consuming sugary foods could cause antisocial behavior. To his dismay, a catchphrase was born. He was 89." Who could believe that he would be haunted by for the rest of his life by a few out of context words, as a photo caption tells us: "Martin Blinder in 1983. He distanced himself from what reporters called the Twinkie defense, saying, “Dr. Blinder found the whole experience infuriating. “There never was a Twinkie defense,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1983. “Because it’s so preposterous, it’s made me the object of derision.” so preposterous, it’s made me the object of derision.”

 WIKIPEDIA ENTRY: "White's defense was that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. Contrary to common belief, White's attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White's actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. The product itself was only mentioned in passing during the trial. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and served five years in prison."......"In stories covering the trial, satirist Paul Krassner had played up the angle of the Twinkie, and he would later claim credit for coining the term "Twinkie defense". The day after the verdict, columnist Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicleabout the police support for White, himself a former policeman, and their "dislike of homosexuals" and mentioned "the Twinkie insanity defense" in passing.  News stories published after the trial, however, frequently reported the defense arguments inaccurately, claiming that the defense had presented junk food as the cause of White's depression and/or diminished capacity, instead of having been symptomatic of an existing depression.  Dan White committed suicide seven years later. As a result of negative publicity from the White case and others, the term diminished capacity was abolished in 1982 by Proposition 8 and the California legislature and was replaced by the term diminished actuality, referring not to the capacity to have a specific intent, but to whether the defendant actually had the required intent to commit the crime.  Additionally, California's statutory definitions of premeditation and malice required for murder were eliminated by the state's legislature, with the return to common law definitions. By this time, the "Twinkie defense" had become such a common term that one lawmaker had waved a Twinkie in the air while making his point during a debate."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense?shem=aimgspe,

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QUOTE  OF THE DAY: "Dr. Blinder remained a highly sought-after forensic psychiatrist long after the White case receded into history. But he never stopped trying to live down the moment that made him famous. If I found a cure for cancer,” he told the news website SF Gate in 2003, “they’d still say I was the guy who invented the ‘Twinkie defense.’”

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OBITUARY: "Martin Blinder Has Died. He Was Blamed for the ‘Twinkie Defense,' by Clay Risen, published by The New York Times, on November 6, 2026. Clay Risen is on the New York Times  'Obituary Desk.' As he describes his work: "I write about all manner of fascinating lives — a pioneering oyster farmer in Louisiana, a French pianist still recording albums in her 100s and one of the last victims of the Red Scare, to name a few. Obviously, the reason for writing an obituary is the recent death of its subject. But to me they are really about people’s lives, how they lived them and why they mattered. Each is a brick in a wall that together constitutes our shared history."

SUB-HEADING: "A forensic psychiatrist, he testified that consuming sugary foods could cause antisocial behavior. To his dismay, a catchphrase was born. He was 89."

PHOTO CAPTION: "Martin Blinder in 1983. He distanced himself from what reporters called the Twinkie defense, saying, “It’s so preposterous, it’s made me the object of derision.”

GEST: "This much was clear: On Nov. 27, 1978, a disgruntled San Francisco politician named Dan White walked into the office of Mayor George Moscone and shot him to death.

He then walked down the hall to find Harvey Milk, a member of the city’s board of supervisors and the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Mr. White shot and killed him, too.

Mr. White was immediately arrested, and he confessed. But at his murder trial the next year, his lawyers claimed that his mental capacities had been diminished by stress and depression, a claim they supported by calling the forensic psychiatrist Martin Blinder to the stand.

Dr. Blinder testified for more than four hours. But it was a passing reference to junk food that earned him a place in history.

Mr. White was a fit, healthy man, Dr. Blinder said. But he struggled with depression, and when he was depressed, he turned to sugary foods to cope.

“Whenever he felt things were not going right, he would abandon his usual program of exercise and good nutrition, and start gorging himself on junk foods — Twinkies, Coca-Cola,” Dr. Blinder testified. “The more junk food he con­sumed, the worse he’d feel. The worse he’d feel, the more he’d gorge himself, and so on, in a vicious circle.”

And several studies, Dr. Blinder noted, showed that “high-sugar-content food with lots of preservatives can precipitate antisocial and even violent behavior.”

He never claimed that junk food like Twinkies had caused Mr. White’s diminished capacity; he offered a much more nuanced analysis. But after the jury found Mr. White guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, reporters looking for an explanation blamed Dr. Blinder and what came to be known as the Twinkie defense — namely, that eating too much junk food made a person temporarily irrational.

Dr. Blinder, a highly regarded forensic psychiatrist who spent the rest of his career trying to correct the record, died on Oct. 30 at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 89.

His wife, Mary Mahima Daily Blinder, said the death was from pancreatic cancer.

The Twinkie defense became a pop-culture buzz phrase in the early 1980s, and a popular target for victims’ rights advocates, who saw it as evidence of a legal system run amok. In 1982, California voters abolished the diminished-capacity defense, and several states placed restrictions on the use of expert witnesses in felony trials.

Dr. Blinder found the whole experience infuriating.

“There never was a Twinkie defense,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1983. “Because it’s so preposterous, it’s made me the object of derision.”

Martin George Blinder was born on Feb. 22, 1937, in the Bronx. His father, Harry, was a cardiologist, and his mother, Regina (Schwartz) Blinder, managed the home.

He graduated from Cornell in 1958 and received an M.D. from the Chicago Medical School in 1962.

Dr. Blinder settled in San Anselmo, north of San Francisco, where he practiced medicine and taught at nearby universities. He also got into politics: In 1972, he was elected to the Town Council, where he oversaw the passage of one of the country’s first restrictions on smoking in public places, and served as mayor from 1975 to 1976.

He was married three times. His first marriage, to Dorothy Braco, ended in divorce in 1976. His second wife, Elizabeth Doney, died by suicide in 1986.

In 2000, Ms. Braco attacked him in his home, stabbing him multiple times before fleeing. He managed to call 911 before collapsing from blood loss. Ms. Braco’s car was later found near the San Francisco entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge; her body washed up on the shore nearby.

He married Mary Mahima Daily in 2010. Along with her, Dr. Blinder is survived by two children, two grandchildren and a sister, Phoebe Blinder.

Dr. Blinder wrote several books for academic and popular audiences, including “Psychiatry in the Everyday Practice of Law” (1972) and “Lovers, Killers, Husbands and Wives” (1985), about the reasons people kill intimate partners.

Mr. White received parole in 1984 and died by suicide in 1985.

Dr. Blinder remained a highly sought-after forensic psychiatrist long after the White case receded into history. But he never stopped trying to live down the moment that made him famous.

“If I found a cure for cancer,” he told the news website SF Gate in 2003, “they’d still say I was the guy who invented the ‘Twinkie defense.’”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

NYTimes: Martin Blinder Has Died. He Was Blamed for the ‘Twinkie Defense.’ 

The entire obituary can be read at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/us/martin-blinder-twinkie-defense-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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

November 8: Fake (junk) Science: (National Public Radio): Transcript of Emily Kwong's enlightening interview with Chris Fabricant on the topic," Is your favourite crime show rooted in fake science: Fabricant: "FABRICANT: Over half of all known wrongful convictions are attributable to the use of junk science. KWONG: And Chris says that is a problem. Today on the show, the junk science keeping people in jail. We're diving into the forensic techniques that have been completely debunked, the ones that should be examined more carefully, and the systems that have kept them alive in criminal courts for so long. I'm Emily Kwong. And you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR."

PASSAGE  OF THE DAY: "KWONG: Of the methods we've described, have any fallen out of favor in a way that you're like, this is good? It's the method that's the problem. Or is it actually the whole field that's the problem? FABRICANT: I get asked that question a fair amount. People say that, you know, we're not using hair microscopy anymore, and we're not using bite marks, or what have you. And the reality is that we are, in that I get a call all the time from defense attorneys that are seeking to resist the introduction of those techniques. But new junk science emerges every day. Let's talk about ShotSpotter evidence, right? This is supposed to be a digital, acoustic, forensic technique that allows police officers to detect gunshots and separate those sounds from all other loud noises, and then direct police resources to the sound of gunshots. KWONG: Wow. FABRICANT: And that sounds reasonable, right? KWONG: Yeah. FABRICANT: But actually, it's worse than flipping a coin as to whether or not there are actual gunshots. You know, without real scientific scrutiny, the chance of a forensic technique being introduced at trial and being wrong or exaggerated is overwhelming.

--------------------------------------------------------'

PRODUCTION: "National Public Radio (NPR) production: "Short Wave." 'Is your favourite crime show rooted in fake science?' Published on October 30, 2026. (Chris Fabricant is the director of strategic litigation (Joseph Flom Special Counsel) at the Innocence Project. In this role, he leads the Innocence Project’s strategic litigation department, whose attorneys develop and execute national litigation and public policy strategies to address the leading causes of wrongful conviction.  Chris is one of the United States’s leading experts on forensic sciences and scientific litigation. Prior to joining the Innocence Project, he was a longtime public defender and law professor. He frequently serves as a public speaker on law reform issues, and is widely published in both legal scholarship and in mainstream media. In his new book, Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, Chris examines the role that faulty scientific evidence has in continuing and strengthening an unjust and racial biased criminal legal system."..."Emily Kwong is the founding reporter and now co-host for Short Wave - and she is also the host and co-creator of Inheriting."

GIST: "[MUSIC PLAYING]

ANNOUNCER: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

[BACKGROUND CHATTER, DOG BARKING]

SPEAKER 1: I could speak volumes about Conrad Ecklie, but I have a crime scene to process, so you'll have to-- you'll have to excuse me. (Conrad Ecklie, for those who do not know, is a character in CSI "Crime Scene Investigation." I used to love that show!  HL); 

[END PLAYBACK]

EMILY KWONG: You've seen it. I've seen it-- crime scene investigators doing what they do best-- making perfect TV.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

SPEAKER 2: Kind of light.

SPEAKER 3: What, are you working for OSHA now? [SCOFFS] This is a Lady Macbeth.

[END PLAYBACK]

CHRIS FABRICANT: Forensic evidence in those shows is presented as conclusive, objective, infallible. They get the bad guy in a half hour and wrap it up.

KWONG: That's Chris Fabricant, the Director of Strategic Litigation at the Innocence Project. He started out as a public defender in New York City, in the Bronx. And he told us, in the early 2000s, forensic evidence came up all the time in court, the kind presented on TV and widely used by law enforcement in the real world.

FABRICANT: DNA evidence, blood-spatter evidence, what your listeners will think of as ballistics evidence, psychological evidence-- the heavier the cases are, the more forensics that are involved in the case.

KWONG: Over the years, Chris watched law enforcement and forensic experts present this evidence as a silver bullet.

FABRICANT: It's almost always admitted by the court, no matter how vigorous of a challenge beforehand. And it's almost always accepted by lay jurors as providing an objective, scientific truth that they wouldn't be able to glean for themselves.

KWONG: But then a watershed report came out in 2009 from the National Academy of Sciences.

FABRICANT: That examined 13 of the most commonly used forensic techniques and found the conclusions that were being accepted in criminal courts were scientifically indefensible.

KWONG: Chris has a simpler term for these techniques. He calls them "junk science." Anyway, later that year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy created a subcommittee on forensic science to address problems and strengthen forensics overall. And then, a few years later, the Innocence Project partnered with criminal defense lawyers, the FBI, and the DOJ to review more than 2,000 criminal cases involving the debunked technique of microscopic hair analysis. It's progress. But as any true crime enthusiast will tell you, forensic science has not fallen by the wayside-- far from it.

FABRICANT: Over half of all known wrongful convictions are attributable to the use of junk science.

KWONG: And Chris says that is a problem. Today on the show, the junk science keeping people in jail. We're diving into the forensic techniques that have been completely debunked, the ones that should be examined more carefully, and the systems that have kept them alive in criminal courts for so long. I'm Emily Kwong. And you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

KWONG: OK, Chris, I'm going to start us off with your words. You have called certain forensic techniques "junk science" and said they don't come from the world of science.

FABRICANT: Yes.

KWONG: So where do they come from?

FABRICANT: Forensic sciences are often created by law enforcement for law enforcement purposes, often to solve a particular crime. That's not the scientific method. That's expedient to get a conviction. And once a forensic technique has been admitted in a criminal court, it's forever thereafter accepted by other courts. Legal precedent reigns supreme in criminal law. The first time that something is introduced in court and accepted by court, there's a legal precedent is established. And it's very, very difficult to get any other court to exclude that evidence.

KWONG: So there's a lot of forensic science that appears in courtrooms as evidence in TV courtrooms, but also, some courtrooms around the country. There's so many different tools that have been used in this way. We can't cover all of them, so let's just focus on three.

FABRICANT: OK.

KWONG: I want to start with hair microscopy. What is that?

FABRICANT: Hair microscopy is a discredited technique that was used to match suspects to hairs found at crime scenes, fundamentally. So a hair was found in a probative place at a crime scene. A suspect is developed. You pluck some hairs from the suspect, and you examine the questioned hair and the known hair side by side under a microscope and declare a match. But it was dressed up as very sciencey by the FBI, primarily. They claimed that there was a match. Often, they would make a probabilistic statement, like that it's very, very likely that it came from this suspect, or something along those lines. But what they didn't know, in reality, was, it could be 1 in 10 people might also match that hair, or 1 in 10 million, right?

KWONG: Whoa.

FABRICANT: They really had no idea. And it was-- it took nearly 70 wrongful convictions-- 70-- before the FBI and the Department of Justice came to the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and admitted that their agents had been overstating the significance of this evidence.



KWONG: And comparing bite marks, I suppose, made by people's teeth has also been used as evidence. What do you think about that?

FABRICANT: Bite marks are garbage. They should never have been used.

KWONG: Tell me how you really feel. OK.

FABRICANT: There's nothing probative that could ever come from a so-called bite mark comparison. Eyeballing an injury and determining that it's a so-called bite mark, the research shows, and anecdotally, from wrongful convictions, forensic dentists are no better than you and me at diagnosing an injury as an adult human bite mark. And beyond that is that these dentists were taking photographs of these injuries at a moment in time. A decomposing body changes hour to hour, day to day, week to week. So a so-called match, you know, could be a match one day and not--

KWONG: Yeah.

FABRICANT: --match the next.

KWONG: One of the most widespread techniques that the FBI has also supported is blood spatter analysis. And what's interesting about this one-- I did a little reading-- ProPublica has a really good article about it-- that this method was created by a scientist, someone with a chemistry degree who--

FABRICANT: Right.

KWONG: --kind of got into forensics. What do you think of blood spatter work in forensics today?

FABRICANT: Well, there is a there-there with blood spatter evidence, if it's done by an expert who understands trigonometry, understands the effect of gravity on blood spatter, and understands fluid dynamics, which is an area of research that's highly technical and highly scientific, and beyond the ken, certainly, of your average crime scene technician. So if it's done in a way that it can be relatively rigorous and modest in what it can and cannot say, it could be used. The trouble is, blood spatter evidence is often used by under-trained police officers who don't have a background in mathematics or real science. And it's used to explain an entire crime scene, how everything unfolded, and way overstated and has led to wrongful conviction.

KWONG: Yeah. I want to talk about the people who are presenting this evidence. You describe them as they're forensic experts. And they're presented as having significant backgrounds in science. And that's a key part of why juries should believe them. What do you think about the people who are the ones taking the stand to share this evidence in trial?

FABRICANT: Well, forensic experts, I should say, are well-intentioned, smart, dedicated, well-trained in their fields, and are trying to do the right thing. You know, they believe that they're participating in a civic responsibility. Troublingly, many of them look at themselves as crime-fighters or crime-solvers, which is, of course, not a scientist's role, which is to provide objective, scientific information. The trouble with most forensic experts and in their fields, is that there are less formal training. They don't have degrees in science. And they're not required to have degrees in science. And they've accepted at face value the overstated and exaggerated claims that their mentors have taught them.

KWONG: Of the methods we've described, have any fallen out of favor in a way that you're like, this is good? It's the method that's the problem. Or is it actually the whole field that's the problem?

FABRICANT: I get asked that question a fair amount. People say that, you know, we're not using hair microscopy anymore, and we're not using bite marks, or what have you. And the reality is that we are, in that I get a call all the time from defense attorneys that are seeking to resist the introduction of those techniques. But new junk science emerges every day. Let's talk about ShotSpotter evidence, right? This is supposed to be a digital, acoustic, forensic technique that allows police officers to detect gunshots and separate those sounds from all other loud noises, and then direct police resources to the sound of gunshots.

KWONG: Wow.

FABRICANT: And that sounds reasonable, right?

KWONG: Yeah.

FABRICANT: But actually, it's worse than flipping a coin as to whether or not there are actual gunshots. You know, without real scientific scrutiny, the chance of a forensic technique being introduced at trial and being wrong or exaggerated is overwhelming.

KWONG: What you're describing, the way that forensic science is widely used in courtrooms across the country, of course, has consequences. Your colleagues and you have found that when this happens, it leads to false convictions. How often is that happening, and to whom?

FABRICANT: Well, the "to whom" question is overwhelmingly poor people and disproportionately Black and Brown people. That's true with everything about the criminal legal system in the United States. This is happening all over. Before I got to the Innocence Project, I had never litigated a capital case. And I naively assumed that in capital litigation, that the science would be much more rigorous, that the evidence would be much more rigorously tested, that the evidence would be more carefully scrutinized, that courts would exclude unreliable evidence because the stakes are literally life and death. But what I have found is the opposite-- the higher profile, the higher the stakes, the more capital litigation that I've done, the more junk science that I've seen.

KWONG: Yeah. And I understand that's in part because of something called the CSI effect, where jurors are biased towards forensic evidence because of TV, because of how science is portrayed on CSI or Dexter.

FABRICANT: So there are two versions, or two points of view, on the CSI effect. There's a prosecutor's point of view, and there's the defense attorney's. Prosecutors argue that CSI effect requires them to introduce scientific evidence, because all these crime shows always have scientific evidence, and that jurors are going to expect scientific evidence. And if they don't get it, they won't get their convictions.

KWONG: Wow.

FABRICANT: And what the defense attorneys will tell you is that the CSI effect makes jurors credulous about any scientific evidence that's presented, because as we talked about earlier, crime television and regular news presents forensic science as infallible.

KWONG: Yeah.

FABRICANT: Always catches the bad guy--

KWONG: Interesting.

FABRICANT: --right?

KWONG: What a pickle.

FABRICANT: I've got an easy solution.

KWONG: What is it?

FABRICANT: Well, one is that we need to have something like the FDA for forensics. We have to have a government agency that's testing the validity and reliability of forensic techniques before they're ever introduced to make life-and-liberty decisions. And the other thing, the easiest free fix that you could have is to blind the experts from biasing information.

KWONG: To make them more like scientists, where there's--

FABRICANT: Right.

KWONG: --double-blind studies involving the participants.

FABRICANT: Right. Every other area of science goes through--

KWONG: Yeah.

FABRICANT: --hoops to avoid bias improperly influencing a subjective decision. Nothing like that is done in forensics.

KWONG: And you're saying that forensic experts, whoever's presenting this evidence should be far more explicit about the uncertainty involved.

FABRICANT: 100%. That's a good way to put it. You know, I mean, much of these techniques and much of this testimony is presented as though there is no error rate, literally. No such thing. The other is the limitations, you know, appropriate limitation as to what, you know, a, quote unquote, "match" means. You know, it's that bullet was fired by that gun, that fingerprint was left by that person, and that shoeprint could only have been made by that shoe, and on and on, called individualization testimony. Does this mean that there couldn't be somebody else in the universe who might also match this? If you eliminate the possibility of mistake and you make claims of individualization, when the science doesn't support that, you invite wrongful conviction.

KWONG: Chris, if I may, it doesn't sound like you're saying, science should not be allowed in the courtroom at all. You want good science to be allowed in the courtroom.

FABRICANT: Absolutely.

KWONG: And what you're advocating for is that before the trial happens, there is far higher standards for what is allowed into that courtroom.

FABRICANT: Yes. I mean, we have to have upstream fixes on it. You have to have a separate entity determining what an error rate for the field is, and what the personal error rate for the examiner is, and the validity of the technique outside of the courtroom. Because once you get in the courtroom, the gloves are off.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KWONG: Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing a slice of your world with us. I know you're, by day, a lawyer, but you've thought deeply about how science shows up in your world. And I thank you so much for your time.

FABRICANT: Thank you for having me.

KWONG: Chris's book is called Junk Science and the American Justice System. This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR."

MUSIC PLAYING

The entire transcript can be read at:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-6012302

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

November 7: From our 'Crime labs from hell' department: 'Hoodline' (a neighbourhood publication) (Reporter Marcus Taylor) reports on a (October 30) Detroit Free Press article by ReporterAndrea May Sahouri which I could not access) in which Detroit police forensic technicians say the conditions they work in — a garage beside the department's tow yard, vans reused across multiple crime scenes, and gloves too thin to avoid leaving fingerprints — are putting both their health and the integrity of criminal investigations at risk, noting that: Detroit forensic technicians processed evidence from more than 5,000 crime scenes last year alone, according to the newspaper's reporting. Defense attorneys, forensic experts, and Michigan's state crime lab have said they cannot know whether evidence they receive has already been compromised, the Free Press reported, and a defense lawyer cited two recent criminal cases involving problems with the department's evidence chain-of-custody."

PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: Forensic failures elsewhere: Detroit's troubles echo a wider pattern Forensic services nationwide face limited regulatory oversight.  Some forensic standards and accreditation remain voluntary. Other jurisdictions have faced their own breakdowns. A Colorado Bureau of Investigation analyst manipulated hundreds of DNA test results, including those tied to the 2017 killings of Kathy Eppler's family."

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

PASSAGE TWO  OF THE DAY: A stalled push for statewide reform: "Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer created a statewide forensic science task force in 2021.  The task force found that, as of 2022, no one tracked the number of forensic providers operating in Michigan and that many smaller units were not accredited; it also reported that some providers prioritized speed over quality while public lab managers said demand had risen without matching funding. The task force proposed an independent statewide forensic science body operating outside the state police, which would require agencies — including Detroit Crime Scene Services — to become accredited within three years, allow employees, attorneys, and the public to file complaints about negligence or misconduct, and require labs to report their own problems."

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

STORY: Detroit forensic techs describe maggots, feces-filled bags at crime lab garage," by Reporter Marcus Taylor, published by Hoodline, on October 31, 2026.

GIST: "Detroit police forensic technicians say the conditions they work in — a garage beside the department's tow yard, vans reused across multiple crime scenes, and gloves too thin to avoid leaving fingerprints — are putting both their health and the integrity of criminal investigations at risk.

Current and former staffers describe a unit so strained that evidence meant to help convict the guilty or clear the innocent may already be compromised by the time it reaches a lab.

The technicians, who handle scene photography, evidence documentation and collection, sketches, reports, and coordination with investigators, told the Detroit Free Press that dysfunction within Crime Scene Services has become a daily hazard. 

Detroit forensic technicians processed evidence from more than 5,000 crime scenes last year alone, according to the newspaper's reporting. 

Defense attorneys, forensic experts, and Michigan's state crime lab have said they cannot know whether evidence they receive has already been compromised, the Free Press reported, and a defense lawyer cited two recent criminal cases involving problems with the department's evidence chain-of-custody.

A Garage Beside the Tow Yard

The department's forensic facility sits in a garage at 11631 Mt. Elliott, next to the department's tow yard, where current and former employees describe potential contamination, no sterile space for packaging evidence, frequent maggot infestations, and cats and rabbits breeding inside, per the Free Press's reporting. 

Technicians still report daily to the Mt. Elliott garage for equipment and supplies, and current staffers say evidence is still processed in unsterile settings including that garage, their own cars, and a second office.

Technicians say they processed evidence at the Mt. Elliott location and sometimes still do. 

They provided photos and videos documenting pooling water, thick dust, an unclean shower used to dry wet evidence, and non-sterile cotton swabs.

One technician shared photos showing underwear stained with feces left in a bag for weeks at the garage because red biohazard bags were rarely collected.

 Evidence from different scenes, technicians said, was routinely packaged in the same often-filthy forensic vans.

Former Staffers Describe the Toll

Three former technicians — Cecilia Leskun, Margaret Lovallo, and Teron Haynes — were identified in the Free Press's reporting alongside six additional technicians interviewed by the paper, five of whom were current staffers. 

Leskun left the department in 2023 after a little over a year, saying her mental health declined to the gutter. 

Lovallo, who left in 2024 after about six years, said technicians were told their job was to pick things up and not ask questions.

Haynes, who left in January after about four years, said he worked that entire stretch as a technician without ever receiving a mask, and said there was no reason for the conditions.

Technicians reported several respiratory attacks after responding to teargas scenes, saying the department lacked gas masks for scenes involving teargas during home raids. 

Kermit Channell, reacting to the described conditions, said they sounded very helter-skelter.

Chain-of-Custody Concerns at Scenes

Nine technicians described detectives allowing civilians to walk and drive through active crime scenes over evidence, and said officers routinely violated evidence chain-of-custody procedures. 

Department policy states that if an officer collects evidence, it cannot be returned to the scene for a technician to collect — the officer must record and process it instead. 

Leskun said she was once told to collect a firearm that had already been handled by detectives, and current and former employees said officers handled suspects' guns at crime scenes with bare hands.

The forensic unit has consistently depleted supplies, with technicians borrowing hospital gloves and often using thin food-handling gloves that leave fingerprints, according to the Free Press.

 Nine technicians said these failures could jeopardize serious criminal investigations and deprive victims and families of justice. 

Detroit police did not answer the paper's questions about supplies, training, maggots, safety hazards, or retaliation, and declined to make Chief Todd Bettison or any police leader available for an interview about the allegations.

State Citations and a Disputed Fine

One state workplace-safety inspection resulted in citations to the department. MIOSHA cited the department for issues involving bloodborne-pathogens training, protective gear, and leakproof blood-specimen containers.

 The department was fined $10,000 over inadequate training, protective gear, and leakproof blood-specimen containers.

According to an appeal letter cited by the Free Press, the department argued the state improperly applied healthcare rules to the practice of preserving bloody evidence in breathable packaging needed for prosecutions. 

The department also used ChatGPT to write its bloodborne infectious disease plan after the complaints surfaced, the paper reported.

Detroit police disputed claims about missing protective gear and training, and said remaining record-keeping and supply issues had been fixed. 

The department said technicians moved in August to a new facility that better supports operational needs — a room in an old school on Sherwood Street — and said no criminal cases or evidence were impacted because evidence was not processed at the former location, except for vehicles.

 Before the Sherwood assignment, the department provided no showers for technicians despite their contact with biohazardous substances, technicians said.

A Unit Still Recovering From a 2008 Collapse

This is not the first time Detroit's forensic work has come under scrutiny. The Michigan State Police lab took over the Detroit Police Department's crime lab in 2008 after widespread problems, including high firearms-testing error rates. 

Events leading to the lab's closure began in spring 2008, amid those problems, according to a Michigan Senate report from senate.michigan.gov.

Earlier this year, former forensic technicians also came forward to describe conditions within Crime Scene Services at Board of Police Commissioners meetings, as WDETreported, around the same time the department was pursuing accreditation from the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. 

That reporting came as Detroit's homicide rate in 2025 hit its lowest point since 1965 and carjackings dropped by nearly half — a trend that makes the reliability of the evidence now being collected all the more consequential.

Forensic Failures Elsewhere

Detroit's troubles echo a wider pattern

Forensic services nationwide face limited regulatory oversight. 

Some forensic standards and accreditation remain voluntary.

Other jurisdictions have faced their own breakdowns. A Colorado Bureau of Investigation analyst manipulated hundreds of DNA test results, including those tied to the 2017 killings of Kathy Eppler's family.

A Stalled Push for Statewide Reform

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer created a statewide forensic science task force in 2021. 

The task force found that, as of 2022, no one tracked the number of forensic providers operating in Michigan and that many smaller units were not accredited; it also reported that some providers prioritized speed over quality while public lab managers said demand had risen without matching funding.

The task force proposed an independent statewide forensic science body operating outside the state police, which would require agencies — including Detroit Crime Scene Services — to become accredited within three years, allow employees, attorneys, and the public to file complaints about negligence or misconduct, and require labs to report their own problems. 

Prosecutors and the state police lab director have argued the proposed body should advise rather than investigate complaints, saying existing accreditation already provides enough oversight. 

Chu countered that when labs pay for their own accreditation, it gives accreditors reason to be lenient. 

Jonathan Sacks, an attorney who served on the task force, said none of its recommendations had been adopted and that legislative action was needed, adding that he did not know whether the recommendation would advance.

Houston offers one example of what independence can look like. 

The city transferred management of its crime lab from the police department to the newly established Houston Forensic Science Center in 2014, a government corporation that could hire out its services elsewhere, giving it financial independence, according to Houstonia Magazine.

 The center's CEO at the time said colleagues around the country were watching it as a model. 

Whether Michigan or Detroit moves toward anything similar remains an open question, with the task force's recommendations still sitting unadopted years after they were proposed.

Source: Hoodline Detroit Forensic Techs Allege Unsafe Crime Scene Conditions 

The entire story can be read at:

https://share.google/eGhWFMX20CFLRNfKn

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

November 6: Christa Pike: Tennessee: From our 'Read this and weep' department' (and abolish the death penalty once and for all - as have numerous countries - wherever it may still exist): Her unedited statement was dictated to her defence team: (Yes. Read this and weep); "There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul. I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position. I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I also want to thank the first responders, doctors, nurses and everyone at the hospital who cared for me. They treated me with compassion, dignity and respect. I will never forget their kindness. I also want to thank my attorneys and everyone who has fought for me, stood beside me and refused to give up on me. I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next."

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

STATEMENT:  From Christa Pike as dictated to her legal team on October 26, 2026). and reposted from Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty; and Jeff Gamso, Publisher of 'Gamso - for the Defence: Commentary by an Ohio Criminal Defence Lawyer', a Blog which has fought the death penalty fiercely (influencing many of his readers, including myself for many years.)

GIST: One month ago on September 30, I walked into the execution chamber at Riverbend men’s prison prepared to die. I had made my peace. I had told the people who loved me, supported me and stood by me through the years I was grateful for them. I had also told the people in the room and who were there to witness my execution that I was leaving them in loving kindness. Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain.

There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul. I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position. I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured.

I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger. But healing is not the same as being okay. Since that night, I have been largely isolated in the prison’s medical ward, away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me. That isolation brings its own kind of pain. I spent 28 years in solitary confinement and much of what I am experiencing today is a repeat of that condition

I also want to thank the first responders, doctors, nurses and everyone at the hospital who cared for me. They treated me with compassion, dignity and respect. I will never forget their kindness. I also want to thank my attorneys and everyone who has fought for me, stood beside me and refused to give up on me.

I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next. Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time. And I am holding on to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone.

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