"WICHITA FALLS, Texas — — Jerry Hobbs signed the confession placed in front of him by detectives, but not because he believed for a moment that he was guilty of killing his 8-year-old daughter and her young friend, he said Thursday," the Chicago Tribune interview by reporters Lisa Black and Dan Hinkel, published on August 5, 2010 begins, under the heading, "'It's not about me. It's about my kid. It's about my baby, Laura.': Jerry Hobbs describes his five-year ordeal in exclusive interview with Tribune."
""The only thing they had gotten out of me was what they got out of a broken father," Hobbs said. "She was my baby girl. She was my joy and my pride, and to find her the way I did, it would knock anybody to their knees," the story continues.
Hobbs described his five-year jail ordeal in Lake County during an exclusive interview with the Tribune at the neatly kept ranch home that his mother, JoAnn, shares with her boyfriend near this northeast Texas city. Their 10-acre spread is located in the rural countryside, where oil rigs, barbed wire and grasslands are plentiful.
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Hobbs was able to wait patiently in jail, he said, because he knew he was innocent. He read the Bible many times while locked up, he said.
"I don't ride on luck. I ride on faith," Hobbs said.
A day earlier, three members of Hobbs' defense team drove him the roughly 1,000 miles from Waukegan to Wichita Falls. They spent most of their time, he said, discussing his case before passing him off to his mother early Thursday at a convenience store.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty against Hobbs until Wednesday, when they led him into court in shackles and then abruptly dropped charges. He had been accused of killing his daughter, Laura, and her friend Krystal Tobias, 9, whose bodies he found and led police to in May 2005.
But in June, authorities learned of a DNA match linking the crime to another man, prompting an investigation that led to Hobbs' release.
Asked if he felt that the prosecutors owed him an apology, Hobbs said they have only invited scrutiny upon themselves.
"They owe [themselves] an apology," he said. "It's not over yet. It's going to bring up lies from other cases."
But Hobbs said he didn't want to be viewed as a victim — that the only victims were the two dead children, whom he called "angels."
"It's not about me," he said. "It's about my kid. It's about my baby, Laura."
Hobbs will turn 40 this month. He is a slightly built, articulate man with a light Texas accent. Smiles don't come easily. Hobbs, who had faced a possible death sentence, appeared quiet and reflective at his mother's spacious red-brick home, which features Texas-style decor, including a stuffed bobcat that once terrorized local chickens.
JoAnn Hobbs served her son burritos for breakfast Thursday. He ate only one, saying he wasn't used to eating a lot of meat in jail.
In jail, Hobbs spent much of his time reading history books and National Geographic magazine, in addition to the Bible, or doodling pictures in letters he sent to his mother, he said. Envelopes addressed to "Mom" were decorated with pictures such as one of a man holding a baby that, he said, he traced from a Bible.
Hobbs drew his own elaborate cartoons, including one of a little boy sitting in a cell, his head hung low and chained to a wall. Hobbs said he spent a lot of time in isolation, but he didn't mind that in the weeks after his daughter's gruesome slaying and his arrest.
"It took me about six months to collect myself," he said.
Back in Texas, his mother stopped talking to people about the case under the pressure of knowing people thought Hobbs was guilty, she said. One Texas politician even used Hobbs as an example of a broken criminal justice system, showing his mug shot over and over in a re-election bid.
Hobbs had been released from a Texas prison shortly before being arrested in the Zion slayings. He served time for a parole violation after a drunken rampage through a trailer park with a chain saw.
"I had a real bad drinking problem back then," said Hobbs, who said he stopped drinking alcohol before he was jailed in Illinois.
Prosecutors have known since 2008 that semen found inside Laura's body did not match Hobbs' DNA.
"It was over in 2008," Hobbs said, referring to when his defense presented DNA evidence that did not match his own.
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"That's why it took five years," he said. "They knew they had no case."
Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller, who has been criticized for his office's handling of cases involving DNA, said he doesn't know what Hobbs means about "lies" in other cases.
"I have no idea what he could be talking about or how he would have any knowledge of any other cases," he said.
Hobbs said he was reluctant to proclaim his innocence while he was in jail for fear it would persuade prosecutors to be harder on him.
Waller said he isn't sure how Hobbs could have hurt his case by proclaiming his innocence from jail. Hobbs had chances to defend himself, Waller said, adding that Hobbs signed the confession to the killings at 5:50 a.m. on May 10, 2005, but he was not video-recorded reading the statement until 2 p.m. that day, according to court testimony.
Police would have looked into anything he said on the video, Waller said.
Hobbs said he wants to spend time with his two boys, Jeremy, 9, and Jerry Hobbs IV, 15. The boys live with their half-sister and Hobbs' ex-girlfriend, Sheila Hollabaugh, who was also Laura's mother, in Grove City, Penn., where she moved shortly after the slayings. Remarried, she now works the overnight shift at a convenience store.
The boys want to see their father, Hollabaugh said.
Jeremy is too young to understand the situation, but his older brother has taken his father's ordeal personally, she said. The teenager "absolutely despises" police because he thinks they pin crimes on innocent people, she said.
"He's been really angry. You know, he's always known that his dad didn't do this," she said.
Hollabaugh, who said she has never believed Hobbs killed the girls, is happy for him. But she continues to receive therapy for issues related to Laura's death. She said she remains furious at Lake County prosecutors and police.
Hobbs, she said, was an easy scapegoat.
Prosecutors have not confirmed the identity of the man now under investigation, but his sister has identified him as Jorge Torrez, 21, a former Zion resident being held in the Arlington, Va., jail without bond on unrelated rape, abduction and robbery charges.
Torrez has not been charged with killing the girls, and he is slated for trial on the Virginia felonies in October.
Hobbs said he has no special plans for his future other than seeing his boys. He said a few times that he wants to use his new freedom to be himself.
"I'm just Jerry," he said.
The story can be found at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/northnorthwest/ct-met-jerry-hobbs-0806-20100805,0,7522701.story
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be accessed at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-feature-cases-issues-and.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439308395320310098" border="0">
"Deaver is a major character in the emerging story of the SBI's troubles. His withholding of evidence contributed to three judges in February declaring Greg Taylor, a Wake County man, innocent of a 1991 murder and freeing him from life in prison. Attorney General Roy Cooper then ordered an audit of the blood analysis unit.
At the bureau's crime labs, where Deaver has been a key agent and trainer, analysts charged with using science to solve crimes have hidden test results or concocted bizarre experiments to shore up a prosecutor's case, a News & Observer investigation reveals.
Deaver and Thomas are among at least 10 SBI agents and analysts who have tailored their investigations to please prosecutors, ignored key evidence or locked on to suspects who turned out to be innocent.
For years, bosses have looked the other way. Sometimes they have promoted problem agents."
REPORTERS JOSEPH NEFF AND MANDY LOCKE: CHARLOTTE OBSERVER;
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BACKGROUND: Seventeen years ago, Taylor was convicted of the September, 1991 murder of Raleigh prostitute Jacquetta Thomas, 26, whose body was found dumped on South Blount Street in Raleigh. Taylor, 47, said he spent the night of September 25, 1991 drinking and doing drugs with friends while he drove around southeast Raleigh to buy crack cocaine. Taylor said he believed police latched on to him for the murder because he and a friend drove along a dirt path off the same cul-de-sac where Thomas's body was found. Taylor and the friend smoked crack, but his SUV got stuck as they tried to drive away. They abandoned the SUV and walked to a nearby street to get a ride. Taylor testified they saw what they thought was a body but didn't report it to police. When Taylor returned in the morning to get the SUV, the police were already there. During several days of testimony, a parade of witnesses poked holes in the original evidence against Taylor. A SBI agent testified that while initial tests on some items from Taylor's sport utility vehicle were positive for blood, follow-up tests were negative. Those negative tests were not revealed to the jury that convicted Taylor. A dog training expert testified that the bloodhound that investigators said found the scent of the victim on Taylor's SUV was not trained in scent identification. A jailhouse snitch who said that Taylor confessed his involvement in Thomas's killing to him stood by his original testimony, but did admit that Taylor got the method of killing wrong. Johnny Beck, the man who was in Taylor's SUV on the night of the murder, testified neither he nor Taylor were involved in Thomas's death. Taylor had exhausted his appeals, but the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission reviewed the evidence against him last year and recommended the case to the three judge panel for further review. The commission is the only state-run agency in the country that investigates claims of innocence. Now the Commission has declared him innocent - the first time an inmate has been freed through the actions of the state's Innocence Inquiry Commission.
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"In the fall of 2007, Davie County prosecutors studied a suspicious bloodstain in a crime scene photograph, looking for evidence that Kirk Turner intentionally slashed his wife's throat with a pocketknife." the story by reporters Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke, published earlier today in the News and Observer begins, under the heading, " N.C. jury stunned by SBI's acts: Attorney general suspends unit that hid results and ran bizarre experiments for cases," begins.
"Turner, a Kernersville dentist, said he killed Jennifer Turner in self-defense after she attacked him with a 7-foot spear. But prosecutors noticed a V-shaped stain on Kirk Turner's T-shirt," the story continues.
"They charged Turner with murder, and then turned to the State Bureau of Investigation to help prove their theory: Turner killed her, wiped the knife on his shirt, then staged the scene by ramming the 18-inch blade through his thigh, twice.
Bloodstain pattern analysts Gerald Thomas and his mentor, Duane Deaver, embraced the prosecutors' theory.
Thomas quietly changed his initial report, which was consistent with self-defense. After a renowned bloodstain pattern expert disagreed with Thomas, Deaver and Thomas conducted unscientific tests to shore up the prosecution.
Thomas stuck steadfastly to the story, even after it became clear that he had filed an erroneous account of the crime scene.
Last year, a jury quickly acquitted Turner. The foreman said jurors were stunned by the SBI's conduct. "Politically, socially, religiously, I'm conservative; I'm a law-and-order man," said Landon Potts, an insurance claims adjuster. "But I don't know what other word to use but a fraud."
Deaver is a major character in the emerging story of the SBI's troubles. His withholding of evidence contributed to three judges in February declaring Greg Taylor, a Wake County man, innocent of a 1991 murder and freeing him from life in prison. Attorney General Roy Cooper then ordered an audit of the blood analysis unit.
At the bureau's crime labs, where Deaver has been a key agent and trainer, analysts charged with using science to solve crimes have hidden test results or concocted bizarre experiments to shore up a prosecutor's case, a News & Observer investigation reveals.
Deaver and Thomas are among at least 10 SBI agents and analysts who have tailored their investigations to please prosecutors, ignored key evidence or locked on to suspects who turned out to be innocent.
For years, bosses have looked the other way. Sometimes they have promoted problem agents.
That may be changing. After questions raised by The N&O for this report, Cooper suspended the work of the bloodstain pattern analysts. He also replaced veteran SBI Director Robin Pendergraft with Greg McLeod and ordered him to examine the training, certification and practices of the agents.
"I want our agents to have the highest possible training," said Cooper, a Democrat. "If further appropriate training is needed, it should be done."
But problems with blood analysis have persisted unchecked for years, despite repeated complaints from defense attorneys and damning rulings by judges.
In October, a federal judge found that Deaver gave false testimony in a 1993 capital case when he testified about invisible bloodstains though he had never performed conclusive tests. At a 2004 hearing in that case, Deaver characterized that sort of testimony as routine.
Deaver built the SBI's blood spatter analysis program. He trained its analysts, including Thomas.
Marilyn Miller, a professor of forensic science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said forensic scientists outside of North Carolina have long been concerned about examinations and testimony offered by Deaver and his protégés. But they feel powerless to do anything.
"He's not a member of any associations. We can't censure him or demand he change the way he works," Miller said. "He trains all these people, and it frightens me to think of the reach of his work."
Stuart James, one of the world's foremost experts at analyzing bloodstain patterns at crime scenes, was hired by Turner's lawyers to examine the evidence before the trial. Since Turner's acquittal, James has shown the video of the SBI experiments in workshops and conferences in the United States and Europe. Every colleague deemed the work unscientific, James said.
"They thought it was a bunch of malarkey," James said. "They were aghast at it."
Deaver and Thomas declined to comment for this report.
Pendergraft, the former director, declined to answer questions about the Turner case.
"I have not studied this case as you have, so it would be inappropriate for me to try to reply to each and every one of your questions," Pendergraft said shortly before she was replaced. "Our goal is to be fact finders and to hand the facts to the prosecution."
The bloody T-shirt
Sheriff's deputies and emergency medical technicians found a bloody mess when they arrived at the Davie County horse farm owned by Kirk and Jennifer Turner on Sept. 12, 2007. Jennifer Turner lay dead in a pool of blood, her throat cut. Kirk Turner was in shock, bleeding from arm, thigh and face wounds.
The Turners had separated and were going through a protracted and bitter divorce. That night, Kirk Turner went with a friend to pick up some tools from a shed on the farm, about 100 miles west of Raleigh. Turner talked with his wife while his friend loaded a truck. Then Turner gave his wife legal papers that included an affidavit from her previous husband and a motion for a judge to compel the sale of the farm.
Kirk Turner said his wife suddenly attacked him with a decorative weapon leaning against the wall: the huge spear. He said she shoved the blade completely through his left thigh, and then skewered his leg a second time, inches from his groin, barely missing his femoral artery.
The defense said he reached into his right pocket, pulled out his pocketknife and slashed at his wife. He slashed her neck twice, in quick succession, and severed her carotid artery. She bled to death in seconds.
Police cordoned off the scene. The next day, they called the SBI for a bloodstain pattern analyst.
Understanding a bloodstain pattern can help investigators understand how a violent event occurred. Flat, round drops suggest dripping blood, while tiny droplets suggest blood sprayed from a nearby beating.
Scientific studies support some aspects of bloodstain analysis, but experts have cautioned against placing too much emphasis on it, saying it can be biased by the theories of prosecutors or defense lawyers.
Gerald Thomas of the SBI arrived to inspect the crime scene on Sept. 14. He collected photographs and examined bloody clothing. Thomas interviewed fellow investigators, who told him that Jennifer had stabbed Kirk, who then slashed her.
Thomas wrote his observations in a three-page, single-spaced report and attached several pages of handwritten notes and photographs. His report included nothing to contradict self-defense.
But in December 2007, a Davie County grand jury indicted Kirk Turner for murder. Prosecutors had locked on to a theory after they saw Turner's bloody T-shirt.
"It was everyone in our office, all the senior DAs," said Gregg Brown, an assistant district attorney and the lead prosecutor on the case. "We looked at the photographs, and it appears, gee, that really looks like a knife; I wonder what the SBI will say."
What the SBI said would have a profound impact on the case. That story emerges from reports, court transcripts and interviews.
A fix to fit a theory
On Jan. 15, 2008, Brown met with Thomas at the SBI lab. Thomas brought Deaver, his mentor.
Thomas and Deaver agreed with the prosecutor that the blood smear on the front of Kirk Turner's T-shirt was made by the knife that killed Jennifer Turner, Thomas wrote in an e-mail message.
There was a problem: In his initial report from September 2007, Thomas had written that the stain was probably made by a bloody hand.
Thomas took his Sept. 14 report and changed one paragraph. He removed "a bloody hand" and replaced it with "a pointed object, consistent with a knife."
Thomas took no notes of the January meeting, though SBI policy requires it. He made no separate report on these activities, though SBI policy requires a report within 15 days. He made no notation that he had amended or changed or updated his report after reviewing the evidence a second time.
The date on the changed report: Sept. 14, 2007, the same as the original.
In April 2009, Kirk Turner's lawyers received a report from their blood pattern analyst, Stuart James of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. James' books on bloodstain analysis are used by the SBI.
James disagreed with many of the agents' conclusions. The smear on the shirt was not made by a bloody hand or a knife, James said. It was most likely a "mirror stain" created when the shirt was folded, perhaps as EMS technicians cut the shirt off Turner or when they tossed it on the floor.
In an e-mail message to a fellow SBI agent in May, Thomas said he would stick with his knife hypothesis. He promised to conduct tests "to shore up this argument."
Thomas and Deaver conducted tests that bore no resemblance to science, at least as it is described by leading experts in the field. Instead of rigorously testing and having peers review their findings, they conducted two tests designed to produce the result they sought.
Video of their work shows that twice, Thomas donned a clean shirt. Each time, he dipped a knife in blood, careful to get blood only on the edges. He carefully wiped the blade on his shirt in an attempt to leave a stain that resembled the outline of the knife. The second attempt was more pleasing to Deaver, who was filming. His comments, audible on the video, were more film director than scientist.
"Oh, even better, holy cow, that was a good one," Deaver exclaimed. "Beautiful. That's a wrap, baby."
Thomas wrote a report summarizing how these experiments refuted the defense expert's finding of a stain caused by folding the shirt.
False statements
In an attempt to find out how the T-shirt was handled after it was removed from Kirk Turner's body, Thomas wrote in his report, he spoke with Capt. Jerry Hartman, the lead investigator for the Davie County Sheriff's Office.
"Hartman stated that he was present when emergency services cut the gray T-shirt from Mr. Turner's body and that the questioned blood stain was observed present in its current condition on the shirt. Hartman said he took the shirt from Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and placed it in a secure area (an adjacent room), laying flat on the floor to dry."
That never happened. At the trial, Hartman testified he entered the crime scene two hours after EMS took Kirk Turner to the hospital. The initial crime scene photos showed theT-shirt crumpled on the floor, inside out.
Later photos show the shirt laid out neatly on the floor to dry.
When Thomas' report about the shirt was shown to be wrong in front of the jury, Thomas refused to change his conclusion, saying he was sticking with his lab experiment.
James, the bloodstain expert, asked several peers to review his work in the case, including Lisa DiMeo, who works for both defense and prosecution as an independent forensic examiner in San Diego. DiMeo said she was appalled by the tests run by Thomas and Deaver.
"I'm glad there was audio, so you could hear the person doing the video directing the actor what to do," DiMeo said.
Jurors said the most powerful evidence of Turner's innocence was blood evidence. Turner kept his knife in his right front pocket, which was smeared with blood. DNA tests revealed the blood was only Kirk Turner's. To the jury, that meant Kirk Turner had already been attacked and had his own blood on his hand before he reached into his pocket for his knife.
None of Thomas' reports mentioned the bloody right pocket.
More tainted work
The Turner case is not an isolated instance. In at least three other cases, the tainted work of Deaver or Thomas has played a part in reversed sentences or outright acquittals.
The agents made the same mistakes years apart. In preparing for the 1993 murder trial of George Goode, Deaver ran a screening test for blood on Goode's boots. The test showed the possible presence of blood. The stain was invisible to the naked eye. There's no record that Deaver performed the subsequent test that would verify the presence of human blood.
Yet at trial, he twice unconditionally described the invisible stain as blood. In 2009, U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard found that Deaver gave false and misleading testimony. Goode's sentence later was reduced from death to life because of ineffective counsel, which included failure to challenge Deaver.
Cooper's chief advisers were aware of Howard's ruling but did nothing about Deaver until February.
At that time, Deaver's work was part of the reason that three judges declared Greg Taylor innocent and freed him from life in prison. The only forensic evidence at the 1993 trial connecting Taylor to the murder was a stain on Taylor's SUV. Investigators testified at trial that the stain was blood.
Deaver had run a preliminary test that indicated the stain could be blood. He told police about the results of that test but did not tell them he ran a subsequent test that found the stain was not blood.
Bloodstain tales
Thomas attempted to give similar testimony in a 2008 murder trial in Greensboro. Donna Smith was charged with the first-degree murder of her live-in boyfriend, Walter Norman Little III.
Donna Smith told investigators she had no idea her boyfriend was beaten to death in the driveway until a neighbor called her. She called 911 and gave repeated interviews to police, even after she learned she was a suspect in the case. Police found no evidence of blood in the house.
A year later, Thomas was called in to analyze the bloodstain patterns produced by the beating. He examined photographs of the crime scene and clothing.
On a white T-shirt taken from Donna Smith, Thomas identified a linear pattern, three inches in length, of 14 tiny circular bloodstains. In his report, Thomas said that the stain could be impact spatter, which is made by blood flying with some force, often from the impact of a weapon. Thomas concluded that Smith was not telling the truth.
"Smith denies being near the victim during or after the time of bloodshed. ... The stain observed on the T-shirt belonging to Donna Smith could have been made from impact spatter. Therefore, the bloodstain analysis disputes Donna Smith's statements."
Before allowing him to testify, Superior Court Judge James Webb asked Thomas - with the jury out of the room - what his testimony would be.
"The wearer of that shirt was present during the time of bloodshed," Thomas said. "When bloodshed occurred, whoever was wearing that shirt was present during it and close by."
Smith's lawyer objected: The stains were too small to be seen with the naked eye. More important, the SBI reported that the preliminary test showed only that the tiny stains might be blood. But according to the report, the laboratory did not run the test that would conclusively establish whether the stain on Smith's shirt was blood.
Webb ruled that Thomas could not testify. Smith was acquitted. News researcher Brooke Cain and database editor David Raynor contributed to this report.
Thursday: In this lab, bias sometimes trumps science."
Read more:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/08/10/1612660/nc-jury-stunned-by-sbis-acts.html#ixzz0wCqkWWRs
The story can be found at:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/08/10/1612660/nc-jury-stunned-by-sbis-acts.html
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READ ALSO REPORTER MANDY LOCKE'S RELATED STORY PUBLISHED EARLIER TODAY;
The truth seeps out at last, and a man is set free
By Mandy Locke
In September 1991, Greg Taylor, a Wake County man, had been accused of killing Jacquetta Thomas, a Raleigh woman whose battered body was abandoned in a cul-de-sac in Southeast Raleigh.
Crime scene investigators collected samples of a dark substance staining the fender of Taylor's SUV. They wanted to know whether the stain was blood.
Two months later, SBI serologist and blood spatter expert Duane Deaver gave a report to Wake County prosecutors informing them that he found chemical indications for the presence of blood on the fender of Taylor's SUV.
Deaver did not mention performing more sophisticated blood tests that concluded the substance was not blood.
It would take 18 years for the truth to seep out:
In 2009, the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission reviewed Taylor's claim of innocence. At a hearing in September, Deaver denied performing confirmatory blood tests.
Commission member Charles Becton asked Deaver: "...but you could not do test number two?"
Deaver: "That's correct."
This year, Taylor's lawyers discovered Deaver's notes from his 1991 analysis. He had performed confirmatory blood tests on two samples from the fender. According to his notes, those tests were negative.
On Feb. 2, Deaver tried to explain his analysis to Wake County prosecutors Colon Willoughby and Tom Ford.
According to notes of the meeting taken by Ford's assistant, Deaver said he got no results from his confirmatory blood tests.
On Feb. 12, at a hearing that resulted in Taylor's exoneration, Deaver testified that supervisors taught him to exclude negative test results from his final lab reports.
Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/08/10/1612667/the-truth-seeps-out-at-last-and.html#ixzz0wD9lnD00
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/08/10/1612667/the-truth-seeps-out-at-last-and.html
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be accessed at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-feature-cases-issues-and.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;